The aim of this essay is to shed light on the modernist dictum form follows function. Taking the dictum as the gist of the modernist principle of design, I would like to pursue this question: Was the dictum ever feasible as a design precept, a precept which promised to bring an end to formalism? The answer of the exponents of the modernist philosophy of design was an unequivocal ‘yes’. They claimed their architecture and design were not a result of stylistic intentions, but of a new anti-formalist design principle. Such claim poses a problem, however. If we happen to accept such understanding, our writing regarding modernist architecture and design will almost unavoidably be reduced to repeating, or at best embellishing upon, what modernists said about themselves. On the other hand, if we deem this design dictum not feasible, we have to suggest an alternative reading of their architecture and design.

http://www.wk12.com/jellytime/

A Silver Knight award winner, enterprising artist and recent college graduate has gone missing while swimming in South Africa, where he was working as a mentor.

link

I thought this was a joke at first. This is heartbreaking.

His website…

T.S.A. Communication is a project that alters the airport security experience and allows the government to learn more about you then just what’s in your backpack. Thin 8.5 x 11 inch laser-cut sheets of stainless steel comfortably fit in your carry on bag, simultaneously obscuring the contents you don’t want the TSA to see while highlighting ideas you do want them to see. Change your role as air traveler from passive to active.

ABOUT THE PROCESS IS a PDF in which many graphic artists have kindly participated, through their replies to the same question concerning their creation processes, is to arouse the interest of graphic artists, students and all graphic arts aficionados.
The question was:
When you work, do you think in terms of forms or in terms of a creation process? Do you have a clear vision of your final image or does it come only from an upstream creation process?

Here then is an outline of the working methods and thought processes of graphic designers today.
Each reply from a graphic designer is illustrated by images of his/her work (the illustration sometimes being the reply) together with the links to their websites for those who would like more information.

You can find it HERE

In Radiohead’s new video for “House of Cards”, no cameras or lights were used. Instead, 3D plotting technologies collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects. The video was created entirely with visualizations of that data.

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/viewer.html

PillowWig

Polite Umbrella

LoveGlove

Self Sustainable Chair

more work

http://www.brooklynfoundry.com/video/index.php?id=1189

Holder is an artist, designer and editor whose work investigates the gap between language and object.

Will Holder’s event is in the Nash & Brandon Rooms on Monday 28 July.

Through his multiple roles as artist, writer, editor and designer Will Holder (born Hatfield, 1969, lives in London) explores the transformative processes at play in the act of publishing. Holder’s project for Nought to Sixty takes place on Marcel Duchamp’s birthday, 28^th July, and is entitled Bachelor Party. This event, which Holder has staged for a number of years, is a celebration encompassing a range of activities, including film screenings, performances and lectures.

Acknowledging Duchamp’s belief in the primacy of concept over form, yet choosing to scrutinise the form of concepts, the project foregrounds language (speech) as an adaptive material. Bachelor Party becomes an interdisciplinary platform from which to “edit, design and ‘publish’ material which ordinarily will not allow itself to be represented on paper”. Holder’s act displaces the notion of publishing from the printed page – and into the more fluid space of conversation and celebration.

Holder’s practice takes many forms, and his work includes printed journals and dialogues with other artists, as well as live readings and social events. In these various formats Holder interrogates the relationship between language and the object, exploring how text in all its forms can manifest in three-dimensions, and how the fixed nature of objects can be destabilised through linguistic interpretation. Holder’s biannual journal FR DAVID, edited with Ann de Meester and Dieter Roelstraete, provides an experimental space in which to discuss these relationships, and in which to explore the use of language in the service of the visual.

http://ica.org.uk/17227.twl 

http://www.quieroverunfantasma.com/eng/

It is no longer 2007. According to Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero mania sweeping the internation, we’re almost three months into -15 BA (Born Again). In the semi-terrifying world of Trent Reznor’s new future-based concept album, the year 2022 is Year Zero, the year we were “Born Again.” Every 12 months prior to Year Zero is denoted by negatives, thus 2007 is -15 BA. If this confuses you, give up now.

