Designblog

ABECEDA 1926

 In 1926, the Czech dancer Milca Mayerova choreographed the alphabet as a photo-ballet.

Each move in the dance is made to the visual counterpoint of Karel Teige’s typographic music.

Teige was a constructivist and a surrealist, a poet, collagist, photographer, typographer and architectural theorist, and his 1926 photomontage designs for the alphabet are a uniquely elegant and witty invention, and one of the enduring masterpieces of Czech modernism.

In the graphic design world, movement refers to the path of a viewer’s eyes as he or she looks at your work. Since movement can add such a large sense of unity in design, it plays a significant role in the ceration process. By tying the different elements of a design together in a specific way, you can control the movement of your viewer’s eyes throughout the medium. As a different media, body does the same thing in ABECEDA 1926 photo-ballet. There is the different movement which is more analog, natural and already exist but still a path of a viewer’s eyes as he or she looks at the work, using the body and an action as a method of design. Despite the fact that the terms action and surface are disconnected even opposite things.

Letters get created

by movements > Movements who

literally give the sound exhaling.

In our case of the Abeceda  Alphabet an example

with the first letter of the alphabet, the letter ‘A’.

The body language of reaching towards the sky asking an ‘A’. 

But expressing ‘A’ as confidence standing tall, putting your hands in your wrist, chin up.

So one single letter can have a wider scala of meaning.

A letter without  a sound of the voice, a movement of the hand can be like an incomplete inform. Just an ”A” on a paper.

Body language which is connected to words is a missing factor in language these days. Digitization is transforming things into less natural outcomes. Which is interesting is relating those two opposite sides; the digitized, formulized and made as a stabilized, structured letters out of the natural, smooth, changing, body movement. Even we can find some elements from both sides in all the sides, still the texting, mailing and internet talk has no presence of body and sound which is ironic because we generally attend to imitate the existing features that we know, take them as a starting point or repeat them.

We can see the first examples of this attend in the ”Cave Paintings”. Cave paintings are also known as “parietal art”. They are painted drawings on cave walls or ceilings, mainly of prehistoric origin, dated to some 40,000 years ago (around 38,000 BCE) in Eurasia. The exact purpose of the Paleolithic cave paintings is not known. Evidence suggests that they were not merely decorations of living areas since the caves in which they have been found do not have signs of ongoing habitation. They are also often located in areas of caves that are not easily accessible. The paintings are remarkably similar around the world, with animals being common subjects that give the most impressive images. Humans mainly appear as images of hands, mostly hand stencils made by blowing pigment on a hand held to the wall.

Some theories hold that cave paintings may have been a way of communicating with others.

The body and other elements are using for communication in a way with ”movement/action of the body and also in a way with ”captured frames such as; paintings, photographs, and even typography as visuals. So we can really understand the idea of connecting body language with the captured, reflected typography together.

According to that point and various examples, we can tell that art may imitate life. The movement, the performance reflected and created an alphabet. But could it possibly be possible to create an alphabet without any reflections from life?

FAUX

Chew your own brooch • Ted Noten [1998]

who’s Ted Noten?

He is a Dutch artist who studied at the Rietveld Academy and at the Academy for Applied Arts. He works with themes of the unusual and familiar. The designer plays with our symbolic values and perception.

what’s the piece about?

Noten hands you a chewing kit, you chew the gum and send it back to him. In return he’ll give you a replica of your chewed creation but this time as a wearable brooch made out of silver or gold. Anyone can become a jewellery designer.

how’s that faux?

It is triggering to see the combination of the famous green gum pack next to the golden jewellery pieces when you encounter the work in the museum. Questions arise and curiosity grows. Then you realize the piece was created from saliva and teeth, and the gum pack is a replica of the real “doublemint gum” brand.

