tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46397970057506638222024-03-18T19:54:26.420-07:00escapisticrheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-39387455447717208862009-06-10T08:44:00.001-07:002009-06-10T08:44:57.868-07:00<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/b1KLkyk1rIQ&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/b1KLkyk1rIQ&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-39924388223726397202008-07-18T11:44:00.000-07:002008-07-18T11:45:04.958-07:00<blockquote><em>Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had<br />words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language<br />trembles with desire</em><br /></blockquote><br /><div align="right">Roland Barthes</div>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-44376589449092926422008-05-28T07:58:00.001-07:002008-05-28T07:58:11.513-07:00<div style="text-align: left; padding: 3px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/23615728@N08/2431033751/" title="photo sharing"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2043/2431033751_11b6f0a69a.jpg" style="border: solid 2px #000000;" alt="" /></a><br /><span style="font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px;"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/23615728@N08/2431033751/"></a>, originally uploaded by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/23615728@N08/">brocantegirl</a>.</span></div><p></p>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-50659157533858435172008-05-28T07:12:00.001-07:002008-05-28T07:16:53.280-07:00<div style="PADDING-RIGHT: 3px; PADDING-LEFT: 3px; PADDING-BOTTOM: 3px; PADDING-TOP: 3px; TEXT-ALIGN: left"><a title="photo sharing" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/23615728@N08/2248523255/"><img style="BORDER-RIGHT: #000000 1px solid; BORDER-TOP: #000000 1px solid; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 1px solid; BORDER-BOTTOM: #000000 1px solid" alt="" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2010/2248523255_1e7b3b261f.jpg" /></a><br /><span style="MARGIN-TOP: 0px"><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/23615728@N08/2248523255/"></a><span style="font-size:78%;">, originally uploaded by </span><a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/23615728@N08/"><span style="font-size:78%;">brocantegirl</span></a><span style="font-size:78%;">.</span></span></div><p>Tiny colored dots on the mirror...</p>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-188493607351294822008-04-14T08:40:00.000-07:002008-04-14T09:19:23.901-07:00Melanie Bilenker<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioRiAM7_uePcmCIP2Dal19akij11IAJNGmxZoVaHJCJ7yWUw4is9UuBtDfeS6QxyGCmDlcn5kNY6byA8rrsIb4w_IrEurwILs0utwIxW4xoVuhGmSfuL3FJ_RfJHa-Jd_Haf0Yg5e7E94/s1600-h/06hairpin.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5189127086863517154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioRiAM7_uePcmCIP2Dal19akij11IAJNGmxZoVaHJCJ7yWUw4is9UuBtDfeS6QxyGCmDlcn5kNY6byA8rrsIb4w_IrEurwILs0utwIxW4xoVuhGmSfuL3FJ_RfJHa-Jd_Haf0Yg5e7E94/s320/06hairpin.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong>Brooch</strong> (2006)<br /><span style="font-size:85%;">2 1/4" x 1 7/8" x 3/8"5.7 x 4.7 x 1 cm</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Materials: Gold, sterling silver, boxwood, epoxy resin, pigment, hair(Photo: K. Yanoviak)</span><br /></span><br /><br />"The Victorians kept lockets of hair and miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to secure the memory of a lost love. In much the same way, I secure my memories through photographic images rendered in lines of my own hair, the physical remnants. I do not reproduce events, but quiet minutes, the mundane, the domestic, the ordinary moments."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.melaniebilenker.com/">http://www.melaniebilenker.com/</a>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-61974273592272740332008-03-29T09:13:00.000-07:002008-03-29T09:16:10.385-07:00The Ones We LoveThe Ones We Love is a project highlighting young and talented photographers from around the world. Each artist contributed six photographs of the person(s) who is most important to them, taken outdoors in a natural setting. The goal of the website is to portray the people who are loved, cherished, and inspirational to these artists, and also showcase the differences and similarities in the photographs each of them took within the same guidelines.<br /><br />http://www.theoneswelove.org/home.htmlrheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-50790154770584367392008-03-15T09:07:00.000-07:002008-03-15T09:08:57.509-07:00Say it's possible - Terra NaomiWhat would you do/want if anything were possible? in three words or less?<br /><br /><object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/AlXlhFlHR8A&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/AlXlhFlHR8A&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-89280394260823400502008-02-23T06:19:00.000-08:002008-02-23T06:21:41.947-08:00PsychogeographyA few years ago, acclaimed British novelist and journalist Will Self started walking. Not just wandering around, but really walking. He began after he quit using drugs, after he was famously kicked off British Prime Minister John Major’s plane in 1997 for allegedly snorting heroin in the bathroom. After that, Self began walking 10 and 20 and even 100 miles at a stretch. As a student of psychogeography, he found a kind of fulfillment in these adventures that he could not find traveling in planes, trains or automobiles. It had something to do with the way the physical world and the mind intersect to create experience, and it’s the subject of his new book, Psychogeography, a collection of his essays about his walks around the world. <br /><br />In it, Self writes that people today are “decoupled from physically geography.” He observes that walking “blows back the years, especially in urban contexts. The solitary walker is, himself, an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveler.” He told the New York Times on his 26-mile walk from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manhattan that, “People don’t know where they are anymore. In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?” <br /><br />The book is one of the most original travel tomes in years. Its essays, which originally appeared in the Independent, are illustrated by none other than Ralph Steadman. It hits bookstores at a time when many people seem to be craving a more immediate experience of the world and are ready to explore experimental travel. Frank Bures asked Self all about it. <br /><br /><strong>World Hum: For the uninitiated, what exactly is psychogeography? </strong><br /><br />Will Self: The term derives from the French Situationists, a post-Marxian groupuscule in 1950s Paris. Their leader, Guy Debord, coined it. For him, what he fervently hoped was that “late capitalist” society was a kind of