So go check out our shiny new site!

To Geoff, Alex, John, Tom, (and if you didn’t know we’ve recently expanded to include) Dan, and Jake:

Cheers bros! It’s been a wonderful year.

Non-fiction writers love to incorporate snippets of French in their prose. These petits fours provide emphasis, adding cachet to otherwise dry sentences. They are often italicized to avoid confusion and help the reader with pronunciation. After all, their purpose is to create an inclusive fraternité between author and audience, not alienate and embarrass.

Editorial writing offers opinion supported by facts. It contains a certain bourgeois entitlement, a privilege not afforded to provençal journalism, technical writing, and other blasé publication. It is that haute entitlement that elevates writing to an international level. The French language accoutrements of which I’m speaking can be employed to conjure lavish images the Belle Époch or tempestuous ones from the subsequent Fin de siécle.

With the newspaper industry’s raison d’etre waning, perhaps editors are taking a more laissez-faire approach to pretension. Widening the aperture of journalistic creativity might be the saving grace of our Quatrième État. We must grant impunity to our newspapermen from stylistic judgement. We only stand to benefit from expanded proverbial exercise in the print oeuvre.

Latin might be the eternal language of scholarship, but French is the language of culture… c’est la vie.

The present is experienced through the senses, mostly realtime, with some delay/buffering. The past and the future are experienced nonlinearly in the mind, via memory and extension/projection. The computer doesn’t do much for the present. It, and our interaction with it, allows us to store memory—photos, diaries, videos, lectures, history texts—and make plans for the future—talk to friends, buy tickets, research vacations, find a new job. The present happens when we close the laptop.

As intelligence increased we (westerners) became more and more literate. That literacy extended humanity and translated to an increased proficiency in experiencing the nonlinear. To transport ourselves to far away places, to become abstract, to escape ourselves and the captivity of the present. It seems we have accomplished that goal and then some. Memory is being outsourced by the petabyte. Every scientist’s goal is to predict the future so that he or she can alter it.

I’m guilty of treating the present as a passthrough that occurs between here and there. It’s that blurry part of our peripheral vision to the left and right of the thing we’re pursuing. I eat too fast. I ride my bike breathlessly. Technology is not to blame, we have developed it in order to extend ourselves. There isn’t really even any need for blame. I’m just curious, with all of this extension and breadth, what emphasis have I placed on my depth? I’m jealous of professional athletes, not for the lifestyle, but their precognitive ability. To catch a pass you have to be so in the present you’re really in the future.

Live in the now!

Thursday April 23, 2009

The discussion which will begin at 7pm. Food and drink at 6pm.

Please join us next Thursday, April 23rd at 6pm for the Junto. This month we will be discussing the past, present, and future of art criticism in Philadelphia. We are pleased to host an all-star panel representing the many sides of the art world.

Sid Sachs: Director of Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, UArts faculty, author, curator, with a long history in the Philadelphia art world.

Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof: the ever-present writers/critics responsible for the Philadelphia Art Blog. Roberta and Libby founded the Zero .1% for Art Commission to bridge the gap between ordinary people and art. Artblog, established in 2003, is an outgrowth of that mission.

Katie Murken: Philadelphia artist and educator. Since receiving her MFA in Printmaking & Book Arts from the University of the Arts Katie has been an instructor at the Tyler School of Art and practicing artist. In 2007, she worked with P’unk Avenue on the multimedia installation Debtor’s Inheritance at the Schuylkill Center. In 2008, she received an Independence Foundation Fellowship for the Public Author Project, a long-term interactive project that will use text messaging to explore the phenomenon of books and libraries in today’s digital climate. Katie is currently collaborating with three Philadelphia artists as part of the Little Berlin gallery’s upcoming exhibition Offerings.

Andrew Suggs: (from the Vox Populi website) “Recent exhibition venues include The Galleries at Moore (Philadelphia, PA), Fleisher-Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), ThreeWalls (Chicago, IL), Publico Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). Andrew currently lives and works in Philadephia, where he is the Executive Director of Vox Populi. He earned an AB cum laude from Harvard University.”

As always, we provide the cold Newcastle Brown and Philadelphia’s best tomato pie. You bring something to share, if it is not too much trouble.

Hope to see you there!

When:

Thursday April 23, 2009 at 6pm

The discussion which will begin at 7pm. Food and drink at 6pm.

Where:

P’unk Avenue
1168 E. Passyunk Avenue
Philadelphia, PA 19147

A picture I took, New York City

Photography is the invention of an impatient world. Insofar as It is a way to render a scene timeless, it varies little from the early functions of painting. However, the quickness with which photography can snapshot such a scene is where it has set itself apart. Photography is an enabler of faster-paced living. We augment and extend our memories by time shifting scenes. We can mediate a vacation through the lens, flatten an overwhelmingly deep scene, vignette a busy one, and most significantly grant ourselves a continuance to process and reprocess the witnessed event at later times. We mostly ignore the present, storing the past on SD cards, and fantasize about photographs we’d like to take in the future.

