Concept, play, and the space between

I went to see Sascha Lobe speak on Tuesday night at MAD, as part of AIGA design talk extravaganza. He runs L2M3 in Germany. And he's really hot. Once I got over that and started paying attention (lets be honest, I still haven't gotten over it), it reminded me of the work I did with Base Madrid. What a great opportunity that was, and the last time I was able to work on a client project with a strong graphic system.

In web design, each project begins with user experience and develops with a focus on the subtleties of interactions rather than making a bold, design-first, graphic system, especially if it would get in the way of proper navigation of the site. I must admit, I was envious of Lobe's work. It's aggressive, and risk-taking. I would like to take these graphic design lessons with me into the web world where I'm currently working. One of the questions after his presentation was, how do you get this work approved? He said he's been asked that many times but that he hasn't run into much resistance. Hm. When there is a strong reason for the design, he explained, then it is hard to argue against it. 

I think the genius of his work comes from the ability to think from a birds-eye view. Literally. Many of his design solutions for architectural space involve a graphic device imposed upon the floorplan of the site, which is then translated to the three-dimensional space.

In response to the odd fact that the building entrance is section E and they weren't able to change the coding, L2M3 created a graphic device of concentric rings to guide the application of the wayfinding system. It's as if a pebble were being dropped down at E and rippling out to other parts. The occupant is mtz Münchner Technologie Zentrum, and that is the extent of my knowledge about this company. Their website is really boring. And in German.

The translation of this system into the interior space is visually intense and slightly disorienting (I'd have to see it in person to know for sure), but a powerful graphic concept successfully applied to the space. They maintained the curvature of the circles on walls, ceilings and floors, to guide the visitor through the space. No matter how small of the fragment of circle you see, you know where the exit is depending on which direction it's curving.

Images snagged from L2M3

The lightboxes in the lobby give a directional cue for each building area as the letters float in their respective color. The direction that the letters move determines the direction to walk. They infused this boring space with so much imagination and visual interest, I wonder if its made those serious employees have more fun.

I was turned on to the Jacques Greene site by Hoverstat.es today, and found myself relating this experience with the feeling of navigating a transparent modern construction like this one. There are a group of windows at fixed sizes, all playing an individual snippet of the video for this song. But within those windows, there are other windows. So you feel like you're navigating through a fuzzy glass-walled fantasy dream with lots of trees, and a young expressionless girl.

I've never seen a music video broken into individual windows. As I was playing, I was asking myself a whole number of nerdy design questions. How does one window experience differ when it's separated from the rest? Do you need all of them together to understand the full story? You can't close or resize them so there is strictness in the playfulness, and maybe a little too limited because the fun ends there. But I was able to get a full experience of the music without altering the visual experience in any damaging way.

In fact, it was cool to move the windows off screen, stretching the common idea of screen real estate.

This made me think of the A List Apart redesign, launched earlier this year. By using off-canvas real estate to park the blog header and footer, besides frustrating people (including myself), is there a conversation that they are trying to have about the current paradigms of the web? My immediate reaction was that I couldn't scroll up to see more of the logo - the fact that it's cropped activates an existing paradigm that there is more content to see. I thought of Facebook's use of the half profile photo when you first land and you have to scroll up to see the whole thing. But maybe the designers are telling us, PLAY! Don't be so contained within this navigable space. Go out of bounds. It's the adult equivalent of coloring outside the lines with your crayons.

Also, people need to chill. Not everything can be explained. I braved a Matthew Barney presentation at the NYPL a couple weeks ago, and the interviewer seemed scattered and irrelevant at best, offensive at worst. In all honestly, it was just as awkward as one of his films, which was just perfect. I felt like he was trying to get inside Barney's brain.

Subliming Vessel, Matthew Barney at The Morgan Library and Museum

After a 25 minute preview of his upcoming film, they began to discuss Barney's current show at the Morgan Library. We saw an image of the drawing above, then viewed a video of the creation of the drawing. The interviewer asked, now what do we know about this drawing now that we've seen the process? He asked Matthew Barney this question! Barney took a beat, and said "the sun in the upper right." And waited for utter confusion to set in. Then he said, "I think it's the most transformative." It was incredible. Not everything needs to be explained, at least in the way people want it to be sometimes.