illusion, or spectacle, in which city dwellers were thrust hither and thither by commercial imperatives—work, consume, die—and so unable to experience the reality of their environment. His solution was the derive, or drift, really a resurrection of the time-honoured tradition of the Parisian flaneur, in which the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it. Since the Situationists—whose main derive was to pick up a few bottles of cheap red wine, get drunk on them, totter through Paris to the Ile de la Citee in the Seine and then sleep it off—psychogeography has mutated in many ways, but most of us who practice it—and it is a practice, not a field per se—take the view that by walking you can decouple yourself from the human geography that so defines contemporary urbanity. <br /><br /><strong>How did you get interested in it? </strong><br /><br />My epiphany came in 1988, when one day I found myself standing in Central London with a day to kill. I realised—from out of the blue—that I had never seen the mouth of the Thames River that flows through London, even though I had been born in the city and lived there all my life. Not only that, I had never even seen a representation of it. It struck me, that if you were to encounter a peasant 30 miles from the mouth of the Amazon, and ask him what it was like at the river mouth, and he was to say that he had never seen it, you would think him a very benighted peasant. Yet that peasant was me. I immediately got in my car and drove to the mouth of the Thames. Needless to say it was nothing like I imagined. But as an indication of how strongly this human-defined geography still holds sway, I recently asked a large London audience at one of my readings how many of them had seen the Thames’s mouth, and only a handful raised their hands. <br /><br /><strong>What got you started as a long distance walker? </strong><br /><br />My father was a big walker. My way of being with him was to walk. We did long walks—hikes, really—when I was a child. The impulse to walk went underground for a long while—walking doesn’t really mix well with drug addiction, unless you’re going to score—but then re-surfaced eight years ago when I cleaned up. Since then it’s been burgeoning and burgeoning. <br /><br /><strong>You write that tourism is a search for a place that will embrace you. Is that partly what you’re doing with your walks? </strong><br /><br />No, not really. I’m an unrepentant Londoner, and the places that have chosen me (because I think it’s that way round: places choose you, rather than vice versa), have already done so. I think you only have room for two or three serious affairs of place in a lifetime, just as you only have emotional space for two or three serious love affairs. <br /><br /><strong>Apart from your walk from JFK to New York, what have been your most memorable walks?</strong> <br /><br />One that springs to mind is at the mouth of the Thames. On the north bank of the river there is a large, 10,000-acre island called Foulness, which has been a British army firing range since the First World War. It’s off limits except to those going on shore from boats. You can then walk across this eerie land that time has passed by and out on to the Thames estuarial mud, this on a Medieval causeway called the Broomway, because it’s made up of bundles of broom buried in the mud. I walked with a handful of companions over the mud for about six miles upriver, before tending back to the shore—an utterly bizarre, dislocatory and quite beautiful experience. <br /><br /><strong>What separates a psychogeographic act from a stunt, or a gimmick? Is it a difference in intent, or in outcome? </strong><br /><br />I’m too old for gimmicks or stunts. The kind of psychogeography I practice really works—for me. It inspires my prose, it soothes my soul. It makes it possible for me to deal with the hideousness of the globalized man-machine matrix. <br /><br /><strong>In such a hypermediated world, what room is there for an idea like psychogeography? </strong><br /><br />Like writing—which is low start-up, all you need is a pen and a piece of paper—psychogeography is bare-bones. You just get out there and experience. It doesn’t require the hypermediated world, it is more akin to a meditational practice. <br /><br /><br />(from here: http://www.worldhum.com/qanda/item/will_self_on_psychogeography_and_the_places_that_choose_you_20071217/)rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-17227230717359645762007-12-06T03:33:00.001-08:002007-12-06T03:33:24.866-08:00Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon's slap, seek manhood, taste a little of godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb:<br /> (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.)<br /> generation, regeneration, again, again.<br /><br />- Walter M. Miller Jr., 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-35008930498724246652007-11-27T01:03:00.000-08:002007-11-27T01:04:02.213-08:00I'm Not There<a href="http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=19818335">I'M NOT THERE trailer</a><br><embed src="http://lads.myspace.com/videos/vplayer.swf" flashvars="m=19818335&v=2&type=video" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="430" height="346"></embed><br><a href="http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.addToProfileConfirm&videoid=19818335&title=I'M NOT THERE trailer">Add to My Profile</a> | <a href="http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.home">More Videos</a>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-46002608545936119332007-10-15T06:11:00.000-07:002007-10-15T06:12:22.457-07:00Bruce Maufrom here http://www.brucemaudesign.com/manifesto.html<br /><br /><br /><strong>An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth</strong><br />Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements that exemplify Bruce Mau's beliefs, motivations and strategies. It also articulates how the BMD studio works. <br /><br />1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.<br /><br />2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.<br /><br />3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there. <br /><br />4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.<br /><br />5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.<br /><br />6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.<br /><br />7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.<br /><br />8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.<br /><br />9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.<br /><br />10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.<br /><br />11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.<br /><br />12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.<br /><br />13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.<br /><br />14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.<br /><br />15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.