Beyond the documentary function of photography there are a number of post-structural functions, those that rely on the interpretation of the viewer. They fit nicely into three categories of design outlined by Donald Norman in his not so recent TED talk—the visceral, the behavioral, and the reflective.

The visceral function speaks to the content of a photograph. A pretty girl, a sunset, a landmark, violence, action, and so forth. These are the pictures in our albums and shoeboxes, gathering dust and yellowing as they attempt to preserve spent time.

The behavioral layer of a photograph contains its composition, the juxtaposition of objects, counterpoint, light and shadow, the mechanics of the scene. It is informed by and understood through the a knowledge of the operation of the camera/lens/film. These are the clever pictures we took in our first black and white photography class.

Lastly, the reflective function is that post-modern one, entirely reliant on the social context of a picture, entirely ignoring the visceral and behavioral. These pictures concern the backstory rather than the scene. They are new topographic photos of small town storefronts, street snapshots, Stephen Shore’s steak dinner, the mundane, photographs of nothing. They don’t have inherent meaning. The burden understanding their relevance falls entirely on the viewer, one with some knowledge of the history of photography and of the culture reflected by the mirror of these photographs.

When I take (I can’t bring myself to say “make a picture,” I’m just not that good at it) a picture I fixate on those functions of photography. I flex my eyes and brain too hard, it always seems to look like I tripped right before releasing the shutter. I end up a little too close, let some rogue element in the corner of the frame, or find perfectly dull flat light. By thinking about too many things, I accomplish very little in my picture-taking.

I get overly excited when I see that someone has unconsciously arranged their overflow recycling to look like a still-life—how quaint and lofty all at once, and Yes! it’s six PM with light hitting it at a wonderfully oblique angle. If I crouch just so, and take a step back, and stop down, and Click. Somehow I have managed to take nothing more and nothing less than a picture of garbage. It’s that other function of photography, the elusive and unteachable one, that contains a photograph’s aura.

Photographs by Isaac Schell

Stockbridge Fine Art Print

319 N. 11th 4th floor

Friday April 3rd, 5-10pm

Let’s talk about art. Isaac Schell is a Drexel photo graduate, and also my housemate. He shoots with a 4×5″ portable rail camera. It’s an enormous thing with an enormous tripod, the kind of camera with a ground glass and a dark cloth that goes over your head. It’s not the most agile camera, but the negatives can be printed 60″ wide before you start to see grain. If it were digital, it would be five hundred megapixels or something.

Isaac’s most recent body of work has had some legs. He participated in a group show at Copy Gallery last August, showing twelve images. One of the photographs was shown in the Project Basho Onward show in January. Two of the photos were selected for the Perkins Center juried exhibition in February. Another photo got him into the 69th annual juried exhibition at the Woodmere Art Museum in March.

Tonight’s show is a revisitation of a previous body of work: Bars, Churches, and Beauty Salons. The prints are really really big. The photographs present a topographic vernacular of West Philadelphia storefronts. These commercial/social institutions have at various times served as community glue, doing their best to stave off decay. Many of them have seen better times.

They are sad photographs, but they are beautiful. The buildings don’t tell us their stories, but they invite us to wonder. You can see former glory, recent disintegration, but also a tenacity. West Philly seems to have some fight left.

For next week you will each have posted at least FIVE items of research, collected data, preliminary design, and other bits of documentation. You will bring with you to class anything you might need to continue getting the project blog caught up to your current progress level. You should continue to exercise the methods we’ve explored thus far, adding photos, videos, scanned notes, data, and copy relevent to your urban farming initiatives. As we are more than halfway through the semester, you should have copious amounts of content ready to upload.

In addition to publishing content, next week’s class will contain a short lecture/demonstration on mapping and leveraging google maps. You will learn to create and share maps, adding points, descriptions, paths, and add maps to the project blog.

GATHER:

• All relevant content you’ve created around the Farm Philly project to date, gather media resources, get organized.

POST:

• AT LEAST FIVE posts regarding your respective contribution to the project. Your posts will be categorized within your group and tagged appropriately.
• Upload your ongoing project photos to Flickr, tag them ides322, farmphilly, and anything else relevant to the project or their content.
• Start creating videos and upload them to your personal video sharing accounts, upload any existing video content. Tag it appropriately. Post it to the project blog.

