Designblog

Adults are used to collecting big toys like cars or antique furniture.
Kids are used to collecting small toys like puppets, useless crystal balls or colorful stickers.
When I was a kid I also collected small postcards and teddy bears.
They lived in an old candy box that I got from my grandma.
Now there is something lying in may hands that reminds me of those dearest small things that are so valuable for every adult.

These fragile memories from the past childhood help grown ups to keep a child in their souls.
Otherwise if a pure and cold rational view of the world dominates it’s going to kill that sparkle.
I think that Irma Boom with her tiny books reminds adults of the small child that still lives in their souls.
Even when it’s buried somewhere deep inside.
Just holding this tiny book in someones hands inevitably brings a childlike smile to their face.
I find these moments very important in someones life.
Even if that book is about Ferrari engines or the latest research in nanotechnology.

My best friend lives in Russia. She is an artist and a photographer.
She sends me these “children’s” gifts that she has made herself.

Take care of your childhood.

Every Thing Design is a book by Hatje Cantz which presents a large number (more than 700) of design works from the collection of Zurich Gestaltung Museum. It mainly shows prints and posters, but includes also a wide range of other objects from many famous designers. The book is, among books designed by Irma Boom (and some of her own library), on display at the Bijzondere Collecties Gallery, in Amsterdam.

First of all the cover: it’s all black, with a white cheap potato peeler; visually it makes concrete what the title say: everything is design! Design is for everybody! The layout of the book presents the objects making interesting comparisons and associating them in couples which have a sort of connection. What’s interesting, in this couples, is that they do respond to a logic that can be less obvious than expected, as a time, place or artist order, but very explicit. Mainly, they are similar objects and visuals from very different periods and uses but with the same strength, the same conceptual value, the same way to visualize the zeitgeist of the period. So the cover of issue one of the magazine “Neue Grafik” (1958) showing the text perfectly insert into a square grid, is associated to a typeface from the early 20s’, the “new graphic” of the time. Two more recent comparison: the first shows the (famous) poster from Obey’s art for the electoral campaign of Obama in 2008 and the (as much) well known poster of Bob Dylan drawn during the 60’s by Milton Glaser, while the second present the famous Levi’s commercial with the Michelangelo’s David dressed up with Levi’s jeans short, with a more recent HnM’s poster of a beautiful and sensual girl wearing a tiny bikini. In the first couple is explicit the high moral value of the person represented, with the “Che Guevara alike” glance of Obama in the “hand-crafted”, old school appearance of the poster, and the streamy colorful hair of an outlined-comic looking Bob Dylan which transforms the pacifist songwriter into an icon. In the second there also is an iconic value which is a bit “debunk”, and while 30 years ago this value was embodied by a masterpiece of art, nowadays it is just the body of the women to be sold.

What i liked the most is the comparison that offers, which i think it’s a fundamental way of thinking in art and design, and the general look that encourages, contributing to shape better the word “design”, depicting the spirit of the time and taking it away from the idea of a competition between world known designers to create the most posh version of a lemon squeezer, and giving it the role of a discipline which applies to many levels and fields, a way to better resolve mankind problems. Design must be everything for everybody!

When going inside the exhibition of Irma Boom I decided to look for the one book that made me want to grab it, huddle in a big fluffy chair and disappear behind it.

The SHV Thinkbook attracted me because it is plain black on the outside, like in the past many books were. Some of these ancient books also being on display (part of the private collection), I can see where she might have got her inspiration from.

Books to me are objects I love being around. They often bring back sentimental memories of a snug warm house and evenings spent divulging my favourite books again and again. And so does this book designed by Irma Boom.

I always thought there is something fascinating about books that are plain on the outside. They hardly reveal any of its mysteries at first glance and thus makes me curious about its contents. When you open it a whole world opens up before you. I wasn’t disappointed now. When you open the SHV Thinkbook you find colourful page after beautiful colourful cotton page, 2.136 pages of them! Within the letters of the title are hidden. Also, on the edge of the pages you can read a poem by Gerrit Achterberg.

Irma Boom wanted the book to be a voyage. For me the voyage already starts with goggling at its cover. Alas, that is as far as I am going to get, since it wasn’t allowed to touch any of the books.

All I can say is: it is a mighty shame I wasn’t allowed to take it home with me and discover its many secrets.

I have chosen the book called SHV Thinkbook designed by Irma Boom.

