Continuing on the road to abstraction

I had a great and productive meeting with Michelle Hinebrook today. She’s not a thesis advisor but I thought I would benefit from her perspective so I asked her to take a look at what I’m working on. She thought I should feel comfortable to go further into abstraction and be limitless at this point. Every question I’m asking myself at this point is precious because this is the work that will carry me forward into my career. Given the topic I’m on now, I couldn’t even cover it in a life’s work. There’s just that much you can do. The visual explorations of our surroundings are limitless, and my approach has been very open-minded and experimental. She made me realize that I should feel more comfortable showing process and talking about the questions I have.

What is my question for Bruce Mau’s visit tomorrow? He’s coming to give us all a short crit and I’ve decided to show him some of my process work for thesis. Using my shape abstraction tracings (from a previous post) as a jumping off point, I started sketching a series of symbols to organize the visual language in our surroundings. I’m interested in the legibility of the city and the mental map that lets us remember a place and navigate through it.

I paired the symbols with phrases from Jane Jacobs “The Life and Death of American Cities”. I thought the language from the foremost urban planning critic would give the images a new context, bringing into light the neighborhood character that is in constant flux. All of these shapes are images taken on Rivington street.

The next phase was taking these images further into abstraction to get to the absolute simplest form. I still haven’t gone far enough into abstraction, so I can do a lot more. This was a really fun process of seeing where the shapes led me, listening to “the yes or no of our material” as Anne Albers said.

Here’s my question: I’m working a lot with abstraction, and I’m exploring it’s communication value. Do you think complete abstraction communicates in that the viewer can insert themselves into what they are looking at? Richard Tuttle is an example of an artist that works with abstraction of the simplest shapes, and I see cityscapes in them. Someone else might see something else, so in that way does it communicate a message in it’s simplicity?

I have abstract maps that I created today as well (need to think of a better word than map), and I will post them tomorrow with the feedback from the crit.

New Rube Ideas

I presented my Rube Goldberg device on Tuesday, although it wasn’t exactly a device. The project reveals the Rube Goldberg machine in everyday life. I created a poster (below) with all of the photos I took in my trek around the city (to trace hello on the map). The process highlights the connections between people and their interactions at each of the sixteen points. In phase two (this poster is phase one) I will track the life story of the goods and services that are exchanged at each of these points. It’s fascinating to think of the effect even small exchanges can make on people’s lives.

I plan on staging a street intervention by placing posters at strategic points on a map, providing a website for people to go and tell the story of their recent transaction. This project requires participation in order to work, so maybe I will also send out emails to ask people to participate as well. Oh I could start a new Ning network, but some sort of platform that encourages interaction would work.

I just started envisioning this project taking off. People submit their latest interaction with another human, and how that changed their day in some way. For example, I just ate a great meal and took an extra long walk. On that walk I ran into someone I haven’t seen in ten years, etc. I need to push the storytelling aspect of it, which is how I’m challenging myself lately. I could involve everyone on my facebook and twitter accounts if I wanted to, instead of restricting it to the posters on the street and word of mouth. The website should have a mapping technology that creates a beautiful design with each point entered. Not like a literal google map but something more abstract and human.

For the street intervention, I will scale the posters down and make them more noticable. Some of the circular photos will be takeaway cards with the website on the back. To be continued…

Urban form study

My interest in this topic began with researching Hippodamus, the first recorded urban planner in ancient Greece and the person credited with the invention of the city grid. This is an image of Pirea, which is the first city to be laid out on a grid. How appropriate that rational Western thought would have created this structure that goes completely against natural growth of cities to make our lives more organized.

City planning in the far east was developed around more mythological theory, and geomancy or “earth divination” is a fascinating method that was used to generate street patterns in ancient China.

Then I discovered urban morphology, which explains how cities are developed based on a multitude of factors. Religious structures, topography, city planning, fortifications, harbors, subterranean networks, and suburbs are all components that contribute to the development of the street pattern in our cities.

I used the list of top 25 cities based on the quality of life study done by Monocle magazine to choose cities for this street pattern study (above). Maybe there is some correlation between the pattern and quality of life. Also, maybe there is one central factor that led to the appearance of the city layout. Medieval cities were developed around religious structures, whereas in Mesopotamia the city was built around the king’s palace. The United States has far more planned cities than in Europe and that contributes to their homogenous form.

