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"hole" Tag


See through the whole


Wednesday, November 5, 2014

‘Voices’

Designed by former UNA-Designers (Hans Bockting + Mark Diaper)

As a start of my ‘guiding’ through my research I will write down a few sentences about the designers/design agency of the book. Just a few sentences because the designers doesn’t seem to have the need of sharing a lot of personal background information on the internet, I don’t feel the need of sharing their personal information as well.

Mark Diaper who was part of the UNA design agency at the time of creating the book, founded his own design agency “Eggers + Diaper” (1999, Berlin) together with Birgit Eggers.

The former UNA design agency existed from 1987 untill 2007, founded by Hans Bockting, Will de L’Ecluse and Henk Hoebé, who all went seperate ways by 2008.

quote; “Kenmerkend voor het werk van UNA is de grote aandacht voor het evenwicht tussen vorm en inhoud, oog voor het detail, respect voor traditie en een zekere vorm van speelsheid.(playfullness, !imporant! to translate!, as I found this interesting for my research, looking at the work of Hans Bockting) Eveneens tekenend voor het bureau is de lange relatie met zijn opdrachtgevers. Voor de stad Amsterdam is UNA een belangrijk bureau geweest omdat de meeste opdrachtgevers hier gesitueerd waren.”

“UNA-Designers” is now going on as “Bockting Ontwerpers” (from 2009) runed by Hans Bockting and his wife Sabine Bockting. Hans Bockting is also co-founder of “Traffic Design” and “Concepts”.

 

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The book I chose for this project is titled “Voices”. It is a book named after an exhibition that once took place, which had the same name as the title.

“Voices is an exhibition that brings together works by nine contemporary artists of different origins and generations, discovering the domain of the visual and the material of sound contributed by the human voice”

The choice I made for this book was quite selective. As I scanned through the given booklist, what caught my attention most were titles with the word ‘voice’ in it. Probably because of last years Studium Generale that took place with the subject of ‘voice’, but turns out a subject that I have an interest for. I noticed this strong attraction for this word and decided to find a book related to this subject. Immediately my eye fell on this book with on its front cover the word ‘voices’ with big letters centered between 4 images that are filling up/being part of the front cover. The backside is divided in 2 images. On the front cover there is a hole in the letter “O” of the word ‘voices’. You can not see through the hole because the following page is covering the hole with its white. But when you flip the second page you will see (through) the continuing hole till page 33.

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And there is more which caught my attention inside the design, the ‘dividing’. A thin black line through the center of the pages (horizontally/vertically) is attracting my eye. It’s seems like a strange element in the whole of the design. I want to know about this line. Why do I experience this line as unfitting, and why is it at some pages not reaching the opposite side it should do/ and does in other pages. 3 Languages who are divided by those attention-seekers of lines in many different ways, so many notations within the book, within the design, resulting to a bit of my frustration of not be able to ‘read’ this musical score.

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While looking at other work of Hans Bockting, and getting introduced to a calendar from Hans Bockting (Traffic Design,1980), which I played with for a while, every month/page a different surprise in it’s full meaning, small attachments, opening/closing/lifting-up/changing material/sizes/colours, TACTILE SENSATION & FEEDING FOR THE EYE, again the sheet music work which I can hardly handle following from start until the end, but knowing it works perfectly as a whole. Let’s play it again.

After some plays I questioned myself why for godsake I am always attracted to such a full-filled mixture of information/ images/elements/things going on in, as now researched ,a book,design. Translated into my experience of observation “CHAOS”!

It is for my personal perspective exciting to see as much as possible, as many possible variations of information on a surface , in design, images etc. ! MASS !

I like to see mass and take time to discover every quality within that mass, but at the same time it is in general the case that I get stuck in the beginning of the discovery, losing track of what I am actually seeing while zooming in on a particular element/part, raising questions, no answers, no guide-through,raising frustration,loosing interest in zooming in on the following element, and taking it as a whole, but not really understanding.