This one caught the most my attention, although it is one of the most simple: black, thick, without any title, it is kind of brutal.  It looks like a simple dictionary. But we can discover the originality of the designer, because this book really doesn´t looks like another one. Because, it doesn´t has any title, only black without any symbol and when you look at the profile we can see the colorful side of the pages which contrast with the deep black of the front. It has something mysterious and unusual.

It has been designed in a way that you can´t guess what is inside (only maybe a strange geometric form white and red can symbolize

something). The cover of this book really makes me wondering  about  the content .

There is a details in this book that I found really beautiful, there are some few deep red bookmarks which go out between the pages. I like this three main colors (red, white and black).

Moreover , the story that Henk told us about this book makes it even more mysterious.

For the same reasons I found the book called Dutch Stampbook well designed. The same black, anything on the front page shows us the content, only a white peeler is appearing used as a kind of image of design (subject of the book).

"Visual interpretation of Victory Over The Sun [click image for movie]

“Victory over the Sun” is a Russian Futurist opera premiered in 1913 at the Luna Park in Saint Petersburg.

The libretto written in zaum language was contributed by Aleksei Kruchonykh, the music was written by Mikhail Matyushin, the prologue was added by Velimir Khlebnikov, and the stage designer was Kasimir Malevich. The performance was organized by the artistic group Soyuz Molodyozhi.

The opera has become famous as the event where Malevich made his first “Black Square” painting.

The opera was intended to underline parallels between literary text, musical score, and the art of painting, and featured a cast of such extravagant characters as Nero and Caligula in the Same Person, Traveller through All the Ages, Telephone Talker, The New Ones, etc.

The audience reacted negatively and even violently to the performance, as have some subsequent critics and historians.”

In addition to my former post about Growing Chairs, here’s a small footnote – a project more close to home.

A fellow student in the Rietveld Foundation Year is Ana Oosting,who is working on her ‘free project’.  In this project, she works with growing materials. The essay she wrote about this subject  is relating to science,  focusing on bio art and art in a more general way. In her essay, she also talks about the more simply forms of this, in both nature and art, not specifically to be executed in a lab.

In relation to this essay, she made some pieces in which she experimented with growth – combining nature with art. In one of her works she let two doves build a nest on a pair of slippers (picture below). This changes the shape of the sandals as well as the way the nest is build.

Another work consists of growing different things on crystals. You see a scorpion in crystals (picture above).
Within her ‘free project’, Ana also worked with citrons (she tried to make them grow in different shapes) and she made an attempt to make graffiti out of moss.

In the same way as the designers – mentioned in Growing Chairs – are working, Ana is working together with nature to make interesting new art-pieces.

To get to this conversation, I asked people around me to question something about the other gender, something the person questions the most (and if they didn’t know, just sOmething)

In my case rules always bring a lot of variations. I observe it a long time because my way of working usually include one or more rules. Sometimes because I pick the rule but most of the time they are visible when work is finished. They reflect my present situation and feeling but for that certain amount of time they become rules and then variation of creating is visible.

It is not random that I found how this rules are already involved in me and I have no problem with it because rule is just a strong word- meaning most of the time something destructive but there is theory in biology which can very easily prove how rules are from the beginning a part of life and that they provide never ending variations of everything we are surrounded by.

Charles Darwin introduced us to his theory of evolution in 1859 with his book On the Origin of Species.

This theory is based on several rules which explain that it is working :

1, In nature of biological species exists variability and is partly hereditary

2, In this variation there must exist some species which are more and some which are less adapted to the condition of environment where they live

3, Species which are more adapted have bigger possibility to create descendants. And when this process is repeated for a longer time then certain type in certain environment will spread and this is called = blind power

4, Everything alive has last universal common ancestor

Example for a blind power is very simple:

Imagine that you are walking some field and you come across a stone, what do you think of is that ok is a stone and it was here or somewhere around from the begun, but now imagine you found a watch.Probably you take it and observe it, you check if it works, you find out that is a machine which measures a time, you see from which kind of parts it is made so it is sure for you that there had to be someone who designed it someone we call watch-maker. Existence of watch prove an existence of watch-maker. But this is the thing which Darwin challenged.He is tried to say that watch can exist without watch-maker.

The choice of nature can be called something like a blind watch-maker – he get some parts of watches separately and one by one he makes a watch from it.The thing is that he doesn’t know that he is making a watch.

Darwin was a very big observant and had a big possibility to travel around the world what makes him very rich of the materials he could used for his theory.