The most interesting discovery I’ve found in this research so far is this paper that correlates the development of street patterns to the veins in a leaf. In fact, they compare transportation networks as structures that convey energy or matter in a variety of fields: city streets, plant leaves, river networks, mammalian circulatory systems, networks for commodities delivery and technological networks. Is the development of ALL of these structures related at a basic level?

Yes! I found Rob Carter’s video on vimeo

I saw this video on the artists website (not the VCU Rob Carter but the Brooklyn artist Rob Carter) and wished I could link to it somehow. Today I just discovered the video on Vimeo while searching for inspiration for another class.

Metropolis by Rob Carter – Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

Amazing. Wish I could do something like this for my thesis project because it shows the change in spaces so vividly. In the full video he begins with the drawings of thecolonial town and progresses centuries into the future. Check out more of his work and the full video here.

two projects to focus on for community building

I’m happy with our direction but we’ve gone through so many different paths and are still unclear on exactly what we’re doing. We have one project that focuses on the MFA population (personalized plants), and one that creates an interactive mural for everyone (MS and MFA) to play with. We have push pins, rubber bands and string to start. We realized that we need to work within a limited budget (i.e. no budget) to get this project done.

We need a design brief for each project so we know exactly what steps to take over the next few weeks. We also need to create a schedule – for example what day to get everyone together for planting.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to get in touch with a few more people to interview. Besides defining transformation design, I’m really curious what direction designers see the field going in. I feel like as school goes on I get more and more confused about what design is exactly. The industry is going through an identity crisis and we’re the best people to come up with a solution!

Before we started going in our current pushpin direction, I was looking at the bathroom as a possibility for an art intervention.

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It could obviously use some sprucing up. The bathroom is traditionally a place for vulgar or witty remarks written on the walls. In some places the walls are covered in words, stickers and graffiti (Max Fish and St. Jerome’s in the les are examples). It’s the perfect place for an art intervention because it can be an attempt to make people aware of a condition that they previously had no knowledge of. The subversive tradition of bathroom graffiti can be married nicely with a meaningful/ funny statement or poetry relevant to our lives as comd students. It would be really interesting to have poetry contributed by students, then create a collage that looks thrown together but with a lot of underlying meaning. Martin Firrell and Jenny Holzer are artists (images below) that do entirely typographic projections on surfaces in public areas and significant buildings.

Possible bathroom surfaces to use: doors, mirrors, or walls. Possible materials for this project: projector, latex bonding primer, paint, paintbrushes OR custom vinyl decals OR spraypaint/stencils, sharpies.

Another fun collage idea would be if everyone contributed a number, letter or illustration and we create a collage based on that. Inspired by the image of the vinyl wall decal below.

Ella

This is the first project I created for visual language this semester. Our task was to create an autobiographical folio. I looked at the various stages of my life and correlating interests, and decided that my foray into film and acting was the most transformational time in my life. I wrote a short script about a girl searching through New York City for something she lost… sometime, somewhere.

This project is a psychogeography of new york, and I’m happy that it relates to my thesis more than I originally thought. I was able to tell a personal story and tried to provide an intimate experience for the reader, which is something new for me. My work until now has been either crafty, abstract, commercial or scientific so I enjoyed creating this juxtaposition of narrative and high contrast photos of New York. My inspiration for this project were the films of Robert Bresson, and I tried to capture the peace and transcendence representative of his work.

Richard Tuttle and notes from my thesis presentation

I found an artist’s work that represents the ideas floating around in my head perfectly. Richard Tuttle abstracts form in such a basic way and creates dynamic, balanced compositions.

While I’m on the subject of abstraction of form, I should post the drawings I created last week. I used one image of the street in the Lower East side to analyze all of the shapes, patterns and interactions of form. There is so much more I can do with this project, and Richard Tuttle’s work is an example of taking it to another level.




Some notes from the presentation feedback:
1. My previous work is a lot more related to my thesis than I realize. The folio is an exercise in psychogeography (I will post tomorrow), and possibly my Sun Day book from earlier this year.

2. I see two distinct directions: psychogeography/memory mapping as the intersection of all my ideas and exploring further with abstraction of form, or being more scientific and creating the system of symbols/typology of the components in our environment (this could be a comparison among cities or a system for nyc)

3. Engaging with the community: some ideas include asking people to define the boundaries of their “neighborhood”, giving people cameras to record their own photos and tell their own story.

4. Incorporating the interior life of a building as well as the building from all angles and perspectives.

5. Defining my topic and creating a stronger argument will be key as we progress. I’m interested in recording the components that define the “essence” of a place; essentially telling a better story about a place in the way that artists like Edward Hopper have done (the block that he painted in Early Sunday Morning below was preserved mostly because of the value created by the artists depiction). I would like to create something that naturally leads to preservation through awareness of the unique value of the sensory experience of a place.

Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning (currently on view at the Whitney)

A new recycling discovery

I was reading Fast Company magazine last night and found an article that made me really happy. Mainly because I have the “electronics bag” sitting in a closet, which contains electronics from as early as 2002 that I couldn’t bear to throw in the trash. Gazelle.com is buying back consumer electronics and reselling them on sites like Ebay and Amazon. So that means less electronic waste in landfills, and cheaper gadgets for people who need them.

Very old or poor quality products are sold in bulk to emerging markets, and any items that are useless are properly recycled. They chose not to make a profit on the back end, which tells me that this company has a good conscience. That step is easily overlooked, and many companies will forgo recycling when costs are prohibitively high. It says a lot that Gazelle will follow through and do the right thing.

Now we just have to figure out why there is such a glut of consumer electronics to begin with. Why do we need new gadgets every year or so? I have a blackberry that’s falling apart because I’ve had it for about three years. I plan on using it until the Iphone gets Verizon, but that’s still a long time to hang on to a phone!

My Rube Adventure

I need to find a connection for my Rube Goldberg project. The assignment is to say “hello” and I want to map out strategic points on a map to spell the word out. The transactions in everyday life are a form of Rube goldberg device. You go to work, get the paycheck, have a dollar bill, spend it on flour, make cookies, bring them to your grandma, she gives you a bag of candy for trick-or-treaters, one trick-or-treater trades the candy for a video game, which he then gives as a birthday gift for his brother, etc.

“Live” is a good word to use, because I’m uncovering the device in our everyday life. On a side note, evil is live backwards. live/evil We can choose to use our purchases towards evil, like companies that have deplorable social practices or environmental standards. What are some examples of companies like that in nyc? live is so abstract, as usual I have a totally abstract idea. I also like “connect”, “contact” and “transfer”. Connect is the most meaningful of those three words, because it conveys a deeper connection among people than contact or transfer. It’s about the interaction between people that results from the transactions (working, spending money, etc.).

Now I need to decide on an area of interest and strategic points that will elucidate my ideas. If I simply draw “connect” on a map that’s not enough. I need to get outside and walk around, choosing my points thoughtfully. How can each of these points convey a greeting or transaction among people. Once I choose the points, I will map them and create posters to display on the street, as well as the website for people to go and share their stories about what their purchases have been for recently.

Hopefully I will get some good stories!

Update: I decided to trace the words “hello” on a map because that was the simplest and least obvious solution. I thought connect would be too obvious in the end, and made a quick decision before I left for the adventure. I’m really happy with the photos I took and look forward to placing them on a map to tell the story. I’m really interested in doing a google maps type thing where you click on the distinct points and images come up with a short description. That will complete phase 1 of the project. Phase 2 can be the poster/website project.

Re-reframing the problem

So far I’ve administered surveys to three people in the MFA program and came back with some interesting ideas. Here are some of them:

1. personality proposal for the MFA. What is it that makes Pratt special, and what makes it a good program? What does a prospective student see/feel and what do they feel they’re going to be a part of? I envisioned a poster with many “identities” that asks students “what identity do you propose?” and the poster could have many different faces (happy, snobby, angry, etc – or more design-related)

2. Tradition is key, and happy hour would be really beneficial for the group to build interpersonal relationships. Events planned in studio would be too inhibited because it’s difficult to separate from our school personas. Events need to be breezy and outside of school.

3. Alumni network – we want to network with the entire department not just the MFA team. Something that Brenda and I have worked on in the past on cc, to build programs and publications to bridge that divide. Pratt ComD currently has no alumni network. People I’ve contacted were found completely on my own. We could create a yearbook where each student has their own page.

4. General agreement that there are different standards in the MS program, but creating community among us is key. There are very talented MS students that chose to stay in the program for various reasons and maintaining that connection is key. Also being insular in the MFA will not be beneficial to Pratt ComD overall – you lose the cross-pollination of ideas, and learning from different courses. Also it creates a strange working environment because of shared space.

5. Screening room would be a welcome break and we could use the classroom over the weekends.

6. agreement that confusion over meeting times is unsettling and confusing.

7. Start from the assumption that we’re all one ComD instead of the outlook that we’re doing work for our MFA program.

In terms of framing the problem, we started out wanting to unify the two programs and started realizing that community needs to be formed within each one first. Now it seems like we’re trying to do both.