<br /><br />16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.<br /><br />17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.<br /><br />18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.<br /><br />19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.<br /><br />20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.<br /><br />21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.<br /><br />22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.<br /><br />23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.<br /><br />24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.<br /><br />25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.<br /><br />26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.<br /><br />27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."<br /><br />28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.<br /><br />29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.<br /><br />30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'<br /><br />31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.<br /><br />32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.<br /><br />33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.<br /><br />34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.<br /><br />35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.<br /><br />36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.<br /><br />37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.<br /><br />38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.<br /><br />39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.<br /><br />40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.<br /><br />41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.<br /><br />42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.<br /><br />43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-53837792217698659552007-09-30T13:59:00.001-07:002007-10-02T07:05:51.794-07:00James Victore<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rIBjNHOrWIw"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rIBjNHOrWIw" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><br />http://www.jamesvictore.com/rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-10823848792483234102007-09-30T13:34:00.000-07:002007-09-30T13:35:08.582-07:00Stefan Sagmeister - Yes, design can make you happy<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/eZp-H9g_jeY"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/eZp-H9g_jeY" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-60383698903985010382007-09-30T12:46:00.001-07:002007-09-30T12:46:32.112-07:00David Carson<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/C_j5M-xJIC0"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/C_j5M-xJIC0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-1712425445233096762007-09-30T12:43:00.001-07:002007-09-30T12:43:53.682-07:00Paula Scher<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/TdzzVeIdwpQ"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/TdzzVeIdwpQ" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-611606144427634982007-09-30T11:38:00.001-07:002007-09-30T11:38:34.245-07:00Saul Bass - Why Man Creates<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/penl-HYfMCg"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/penl-HYfMCg" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-17434275167619934512007-09-30T08:48:00.000-07:002007-09-30T08:49:07.731-07:00Thou Shall Not<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yoN6XfyQsr4"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yoN6XfyQsr4" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-34481062608687340162007-09-30T08:27:00.000-07:002007-09-30T08:28:36.617-07:00TypographyVeteran graphic design/typography and letterpress teacher from the London College of Printing: David Dabner talks... giving an insight into the principles of design, creative letterpress and why computers make students sloppy.<br /><br /><br /><object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/1Xg5O0l7ybY"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/1Xg5O0l7ybY" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />"Computers make students sloppy, it makes for sloppy thinking and sloppy approach."<br /><br />"Good typographers can think, if you cant think you produce a lot of nonsense because in thinking you can delete the nonessential."<br /><br />"...they stop actually using pencil and paper and they work directly on the computer which in itself is ok but I think the computer inhibits their ability to develop."<br /><br />"An analogy can be someone playing jazz, you've got to learn the instrument first, you cant...you can but it just sounds bloody awful."<br /><br />"Its a tool, just like any tool, you need to learn to use it."<br /><br />"Its changed, you have to accept change, you cant hold back. but basic principals of typography haven't changed.<br /><br />"You do become elitist because you care, you need to be a little bit elitist there's nothing wrong with that. You've got to care about what you do."rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-5753546382845299562007-09-28T16:07:00.000-07:002007-09-28T16:08:15.442-07:00Leonard Cohen - Joan Of ArcNow the flames they followed joan of arc<br />As she came riding through the dark;<br />No moon to keep her armour bright,<br />No man to get her through this very smoky night.<br />She said, Im tired of the war,<br />I want the kind of work I had before,<br />A wedding dress or something white<br />To wear upon my swollen appetite.<br /><br />Well, Im glad to hear you talk this way,<br />You know Ive watched you riding every day<br />And something in me yearns to win<br />Such a cold and lonesome heroine.<br />And who are you? she sternly spoke<br />To the one beneath the smoke.<br />Why, Im fire, he replied,<br />And I love your solitude, I love your pride.<br /><br />Then fire, make your body cold,<br />Im going to give you mine to hold,<br />Saying this she climbed inside<br />To be his one, to be his only bride.<br />And deep into his fiery heart<br />He took the dust of joan of arc,<br />And high above the wedding guests<br />He hung the ashes of her wedding dress.<br /><br />It was deep into his fiery heart<br />He took the dust of joan of arc,<br />And then she clearly understood<br />If he was fire, oh then she must be wood.<br />I saw her wince, I saw her cry,<br />I saw the glory in her eye.