Another example of his theory which nicely explain also how rules of environment included food,weather… influence variability in this planet is his observing of birds- finches in the islands where he found out that they differ depending on what surround them and especially what differ is their beak – tool for eating. The reason is that finches split all over the different islands and by evolution they adapted themselves to the world around them and its rules.

Evolution begins with the first life in this planet and thats for me also where the creation begins and where the rules are always present and there is nothing wrong with it. The word freedom would never exist and would never have such a powerful meaning without the word restriction = laws.

To finish I choose the last part of Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species:

“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants

of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects

flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to

reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each

other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been

produced by laws acting around us.  These laws, taken in the largest sense,

being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by

reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the

conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as

to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection,

entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved

forms.  Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most

exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production

of the higher animals, directly follows.  There is grandeur in this view of

life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the

Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone

circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a

beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and

are being evolved.”

- click on image to download this research pdf -

- also read 'There are rules behind complex and organic circumstances [x] -

Perceiving Reality. Every experience that can be had is a probability within our consciousness. Our experience is created in the Mind and is always 1/10 of a second delayed from reality. This delay is attributed to the processing time frame that occurs in the brain. When we visually perceive our environment, the photoreceptor neurons in the retina collect the light (frequencies) and send signals to a network of neurons that then generate electrical impulses that go to the brain. The brain then processes those impulses and gives information about what we are seeing to the self-aware experiencer, the conscious Mind.

"Visual pathway through the Eye" / "Visual pathways in the human brain" (more…)

In April we had a lecture from Ayumi Higuchi. The lecture was about her essay in which she investigates the impact rules have or can have on the process of cause and effect in the creative process.

To give us a visual example how the rules work, Ayumi let us make trees out of duct-tape.

Although it was not the goal of the workshop, it was really nice to see how quickly you could make a beautifull installation with tape. This inspired me to search more about tape and the artist who work with it.

Quick history

Duct-tape was developed during World War II in 1942. It’s a water resistant sealing tape with a standard width of 48 mm. It was used to repair military equipment quickly, including jeeps, firearms and aircrafts, because of it’s strength and it’s water resistand quality.

The original name is duct-tape but the soldiers in World War II changed it into duck-tape because the word duct-tape was to simular to the name for the cotton fabric they used for tents and rain clothing.

After the war soldiers returned home and took the duct-tape with them, to use it around the house. Since then it serves all kinds of perpuses. In the 1970’s duct-tape even made it’s introduction into spaceflights. When the square carbon dioxide filters from Apollo 13 failed, they used duct-tape to fix it.

This saved the lives of the three astrounauts on board.

Over the years duct-tape became a very popular product. People are making items out of duct-tape or decorate objects with it. You even have a lot of websites with information about how to make stuff out of duct-tape, and movies on youtube with instructions how to make it. Like this movie, that shows how to make youre one wallet out of duct-tape.

Increased interest in creating these novelty and fashion pieces has given rise to designer duct-tape handbags, wallets, belts etc.

Not only designers are interested in duct-tape. Also a lot of artist use it.

Click here for more of these installations.



Aaksh Nihilani

Also a lot of graphic designers use duct-tape. Within typography it even got a new name: Tapography. (also used for typography made out ofcasette tapes )

Artist Aaksh Nihilani is one of the artist who works a lot with tape. For the Arario Gallery in New-York he made three installations with duct-tape.

His explanation about the works:

“Since the show was titled Paraphrase, I took the opportunity to get into some tekst, tapography. I did ubiquitous words that we all encounter in our daily travels, especially as a New Yorker, but I wanted my paraphrase of the words to be aesthetically ‘better ‘than their original. So the words pull, push, and exit are all written out in tape, as well as simultaneously being shown acted out, or about to be (as in the exit piece). They were all a little bigger then human scale so as to more objectify their viewer rather than the usual other way around. I think these installations were particularly succesful because they stayed true to the site specific nature of the wordk that got me the show in the first place (i.e. Using the gallery’s door hinge to complete some of my lines), but also took on new levels of content in the figuration of the letters, and new concepts/processes of using the tape to express qualities like peeling and falling”



Autobahn

An other example of a tapografic experiment is tapewriter bu Autobahn. It is developed during a seminar by Richard van der Laken and Eric Wie, and later developed until a type specimin.

Tapewriter is a typeface that gets it’s form from the fence of a soccer-cage. The width of a role duct-tape is exactly the same as the room between two bars of the fences from thes cages. The thought behind this font is that any one who ones a role of ducttape can share their thoughts with the rest of the world.

