Faculteit Letteren€¦ · Baldessari is one of the ur-pedagogues of the art world. UCSD, CalArts and \ൕCLA. Originated the infamous “post-studio” class at CalArts, his first

peter lunenfeld ucla design media arts

PresenterPresentation NotesThanks to Prof. De Graf for arranging this, thanks as well to Matthias Meirlaen for the logistics, and a special thanks to Jan Baetens, who has long been cultivating the areas I find most fertile.

maker’s envy & the generative humanities

PresenterPresentation NotesI suffer from maker’s envy. A critic and theorist, I watch artists, designers, architects and programmers as they present their sculptures, images, buildings and software’s, and I want to be like them. I will fill my allotted time with an exorcism of this envy, via a hybrid lecture/demo, a performative investigation of theory as practice. In so doing, I will exhume two decades of my own contributions to thhe development of print+ culture. Topics this afternoon will include the perils of transmediation, doing theory with back-up dancers, the academic as producer, and how to treat essays as media scripts. Design affordances will be introduced, maps will be augmented, machine translation will be deployed, the names of Johns Berger and Baldessari will be dropped, music will be sampled, sites will be accessed, and apps will be demoed. Warning: there will be Esperanto.

digital humanities

PresenterPresentation NotesBut first, I few thoughts on what brings us together, the digital humanities.

digital_humanities

mit_press_2012 anne_burdick johanna_drucker todd_presner

jeffrey_schnapp

PresenterPresentation NotesFrom Short Guide What is the Digital Humanities? Digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, trans- disciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication. Digital Humanities is less a unified field than an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated.Digital tools, techniques, and media have expanded traditional concepts of knowledge in the arts, humanities and social sciences, but Digital Humanities is not solely “about” the digital (in the sense of limiting its scope to the study of digital culture). Nor is Digital Humanities only “about” the humanities as traditionally understood since it ar- gues for a remapping of traditional practices. Rather, Digital Humanities is defined by the opportunities and challenges that arise from the conjunction of the term digital with the term humanities to form a new collective singular. The opportunities include redrawing the boundary lines among the humanities, the social sciences, the arts, and the natural sciences; expanding the audience and social impact of scholarship in the humanities; developing new forms of inquiry and knowledge production and reinvigorating ones that have fallen by the wayside; training future generations of humanists through hands-on, project-based learning as a complement to classroom-based learning; and developing practices that expand the scope, enhance the quality, and increase the visibility of humanistic research. The challenges include addressing fundamental questions such as: How can skills traditionally used in the humanities be reshaped in multimedia terms? How and by whom will the contours of cultural and historical memory be defined in the digital era? How might practices such as digital storytelling coincide with or diverge from oral or print-based storytelling? What is the place of humanitas in a networked world?

PresenterPresentation NotesYou can find more here

PresenterPresentation NotesEspecially the downloadable part

ucla completed the second year of the graduate certificate and the program Is graduating its first undergraduate minors this spring

PresenterPresentation NotesAt UCLA we’re implementing curricula

ucla’s new research commons accommodates up to 200 users in 23

colorful workstations that can be

reconfigured for small or large groups

pod-like workstations

feature Wi-Fi, display screens,

and hoods to contain sound

PresenterPresentation NotesAnd developing infrastucture

digital humanities

digital humanities collaborative

digital humanities collaborative networked

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive rhizomatic

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive rhizomatic locative

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive rhizomatic locative productive

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive rhizomatic locative productive active

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive rhizomatic locative productive active intertextual

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive rhizomatic locative productive active intertextual hybridizing

digital humanities collaborative networked interactive rhizomatic locative productive active intertextual hybridizing generative

Visualization of "emotional content" of 650,000 tweets over 30 days after the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster

in Japan (March 11, 2011-April 10, 2011), coordinated by Todd Presner, UCLA.

not everything is the digital humanities

not everything is the digital humanities but the digital humanities can be anything

not everything is the digital humanities but the digital humanities can be anything the issue is less one of defining

not everything is the digital humanities but the digital humanities can be anything the issue is less one of defining than it is the work of refining

PresenterPresentation NotesThe British psychoanalyst Kate Barrows once wrote that "envy always involves a comparison - we envy that which we lack." Narcissistic Personality Disorder added a new criterion (criterion 9) in DSM III concerning preoccupation with feelings of envy.

why i’ve envied makers

john baldessari at the whitney museum’s podium

PresenterPresentation NotesThe British psychoanalyst Kate Barrows once wrote that "envy always involves a comparison - we envy that which we lack." Narcissistic Personality Disorder added a new criterion (criterion 9) in DSM III concerning preoccupation with feelings of envy. John Baldessari at the Whitney Museum’s podium. Baldessari is one of the ur-pedagogues of the art world. UCSD, CalArts and UCLA. Originated the infamous “post-studio” class at CalArts, his first class had the late Mike Kelley. About video, he once famously said that he wanted it to be just “one more tool in the artists’ toolbox, by which we can implement our ideas, our visions, our concerns." [John Baldessari, "TV (1) Is Like a Pencil and (2) Won’t Bite Your Leg," in Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, eds., The New Television: A Public/Private Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977), p. 110.]

the endlessly iterative talk

with one title:

zaha hadid at the aa’s podium

PresenterPresentation NotesMoving on to the architect Zaha Hadid, here at the AA’s podium in London, giving the the endlessly iterative talk with one title: SLIDE: Zaha Hadid “MY WORK”

the endlessly Iterative talk

with one title:

zaha hadid at the aa’s podium

“my work”