Looking at my personal way of living, way of working, WORK, I consider myself as a possible face of the word ‘chaos’. I am attracted to chaos, but I would be happy if the chaos could be read in the way of the music sheets. In my personal way of working, I have taken steps back from mass into simple and clear, to understand the way of quality of less and the non-questionable/for itself-speaking element, in order to get to combining variables into a creation not-longer experienced as chaos as ‘?’,. My so called chaos who creates the heart/ the melody in the music sheets.

I decided to send a letter to Hans Bockting with the question, how Hans Bockting can permit himself the freedom to create such a playful diversity of work.

I did not get any response ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

…………

…..

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Then at one moment in thought, I looked up in my room, seeing my lamp.

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The circle. my escape out of the chaos.

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I had returned to the holes-element in my chosen book. My melody maker within my daily-life chaos. I saw dots in everything. The very clear round shaped element just made me understand.

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circles.

dots/points/holes.

the simplest element of visual design.

The defining characteristic of a dot is that it’s a point of focused attention. Dots settle themselves in space and provide a reference point relative to the other forms and space around it.

Dots are the focal points in our compositions. Dominance.

Dots create a relationship with the space around it. The two most important relationships formed are the proportion of the dot and the space around it and the position of the dot within that space.

As dots increase in size we start to see them as shapes, but they still retain their dot-like qualities and characteristics. A square placed in the white space of a page is still a dot. It still attracts visual attention to it, which again is the dot’s defining characteristic.

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Dots centrally placed within a composition create symmetry and are neutral and static, though they tend to dominate the space around them. Dots placed off center create asymmetry. They are dynamic and actively influence the space around them.

Serenity is my outcome of the research. I look through the holes of the book again, but now only focussing on what I see through the circle-out-cut on the following page. I will find the rhythm, I will find the voice.

Rietveld library catalog no : 708.5-cat-50

 

Hey Hole!


Thursday, May 31, 2012


 
The project I singled out from the NAI treasure collection is called 15 MILES INTO THE EARTH by Hendrik Wijdeveld.

Wijdeveld situated his 1944 design for an international geological research centre in a shaft in the earth at a depth of 15 miles. Designed during the harsh winter of 1944 and 1945 at the tail end of the Second World War when food and supplies were scarce, this project is a plea for international collaboration and for putting science and technology to a peaceful use. At that point in time, little was known of the earth’s deeper strata. Wijdeveld foresaw new discoveries, an ‘uranium age’. At the same time, the project is a ‘world theater’. With a ritual scene taking place at the base of the shaft, he depicts the world coming into being as the primordial force of nature and man’s creative power collide in an explosive display of energy.

Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld (1885-1987) considers himself as director with the world as a total theatre, a stage for his designs: he is architect, editor-in-chief, and typographer of the journal ‘Wendingen’, as well as a designer of books, theatrical stage sets and costumes, furniture and utensils. The most famous example is the huge People’s Theatre in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam in the shape of an enormous vagina, the national park Amsterdam-Zandvoort, a number of enormous high-rise projects and “Plan the Impossible”, like this extraordinary proposal dating from 1944, involving boring a 25 kilometre deep shaft deep into the earth, and a plan to hem in the existing city with a ring of towers. The towers would not only act as dramatic landmarks but would set a resolute boundary to urban growth. He took advantage of his experience in theater design to stage a new landscape and evoke collective experiences.
Several architects such as Brandon Mosley, Rick Gooding and Douglas Darden have based their utopias in the underground. The novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne digs into the depths of the prehistory of the globe. Furthermore many modern and contemporary artists worked with the concept of the hole, in primis Anish Kapoor seems to be almost obsessed by it.