In what has to be the most innovative promotion scheme since the leaked sex tape, NIN have treated their fans to a sort of Where’s Waldo game that includes tour merchandising, a dizzying network of websites and, umm, bathrooms in European concert halls. We’d be lying if we said we weren’t checking echoingthesound, the main fan checkpoint, every hour to see what the latest update is.

In case you’ve been living under a rock (without internet), let us catch you up:

It all started with a NIN tour T-shirt. An overeager fan realized that the bolded letters on the back formed a phrase: iamtryingtobelieve, which if you add a .com to the end of it, takes us to the first piece of the puzzle. Here, we learn about the drug Parepin, which has been added to the water supplies of Orlando as protection against similar acts of bio-terrorism against Los Angeles and Anaheim in 2009 (or -13 BA…try to keep up). This site speculates whether Parepin is a medium for the government to control the minds of its citizens. When you email the site owner, who has stopped using the drug because of his conspiracy beliefs, you get this email back:

Auto-reply from water@iamtryingtobelieve.com wrote:

Thank you for your interest. It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent developed to protect us from bio-terrorism. The Administration is acting purely in the best interests of its citizens; to suggest otherwise was irresponsible and I deeply regret it.

I’m drinking the water. So should you.

OK, seems pretty clear we should avoid the water. The next site to emerge was Anotherversionofthetruth.com. The site seems innocent enough, until you click and drag the main page pictures, revealing another, more disturbing, picture underneath. When the under-picture is totally revealed, a link takes you to a message board. We can tell you what is discussed on the message board (a new drug called Opal, the introduction of the Angry Sniper character, and disturbing pictures of “The Presence”), but you should really check it out yourself. It’s complex.

Here, we should introduce you to “The Presence,” an ongoing motif in the game and the subject of Year Zero’s cover (above). “The Presence” is literally a giant fucking four-fingered hand that, supposedly, came out of the sky. It’s speculated that “The Presence” is everything from a giant tornado to the impending rapture to a government ploy used to scare its citizens. Whatever it is, it looks foreboding.

How are these sites found? Well, that’s where European rest rooms come in. Throughout NIN’s European tour, members of whatever all-star marketing squad is behind all this have been leaving USB drives in random concert venues. The drives are filled with new NIN songs (”My Violent Heart” and “Me, I’m Not”), cryptic mp3s and pictures visible only via spectrographs. These files if deciphered correctly also provide us playing the game with the next clue/website….

thisissand.com is a website for play.
It changes the pixels on the screen into digital
sand that canbe used as building material for cosmic landscapes,
Clemens-stylesand paintings, mandalas and so on.

made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo.

Developed by Zach Lieberman and Theodore Watson along with help from the OF community.

OpenFrameworks is a C++ library for creative coding.

Inspired by the following question: Can artists make tools, at the same time that they create artwork?

NEW EVENT CATEGORY (tag all event posts with event tag for convenient viewing)

Tuesday July 15th
Hardware Hacking for Interaction
6PM | FREE
540 W. 21st St @ EYEBEAM
http://www.eyebeam.org/engage/engage.php?page=unique&id=183

New York Philharmonic Concerts in Central Park

When: Tues, July 15, 8:00 PM
Where: The Great Lawn, Central Park
What:This beloved tradition, now in its 44th year, is coming to a park near you. Music under the stars, family and friends, and a fireworks finale make for a perfect summer evening.

