notes, week 1 (meeting 1)

for Tuesday 7 September —

Have revised thesis proposal where appropriate, taking into account further thinking and our discussion last Thursday;

Be prepared to show something, or discuss new thinking, ideas, findings; and

read and have some thoughts about three items, that were distributed on paper in class, and can be found in the google drive created for Design Seminar) :

1. The OED (Oxford English Dictionary) entries for design in its verb and noun forms. These entries include definitions and examples of usage for those respective senses; some of these senses are obsolete or quite limited in scope. The question here is, what senses(s) of design are relevant to what you are doing? What are your “designs” — intentions?
2. Darcey Steinke, her essay “My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer,” in The New York Times (June 6, 2019)
   I prefer its print title “My stutter made me a writer.”
   The bottom line, “stuttering," which might be likened to “stammering” or to struggling in any way to make sense, is ok.
3. Heinrich von Kleist, “On the gradual completion of thoughts during speech”
   in the Bosch series type specimen book that you have received via e-mail and in hard copy
   the text is only six pages long — pages 11-17 within the pdf document). It has to do with the importance of conversation (with others) to actually figuring out — hearing — what we think. To that conversation I would add materials, clients, developers, printers, colleagues... Both studio and seminar room are where we can model that conversation, to see where it leads (us, individually).
4. I also handed out (but didn’t put on Drive), Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules (1965-1968), shown below and worth thinking about.

The same (and some background on Sister Corita Kent) at and via brainpickings
 

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thoughts and afterthoughts, references
 

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1. primitive futurismo
   for Gervin, Melissa

   Colonel Bleep (1957)
   watch here
   primitive futurismo (inflected by Cold War ideas, too!)
    

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2. photos, the social photo, the unshared photo
   for Eileen

   John Kramer, Dailies: installation (partial)
   Hallspace Gallery, November, 2005. A project of photographing the Arnold Arboretum every day on the way to work. This wall piece shows every photograph taken.

   Nathan Jurgenson’s book The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media (2019) is relevant, I think. The short book is longer than it needs to be; a review that is now uploaded to the 405F21 Google Drive gives a quick overview —
   

   Leah Ollman, “Review: Writing the book on selfies — sociologist reframes social photos,” Los Angeles Times (August 10, 2019)
    
   The question is, what are we doing when we “take” photos? are they always the same thing? are they even “about” the picture?
    

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3. house, houses
   for Will

   see Tatsuya Tanaka 田中達也, his miniature houses/scenes/art at @tanaka_tatsuya

   may have mentioned this previously — “The Woman Who Invented Forensics Training with Doll Houses,” by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson, The New Yorker (November 5, 2017) : here (I may have this in print version, stay tuned)

   Ask to look at Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual (1978, David Bellos, trans, 1987), described at wikipedia, for example —
   

   One of Perec’s long-standing projects was the description of a Parisian apartment block as it could be seen if the entire facade were removed, exposing every room. Perec was obsessed with lists: such a description would be exhaustive down to the last detail...

   Maybe think about pop-ups of architectural drawings; will show something (from the 1930s) about “Folding drawings of famous tea houses.”
   link (Ursus Books, catalogue description)

   Perhaps let the house — not the agonied residents — be the “protagonist.” Let the residents be visitors, tenants... who leave their marks on the scarred, year-after-year mutating, house.

   Let language (not yours, but from somewhere/someone else, e.g., Emily Dickinson) leak in...

   The word “stanza” means “room” in Italian.

   See Jeremy Rodas, his thesis project “Momento” (Fall 2017, Spring 2018). (Where he mapped cracks and other insults in the walls of the Hardie Building.) There have been some other thesis projects devoted to houses, buildings, rooms. See for example Lana Wheeler her “The Closet” (2012).

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4. map, maps, mapping
   for Henry
    
   A tusk, as map? —
   “A Woolly Mammoth’s Tusks Reveal a Map of Where It Roamed in Life”
   The technique used to reconstruct the animal’s 28-year journey across prehistoric Alaska could solve mysteries about the demise of the elephant-like mammals.
   By Kenneth Chang, New York Times (August 12, 2021) : here (and in the 405F21 Google Drive.

   Paula Scher, Maps (2011), description

   In what different ways are the words “map,” “mapping,” used?
   How many kinds of maps might describe one neighborhood? or even street? What goes on in that neighborhood or street, that doesn’t obviously involve the humans who live there?

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5. retrofuturist imaginings
   for Melissa

   Is there a story or argument these visualizations are supporting? What is it? How far back in memory (history) must we go, to come up with something relevant to the scenarios that may well lie ahead?

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6. streetwear... brand versus style... social media (and keeping some work separate)
   for Brooke

   Being always under surveillance (social media) can have good and less good results. One might self-edit, pre-edit, hold nothing in reserve... be too attuned or even hostage to “likes,” reblogs, etc.

   Important to just make stuff, content, designs. try them on different materials, canvases. experiment (and never stop the experimenting. Let this work feed or leak into the business side, the message side.

   Be willing to kill what you love, says painter Susan Rothenberg in an interview I read yesterday. When everyone said, don’t paint horses, she painted horses. Later, she moved on. This interview, and a more recent review of her posthumous show in Chicago (and later New York) are in the 405F21 Google Drive.

   Liv Varney livvarney.com, @livvarney