Tapewriter showes that you can write with anything and that any surface can become your paper.

More information and the total typefase you can find on the website of autobahn.



Experiments with Duct-tape

Inspired by this all I started to experiment with duct-tape myself.  My first experiment was just to write something on the wall with tape.

After that I wanted to create a 3-d effect into space, wich I achieved to tape tekst to my window an fotograph it with the outside landscape:

In my last experiment I really wanted to go 3-d. So I made lines with yellow tape in the air and made letters with black tape in it. It creates

a very interesting effect because it looks different from each side. As you can see on the picture below and the title picture.

Growing your own design-chair, made out of living trees, grass or crystals – sounds interesting?

Nowadays, more and more designers are working with nature, instead of against it. They’re combining unpredictable, living objects with well-thought design and come up with new ways to make creative and durable furniture.

In a workshop, given by graphic designer Ayumi Higuchi, students had to create trees out of black tape. Every student received one role of tape and together they had to make a tree on the wall. It was interesting to see how this worked out – you’re able to control your own decisions, how and where to place the tape on the wall, but you can never completely control what the others will do with their roll.

This concept – not being able to direct the final outcome of a project- is closely related to the trend of ‘growing designs’. One could speak of an ‘eco-trend’, a form of slow design in the furniture-industry. In recent years, more and more designers experiment with the combination of nature, and the natural forms it grows in, together with practical and smart designs. We can see this most clearly in the design of chairs. Chairs that mingle the, in a way, unpredictable side of nature with the well-thought side of modern furniture design.

Just like with the trees made of tape, designers are using elements in their work that they can never fully control – and they do this on purpose, because it makes the outcome more interesting. One can only predict the way the final work will look like. And, commercially speaking, it’s a smart way of working. In the IKEA-era, a time in which identical chairs can be bought for just a few euro’s,  buyers are now looking for more unique, durable designs – they don’t want to see how the chair they just bought is also to be found in the living room of their neighboor.

Below, you’ll find some interesting projects that illustrate this new design-trend. All working very differently, they still show simular starting points.

First, there’s the work of Christopher Cattle that really shows the concept of taking the time to make an object, being very aware of the process of designing and being able to constantly make small changes in this process, to try to change the outcome. In this case it’s the use of growing trees, to make a small stool. The making of one can take about 5-7 years and you can make it bigger, stronger and higher by working together with the growing process of the tree itself. As you see on the image, the stool is made from three sycamore saplings that are ‘trained’ and grafted together around a plywood jig to form the tripod base of the chair. In an interview, Cattle points out:

‘Growing furniture […] can be used to demonstrate that it is possible to create genuinely useful things without adding to the pollution that industry inevitably seems to produce. Trees are self-generating […] It’s free and it’s non-polluting. Training and grafting trees as they grow are established traditional crafts, and wood is durable but it’s also biodegradable, so it doesn’t have to end up in a hole in the ground. I call this Grownup furniture as it’s the result of mature thinking.’

Another project in which a designer is working with nature, is the ‘Venus Chair’ by Tokujin Yoshioka‘s. This chair might not be that comfortable, it is a nice concept in which design and nature can get along. The object is made from growing natural crystals.
The Venus Chair is grown in a tank, the production process is half controlled by Yoshioka and half left up to nature, therefore giving space for interesting developments in the work. Yoshioka says: “I […] feel that incorporating the principles and movements of nature into ideas will become something important in future design.”
This is a prototype of his crystal-chair.

A work that is ready to use, is the design developed by Michel Bussien. It’s called the ‘Growing Chair’. It’s potted and on rollers, but you can of course remove the box and put it in your garden. A nice see-through chair, a very good example of letting nature, literally, fill up the design. To use the complexity and beauty of natural forms and include this in new designs – to almost ‘reconstruct’ nature, without having to bend and force the natural shapes in a dramatic way.

Also great for your back garden is ‘The Grass Armchair’, by Purves & Purves. Again, working with a frame, this chair is ‘leading’ the grass. It will almost dissapear in the landscape, being completely covered up with the surroundings, you’ll have to be careful while mowing.
The chair is made of biodegradable cardboard which you fill with gravel and soil, seed with grass.

