Designblog

Dialogue, Wendy, Robert, Anne" from Zara Zerny on Vimeo

about the movie: text in progress

[images Graduation Show, Zara Zerny]

The essay by Zara –as part of here graduation project– is an investigation and interest in approaching a method used in the moving image, film; the improvised conversation.
For years improvised conversations have mostly been used in independent films, which have a different focus and storyline then a traditional Hollywood movie. It is often noticeable to the viewer when a conversation is improvised; a specific atmosphere appears in which the random is made possible in a controlled environment; fiction becomes infiltrated by reality. A director works in a different way, when using an improvised conversation. Instead of following a strict storyboard the director designs a setting that allowes the actors to improvise within restricted environments.

download thesis: ‘Conversations and Design in Improvised Conversation’

[publication of graduation essay by Mila Lanfermeijer 2011]

Op een lichte dag, als de zon schijnt komen we overal spontaan onze weerspiegeling tegen. In winkelruiten, glazen, lepels en de ogen van anderen. Het zijn niet alleen spiegels die ons vertellen hoe we eruit zien. De wereld bij daglicht is een omgeving van eindeloze reflectie. Omgeven door glimmende oppervlakken kunnen we niet aan onszelf ontkomen. In de scriptie ‘tussen ruimte’ word een fictieve ruimte beschreven en onderzocht waarin zich een aantal van deze reflectieve oppervlakken bevinden.
‘Tussen ruimte’ is een aanloop geweest naar het werk ‘ Vanya en Lara’ een portret van twee zussen. Niet alleen in de spiegel herkennen de zussen zichzelf maar ook in elkaar. Het beschrijven van het spiegelbeeld als ervaring gaf niet alleen inzicht in de ervaring van het kijken maar ook wat het betekend om te worden bekeken.

[images Graduation Show, Mila Lanfermeijer]

Vanya and Lara are sisters with two years between them. The girls are similar in appearance, have similar ways, movements, habits. Yet they are not more similar than they are different.
The girls become a good point of reference for the artist who has a sister herself. To what extent does my sibling other function as a mirror? Will knowing how I differ from her make me know myself? Or will our similarities tell me who I am?
The girls are filmed on several occasions. The first time without directions at their mother’s house. At one point they are asked to re-enact each other’s movements until they become synchronized. They perform a sequence of small movements; they practice and watch each other. Eventually, in turns, they are seated in front of a mirror as a life-sized image of their sister is projected over the sitter. They look at themselves and are now able to see the other at the same time.

from the jury rapport: ...., you were the only student from the Textile department that did not present your work in one of the greenhouses in the park outside our academy. Our jury members noticed you and your work anyway, partly due to the professionality with which you announced your work. You chose Textile as a startingpoint but your work was merely a thorough research of both yourself as the outside world. The relatedness was omnipresent and for every spectator there will be another interpretation. Our jury members were impressed by it’s intimacy, it’s colouredness and it’s futuristic thought. The multi-mirrors in your work are smart references to a world in which we constantly mirror ourselves to others. You have told this story beautifully and therefore the jury was pleased to nominate you.

  download thesis: Tussen Ruimte /thesis van Mila Lanfermeijer

[dutch language]

This essay by Elki Boerdam is about a new type of image: the still. A stopped movement. A scene frozen in time, a paused frame.
Its a mysterious image. Filled with references, context and suggestions. You feel there is more to see than that one frame, that there is a story. And that this is just a flash out of a bigger thing.
Its a type of image that requires intense participation from the reader. It asks questions about recognition, relation and reference.
This investigation explores this new kind of image. Trying to define it by placing it in an art environment. Could the still be seen as an autonomous artwork? Is the context the still gives us really important for the meaning of the image? And does a still always needs to stand still? The still is a sort of image not to be overlooked and that is getting more and more importance every day. For normal users as well as artists and designers.