<br />Myself I long for love and light,<br />But must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-19839673624420839232007-09-17T04:51:00.000-07:002007-09-17T04:52:31.421-07:00The Revolution Will Not Be Televised<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GPvrnCoHSwo"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GPvrnCoHSwo" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-451954629269262982007-09-06T13:53:00.001-07:002007-09-06T13:53:50.168-07:00<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/GORdDogxyuE"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/GORdDogxyuE" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object><br /><br /><object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/UBnp84WWHuk"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/UBnp84WWHuk" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-23091398806836922842007-09-03T07:17:00.000-07:002007-09-03T07:18:11.207-07:00THE WD INTERVIEW: Chuck Palahniukfrom <a href="http://www.writersdigest.com/articles/interview/chuck_palahniuk.asp">http://www.writersdigest.com/articles/interview/chuck_palahniuk.asp</a><br /><br /><strong>Shock And Awe</strong><br /><br />Cult author Chuck Palahniuk continues to push literary boundaries in strange—even forbidding—territories. Find out what compels this seemingly mild-mannered author of novels like Fight Club to delve into the dark side.<br /><br />by Jordan E. Rosenfeld<br /><br /><br /><br />Controversy rides Chuck Palahniuk's back like bad weather, which is exactly how he likes it. When he tried to get his first novel, Invisible Monsters (then titled Manifesto) published in the early 1990s, some editors secretly loved the dark novel about a model who's shot in the face, but they shied away from acquiring it. Frustrated and rebellious, the Portland native embarked on an even darker book. The result was Fight Club, a novel about fist-fighting, anti-corporate power and identity, which rocketed him from obscurity to success and then fame when the book was adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.<br /><br />While critics are still uncertain of what to make of 42-year-old Palahniuk's unique blend of dark, irreverent and discomforting fiction—labeling him a "shock writer"—his fans are so passionate, they've organized "The Cult" website (chuckpalahniuk.net), where they act as his unofficial PR team, staunch defenders and cult of worship.<br /><br />Though Palahniuk claims he still isn't sure he's made it as a writer, his 10 books (two nonfiction) have sold more than 3 million copies, and at least three more of his books have been optioned for films, with Choke set to begin filming this year.<br /><br />For a man who writes about violence and sex in unabashedly graphic terms, the writer himself is disarmingly soft-spoken, even shy, and extremely private about his personal life. When we spoke, his new novel Rant had just been published and was garnering harsh reviews from critics. But Palahniuk is a testimony to the aphorism that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Even as critics pan him, his books continue to rise effortlessly on the bestseller charts.<br /><br />YOUR PATH TO SUCCESS DIDN'T FOLLOW A STRAIGHT LINE. AT WHAT POINT DID YOU FEEL LIKE YOU REALLY MADE IT?<br /><br />I'll let you know when that happens. I don't know if you ever really feel like you've made it. Maybe it was one day when my mom called and said she'd seen a pallet full of my book Lullaby at Costco.<br /><br />YET YOU HAVE AN INCREDIBLY LARGE FAN BASE THAT EVEN HAS ITS OWN NAME AND WEBSITE—THE CULT. DID THEY MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A SUCCESS?<br /><br />I try to forget about the expectation that's out there and the audience listening for the next thing so that I'm not trying to please them. I've spent a huge amount of time not communicating with those folks and denying that they exist. You realize you have no control over how you're perceived. I want to focus my energy on the thing I can control—which is the next book.<br /><br />YOU HAVE SUCH VARIED AND WILD NEW IDEAS FOR EACH NOVEL. WHEN DO YOU KNOW THAT SOMETHING HAS THE MEAT TO BECOME A NOVEL?<br /><br />It's usually a premise that I can present in a short story and bring to my workshop. Hopefully, they can instantly get it and be very excited about it and take it off in different directions. When it gets a response like that, I know the premise is good. When it generates personal stories from other people, when an idea seems to portray an aspect of my experience that's really close to other people's, that's another really good sign that it can go for a few hundred pages.<br /><br />IS INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE A BIG PART OF YOUR WRITING PROCESS?<br /><br />Entirely. My writing has to excite people and depict or include their experiences. That way, every time I go out socially, and people ask, "What are you working on?" and I tell them the premise, I end up illustrating it with anecdotes taken from hundreds of people. That's part of my process—to go out and interact with people. It's very much like an archival process. I understand that the Brothers Grimm would go out and get people talking so they could document folk tales that weren't being documented any other way. I try to offer a little bit of myself—some experience from my life that evokes stories in other people.<br /><br />THAT'S AN INTERESTING POINT IN LIGHT OF YOUR NEW NOVEL, RANT, WHICH IS WRITTEN AS AN ORAL HISTORY—A SERIES OF INTERVIEWS ABOUT THE TITLE CHARACTER. WHAT MADE YOU WANT TO WORK WITH THIS FORM?<br /><br />One, I've always found the form just incredibly readable. It's a form that's presented in small nuggets, so whether you enjoy the moment or not, there will always be a payoff at some point. It's such a flexible form that it can be used to make a fairly mundane character much more attractive. For example, the biography of Edith Sedgwick: She really was a spoiled rich girl who did a lot of drugs, but by using this form, her story is more readable, compelling and dynamic than it actually was.<br /><br />Second, it's a nonfiction form. You can always tell a more incredible fictional story if you present it with the structure of nonfiction. An example: Orson Welles telling H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds through radio, giving it a credibility or gravitas. And later, doing Citizen Kane, a fictional movie using a nonfiction form. Or think of the movie The Blair Witch Project that was presented as lost documentary footage that had been recovered. You can tell a more over-the-top incredible story if you use a nonfiction form.<br /><br />Third, this form allows you to cut things together like a film editor cuts film. You can really experiment with collage and juxtaposing certain elements. Seemingly unrelated things can be placed next to each other, and you don't have to worry about lots of wordy transitional phrases. You can present the best nuggets in whatever order serves it best.<br /><br />A HALLMARK OF YOUR WRITING IS THAT YOU PLAY WITH FORM IN A WAY THAT MAKES PEOPLE THINK DIFFERENTLY. WHY DO YOU LIKE TO PLAY WITH THESE NON-TRADITIONAL NARRATIVE FORMS?<br /><br />Laziness. I just hate having to come up with all those transitional establishing shots, all the conventions. You know, the part where the character looks into a shiny mirror or teapot so they can describe themselves—all those hackneyed, obligatory 19th-century things. I hate doing that, so I find a nonfiction form that provides me with the structure I need. I've done it with every one of my books.