Finally, this last example is made by the Dutch ‘Droog Design’. It’s the so-called‘Tree-trunk bench’ by Jurgen Bey. In his design ‘A fallen tree can serve as a seat. The addition of bronze classical chair backs makes it a proper piece of furniture, a crossing between nature and culture.’
The designer makes clear, very firmly, that ‘it is ridiculous to transport trees when they are locally available.’
It is because of this statement that only the chair backs are for sale, thereby forcing the buyers to really find a tree, that’s already there, to use. Thereby making the buyer very active in the process of the design. Although this tree is not growing anymore, it’s still a nice way of using natural shapes and transforming it into a design.

All these projects show how you can make unique design in a new, eco-friendly way. A ‘movement’ that will probably set the trend for future designs and will constantly inspire designers to work in a creative way with what’s already there.

Detail of the Bayeux Tapestry,c.1066. People eat, sleep, breed and create.

In this post I will quickly address to a specific example and a specific theory that goes into this subject. Even though we do not see art as a necessity to life, as long as we life there tends to be creativity. Apparently they go together, they feed each other. How are they linked? Besides sleeping, eating and breeding, do we need culture? If it does not contribute to surviving, why is it there? Man has been carving in caves, painting in sand and weaving threads to tell stories that will survive us. You could say this is a pattern in human existence. If storytelling or archiving in either books or objects is a pattern, is creation equal to basic need? Researching this subject I found the Bayeux Tapestry to be a nice study case. Tapestry’s made at the time of the Bayeux Tapestry are often described as folk art. Folk art, a concept that is very well explained by Jean Dubuffet, typically embodies traditional forms and social values. It originally suggested crafts and decorative skills associated with peasant communities in Europe – though presumably it could equally apply to any indigenous culture. It has broadened to include any product of practical craftsmanship and decorative skill. Folk art has also a utilitarian characteristic to it. Utilitarian because it displays the life events of a collective, rather than an individual experience. This social or collective aspect of it makes it interesting to research in association to social behavior. When looking at cultural history there are bluntly put two ways to look at the history: through folklore culture and through ‘elite’ art culture.
Art in the 14^th century was a male dominated field. Artists worked a lot for commissions, and painting can be seen as the biggest medium. It represents an elite culture because the elite financed most paintings. On the opposite the folklore culture deals with a great collective history. Woman, left on the shores while their man went out for wars or exploration, stood together and shared their lives in many ways. It is no wonder then, that most of the folklore art, made by these women in particularly, is usually subject to a specific event in their lives. The documentation we know nowadays, is the same as the folk art way of storytelling of these long last centuries.

Greec Vase 570 BC, Trajan Column Rome, Captain America vs the Axis of Evil, a message from the Minestry of Homeland Security.

Although you could argue that the Bayeux Tapestry is not an example of folk art, I would say it is. It is true that the tapestry was made as a commission and the ‘team’ of people who made it where highly classified workers who were selected to work for the state of England. But think about it. It is not about who made it that much, it is about the specific choice for this medium. Each medium talks and feeds our minds differently, not only visually. So the English King and Queen wanted to document this period of Great War. They could also have chosen any other medium besides tapestry. They could get a painter to make a huge war scene; they could pick a hero from the battlefield and give him a statue. But they chose for the medium of textiles. And there is a reason for this choice. The Bayeux Tapestry is made in this form so that the people could relate to it. It is made as a form of propaganda to underline connections between the English crown and the bishop at the time in England. Also there are small references to the Normandy regime, undermining their power and choosing a more heroic English version of the battlefield. The Bayeux Tapestry, or actually the real technique is embroidery, is like a modern propaganda youTube movie. Looking at it shows no difference to ‘real’ amature paste-up movies. In this case there is surely a strategy behind it. I do not want to go into this too much, or make it a conspiracy story, but it seems not more than logical to me that a mass medium is not always just directing the masses of the people. It can also be used to address the elite, because it appeals so much to the mass. Susan Sontag already wrote it in on photography. Amateur pictures and art photography are different. They talk different. But this difference is a strength you can use.

So from which desire does folk art come? In researching the essence of why we create the basic question first is what is there to create from? Philosophers have written many theories about how we perceive the world. Choosing one of the many, I focus on the theory of Lacan. It describes three ways in which the world is ordered. It is interesting because it suggests that the way we life, think, and create are prior to eating, sleeping and breading. This all comes from Lacan’s theory on the three world orders, being the real, the symbolic and the imaginary.