hole (hõ?) noun 1. opening into or through a thing 2. hollow place, as a pit or cave (a deep place in a body of water; trout holes) 3. underground habitation, burrow 4. flaw, fault 5. the shallow cup into which the ball is played in golf; a part of a golf course from the tee to the putting green 6. shabby or dingy place 7. awkward position. [middle English, from old English hol (from neuter of hol, adjective, hollow) & holh; Old High German hol, adjective, hollow and perhaps to Old English helan, to conceal; first known use: before 12th century] 1. I have a hole in my sock 2. He fixed the hole in the roof 3. There is a mouse hole in the wall 4. The dog dug a deep hole 5. Her putt rolled right into the hole 6. She made a birdie on the seventh hole 7. The course has 18 hole synonims perforation; gap; flaw; weakness; burrow; aperture; orifice antonyms bulge, camber, convexity, jut, projection, protrusion, protuberance rhymes with hole bole, boll, bowl, coal, cole, dole, droll, foal, goal, knoll, Kohl, kohl, mole, ole, pole, poll, prole, role, roll, scroll […]

‘A hole?’ the rock chewer grunted. ‘No, not a hole,’ said the will-o’-the-wisp despairingly. ‘A hole, after all, is something. This is nothing at all’. (Ende)

Holes are an interesting case-study for ontologists and epistemologists. Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference, on a par with ordinary material objects. Hole representations – no matter whether veridical – appear to be commonplace in human cognition. Not only do people have the impression of seeing holes; they also form a corresponding concept, which is normally lexicalised as a noun in ordinary languages. Some languages even discriminate different types of hole, distinguishing e.g. between inner cavities and see-through perforations. Moreover, data from developmental psychology confirm that infants are able to perceive, count, and track holes just as easily as they perceive, count, and track paradigm material objects such as cookies and tins. These facts do not prove that holes and material objects are on equal psychological footing, let alone on equal metaphysical footing. But they indicate that the concept of a hole is of significant salience in the common-sense picture of the world, specifically of the spatio-temporal world. If holes are entities of a kind, then, they appear to be spatio-temporal particulars, like cookies and tins and unlike numbers or moral values. They appear to have a determinate shape, a size, and a location. (‘These things have birthplaces and histories. They can change, and things can happen to them’, Hofstadter & Dennett) On the other hand, if holes are particulars, then they are sui generis particulars. For holes appear to be immaterial – they seem to be made of nothing, if anything is.
For example: 1. It is difficult to explain how holes can in fact be perceived. If perception is grounded on causation, as Locke urged, and if causality has to do with materiality, then immaterial bodies cannot be the source of any causal flow. So a causal theory of perception would not apply to holes. Our impression of perceiving holes would then be a sort of systematic illusion, on pain of rejecting causal accounts of perception. (On the other hand, if one accepts that absences can be causally efficacious, then a causal account could maintain that we truly perceive holes) 2. It is difficult to specify identity criteria for holes – more difficult than for ordinary material objects. Being immaterial, we cannot account for the identity of a hole via the identity of any constituting stuff. But neither can we rely on the identity conditions of its material “host” (the stuff around the hole), for we can imagine changing the host, partly or wholly, without affecting the hole. And we cannot rely on the identity conditions of its “guest” (the stuff inside it), for it would seem that we can empty a hole of whatever might partially or fully occupy it and leave the hole intact.3. It is difficult to assess the explanatory relevance of holes. Arguably, whenever a physical interaction can be explained by appeal to the concept of a hole, a matching explanation can be offered invoking only material objects and their properties. (That water flowed out of the bucket is explained by a number of facts about water fluidity, combined with an accurate account of the physical and geometric conditions of the bucket.) Aren’t these latter explanations enough? Further problems arise from the ambiguous status of holes in figure-ground displays. Thus, for example, though it appears that the shape of holes can be recognized by humans as accurately as the shape of ordinary objects, the area visually enclosed by a hole typically belongs to the background of the host, and there is evidence to the effect that background regions are not represented as having shapes. So what would the shape of a hole be, if any?

