Designblog

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I don’t really know the way, but I want to. I have this habit to wander off randomly when I’m unknown with a place. Just to see where I’ll end up if I let go of control. “Let fate decide” says the romantic in me.

After a while I see patterns and I believe that I know where I am. Finding attractive by-streets in every corner. But that’s an illusion. By the next turn this pattern is shattered by reality.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I don’t want to stay. Just keep going, till this frame turns into bedlam. Borders can’t contain me anymore. Looking back I can’t trace back my origins. I’m not lost. I’m new here.

I am chaos.

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“subjective library” images and flickr tag-cloud

Read the reflections of students as A and C group journey into the Rietveld Library’s Design and Art section. A journey to investigate, making our fascinations, preconceptions and hidden desires manifest. How does a subjective book choice create a personal mirror and leave traces (tags), connecting Design to Art, exposing autonomy in both.

Read about the subjective, open and intiutive first book choices from the Design section of our library. Wonder about those tags connected to their accounts. Follow the continuing storiy after a second book is selected, based on those tags created. Witness the third posting in which those sets of tags lead us from Design to Art. A move that forces us to reflect upon the connection between them both.

Follow the continuing accounts of the three succeeding investigating postings by clicking on the yellow link. Experience the total list of tags created during this “Subjective Library” Project.

LIST OF TAGS:

3289 days, A4, cover, funky colors, television, unatractive, film photography : fauna, flora, interesting, lines, strange, fluffy, simple, horrible, brainwork, complicated, proud, “to know” : disorder, game, grid, systematization, “One Minute Sculpture” : library, swindler, breaking news, library loser, extraordinary, talented : space, absence-presence, framework, surrounding, returning : abnormal, rediscover, choice, plain, others : 1000, 754., direction, signs, city, direction, traffic, political, posters : blue Pinocchio, screaming, spine of book, blue, Pinocchio, blue fairy, eyecandy, contemporary, folk, mentality : not getting there, unknown, judging by covers, content, connection, strangers, subject : supermarket, theft, housewife, tiny, midlife crisis, multilingual : logic, question, reason, consciousness, interest, remarks, impossible, mathematical, perspective : attraction, strange, swissfolk, art, death, life, love, Maurizio Cattelan : cover, old book, unique, obsession, miniature : Anita, eyes, portrait, dominant, name, color, film : Wiener Werkstätte, characteristic, hand work, mass fabrication, original, process, realization, detail, photography, the nude : cheap fashion, funny, random, tattoo, tribe, weird, mysterious, tribe : attraction, new texture, action, quick, warning, a priori, new, amusement, choices, eye-catching, eyes, random : escape reality, library, overflow of impulses, fruitless reality, jostling time, absorbing force, déjà-vu : arrange, industrial, library, architecture, museum, self-made, Andreas Gursky, index : city, nomadic, reality, funky, colors, interiors : contrast, fat, texture, typography, culture, nudity : conceptional, distance, no image, steps, thinking space, braille : cat, compulsive, font, chaos, subjective, illustration, objective, random, Tadao Ando : airplane, airport, choice, structure, worldmap, 756, 80’s, human, machines, unique, flying : dot, jewelry, shapes & forms, yellow, children, fun, paint, playful, all colors, blue, green, theory : extraordinary, life, normal, objects, absurd : 80’s, desire, fashion, party, techno, desire, fabrics, orgasmatic : alchemy, identical, methaphysics, mysticism, mythology, Arabic, identical, inaccurate, ladies, naked, orient, sculptures, stereotypes : Canada, Indian symbols, kitsch, raven, Indian art, Mexico, Jeff Koons, porn : attraction, gold, meeting an old lover, recognition, cheap, irresistibility, not psychology, wrong, beauty, compare, contrast, couple, same, similarity, together, two books, ugliness : connection, embroidery, hundred years, death, funerals, general terms, invisible, object, spirit, visible : color, feeling, personal story, feminism, graphic : first sight, mystery, old-fashioned, bloody, mad, rituals, revelatory, Yin : oblivion, automatic lives, bottom shelve, eat, mantra, story-making, colorful, dogs, double-take, eat sleep, vases, vegetables : attracted, nothing, black, disturbing.

still curious read the books involved at the Gerrit Rietveld Library, (catalogue numbers are included).

Welcome to part 3 of : tagging slow design. This is a worksheet on which all the link-topics and post-it tags collected on the “slowWall” are listed in relation to the research subjects as components of the ‘slow design project’. (researches can be downloaded as .pdf’s).

link topics.

