Following my character assassination of Father Christmas (which made its way into Tim’s Britblog Round-up this week), it seems as if Calvin and Hobbes agree that Santa is running an incompetent organisation:
I love Calvin’s phrase “let’s get with the program, huh?” It has a haiku-like quality, and I have consciously stolen it on many occasions.
Tag: Visual (Page 15 of 16)
Reviews, comments and thoughts on visual arts and graphic design
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Several Edinburgh Fringe Festival shows this year have marketed themselves with Julian Opie style images. I’m not quite sure why Opie’s aesthetic, made famous by the Best of Blur album cover design in 2000, has suddenly caught the zeitgeist. Perhaps the producers see how the stylistic forms, which are simplistic yet idiosyncratic, remind us how we build up our ideas of the human and its nature from a few bold strokes. More or less the same lines, but a million different possibilities. The same, they reason, could be said of their play.
Or perhaps its just easy, lazy design, tapping into an already recognisable ‘cool’. Maybe its a coincidence.
Elsewhere, I see Jabr-wocky has suggested that the Best of Blur album may have been derivative in itself.
A few months back, I wrote about the ghosts in the ipod, who swim about in the diodes and relays of your MP3 player, and choose songs which somehow soundtrack your mood. It is interesting to gaze upon an old, familiar sight, and yet feel new emotions, even notice new things, because the accompanying soundtrack has changed.
A few days ago, I attended a quirky piece of theatre titled Ghost, produced as part of the Leith Festival. Arriving at the venue, you are presented with a small MP3 player and headphones, and sent off onto the streets and schemes of Leith. A narrator allows his story to unfold, while you are told which paths to follow by a robotic, feminine ‘GPS’ guide named Thanos. As you walk past random pedestrians, and sullen truants, you realise you are part of a clandestoine world which those around you cannot access. When you do spot another ‘theatre-goer’, you let slip a conspiratorial smile. Their identical MP3 headphone set is like the badge of a secret society.
The story is one of love, loss and flight, but is not without wit. References to an Icarus-like fall from the Heavens are complimented with a pair of angel wings, discarded in a tree in a church-yard. It is as if William Blake’s angels in the trees have had a nasty mid-air collision. Soon after, the narrator (a Daedalus figure) declares that he has invented the ‘cyborgs’ who walk around you. Look, notice! The man on his mobile phone, or the others with wires coming out of their ears. All robots, following the complex programming they have been hard-wired to follow. It is at this point that you are struck by the realisation that you, too, are following a pre-ordained path around the city. The production company is Puppet Lab: they have created a show where the audience and the puppets are one.
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I do enjoy trawling through someone else del.icio.us tags. First, bookmark a web page. Instantly find out who else has linked to it, and in turn what they have linked to. The act of bookmarking a site is a different thing from posting on a blog. A blog is a public diary, whereas a linklog is more a private scrap-book. Rumaging around in it feels slightly illicit. The act becomes a guilty pleasure, even if the whole point of del.icio.us is openness and sharing.
It was via del.icio.us that I sumbled accross Aharef (Subtitle: The Link Salt in the Web Soup). A page innocently named “Websites as graphs” caught my imagination with a very simple tool, which allowed me to generate the image below.
[photopress:sitemap.jpg,thumb,alignright]This intruiging pattern is not an organic chemical or a subway map, but a graphical representation of this site’s homepage (you can click it to enlarge). Each node represents an HTML tag such as DIV or SPAN. Begining with the black HTML tag/node which begins pretty much every page on every website, each line represents one tag ‘nested’ within another. The grey clump is the header information; the orange mess is the block of recent posts (uneven in length and content); and the regular protrusions that look like dandelions comprise my blogroll.
The page at Aharef gives some sample maps from popular websites, like Google and Boing-Boing. What I enjoy is how the more aesthetically pleasing patterns belong to those sites with a better site structure. A sparse pattern with plenty of red dots implies a complex site designed with tables. A cleaner, simpler site will have fewer but more concentrated nodes. They illustrate how a site with a clear structure will allow more people to read the information more efficiently.
Thinking about the philosophical ideas of mapping and representation, I wonder which is the ‘true’ representation of the document: the web-page or the diagramme? Both are valid ways of interpreting the same information. I wondered if a page could be created in which a greater meaning to the content could be found within its source code. My first, rudimentary attempt is called “I Had A Little Nut Tree”. You can also watch the visual representation spawn via Aharef. The poem is a friviolity in itself, but given a twist by its unique code structure.
I am reminded of other ways in which the same information can give rise to different things, depending on the medium you read it in; I am reminded of how the written word can take on a different meaning when read out loud; or how two people can interpret the same book as having different meanings; I am reminded of the post-Borgesian play Hear No, See No, Speak No; of the ‘graphic’ function in Apple iTunes that creates screen-savers from my MP3 collection; and how DNA code can be rendered not only into living things, but also into chromatographs so accurate that we can point at a bizarre pattern of dots, and give it a person’s name.
Browsing the website of Irshad Manji, the ‘Muslim Refusnik’ who wrote The Trouble With Islam Today, it was interesting to note the variations (and similarities) between the book jacket designs in various countries worldwide.
My favourite is probably the image of the author’s mouth being censored (by the title), which appears in the French, Norwegian and USA editions. Finland, Belgium and Norway employ the same concept, but less effectively I think. By comparison, the English cover, depicting a group of Muslims at prayer, seems less imaginative, although the connotation with a phalanx of soldiers does convey one of the key concepts from the book:
Irshad Manji calls herself a Muslim refusenik. ‘That doesn’t mean I refuse to be a Muslim,’ she writes, ‘it simply means I refuse to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah.’
(from the Amazon blurb)
The English cover stands out as being very different from all the others. It is fascinating to look at what different publishers thought would sell well in the respective countries, and what best communicated the concepts of the book. Several jackets depict stone walls, while several others choose a veiled woman instead of Manji, with her uncovered, spiky hair. The covers for India and Canada are purely typographic. I am reminded of an article by my colleague Leo Warner, who wrote:
if you want to see a culture describe itself at the most organic level, you should observe the design and not the art.