www.elkiboerdam.com

download thesis: STILLS, Het Vastgevroren Beeld  download reader: STILLS, In Text [Reader]
publications will be translated in english soon. Use 'comments' for english request

click the image to download this issue as pdf
Crystalline Fantasies in the World of Architecture is a co-production of
Lotte van der Hoef & Ralph Dennis

This thesis by Daniel de Zeeuw won the 2011 Rietveld Thesis award. The Jury rapport  said: “a very thorough research on internet and its relation to notions of conspiracy. A text in which everything is so well connected and hangs so good together that the reader starts suspecting a conspiracy. Daniel has such a complete knowledge of the field he is writing about and has such an extensive grip on the vast amount of literature he has handled that the text sometimes starts looking like a PhD dissertation“.

You could hear voices no mainstream media would ever dare to speak

With the rise of the Internet, a special realm of being has exploded and taken on enormous proportions. Between the mass-medial hermeneutic machines and the sub-medial everyday is now another world-historical playing field: below the thresholds of newspapers and television stations, but broadly distributed and encoded through visual formats nonetheless: a self-replicating and self-distributing of the General Intellect, including the infectious diseases that torture it. We are all potential witnesses and accomplices to what is going on anywhere, anytime, or so it seems. The structure of the Internet is like a conspiracy theory.

Download this thesis: Something Is Out there! Networked Encounters of the nth Kind: The Art of Conspiracy

[images Graduation Show, Daniel de Zeeuw]

from the jury rapport: Something Is Out there! Networked Encounters of the nth Kind: The Art of Conspiracy is according to the jury a very thorough research on internet and its relation to notions of conspiracy. A text in which everything is so well connected and hangs so good together that the reader starts suspecting a conspiracy. Daniel has such a complete knowledge of the field he is writing about and has such an extensive grip on the vast amount of literature he has handled that the text sometimes starts looking like a PhD dissertation.

During the research of my subject there was one point where I got stuck.
I knew that I could read more about the designer, but never really understand what he is about. So I choose two ways of dealing with the subject.
One was the text and in the second one I tried a tailoring-procedure the designer is famous for called “deconstruction by myself”. I used the pictures of this second research to separate the text, so that they are naturally incorporated.

It seems almost unbelievable to start a career in the fashion-industry, to become famous and never get criticized for your work. Now written down it looks even more surreal. But at least one succeeded by achieving this: Maison Martin Margiela.

(more…)

There is something very appealing to a grid. It is a neutral base of regular units, and it invites you to create something within it. It’s a frame. it’s limited. But limitations can create freedom.

Graphic designer Wim Crouwel embraced the limitations of the cathode ray tube technology [x] when creating the type face “New Alphabet” in 1967. The type face only consisted of horizontal and vertical lines and drew, at it’s time, a lot of attention because of its modernity and radical difference from other type faces.

Seeing Crouwel’s sketches for New Alphabet, drawn on thin-gridded paper, evoked my autistic desire to get really really close to the paper and start filling in those tiny squares with a sharp edged pencil… There is a very comforting feeling in working within the linear walls. There is filled or empty, right and wrong.

In addition to the field of graphic design, grid-based systems are being used in numerous areas, in order to organize and visualize things. Looking closely to my laptop screen, I can see the grid, in which #000000 colored pixels form these letters…

My fixed information resource Google, tells me cartography is a significant area within the grid-world. I fall into tacky new age web sites and read with curious eyes, and a half open mind about alternative planetary grid systems, made throughout history. Critical of the conventional longitudinal/latitudinal geography. One of them is The Becker-Hagens Icosahdron Projection [x] (The name in it self is impressive). It’s a mapping of all the megalithic sites around the world. The results showed to form a pattern of an icosahedron [x]. I also came across an implied connection between UFO phenomenon and magnetic-vortex-gravity anomalies in the Grid(!) Even though this information is highly questionable, it is always good to put the existing order into question.