Performance links the Morgan O’Hara research to the one on Julia Mandle. The Julia Mandle research links to the one on Richard Long on the topic street /nature & art, by slow movement to the Kunsthalle Bern exhibit and by sensibility & violence to the Psychogeography research. Psychogeography has the link topic urban life with the Karmen Franinovic research, consumption /destruction /life style with Futurisme, against and pro community with Wim Wenders, evolution of everyday life to Downshifting, and a anonimous link to Maria Blaisse. This anonimous link is not the only one linking Marie Blaisse. Link topics like art and left over, connect this research to Uta Barth. Karmen Franinovic links to Christian Nold by means of the topic mapping, and to Psychogeography by urban life, to Futurisme by life is getting faster & people are getting a social, to Julia Mandle by just stop & think and to Richard Long by the link a way to see. Richard Long links to many other researches: to Sophie Calle by self related art, to Christian Nold through a line made by walking, to Karmen Franinovic linked by the topic a way to see, to Downshifting by choosing slowness. Downshifting links back to Julia Mendle by the link topic us and them, to Psychogeography by revolution of everyday life, to Futurisme tagging the link with designed lifestyle, to Marie Blaisse by us and them, and to the Kunsthalle Bern exhibit by reflect /a closer look. The research on Futurism has some remaining links to Julia Mandle through the topic exploring / explosive / sculptural. Following links from Wim Wenders to Uta Barth is made possible by the topic notice the small things in life, to Christian Nold by moving /memories. Mapping links Christian Nold to the Ambient/Brain Eno research while that last one makes a link back to the Kunsthalle “The Half and the Whole” exhibit creating a take time to cook link.

Reading all the researches the links will surely start to make sense, as will their variety shed light on the specific nature of many of them. Some research subject however did not create any link at all, like in the case of Maison Martin Margiela. And it was 0nly after some discusion that the performance link was created between Sophie Calle and Karmen Franinovic. Uta Barth was anonimously linked to Richard Long which might have been an intuitively act

Post-it tags.

No links did not mean no tags. Time, Maison Martin Margiela for example was closely read and tagged with post-it. This created tags like memories, replica, time(less), can’t relate to it, time, physical picture of memory and the photographical tag to a picture by Mark Manders. Wim Wenders (present in our research list because of his beautifull documentary “Notebook on Cities & Clothes” about fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto) generated also many tags like sublime, I finally found time, hillbilly, surreal, the truth, place, moving. Sophie Calle tagged by the moderator with authorship, generated: life=art, stories, documenting life. Uta Barth looking was tagged: rainy day with half closed eyes, in between places, no left over, sunday. Ambient the research connected to Brian Eno tagged as big here long now was retagged as live the moment, loosing yourself, don’t think, sound. Christian Nold place-ness got tagged with keywords like biomapping, google earth, links, remapping memories. Linked to many, tagged by few. Julian Mandle pause, was tagged with pause from urban flow only. Morgan O’Hara gestures was tagged with trans, transforming, concert-art, transmission, energy of moments, reaction. Maria Blaisse architecture by border between self and not self. Futurism with fast life, life style, save time? Downshifting was tagged with life style too and change assumption. Richard Long tagged as a subject with landscape was enriched with the two tags: exploring fast and slow and perception of space, time and personal potency. Psychogeography with destruction of community, philosophy, socialism, anarchisme and urban live. Finally Karmen Franinovic subtraction, served as a hub for the tags: observe, spontaneous landscape, discover a realy nice place that never be online, easy fast, MTV generation, reflect, and observe. Some researches like Conditional Design re-mapping did not make “the slowWall” and were concequently not linked

added tags from the slow design lecture.

scale, gestures, measurements, relations, sustainability, evolving, creative activism, reveal, expanding awareness, reflect, engage, participal, deceleration, fresh connections, rhythm, probing, (im)materiality, metabolism, reflective consumption, live span, memories, community, record, tracing, (human) body, break (take a break), nothingness, inclusive, transparent, re-mapping, connection to scale

read also: >tagging slowdesign part 1

After lecturing on “slow principles in design and art” by Carolyn F. Strauss, students reflected upon their own work and process before starting a research into a variety of slow design and art related subjects. To clarify the effect slow design can have on the work in progress we invited Marie Ilse Bourlanges to present her work and share insight in her working process.