Hope Service For Seraphin
Please come and bring your support, prayers and hope
Time and PlaceDate:
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Time: 8:00pm - 11:00pm
Location: Pratt Chapel
what happened

Wednesday July 16th

+AIGA DESIGN REMIX
Andrew Sloat
6:30-8PM | FREE
103 Prince Street @ Soho Apple Store
http://www.aigany.org/events/details/7A14/

Thursday July 17th
Celebrate Brooklyn
Prospect Park Bandshell
07/17/08
7:30 p.m.
Jerry Douglas, The Holmes Brothers

Friday July 18th
Hudson River Flicks
When:Wednesdays in July& August, films start around 8:30pm
Where: Wednesday at Pier 54 on 14St. & West St., Fridays at Pier 46 on Charles St. & West St.
What: Enjoy great movies and free popcorn every Wednesday and Friday in July, under the stars in Hudson River Park.
July 16 -Almost Famous(R)
July 23 -Purple Rain(R)
July 30 -Dream Girls(PG-13)
August 6 -Saturday Night Fever(R)
August 13 -Rock Star(R)
August 20 -The Blues Brothers(R)

Celebrate Brooklyn
Wordless Music presents:
Deerhoof + Metropolis Ensemble: Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring
Prospect Park Bandshell
07/18/08 730p
Wordless Music is known for its oddball pairings. Here, Stravinsky’s Rite sets the stage for the Bay Area art-pop darlings.

Sat July 19th
warm up (again..)
3-9
at PS1

Celebrate Brooklyn
Prospect Park Bandshell
07/19/08 730p
Enter The Dragon with Karsh Kale, Soh Daiko07

Sun July 20th

LAB is a Portable Document Format publication
which collects the work of artists, designers and writers.
With the contribution of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT,
Daniel Eatock, Experimental Jetset, Fons Hickmann, Mevis & Van Deursen, O-R-G …

LAB generates and is generated.

Matt Willey recently recorded his decision-making on a feature design for the Royal Academy magazine. Anyone who’s designed a magazine will recognise the process — a very useful insight into how page designs get arrived at.

via Ali Madad.

new blog for Base launches.

http://interactivos.eyebeam.org/dokuwiki/doku.php

http://interactivos.eyebeam.org/ 

The Big Picture is a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com, compiled semi-regularly by Alan Taylor. Inspired by publications like Life Magazine (of old), National Geographic, and online experiences like MSNBC.com’s Picture Stories galleries and Brian Storm’s MediaStorm, The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery - with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.”

In other words, this photoblog is packed with a brilliant selection of mind-blowing images.
Guaranteed to keep you checking back for more.

http://www.lively.com/html/landing.html

Out of the blue, Google has announced a new 3D virtual world called ‘Google Lively’. The world is similar to Second Life, or the upcoming ‘Home’ for PS3.

Users can create their own 3D “rooms,” and deck them out with furniture and other accoutrements, in addition to being able to add themed music to complete your personalized virtual space in Google Lively. Users will be able to visit others’ rooms, leave items for other Google Lively netizens as well as being able to stream photos and video.

“Based on feedback from ASU [Arizona State University] students and with help from the Google Desktop team, we added support for playing YouTube videos in virtual TVs and showing photos in virtual picture frames inside our rooms. Better yet, the gadgets you have in your Lively rooms can also run on your desktop.”
- Niniane Wang, engineering manager.

A few other differences from Second Life: Lively doesn’t have money. It’s designed to be easier to use, with a drag-and-drop interface. And it’s not programmable, at least yet, so you can only select furniture, clothes, hairstyles, and such from the prefabricated catalog Google supplies.

As of now, Google Lively only runs on PC’s running Windows XP or Windows Vista, with a special browser plugin that uses Emergent’s Gamebryo engine.

‘Issue 1′ is a magazine that rejects normal methods of publication, distribution and content. Grouped by no specific genre and with no advertisements, articles are submitted by anybody who wants to send something in. They are then printed and distributed in piles to random locations around the country. With nobody to answer to, and no traceable authors (all contributors names are left out), people are free to say anything they like, and readers are free to interpret the content without the layers of context that might otherwise surround it.

http://www.createreject.com/projects/issue_1/