1. One may have a rapport with his or her Bank Teller, but waiting in line at a bank is the worst. It’s laughable that for all the digitalization of commerce we spend a reciprocally large amount of time waiting for tables at restaurants, in the checkout line, the DMV (all of whom’s business could be conducted online), and so forth. Lines at those irreplaceable real world venues are getting longer. With regards to banking, ING has been quite successful at being paperless/branchless/painless. Unless you need to pay bills online…

2. Banks need the best websites. Intuitive e-billing, better graphs, trending, pdf creation. I use PNC bank for checking, their Bill Center is only OK…

3. It doesn’t make it easy to have a free overdraft protection solution (you had to pay to open ANOTHER credit card, I gave up). My various accounts (checking, savings, money markets) are unlinked. When I give them my money they put it in one large pool, why can I not do the same…

4. My main recommendation is to allow for account partitions. Instead of thinking in terms of Checking, Savings, etc. I should have one pool of money. If this is tricky under Government banking regulations, simply allow it to be visualized in this way. It should all earn the same competitive savings interest rate (ING is currently a cute 1.5%). It should be partitioned into custom pie slices: rent/mortgage, bills, tax savings (if you’re a 1099er), personal savings, pocket money, and any other useful partitions. Give me a simple interface to adjust partitions or add new ones. Perhaps I’d like to split my savings into rainy day and vacation funds…

5. Give me a line of credit and a credit card based on my cash flow. Make the rate fair and adjustable based on my payment schedule. If I don’t feel slighted by rising rates or bully late fees I won’t jump ship and get a new 0% card every year…

6. Incorporate the better features of Mint—comparative graphs and charts of my spending each month, long and short term trends. Don’t make me think, show me where my money is, what it’s been doing, why I should give it to you…

To put a weary metaphor to rest, I will do my best to never again refer to absorbing the internet as drinking from a fire hose.

At first I was reluctant to use Google Reader. Alex and John convinced me it was the civilized way to keep up with blog reading. I bought in and bought hard. I really love using the j and k keys to motor through unread posts. It’s something like elective torture a la A Clockwork Orange. I don’t even need those eyelid clips.

This has been an ongoing conversation lately among my peers. Are there repercussions from letting all of this stir together? I actually read/browsed/scanned four thousand items in the last four weeks. That doesn’t count links emailed to me, the New York Times, images shared in our work chat, and anything from real life. I still have some idea of “my visual style” and “my personal politics” at the end of it, but I feel wary.

Searching for influences in a piece of design used to be something like spotting a familiar sample in a Public Enemy song. Now, I find, it’s more like trying to keep up with the stream of provenance in Girl Talk.

A newish field of art has recently sprung a leak from the hose (last last time, I swear). I don’t know if it has a name, but it’s similar to the hybrid Curation Is Creation idea I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Joachim Schmid spent years as a photo archivist and collector of found photography. More recently he has turned to searching Flickr for torrents of images sharing uncanny visual similarities. Self-portraits of feet, plates of food, objects shot in harsh flash.

Penelope Umbrico has made several similar bodies of work, one including thousands and thousands of Flickr sunsets. Another consists entirely of the flash reflected in television screens for sale on Craig’s List. The prints were then sold on Craig’s List for the asking price of the original TV. I bought one of those, it’s nice.

In some ways this is all very exciting. All of this information flows over me and it’s warm and fuzzy. I’m less confident, however, with my retention. I star/delicious/share the good ones, but they are buried nonetheless. I suppose it’ll just be refreshing to leave it all behind and retire to a mountain house some day. It will have very little furniture, and plenty of books that take a month to read.

This post was going to be called Designing Under The Influence, but I realized that sounded familiar for some reason.

With everyone well-rested after the break, we will be reviewing your instructables and gathering feedback about your experiences putting work out in the world. Our hope is to have the presence of an audience motivate the work and create a larger conversation about Industrial Design, getting you interacting with the community outside school. This theme will continue to the end of the semester (and hopefully beyond). We love to see your work getting in the spotlight, Wes, Jesse, and Elissa were featured on the Instructables homepage. These things work.

After wrapping up with Instructables we will discuss the assigned readings regarding Personal Identity. We are all constantly broadcasting information on a number of wavelengths. What you say, how you say it, to whom it’s said, what you wear, how you wear it, how you spend your free time—these things aggregate to become your social persona. When you all become famous that social persona will become a personal brand.

We would like everyone to pay a bit of attention to what they are putting out in the world beyond their design work. For next week you will be creating “Day in the life” videos that shed some light on the men and women behind the work. Document the things you communicate to the world, how does that communication relate to who you strive to be? Essentially, the videos should communicate a “How to be me” thesis. All videos will be edited to one minute in length and uploaded to your video accounts. Embed the videos in your blogs and share a few reflections on the experience.

Week 7

CHECK OUT:

• Cargo Collective: a new portfolio site platform. You will need to apply for a beta account, but you might like this better than Coroflot.

CREATE:

• A one minute “Day In The Life” video documenting your daily experience as a member of a community, and a designer. Upload it to your video service account.

COMMENT:

• Embed your video in your blog, write a short post providing some context for your video and reflect on the experience. Feel self-conscious.