Barney is inspiring to me because of the way he abstracts concepts from the things that interest him. All of his work is based on the narratives from literature by Norman Mailer and other masculine literary figures and athletes. He has a major focus on the concept of the masculine.

A strong underlying concept provides a bounded space, which allows room for experimentation within, and the work doesn't stray too far outside of those lines.

I was trained by students of Yale modernists, who practiced design by stripping down meaning to its most basic form. I love that process of finding simplicity, but I also love how school taught me to always think of something as something else, everything is contained within its larger category and classified in a way. Like Barthes explains the Japanese theater as the antithesis of theater, as creating distance and of performing the void, where there is a lack of meaning. This is opposite of western theater where it is packed with layers of meaning.

In my work I've found myself more interested in the space between. Nothingness. Emptiness. Spatial relations among architecture for example, are fascinating to me. Windows and the viewpoints they create, portals and perspective in physical space and on the screen. I just finished my freelance work at Code and Theory in preparation for my move to London, and now that I have some free time I'm going to start on a self-initiated project that I think will be a lot of fun. I need a better camera.

Elena Asins: An architect's dream artist

Yesterday I went to the Museo Reina Sofia here in Madrid, and in ten enormous rooms on the third floor was the exhibition of Elena Asin's work: Fragmentos de la memoria. She was born in 1940 in Madrid, and is one of the first artists in Spain to use the computer to assist her work, and somewhere along the way she studied semiotics with Noam Chomsky at Columbia. The seemingly endless walls of lines and planes reminded me a little of Sol Lewitt - The search for perfect geometric abstraction, and an investigation of mathematical principles in art.

In the artist's statement before you enter the exhibition, she explains that she doesn't create with the purpose of making art - she just systematically works on the problems of space that preoccupy her mind. I could see an architect walking into any of these rooms and finding endless possibilities of angles, shapes and viewpoints.




She admired the work of Piet Mondrian and in an essay in 1969 she writes "For Mondrian this space-plane is a positive void, as it is an essential condition for objective existence. Creating the void is the main action and therein lies true creation, because this void is positive; it contains the germ of the absolutely new."

The space in-between is the most important - reminds me of meditation. Her work is a life-long methodical meditation on the structure of the plane.

Images from the Museo Reina Sofia

What is all this psychogeographic stuff?

In the hopes of learning through making, I've explored a few possibilities for maps of my own.

This isn't really a map but I wanted to include it anyways because when I started writing this post I was reminded of it. My friend Betsy asked me to contribute to an exquisite corpse project she was working on for the Michael Rock lecture, and this is what I sent (above).

I handed this out for my presentation today - a map of my ideas in a Situationist style. I realized that psychogeography is an umbrella topic for many different things:
a. the personal experience of the street
b. the alternate experience of the street enabled by another person (artist/performer)
c. an artist who aggregates many people's experiences.

The experience can include emotions, atmospheres, encounters with people, play, and letting the contours of geography guide you.

Another topic entirely is the memory map - recording all of the associations you have with a place.

Ok, glad I got that all organized for myself. Here are a few drawings I made with colored pencils based on the symbol exploration (I posted earlier). Using the abstract grid and symbols I recreated my personal experience on Rivington street. So these are memory maps, not psychogeographies. But how can you represent the psychogeography you experience on the street? Through memory, unless there is a way to record it in real time. Oh, video does that. But video doesn't capture the moods, feelings and energy of a place as well as being there. I'm feeling the limitations of all mediums for this idea but I'm prepared to embrace those constraints. I have a relatively interesting idea for my next project, and I'm excited to see where it takes me.

There are three different types of symbols that I used for these: actual symbols, letters that are similar in form to the symbol, then a "free draw" of what I felt represented the symbol. I'm using the word symbol loosely here, and maybe I should look into other word options.

I'm not going to go much in depth about my critique with Bruce Mau last Friday, but the most important thing I learned was to NEVER say the word preservation in association with my thesis. EVER AGAIN.

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.