To present Slow Design a carefully selected list of research subjects was crafted. This selection presented “slowdesign” in various contexts of works and ideas (even ideologies), so that it could be recognized as a set of priciples against which ideas, processes, motives and outcomes can be interrogated. Much emphasis was put on the creation of specific keywords to accompany the students on their research. Keywords/tags that surfaced during the Slow Design Lecture and keywords/tags that were formulated at the slowLab website were added to the search subjects. These tags together with the ones created on the “slowWall” added meta data to the project

a physical process of linking and tagging with crèpetape and post-its.

Within this context adopting slow design as a working principle in our educative process, it became important to underline and make visible the relations between these student investigations. To emphasise a surfacing network between the subjects we did draw visible links between the research results, adding link topics. Additional tags could be post-it to each others research A4 to create shared keywords/tags.

Tags (trefwoorden [dutch] or entrances) are non-hierarchical keywords or terms. They make possible to search and find data. Tags create meta data. During the past years Web 2.0 applications like Youtube and Flickr added immensely by allowing users to add “free-form” tags as a tool for searching. The interesting thing is that tagging presents a system in which there is no information about the meaning or semantic of each tag. Orange might refer to fruit or color. Retagging found data even led to tag based social networks on the web. Tagging on this Designblog!

read also: tagging slowdesign part 3

wall tagging-linking methodology by Carolyn F.Strauss : slowLab

Wonder where all the tagging started?……….

It was the 5th of February when we started a project moderated by Carolyn F. Strauss, designer, curator and founding director of slowLab. Together with the students of the FoundationYear’s D group she lectured and set of an investigation into slowdesign and related designers and artists. True to the principle of personal connection we started with a quick mapping of ourselves and our working process as designers and artists in relation to “slow” as a subject. Mapping to find keywords for processes and experiences that make up our conditions and inspiration for behaving and performing, to visualize that flow and determine specific tags to describe it. How do these tags symbolize slowness in our work and working process.
Ask yourself the question “slowMe”?
The results became clear instantly through a series of “slowMe” postings

read also: tagging slowdesign part 2

On request of Gray Magazine #5 (yearly published on the occasion of Rietveld’s final exams show) 40 students of the Foundation Year, guided by Henk Groenendijk and Tine Melzer, unleashed a two day project to create a new context for a highly varied 20.000 slide images archive. André Klein, now chair of Fine Arts and Sandberg Applied Art Dept, compiled these slides over his 25 year long career of art history teaching.

We could only guess after the motives and meanings that bound these images together in a dynamic process of ever changing contexts and wonder what new context of relation they would have in the eyes and minds of the basicyear students. The uninhibited existence of a ‘democratically’ selected 1000 reproductions, registrations and images was given new meaning through a process of retagging with subjective keywords. In the 2 day process new contexts and connections were created, processes where discovered, and results presented in a physical display of image related tag-lists and monumental alphabetical (key)word lists. I am a kid
I burn
ice
ice cube
iceberg
ice cream
Iceland
ideal
IKEA
ill
illusion
Illustration
image
imagination
immigration
imitate
imitation
immaterial
impale
imperfection
impossible
impression
in scene
incest
inconvenient
increasing
identical
India
India
Indian
industrial
industry
infinity
influence
information
ink
inner space
innocence
inquiry
insane
insect
insecure
inside
insides
installation
institute
instruction
instruments
integrate
intellectual
intense
interaction
intercourse
interest
interference
intergalactic
interior
intertwine
intimacy
intruder
invasion
invention
invisible
invitation
irresponsible
island
isolation
it
Italy
itch

Awareness surfaced about the relation between content and image and word and form and content in the contexts of our own terms. Tagging images uncovered these relations

some of the question we asked ourselves were:

The mechanisms of images and imagination on one side and the mechanisms of names and naming on the other – where do they both meet?
What is the link between what we see and how we call it?
What is the process of agreement with the other(s) to find relevant and appropriate names?
Is tagging also a kind of ‘baptizing’? Or rather an act of memory and memorizing, how things are called?
What is the level of interpretation when we have to give an image a tag?
What is the relationship between tag and image, word and view?