Lacan’s order of the Real finds a lot of similarities with the well known philosophical term ‘die welt an sich’. The real order is the objective outside world, known as a whole, without any conceptual boundaries set by language. This order always remains invisible for the subject, never to grasp. The symbolic order is the world the way we experience it through language, image, story, and so on. Every conceptual possibility in words is used to give form to the imaginary order. That imaginary order is the world of desire and fantasy. It is not only desire and fantasy as we know it in de Freudian way.
In Lacan’s theory the imaginary refers to every single subjective experience through the real. In the three orders it is clear that the imaginary order is something that is fundamental to our being. We think, or at least we would like to believe so. Every thought, desire, fantasy or whatever you experience non-materialistically fits into this order. But it did not come there by a gift of god. Like I said above, the three orders feed each other. Our experience comes from the real world, but what we notice of this is depending on the symbolic order. In a way the symbolic order determines what we explore of this real order. Then again, the imaginary takes all these concepts deriving from the symbolic order into consideration and is able to give some output.
This output needs a concept, definition, or even materialization to be noticed and to be justified. And this is the point were culture comes in. From this I understand that culture is like a snowball. It takes along things that stick, it leaves out things that don’t.  It starts small but picks up along the way and grows and grows and grows. When accepting this theory it is very logically that creation is a fundamental part of our existence, because we need concepts and objects to think. Without thinking we cannot react.
What for example the Bayeux Tapestry is showing us, is in a way nothing new to what we already know: we shape and create our own existence. This does not come after the first basic surviving needs of eating sleeping breading etc; it goes parallel next to it.

THERE ARE RULES BEHIND COMPLEX AND ORGANIC CIRCUMSTANCES

This is the opening sentence of “Rules” a graduation essay written by Ayumi Higuchi in which she investigates the impact rules have or can have on the process of cause and effect in the creative process. A story that drags you into the exiting process of research where every question or statement leads to two others.
Using interviews as a platform to ask questions and create interaction, she involves Jan Groenewold (physician-chef), Luna Maurer and Jonathan Puckey (graphic designers), Snejanka Mihaylova (philosopher-writer-artist) and Peter van Bergen (musician-composer) to talk about the subject from the perspective of their specific discipline.
Look for yourself how she illustrates this story with many images and quotes dragging you deeper into the matter every page, creating in depth understanding. Munari, Wittgenstein, 9/11, John Cage, mixing politics with art and science with nature to get her point across.

Ayumi visited us in April 2010 to present a workshop in which she planted the seed of understanding using Bruno Munari‘s observations; […] We can establish a rule of growth: the branch that follows is always slenderer than the one before it (Drawing a Tree).
Providing us with a trunk and applying two simple rules to it: The branch that follows must be slimmer than the one before -and- the tree must be symmetric, it quickly became clear that there are many rules behind complex and organic circumstances.

download this research essay: “RULES”, there are rules behind complex and organic structures

Dear fellow student,
I have been for a couple months gathering from friends and writing myself Parallel reading reports*, brought together as two PDFs, around the quite broad themes of (self-)education and the death of the author.

1 - Le Lecteur / Collectif, Nathalie Piégay-Gros • 2 - “The?Extasy?of?Influence: A Plagiarism”, Jonathan Lethem • 3 - Composition n° 1, Marc Saporta • 4 - Fahrenheit 451 — plagiarism, Stéphanie ?Vilayphiou • 5- “The?Death?of?the?Author”, Roland Barthes

*: PARALLEL READING REPORTS are personnal notes written along the reading of a text, image, artwork, lecture, exhibition (anything goes) in order to remember it better. They can be simply handwritten and scanned, continuous text, drawn or layouted; disect the source or give a personal interpretation. The only important thing is that they avoid showing the original material and end up being shared!

**: PARALLEL SCHOOL OF ART is a virtual and international school where people who want to self-educate themselves can share what they are doing and thinking, as well as their interests and projects. Parallel school wants to generate and spread work emulation, and to develop self-initiated projects such as publications, meetings, lectures, workshops etc.

Jules Estèves

— More details, documents and reading reports on: http://www.parallel-school.com
— More by Jules E.

SI Module is the portable platform for Applied Arts and Autonomous Design, initiated by Sandberg Institute Applied Arts department.
On a special table a system of modules will be build. The sizes of these modules are variable, depending on the size of works exhibited.
SI Module, was part of Object Rotterdam

three more links inspired by the design fair: Object Rotterdam
1•Odd Designs on Film, 2•Richard Hutten "playing with tradition", 3•Total Table design
The Object Rotterdam excursion was part of the Basic Year "form-lab" workshop