Open source book about the open sourcing of design
“Design is undergoing a revolution. Technology is empowering more people to create and disseminate designs, and professionals and enthusiasts are using it to share their work with the world.”
Coveting!
Doesn’t look like it’s out yet, but this gem is coming out soon, published by Thames & Hudson
The Imp of the Perverse - Helen Friel
A short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Imp of the Perverse discusses the voice inside all of us that makes us to do things we know we shouldn’t do. Each page is perforated in a grid system with sections of the text missing. Readers must follow the simple instructions to tear and fold specific sections to reveal the missing text. Books are usually precious objects and the destruction is engineered to give the reader conflicting feelings, do they keep the book in its perfect untorn form? Or give into the imp and enjoy tearing it apart?
So thrilled to own #151/500 of this book. Emmet Byrne & Michael Aberman designed a delightful “box set” of a catalog.
Emmet Byrne’s recent Alec Soth catalog is also a terrific catalog design (similarly thrilled to own a copy of that one, as well).
Living with an Alec Soth fan pays a lot of dividends in the book design department!
Alec Soth gives a tour of the Postcards From America box set. Buy it here: http://postcards.magnumphotos.com/
Beautiful Minds: The Creative Brain Across Time and Cultures
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
There’s little doubt, most brain researchers agree, that genius looked much different thousands of years ago. With new tools and improving technologies, scientists are able to see traces of this evolution and observe how our brains are reshaping themselves. But, how are our ideas and commonly held assumptions about intelligence and the creative process being informed by these technologies?
In our most recent show, “Creativity and the Everyday Brain” with neuropsychologist Rex Jung, we featured this video from the World Science Festival. Here, uber-director Julie Taymor (a force of nature and creativity in her own right) and neuroscientists Rex Jung and Douglas Fields wrestle with the notions of genius over time and the possible effects of new technology on attention and creativity. It’s been one of our most popular pieces online, and I hope you’ll add your ideas to the mix.
Book sightings in the “wild”: My book design on Austin Kleon’s Tumblr today! Nice surprise!
Austin’s response to this book reminds me of something Tristan Tzara wrote, in his instructions for how to make a Dada poem. Even though the poem is constructed by chance, Tzara claimed that it still held the stamp of its maker:
“The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.”
Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century
Here’s a list of “self and ego effacing” tactics Kenneth Goldsmith suggests using to perform the act of “uncreative writing”:
uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud theft, and falsification
Out of all those, the one that really bothers me is “illegibility.” Goldsmith says his pieces are “unreadable,” that he’s the “most boring writer that has ever lived,” that you don’t really need to read his books “to get the idea of what they’re like,” and that “Readability is the last thing on this poetry’s mind.”
This is the opposite of what I am looking for: I’m looking for writing that is very readable, actually, and not boring. Pleasure is above all what I like to take from reading, and if reading a book provides no pleasure, I go pick up another book.
One of the things that struck me when researching my book Newspaper Blackout poems was how many poets used the erasure or cut-up technique as a way out of their ego. The thing is: I go to poetry for egos. I want to hear what humans have to say, in fact, I want to feel as if I’m talking to a good friend when I’m reading a book. (Or at least an interesting crazy person on the street.)
I want someone to sing to me.
Call me old-fashioned, but this is what I look for.
When I’m making my poems, readability is actually the thing foremost in my mind, and the second is: “what of me can I find in this newspaper article?” (Of course, “me” is whoever I happen to be that day…”
The funny thing about this pose of “uncreative writing,” is that you can’t help but put your mark on something, even if you make something out of the words of others. Perloff hits on this in the 3rd-to-last paragraph of this book:
According to taste: it is important to remember that the citational or appropriative text, however unoriginal its actual words and phrases, is always the product of choice—and hence of individual taste.”
Next up (if I even need to read it now…): Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, which Goldsmith writes in his introduction is actually a cousin to Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying — both books “stem from the same ten days,” and began as a collaborative project on sampling between the two.
Filed under: my reading year 2012
It’s a Fluxus influx! But I couldn’t resist this stationery by George Maciunas.
In some research yesterday, I discovered that this “typeface” is actually his IBM Selectric (he also used it to typeset An Anthology of Chance Operations, 1963).
FLUXUS, OR
FLUXATLAS
FLUXBOOKS
FLUXBOXES
FLUXCARDS
FLUXCHESS
FLUXCLOCK
FLUXCURES
FLUXDANCE
FLUXESTRA
FLUXFAKES
FLUXFESTS
FLUXFILMS
FLUXGAMES
FLUXGROUP
FLUXHOUSE
FLUNITURE
FLUXJOKES
FLUX-KITS
FLUXMEALS
FLUXMUSIC
FLUXORGAN
FLUXPAPER
FLUXPOEMS
FLUX-POST
FLUX-QUIZ
FLUXSHOPS
FLUXTHING
FLUXV-TRE
FLUXWATER
FLUX-WEAR
FLUX-WORK
FLUXMIDST
Which is your favorite FLUX____?
Yes, please!
Fluxus Mailing List Card
George Maciunas
c. 1965
Photograph © Walker Art Center
Object © George Maciunas
Fluxus ‘logos’ by George Maciunas in the Walker’s Fluxus archives.
Photograph © Walker Art Center
Object © George Maciunas
Voluminous | essay by Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier writes, of his books:
“These things are not mine; I am theirs.”
“They take up room? Of course they do: they are an environment; atoms, not bits. My books are not dead weight, they are live weight—matter infused by spirit, every one of them, even the silliest. They do not block the horizon; they draw it. They free me from the prison of contemporaneity: one should not live only in one’s own time. A wall of books is a wall of windows. And a book is more than a text: even if every book in my library is on Google Books, my library is not on Google Books.”
The brilliant book cover designer David Pearson will be speaking at the Walker Art Center as part of their 2012 Insights Design Lecture Series. (aka my favorite TV channel)
Calendar marked!
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
7:00 P.M. CST live webcast
This thinking about micro-parks also reminds me of the Park(ing) Day project. On the third Friday in September, people around the world plug parking meters and then create public parks in their parking spaces.
The idea started in 2005, when Rebar created a 2-hour park(ing) installation in a San Francisco neighborhood lacking in public parks. In 2011, there were 975 parks in 162 cities in 35 countries!
Natalie Jeremijenko, The art of the eco-mindshift
At the 7:30 mark:
Another example of neighborhood micro-parks, but in this case they are installed in order to replace the asphalt (an impervious surface that causes pollutants to pool on the street and wash directly into estuaries). These tiny parks improve the urban environment’s capacity to intercept pollutants.
Disruptive design.
(At the end of the video, there is a description of the river LED project I posted earlier. Great stuff!)
In order to promote water conservation, Smart borrowed ideas from nature to create awareness (in the form of “soft boundaries”) of how much water we are using, which in turn promotes more mindful water consumption.
My favorite aspect of this project is the community garden that wilts when the neighborhood’s water is being over-used, and thrives when water is being conserved.
more info: Alissa Walker article at Fast Co.
designers: Smart Design
see also: IBM’s SmarterCity initiative
Initiated by Jan Willem Renders, the exhibition ‘E’ven schilderijen’ was focusing on thirty contemporary painters from Eindhoven. For the book we focused on the different formats of the painting. Usually it is hard to get a grasp of the size of a painting when you see a reproduction. All paintings were represented in scale drawings with specific structures displaying the painting medium and carrier.
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