:
  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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New Tags for the Rietveld Library:

How do you find interesting books when you don’t know what you are looking for? How do you stray through the collection in search of inspiration? Can the library catalogue help you or do you better construct one yourself, Exploring connections in the library between design- and artbooks, students created keywords/tags that linked them together.
a recount of tagging the library

Click the keywords/tags from the Tag-list [purple column at the left] to see all related postings, or use a yellow keyword link [below] to read the postings and experience how they are connected together. Use these keyword links to navigate between the postings!

overview, freedom, animal, elder, identity, intervention, repetition, connection, tattoo, self sufficiancy, structuur, illustration, pyramid, leader, visual language, individuality, playground, best, give, beeld, independent, shelter, West Coast, time, neon, develope envelope, fragile, construction, wisdom, invention, oppervlak, culture.

– First week: I grabbed the first book that caught my attention. Something on weaving, because I had misread it and thought it was about waving. I then drew all the hand positions displayed in the book and asked a sign language student to associate the ones he could recognise to words. The result became the starting point of the exploration: ‘independent – animal – west coast – give’.

– Second week: I used the search engine of the library. Typing in, one after the other, the four different words, I ended up with 10 book results. 2 for ‘independent’, 6 for ‘animal’, none for ‘west coast’ and 2 for ‘give’. 4 of the books were fitting within the design field, 2 of the ones found with ‘animal’, 2 with ‘give’.
Wondering about what to do with these four books, I took inspiration from a Wire album cover, On Returning, (a compilation of the three first album covers of the band) and compiled the four book covers.

– Third week: I asked someone for leads. Eveleen, who I asked if she would have ideas on compilation and art, told me to look into a book she heard quoted in a lecture, it was called something like ‘Postmodernist exhibition’. I couldn’t find a trace of the book in the library here, in CS nor on the internet but the idea was seducing.
In the meantime, I came across Martino Gamper’s work, approximately fitting with the subject I gave myself, but I wanted to keep using the system I had set, relate to the defined keywords.
I came back to the 10 books found earlier. 4 of them, as well, were fitting within the art field, 2 of the ones found with ‘independent’, 2 with ‘animal’. I then tried to install the 4 books as a ‘postmodernist exhibition’.
Funny thing is:The selection of the second week, on design, consists of books found through the keywords: “animal give(s)”.
The one on art then consisted of books found through the keywords: “independent animal”.

by Jules Estèves

keyword: sign language

The Graffiti Research Lab, is a New York based art group with a technical twist. The GRL was founded in 2005 at Eyebeam Openlab where Evan Roth and James Powderly were both doing fellowships when they met and teamed up. Both of the founders have strong technological backgrounds  so it came as no surprise that they would use those skills in their creations.
The team works on new technological ways for people to express themselves through graffiti. Their best known products include the LED throwies which are little LED lightbulbs with a magnet that can be thrown  on to any metallic surface to either decorate or get a message accross and the Laser tag which involved using a prjocetor and a technology they developed with Theodore Watson , where  they had made a program that imitated the leaking patterns of real graffiti and were able to paint on big houses with a laser. The Laser tag had no long term effects so it was not hard to get a permit for making it when they first did it in Rotterdam and has since been recreated in various ways and always attracted an active, interested crowd.

Theodore Watson, who programmed the Laser tag I found especially interesting. He is a british artist with a very strong focus on technology and programing and is currently residing in Amsterdam.
Watson has a BA in Fine Arts and Design and Technology from Parsons and has had his work displayed at various high profile museums and art fairs such as the MoMa, Tate Modern, Sundance and so on and so forth.

Most recently Watson has been working with children, he designed with visual and motion graphics designer Emily Gobeille, an interactive forest program for children, called Funky forest. The project was premiered in 2007 at the Cinekid festival in Amsterdam. The installation lives and moves with the visitors, by pressing your body against the forest creates a new tree in your shape with different characteristics, by diverting streams of water flowing on the floor different parts if the forest grow, if a tree doesn’t get water it dies. The health of the trees in the forest controls the inhabiting creatures. The installation shows children how nature works in delicate ecosystems.

My favorite work by Watson is his work for a Michel Gondry exhibition. Watson made interactive installations around Michel’s new film at the time, The science of sleep. He made a cardboard covered, kitchen like room with built in screens and paper covered interactive cameras. In one part of the room you could stand facing a screen and pull strings to control the face of Gael García Bernal, in another you could move a camera and see parts of the room with strange effects. A special room with big windows that displayed scenes from the film as fake reality with moving lights and finally a video-piano. The piano had videos and sounds recorded and displayed them when the piano was played. http://muonics.net/
posting by Sunna Sigurmarsdottir