<br /><br />LET'S TALK ABOUT RANT THE CHARACTER. HE'S SORT OF A PILGRIM FOR AUTHENTICITY; HE'S ALWAYS SEARCHING OUT WHAT'S REAL, EVEN IF IT'S UGLY OR PAINFUL OR BASE. I WONDER IF YOU FEEL LIKE OUR CULTURE HAS BECOME SANITIZED OR SEPARATE FROM OUR HUMANNESS? THAT COMES UP IN A LOT OF YOUR WORK.<br /><br />I'm not sure about the whole culture, but I would be comfortable saying that intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them.<br /><br />I try to provide as many strong experiences as possible so that you're left thinking you experienced or lived through what the characters have. The idea is to try to place the reader in that reality so they really feel like a character.<br /><br />YOU OFTEN ARE DESCRIBED AS A SHOCK WRITER AND SOMEONE WHO LIKES TO PUSH BOUNDARIES AND GO FOR THE DISCOMFORT ZONE. ARE YOU OUT TO SHOCK OR MAKE PEOPLE UNCOMFORTABLE?<br /><br />I'm just trying to record and honor stories that have been told to me because more often than not, everything I write about begins with an anecdote. My first goal is to document an aspect of human experience that won't get documented by any other form of media.<br /><br />My second goal is to make my workshop laugh on Monday nights and to make my editor laugh.<br /><br />My third goal is to shock myself—to put something on the page that I never want my mother or nephews to see and that I cannot imagine reading in public. Because if you're always going for the thing you can conceive of, it's boring; you don't force yourself to change. But if you can somehow create something that you can't conceive of at the beginning, you evolve—you discover something that was beyond your capability when you started. That makes more sense to me.<br /><br />DOES IT GET HARDER TO SURPRISE YOURSELF?<br /><br />Not really. It's such a harvesting/gathering process. A lot of my discoveries involve other people who bring me stuff that's so outside my own experience. I find myself continually amazed, shocked and moved by how diverse people's lives are.<br /><br />WHAT'S YOUR WRITING PROCESS LIKE?<br /><br />My writing process isn't a very organized thing. It seems like I'm always working in some way. Even when people are sending me letters, I'm looking for a really strong anecdote that resonates or doing the research to develop those seeds and illustrate them in different ways. Or I'm talking to people, gathering firsthand experience. The actual writing part is a tiny part of my life. I often write in public. I bring my laptop or write freehand in notebooks. Then, I'll read through them while I exercise or walk the dog. The very last thing I do is the sitting alone at the computer part.<br /><br />WHY DO YOU LIKE TO WRITE IN PUBLIC?<br /><br />Typically, by the time I'm sitting down to write a story draft, I have an idea of the dynamics I'm holding in my head, and I'll know the purpose of the scene. For instance, I often need physical gesture to balance dialogue. If I write in public, every time I need to know what a character is doing with his hand or foot, I can look up and study people and find compelling gestures that I can harvest. Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.<br /><br />I READ THAT YOU HAVEN'T HAD A TV IN YEARS. DOES THAT INFLUENCE YOUR WRITING?<br /><br />I haven't had television since 1991, and it definitely influences me. As a child of the 1970s, I couldn't hold a narrative in my head; I was lucky if I could hold a joke in my head, because every time you turn on television or radio, it wipes the slate clean—at least in my case. After I gave up television, I found I could carry longer and longer stories or ideas in my head and put them together until I was carrying an entire short story. That's pretty much when I started writing.<br /><br />TELL US WHAT'S NEXT.<br /><br />I've fallen into a pattern of one kind of acceptable book and one really appalling book—I have to warn you that next year's book, titled Snuff, is the appalling book.<br /><br />WHEN YOU SAY "AN APPALLING BOOK," DO YOU ACTUALLY APPALL YOURSELF?<br /><br />I appall my editor. I make myself really, really nervous. Right now, the workshop that I attend on Monday nights is entirely female writers. I'm not sure what kind of material I should present, because I don't want to offend or anger them. With the material for Snuff, the women either roared with laughter or told me more experiences that I needed to hear. They ended up egging me on to places I would never have gone. They are an enormous, fantastic resource.<br /><br />THERE ARE A LOT OF ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WHAT'S ACCEPTABLE TO WRITE ABOUT, AND WHAT'S NOT, BUT YOU DON'T SEEM TO CARE WHAT PEOPLE THINK.<br /><br />As horrifying as something might be, it's happened to somebody. That's my line of defense. Just because I'm writing about something, it's not so unique or unusual that millions of people aren't already doing it. Sometimes the very best way to deal with unpleasant things is to depict them in ways that allow people to laugh at them and destroy the power of unsayable things, rather than refusing to acknowledge them.<br /><br />DO YOU FEEL YOU GET ENOUGH CREDIT FOR THE HUMOR THAT'S IN YOUR WORK?<br /><br />My workshop laughs a lot. My editor laughs. I have a secret goal with my editor—he has asthma and uses his inhaler, and after I send him a new manuscript, I'll have his assistant phone me and tell me how many times he had to get his inhaler out while reading a draft. It's my secret laugh meter.<br /><br />YOUR WORK CAUSES PEOPLE TO FIRST LAUGH AND THEN CRINGE.<br /><br />That's the idea, the juxtaposition of those opposite states. Tom Spanbauer, who taught me to write, said you have to make them laugh and then, as soon as possible, try to break their hearts.<br /><br />DO YOU THINK YOU'LL EVER WRITE A SWEET STORY?<br /><br />I started to write a children's book about a little boy whose mother dies. After coming home from the funeral, his father leaves him alone in the apartment, and he finds a phone number on a business card that says: "Ladies for all occasions." He phones up and says, "I need a mother," and a jaded escort girl shows up thinking he's a pervert but ends up having this sweet afternoon with this 6-year-old boy after he's just buried his mother. As a children's book, it didn't go very far.<br /><br />I HEAR THAT CHOKE IS BEING MADE INTO A MOVIE AND THAT A FEW OTHER BOOKS HAVE BEEN OPTIONED. WHAT'S IT LIKE TO UNDERGO A FILM ADAPTATION OF YOUR WORK? ARE YOU ATTACHED TO THE PROCESS?<br /><br />Once again, I say control the things you can control. As for the rest of it—God bless it all. I know that [the filmmakers'] goal is to do what they do as well as possible.<br /><br />DID YOU LIKE THE MOVIE VERSION OF FIGHT CLUB?