Wrigley's Doublemint Gum

 A treasured replica

Ted Noten copies the recognizable design of the pack to attract the viewer’s eye and make the subject clear as most of us know this brand. As an audience you are appealed by what you think it is, but it actually isn’t. He fools us, trying to get our attention, and succeeds. However he adds his own instructions and name, and through a simple gum pack, sets the rules.

Also, the final pieces shown in the exhibition are the golden replica, which aren’t what the chewers created. It is a copy, even though it is more valuable than the original, it is still a copy, an imitation.

“It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it sometimes follows function (…)” (Het Nieuwe Instituut booklet)

In this case, no one would have worn a sticky piece of gum on themselves, but many would adore wearing a golden reproduction of what came out of their mouths (and still proudly say they made it). The function of the final piece is the reason why they accept the falseness of it.

There is a clear link between Chew your own brooch by Ted Noten and The Transylvania Archive by artists Marta Volkova and Slava Shevelenko (https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/VanilleOugen_screenshot.jpg). These three artists are trickery masters and no one blames them for it. Both of the pieces question the capacity of viewers to see through the surface and discern its core. Imitation is used plentifully and effectively but it isn’t perceived as immoral. As a matter of fact, imitation is the powerful characteristic that elevates them.

In conclusion, the copy of the gum pack served the function to explain the project visually, and the golden jewellery which is a reproduction of the actual creation serves the function to be functional.

Startingpoint

The startingpoint to my design project  was my interest in costumemaking and theatre. I arranged a meeting with the costumedepartment of the Nationale Opera & Ballet in Amsterdam. During my visit I gained insight into the process of costume making and was struck by the amount of detail, creativity and knowledge that goes into every piece.

What inspired me most was the fact that the goal is to create the perfect illusion, to make something look like the real thing in order to make a play, character or story believable.

First Tryouts

To kick off my research I applied the idea of creating the perfect illusion onto the example of a sock. The questions I asked myself were:

–How is a sock constructed?

-What happens when commonly used materials are replaced?

-When is a sock a sock?

When taking a closer look at my try-outs it was clear that replacing common materials with new ones not only affected my object’s appearance but could potentially change its function. All of a sudden that sock had turned into something more. I decided to investigate this aspect more closely by moving away from the idea of simply creating a visually authentic object, like it is mainly the case with costume making. Instead I tried to find a new or added function that would derive out of the use of a different material.

All the materials I had used so far in my research had/made very distinctive sounds. In the following steps I therefore narrowed my focus on 3 basic movements, 3 distinctive sounds and 3 different materials with the goal of making a sock that makes sound.

 Sound

When making music, people like to tap their feet. When I play the guitar myself the rhythms in my right foot can be reduced to these three movements:

*kdung*

*tap*

*tick*

After having limited and simplified the movements I chose three different materials that would fit each of them and represent them with a suitable sound, looking for a high pitch for the area below the big toe, a short tap for the footpad and a dull, low sound for the heel.

Metal (big toe), plastic (footpad), plaster (heel); shaped to match my own footprint as it taps the floor:

Final Object

To combine these three sound-elements into one wearable and therefore flexible and fitted object, I needed a third component. For that part of my final object a material research I had made earlier on during the process, a combination of jersey fabric and metallic isolation material, seemed to have all the needed qualities and even came with an additional effect: a rustling, swooshing sound as the foot is being bent, the final sound.

Playing the Sock

Trying to play with the sound-sock I noticed that it takes a quite some practice. Even though the number of different sounds is limited to three they can be used with a lot of diversity, combined, separated, fast and slow. The following video gives a brief idea of how the sock sounds and can be used:
 

It was an assignment that started out with body extensions, and ended in animal imitations. The best known or most visible aspect of a certain animal was picked out and preformed by one of the students. I personally thought they did it in a very funny way without turning it in to a joke. My favourite was maybe the video where Timo Rohula tried to seduce Maria Pedersen. Timo wore the best, most flashy outfit he could get his hands on, and danced like a crazy man. All to get some female attention. Like a tropical bird flaunting his feathers.