In 1977, the office of Charles and Ray Eames made a short film
depicting the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten.
The film begins with an aerial image of a man lying on a blanket; the
view is that of 1m2, then slowly zooming out to a view of 10m2,
revealing a man and woman enjoying a picnic in the park. The zoom-out
continues at a rate of one power of ten every
10 seconds, ending with a field of view of 10m24, or the size of the
observable universe. The camera then zooms back in
at a rate of a power of ten every two seconds to the picnic, and then
slows back down to its original rate into the man’s hand,
to views of negative powers of ten—10m—1, and so forth—until the
camera comes to a proton in a carbon atom at 10m—16.

The analogy of cropping to and fro in the film suggests both an
interpretative view of an archive and an insight into provenance,
panning back to view it as continuously evolving means.

Slides function as a tool for teaching and this magazine presents
itself as a series of translated lectures by eight teachers from
various fields of study within the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. 8000 of
these slides were digitally scanned and structured as originally on
the shelves, then printed collated and dispersed to the teachers as
contact sheets.

On 8th April 2009, the new interpretations were presented and
recorded. After transcribing, the lectures have been edited into a
printed report of the day.

  download Gray Magazine # 5 [this is a 44 MB document] :
For more information on this and other lecture projects based on the same archive, read Gray Magazine #5. Get your own hard copy from the Library

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When I heard about the powers of ten I thought it was some highly complicated scientific theory that you had to read really carefully and with much mathematical understanding to comprehend.
But in fact the ”Powers of Ten” is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray and Charles Eames, re-released in 1977.

The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten.
It illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery.

It presents the profound idea of orders of magnitude, with the subtitle of the film being:A Film Dealing With the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.

I want to show you one of the many remakes that have come up since 1968.

A little bit more cheesy, Americanized than the original with Morgan Freeman’s voice.

It shows the part of space we (humans) can see.
it’s stupendously big!!

Cosmic voyage – the power of ten HQ on YouTube

The theory of powers of ten tries to comprehend our world in numbers.
It fits everything from the atoms in our cells to the outer universe into a simple scheme of multipliing by ten.

By depicting this scheme the film gives a portrait of the various perspectives we can have on our world.

Our brain is capable to perceive the world on so many levels.
We can think a lot further than of what we actually know or have experienced, like the universe for example.

But we can as well think about the ungraspable development of thought .
Our brain can think about itself thinking.

There are many different levels of perceiving the world we live in.
Starting from ourselves I could think of the following levels:

The material level (what we consist of)
The personal level
The closer social level
The cultural (society level)
The global level (political/environmental)
The universal level ( seeing the world as a spot in the universe/ a world of constant change)

What matters to us changes violently depending on in which level we are thinking about things.

(more…)

“Designer as Artist is an article written by Louise Schouwenburg [x] for the art magazine “Metropolis M“. After reading this article it became a source for our research project investigating the position and role of designers and their relation to art. After visiting the exhibit Hella Jongerius “Misfit” held in the Boymans van Beuningen museum Rotterdam, we decided to invite the author (also writer of the Misfit catalog) for a discussion. This discussion focused on the new trend in design where more conceptual freedom emphasizes a new role for the designer. Students of The Rietveld Academy Foundation Year’s E_group research and opinionated this subject as you can read in their individual posted contributions on this Designblog

The article mentioned and the choice of this subject is not without reason. Last September 2010 the Sandberg Institute (Rietveld’s own Master program) appointed one of the Dutch leading designers Jurgen Bey as their new director. This internationally acclaimed designer takes an outspoken position in this debate. “We need contemplative visionars. The changing world asks for critical artists and designers who can work together and make themselves subordinate to a greater cause”, say’s Bey

Looking out of the window of our class room we see his office at the Sandberg Institute an opportunity we could not let go. Time to get acquainted. We invited Jurgen Bey to come and visit our program as a mutual exchange and tell us something about himself within the context of our subject “the designer as artist !?”. Before this was arranged we had a great opportunity to meet him in person as part of a program organized by the museum of modern art Temporary Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Their program “Talking Film” #5. In this program Jurgen Bey presented a selection of films showing how artists and designers create and capture their own world. Indirectly he used this evening to present his attitude in directing art, design and architecture at the Sandberg Institute.