<br /><br />Yes, I thought they did a fantastic job. But cross your fingers: the Fight Club Broadway musical is still alive. I can't say any more than that.<br /><br />DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR BUDDING WRITERS?<br /><br />I've got so much! One—persevere. I know so many writers who are a hundred times better than me and have longer, greater ideas than mine, but they gave up; they stopped. The biggest talent you can have is determination. Do you use the writing process as your ongoing excuse to keep exploring the world, meeting people and learning things? If you can do that, then the writing itself will be its own payoff and reward.rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-86584777552658654792007-08-31T08:28:00.000-07:002007-08-31T08:30:52.392-07:00MJK<strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: Springfield, Missouri: the buckle of the Bible belt. Unbuckle the belt, take off your pants, and drive drunk (during a concert, Springfield, MO, 8 March 1997).<br /><br /><strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: Maybe we should have prefaced the show. You know a lot of people get the wrong idea when it comes to the message of our music. Do you know the difference between compassion and fear? Progression and stagnation? Quit beating on each other (Directed toward persons in the audience who were violently "moshing"; Boise, ID, 16 August 1998).<br /><br /><strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: Religion, TV, and media...have powerful effects on the way people see the world. When we’re on the tour bus traveling from city to city, we have a Play Station 2. When I play [a game called] Quake 3 for a few days, I find it impedes with my ability to relate to people. So media in its various forms does, to some degree, affect the way in which we interact with one another. I have to deliberately separate myself from this game and the real world. Lately, the media has turned us into suspicious Americans. The media has generated enough fear to allow Congress to give the cops permission to check our colons whenever they want to. (On the greatest injustices in the world right now; from a 2001 interview)<br /><br /><strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: I think [the situation in America] is going to have to come to a head, because it's gone so far, and the people that have been duped are embarrassed, but they're not going to do anything about it. They're going to toe the line just to see if it pans out in their direction so they can say, "See, I was right." It really is imploding; it's getting nuts everywhere — and it's this crazy nationwide, if not global, push for this polarizing religious fanaticism that's just infecting everything. I mean one of the Baldwin brothers is now preaching. Jesus f--king Christ! (from a 2006 Interview)<br /><br /><strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: I think it's really important for people who have some kind of access to this industry, or some kind of success, to understand that this is not the real world. If you really want your children to grow up in a stable environment that's going to foster actual skills that will translate globally, you can't do it [in L.A.]. Either that or you have to put them in a situation where they're going to grow up in a different way (After being asked what sort of values MJK wants to pass down to his son, Devo).<br /><br /><strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: We just released our new album and I want everyone to go buy a copy because I want to add another wing to my vinyard. (during the Tool concert at Detroit, MI on 15 May 2006)<br /><br /> <strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: Sorry about the ticket scalpers. I suggest you scalp them back. Not literally though, I could get into legal trouble for saying that. (during Tool's show at Kansas City, MO on 11 May 2006)<br /><br /><strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: Welcome to our first show in many years. We wanted to take it down a notch, keep it all small and intimate, invite a few friends. Welcome... But you, dude. You need to put your f---ing clothes back on. You're bumming me out. Got lost on the way to Burning Man. (just before Tool played "Jambi" at the 2006 Coachella Festival)<br /><br /><strong>Maynard James Keenan</strong>: The guys (the other three members of the band Tool) know that I've gotta be in Arizona for the harvesting and processing, and then I'll need to be back there again for the bottling. We'll be working our 2006 touring schedule around it.rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-62725231623135730052007-08-31T06:36:00.000-07:002007-08-31T07:52:10.000-07:00Neville Brody : 'what now?'Neville Brody : 'what now?'<br />Category: Art and Photography<br /><br />New York, May 2003<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />It is difficult today to discuss design at such a critical time in all our lives, with the world in such a traumatised state. It is vital to look at things always from within a context. In the case of any kind of design, that context has to be the world and the society that surrounds it, and, in theory, that which it serves. With a decreasingly smaller and more patterned world, as western culture spreads virtually unchecked throughout the globe, it is crucial to look outside the industry we inhabit and to notice not only it but the effect, both positive and negative, that we are having on it. It is also vital to understand where and why our progression is violently opposed, and what we see as progress is seen as incursion.<br /><br />We seem to focus on the how and the what of our work, but we need to focus on the why.<br /><br />we are the middle men, the trusted souls that lay between a public and its information. We are the ones that help shape the opinions of the reader through the way we interpret and present ideas. We are the ones that make the choices over what a story means, and how it should be reacted to. We inform the outcome, information being the way we are informed about a fact.<br /><br />We distract ourselves with awards and groundbreaking design.<br /><br />We should be the ones who are more knowleadgeable. We are the ones who have the direct access to information in its raw state. we are the ones who straddle both worlds - the world of pre-publishing and the world of its receipt, i.e. we are the translators of invisible concepts into packaged form, we convert thoughts and actions into mental images and attutudes. In many cases we control the interpretation of the world and manipulate its understanding, like a filter. we take real world experience and turn it into formula. The font we choose, the photo we select and crop, the way we use space - all these control our response as readers. Shakespeare set in 36pt franklin gothic condensed is going to create a totally different response if it was set in 10pt garamond.