These difficulties – along with some form of horror vacui – may lead a philosopher to favor ontological parsimony over naive realism about holes.
A number of options are available: [A] One could hold that holes do not exist at all, arguing that all truths about holes boil down to truths about holed objects. This calls for a systematic way of paraphrasing every hole-committing sentence by means of a sentence that does not refer to or quantify over holes. For instance, the phrase ‘There is a hole in…’ can be treated as a mere grammatical variant of the shape predicate ‘… is holed’, or of the predicate ‘… has a hole-surrounding part’. (Challenge: Can a language be envisaged that contains all the necessary predicates? Can every hole-referring noun-phrase be de-nominalized? Compare: ‘The hole in the tooth was smaller than the dentist’s finest probe’) [B] One could hold that holes do exist, but they are not the immaterial entities they seem to be: they are, like anything else, material beings, which is to say qualified portions of space-time. There would be nothing peculiar about such portions as opposed to any others that we would not normally think of as being occupied by ordinary material objects, just as there would be nothing more problematic, in principle, in determining under what conditions a certain portion counts as a hole than there is in determining under what conditions it counts as a dog, a statue, or whatnot. (What if there were truly unqualified portions of space-time, in this or some other possible world? Would there be truly immaterial entities inhabiting such portions, and would holes be among them?) [C] One could also hold that holes are ordinary material beings: they are neither more nor less than superficial parts of what, on the naive view, are their material hosts. For every hole there is a hole-surround; for every hole-surround there is a hole. On this conception, the hole-surround is the hole. (Challenge: This calls for an account of the altered meaning of certain predicates or prepositions. What would ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ mean? What would it mean to ‘enlarge’ a hole?) [D] Alternatively, one could hold that holes are “negative” parts of their material hosts. On this account, a donut would be a sort of hybrid mereological aggregate – the mereological sum of a positive pie together with the negative bit in the middle. (Again, this calls for an account of the altered meaning of certain modes of speech. For instance, making a hole would amount to adding a part, and changing an object to get rid of a hole would mean to remove a part, contrary to ordinary usage.) [E] Yet another possibility is to treat holes as “disturbances” of some sort. On this view, a hole is to be found in some object (its “medium”) in the same sense in which a knot may be found in a rope or a wrinkle in a carpet. (The metaphysical status of such entities, however, calls for refinements.)
On the other hand, the possibility remains of taking holes at face value. Any such effort would have to account to the effect that holes are sui generis, immaterial particulars – but also for a number of additional peculiarities. Among others: [a] Holes are localized at – but not identical with – regions of space. (Holes can move, as happens anytime you move a piece of Emmenthal cheese; regions of space cannot.) [b] Holes are ontologically parasitic: they are always in something else and cannot exist in isolation. (‘There is no such thing as a hole by itself’) [c] Holes are fillable. (You don’t destroy a hole by filling it up. You don’t create a new hole by removing the filling.) [d] Holes are mereologically structured. (They have parts and can bear part-whole relations to one another, though not to their hosts.) [e] Holes are topologically assorted. (Superficial hollows are distinguished from internal cavities; straight perforations are distinguished from knotted tunnels.) Holes are puzzling creatures.
Black Holes appear to be the origin of the Universe, and vaginas the cradle of life.
 

The hole in Wibautstraat


Saturday, November 20, 2010

Our assignment was to get inspired by a Rietveld building or Rietveld concept, and make a scale model for a new building in the the small triangular park at Wibautstraat, near Amstel station.
At first I and my classmates went to the spot at Wibautstraat to measure the whole area and be familiar with the surroundings.
In the beginning I was looking at the Rietveld Academy’s corners. I guess a lot of people do that, because they are quite fantastic.
I went outside looking at the academy in rainy weather, and I took some pictures of the corners of the academy.

Then I imagined that it would be dirt that surrounded the high corners of the academy building instead of the sky.
So then I got this idea, to put the whole glass building upside down, and then down in the ground, or a big triangular hole at Wibautstaat.

The corner of Rietveld Academy upside down:

Then you would still be close to nature (as Rietveld wanted it), not the same light nature, but a much more dark and deep nature. I liked that idea.
So this was my starting point.
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