We tried to re-create the program presenting a mock-up of the films he showed and some of the statements he made:

(more…)

I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold, I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas – such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which color it in turns. I change, then, without ceasing. Henry Bergson

Being Motion is a graduation thesis by Charlotte ten Raa, and won the 2010 Rietveld Thesis Award. It consists  out of different texts. They circulate around the subject, the self; as a movement with the possibility to reflect. I wanted to bring the subject motion close to yourself, so close as to our consciousness. How we see the movement of a train passing by as well as how we can see our consciousness as one constant motion. How the self makes up stories from what it sees and how we form an image of yourself, seeing yourself as a subject  and as an object.  How there are different perspectives on time and space, looking from the starting point:  the self.

Our way of being in the world is very much about predicting what’s going to happen, taking tiny fragments and putting them together. William Kentridge

http://charlottetenraa.blogspot.com/

download this thesis: Being Motion

image: Etienne Jules-Marey

The jury was unanimous in its decision: Because it is a thesis that involves the reader in an interplay between form and content in an amazing way. Because it is very well written, keeping a careful balance between the personal and the objective, between anecdotal and philosophical, between thinking and doing. Because it shows that it is possible to deal with a very complex theoretical problem in a very light way.
It might be called a special coincidence that this thesis and its excellent understanding of the philosophy of Henri Bergson has been written in the spirit of our theory teacher Raoul Teulings [†2010] who we all miss very much, and in whose memory this first Prize for Best Thesis is given.

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

Conditional Painting is truly happening in the van Abbemuseum Eindhoven! They call it the Vitruvian Paint Machine.

As part of  “Take on me (Take me on)” /Dutch Design Week 17 to 25 Oct 2009, Luna Maurer and Edo Paulus executed a mural painting on pre determined conditions based on the proportions of the body and visitor interaction.

The act of designing is based on rules they say. So Luna and Edo, together with Roel Wouters and Jonathan Puckey, created a manifesto of explicit rules for design.

Visiting their lecture, as part of the “Take on me (Take me on)” event, they made it clear that setting strict conditions does disconnect you from subjective standards and creates awareness in the process. A beautiful time based movie of their “machines” made this crystal clear.

download this research essay: by Jules Esteves: “Conditional Drawing, Conditional Painting” questioning the practice of Conditional Design.

Traces of the everyday embedded in textile

Rietveld graduate (2008 TXT) Marie Ilse Bourlanges visited the Slow Design research class on Thursday 12 February to present about her graduation project, ‘Decay,’ a collection of sweaters exploring complex relationships of time, the body and materiality.  By taking the class through her project from concept to final product, Marie Ilse revealed the deep and mindful processes of research, design development, experimentation, and production that enriched her project.  She talked about sources of inspiration: the work of writer/biologist Midas Dekkers, the concept of Time in the work of Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela,  the symbiotic relationship of crumbling architectural forms and the natural forces that overtake them, patterns of cellular growth and decay, and the hidden treasures of a threadbare teddy belonging to her niece (among others).  She also described the evolution of her pattern, which derived from capturing subtle, everyday body movements and subsequently was subjected to fractal geometry, while also providing instructive detail about her various stages of experimentation with materials and techniques.  Marie Ilse’s project is a beautiful example of Slowness as a process of designing, and also Slowness as a more engaged and reflective experience of a designed artifact.  Her work on this project demonstrates how Slow Design tools and persepectives were supported and enhanced by the atmosphere of the Rietveld, and it hopefully was reminder to the Basic Year students about both the opportunities and intrinsic responsibilities of creative education.

 
download this thesis:  ‘Decay’  by Marie Ilse Bourlanges was

the Winner, of the GRA Thesis Award 2008