<br /><br />Secondly, I myself have found that I have become increasingly disconnected from my own work, and the reasons why I do it. This feeling has spread to other areas of my life, as I find myself struggling with the search for core purpose. This is not only a spiritual dilemma, but also a social one. I am finding it difficult to understand my core purpose, if I have one, to understand the surrounding world, and to define my place and role within that, if I have one.<br /><br />I continue on a day to day basis, I go through the motions, with apparent increasing activity but decreased output. And as the heart of my raison d'être becomes more elusive, my attempt to counter it with frantic activity increases until I am often left exhausted by the very act of manic non-production.<br /><br />For instance, I receive, like everyone, tons of emails. Afer eliminating the spam and the irrelevant, it still leaves me with fifty-odd mails that need a response, a process that often takes several hours each day.<br /><br />What kind of world do I live in?<br /><br />My world is filled with gadgets. With my mobile phone I can email, browse the internet at high speed, read the news, receive and watch videos, listen to my entire record collection, control my diary, take photographs and edit them, then send them to others, send text messages, play games, wake myself up, control my finance, pay my bills. When I use it as a remote control I can control nearly all my electronic appliances. And somewhere in there I can also speak to someone. My only regret so far is that it doesn't cook my food.<br /><br />I feel that I have had a hundred wires and pipes plugged into me to carry information to and from my being, like a hundred drip feeds.<br /><br />I am losing my sense of self in all of this, my very existence is becoming fragmented and I feel I am ending up as a Hub, a series of conduits for channeling information at high speed. This process allows little time to respond to anything with any great depth. The simultaneous pressure to receive and publish a million messages a day means the machine takes over, and I become defined by my input and output.<br /><br />This process means that ideas do not have time to build any great depth, that stories are barely fleshed out before the need to publish them rips them away from their incubation, that half-formed concepts are being pushed out the door in the mad rush to fill all those channels of output. The demands of such a voracious communications machine demands to be fed. More magazines, more channels. Upwards of 20,000 hours a week of national broadcast space to be filled every week.<br /><br />I live in a multi-option, multi-channel world of apparent infinite possibilty, one where I feel I am making real choices, but in fact I am simply choosing from pre-selected options. I am not actually changing my world, I am simply editing and filtering it. I do not change the message itself, that has been protected, and would give away too much control to the user to allow such access. The only real choice I have would be to turn off. Or on. Customised media is moulding itself to my tastes, in the hope of selling me more product to me, copying is the sincerest form of flattery.<br /><br />There are so many choices, that I am drowning in them, swirling around in an array of thousands of publications, cd's, websites, tv channels, all of which are growing in number at an exponential rate.<br /><br />I live in a world where I am forgetting how to be intuitive, instinctive, artistic, natural, analogue. A world where my formulaic responses and technological output are mechanical, or scientific, even though I imagine I am making free choices. Today, I calculate, instead of create. I have forgotten how to work with my hands, to mold things like clay, witnessing the birth of new shapes and emotions. I used to look at my work in the same way as playing jazz, a world of informed improvisation. Today, I usually play to a musical scale based on marketing.<br /><br />Most art and culture is now suffering from what I call a post-production syndrome. That is to say that most culture is now calculated, geared towards a desired reaction, a controlled outcome. The project starts with the response, then works backwards to the object. Then we figure out how to build it. We no longer allow ourselves the risk of allowing something to just happen, to risk the unknown, to experience something unpredictable.<br /><br />I seem to live in a world where business has become all important, where quarterly returns govern all decisions, where a drive to collect clients and seduce them into providing means of support has become all pervasive, as is the demand I accept to use my skill to persuade the public to purchase the goods of my clients in oredr to keep myself in business. This is a place of fear, where we take decisions based on a survival criteria, but one where there simply is not enough money, not enough clients, not enough praise or awards, to keep the wolf from the door. And so we clamour for more, and the victim is our unbridled creativity, the unshackled growth of the human spirit and its culture.<br /><br />I discused this recently with Jean-François Bizot. Over the last twenty or so years a critical transition has occured.<br /><br />Whan I started working, it did not matter to me if I would earn money or not. In fact, I lived on the poverty line for almost four years after leaving college, not knowing where my next money would come from. What drove me was the belief that what I was doing was right in its risk-taking, and that it could make a difference somehow to the way people saw things. I was part of what you could call a Revolutionary Generation, born in the culture of the sixties, a generation which truly believed that society could be challenged and changed for the better, that artists were working for the public good, and that ideas counted for more than commerce.<br /><br />This broad social challenge was perceived by the Reagan Thatcher governnents as dangerous, and quickly replaced in society by an advertising and marketing machine that could mimic danger without being dangerous in order to sell into niche markets. This policy anhialated any real challenge, as it is hard to fight a mirror image. Instead, money culture was introduced as the core objective of 'creative' society. The outcome of this is that today everything has become commodotised, turned into a saleable commodity, and genericised. Anything of risk simply doesn't get produced, or if it does, isn't distributed by any of the major distribution channels in either the physical and electroinic worlds.<br /><br />Revolution was replaced by a 'Comfort and Prestige' generation, a no risk-taking, security-chasing generation disconnected from the chaos of creative liberation.<br /><br />Now, in the third act of this play, we are left in the position of sensing how vaccuous our culture is, how interchangeable and limited our commodities are, of knowing that somewhere there must be more, and we are not convinced by filling the void with war. We yearn a more spiritual place, but we don't believe in religion. The young sense the hollowness of their commercialised culture, but the voices of revolution have become faint echoes in the white noise of media overload.<br /><br />We live in a world where Revolution is a Gap advertising campaign, where an average of 30% obesity in the population is an accepted norm, where the cancer of genericism has eaten our culture away.<br /><br /><br />I live in a generic world, where the very means of distribution have created a processed culture, like processed food. The act of production means that everything must be comodotised, simplified, easily varied from the same basic list of ingredients. Culture, film, music, literature, art, tourism, architecture, magazines, could all come with a list of ingredients, like supermarket food, with added flavour enhancers to make the blandness seem appetising and addictive. The differences between products are now often slight, the unique qualities that define something as individual are minor, but are trumpetted loudly. Cities begin to look the same, no matter where you are in the world.<br /><br />Ironically, as we produce generic culture, we ban others from producing generic versions of it. We ban the manufacture and distribution of generic drugs that would save the lives of millions in the developing world. We also crack down on copies of brand goods in third world countries where poverty is rife but our prices are out of reach.<br /><br />We live in a world so full of love that we no longer know how to find it, so full of the human spirit tat we had to paint over it. We live in a world with such potential positivity that we choose to live in the negative. War is all there is, what is it good for?<br /><br />I am struggling to understand the world I live in, and I can no longer see the wood for the trees, I can no longer see the city for the coffee shops. My space has been invaded by generic molecules, a nanotechnology of invisible identikit machines that are proceeding to consume all other matter; atmosphere that we breathe in as we gasp for air, for oxygen.<br /><br />We modify society to desire certain things and to make certain choices unknowingly. This craving is controlled through a kind of cultural genetic engineering, dna alteration. We are the scientists that know what images, colours, fonts and words will produce key reactions.<br /><br />The real point of all this, is that we have created for society and for ourselves a pallette of very limited alternatives and choices, a homogeneous stripped-down set of dna building blocks with which we construct all of our global culture. We live in a world of mediocrity with all the sensory controls full on. In this restricted culture we perceive apparent hills and valleys, light and dark, but the pallete only has 256 colours. We have limited our imaginations, dressed them up in the same wardrobe, and have forgotten how to look beyond. The world is moving from high to low resolution, from infinite possibility to 72dpi.<br /><br />We have forgotten that we can break the rules, I mean really break the rules. We just vary what we already have, instead of allowing new things to happen, or to enter our limited vocabulary. We have forgotten how to embrace chaos, and trust to chance. We have forgotten how to trust ourselves, and we have lost the courage to be truly different. We have forgotten that other cultures and races can be respected and learnt from, and we just don't know how to stop ourselves from wanting to impose our own cultures and way of seeing the world upon them. And we don't understand when other cultures reject our own, especially when we have largely rejected all others, or assimilated them into our own limited pallettes.<br /><br />Art and commerce do not mix today. The lowest common denominator, the line of maximal sale and appeal, is the goal. This renders everything as homogenised, averaged, mediocre. We counteract this by shouting, or choosing a piece of sensory territiory to call our own. So we choose blue, or circle, or grunge, or M, and scream it out to appear different. Or we choose cars, or sport, or gardens, or drugs.<br /><br />Brands are like this. At a root level, there is little difference between starbucks, nike, virgin, ford, macdonalds. Again, little variation within a limited pallette of expression and imagination is worn loudly and proudly. In this Matrix of imagination, true revolution will never occur, and any real difference is stamped out as being the real enemy.<br /><br />You may ask, what does this have to do with design? Today, the main characteristic of design is its interchangeability, and how little real risk is being taken. The quality of design is extraordinarily high, the production standards unrivalled and the craftsmanship superb, but somehow we have seen most of it before. We admire the easthetic and technical standards, but we are left somehow empty, or unmoved.<br /><br />You see, we are stuck in a place of fear. Fear that we won't survive, fear that we will lose our jobs, fear that someone will attack us, fear to be too different, fear to criticise openly our own governments or their actions, fear of failure, fear of fear. This constant, low level anxiety that we all live in is exhausting, a dehumanising experience. No wonder we are afraid to raise our voices.<br /><br />But raise our voices we must. We owe it to ourselves and the society we serve to tear up the rules and try something new. We must embrace risk, danger, thoughts beyond the normal pallette of thought. We have to open the gates to input, become receivers of the world instead of just broadcasters. We have to embrace the technology that allows our messages to be changed, instead of delivering predefined options. We must embrace an alternative to the Hollywood of our lives, step beyond the AOL Timewarner Disney-isation of our worlds<br /><br />In other words, we can use other words. We can talk about love for our fellow man, of opportunity, of learning and education. We can help use our tools to educate, instead of dictate. We can break the cycle.<br /><br />We must bring new and real meaning to that phrase, think different, and let's see what difference we can really make.rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4639797005750663822.post-58479061750588759452007-08-29T17:37:00.001-07:002007-08-29T17:39:10.724-07:00The Balenciaga fw07 reconstructed<a href="http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/set?.mid=embed&id=124862"><img width="400" src="http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-set/BAcEMTIzNAQEBAgDAwAAAAoDanBnBAAAAC5vdXQKFnlnQWcyQlZUM0JHc0FKQ2V3dlk0MEECAAAAaWQKAXgEAAAAc2l6ZQ.jpg" title="Balenciaga inspired 2" height="400" border="0" /></a>rheakhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02696005858251373474noreply@blogger.com0