PresenterPresentation NotesInstead of aping art-making, I’ve decided to exorcise my envy by appropriating the style of their discourse and my own version of the “My Work” talk. Only, as you may have notice from the title, I didn’t have the courage to just go ahead and do it, and call this talk “My Work” or even the Dutch “Mijn Werk” so I’ve hidden behind the synthetic language of Esperanto…

PresenterPresentation NotesInstead of aping art-making, I’ve decided to exorcise my envy by appropriating the style of their discourse and my own version of the “My Work” talk. Only, as you may have notice from the title, I didn’t have the courage to just go ahead and do it, and call this talk “My Work” or even the Dutch “Mijn Werk” so I’ve hidden behind the synthetic language of Esperanto, and used Google Translate to create my title, “Mia Laboro.” I translated the title into Esperanto to give myself and ideally you, just a bit of distance, using the failed universality of Esperanto to deal with the impossibility of fully transtioning from critic to maker. [Sweet and tragic history of Esperanto – Zamenhof and his daughter -- including concentration camps and gulags for its speakers, but the word does mean “hope,” so there’s always that.]

the maker’s discourse

PresenterPresentation NotesTo further explain what I mean by the “Maker’s Discourse,” I need to juxtapose it against two other, more readily identifiable ways of writing about creative practice.

tacit

knowledge

PresenterPresentation NotesThe first revolves around what has been called “tacit knowledge”: the instructions in craft and the specificities of making.

These include everything from instruction manuals to letters between makers, to what John Caldwell has called the “low theory” of critical industrial practice. Tacit knowledge has been invoked recently as a way to reinvigorate the appreciation and discussion of craft in making, after a presumed period of privileging concept. The English theorist Peter Dormer devoted the last monograph of his career, The Art of the Maker: Skill and its Meaning in Art, Craft and Design, to challening what he saw as the “modern orthodoxy… that conception and execution are separate activities and that execution – mere making – can take care of itself.” John Caldwell, Critical Industrial Practice Branding, Repurposing, and the Migratory Patterns of Industrial Texts Television & New Media Vol. 7 No. 2, (May 2006) 99–134. See also John Thornton, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham: Duke UP, 2008)Peter Dormer, The Art of the Maker: Skill and its Meaning in Art, Craft and Design, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), P. XXXX. The great American designer and design pedagogue Lorraine Wild drew upon Dormers’ work on tacit knowledge in her quest to “salvage graphic design in the face of the juggernaut of technology and the demands of the market,” in a well known polemic from 1998 titled “The Macramé of Resistance.” Lorraine Wild, “The Macramé of Resistance” [Emigre no. 47 (1998), p. XXXX]

pragmatic

intuition

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

PresenterPresentation NotesTacit Knowledge tends to concentrate on craft, intuition, and materiality, using descriptive language for pragmatic, even professional ends.

pragmatic

intuition

gesture

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

PresenterPresentation NotesIts key human attribute is the gesture.

pragmatic

intuition

gesture

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

theory

PresenterPresentation NotesIf that short list makes it past you without too much trouble, offering an equivalent structure for Theory, in 2012, after at least 1,000 papers and panels on theory during the past decade that included the words, “Crisis,” “Death,” “Post,” or “Attack on” will prove to be more problematic. That said, I’ll simply appropriate David Rodowick’s definition from the essay “An Elegy for Theory”: “Theories seek to explain, usually by proposing concepts, but in this they are often distinguished from doing or practice.” D.N. Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” October 122 (Fall 2007): pp. 91–109, p. 97.

pragmatic

intuition

gesture

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

analytic

exteriority

theory

structural

criticism

history

PresenterPresentation NotesA Theory of making draws upon history, criticism and other bodies of pre-extant theory, tends to approach practice from a position of exteriority, and offers structural and analytic explanations primarily for academic audiences.

pragmatic

intuition

gesture

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

analytic

exteriority

theory

structural

proposition

criticism

history

PresenterPresentation NotesIts key human attribute is the proposition.

pragmatic

intuition

gesture

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

analytic

exteriority

theory

structural

maker’s discourse

proposition

criticism

history

PresenterPresentation NotesThe Maker’s Discourse as I have been charting it draws from tacit knowledge in that it emerges from practice, but the Maker’s Discourse treats theory as a powerful tool rather than as an antagonist.

pragmatic

intuition

gesture

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

sensibility

eclectic

dialogic

analytic

exteriority

theory

structural

metalogic

maker’s discourse

proposition

criticism

history

generative

PresenterPresentation NotesThe Maker’s Discourse hones a sensibility about practice, is defined by its eclecticism and embrace of ambiguity, and desires to enchant as much as argue. It is both metalogic and dialogic and strives to generate responses both as made practice and written retort.

pragmatic

intuition

gesture

professional

tacit

knowledge craft

wit

sensibility

eclectic

dialogic

analytic

exteriority

theory

structural

metalogic

maker’s discourse

proposition

criticism

history

generative

PresenterPresentation NotesIts key human attribute is wit.

in the coming generation... the linguistic will take a visual turn as will its pedagogies just as art, architecture, design, and even music embraced the languages of the humanities (theoretical, philosophical, criticial) over the last thirty years In what has been called the linguistic turn so now will the humanities be embracing the generative, making-centric paradigms of the arts.

varieties of visual intellectuals

varieties of visual intellectuals & generative humanists:

varieties of visual intellectuals & generative humanists: thinker/designers

varieties of visual intellectuals & generative humanists: thinker/designers writer/programmers

varieties of visual intellectuals & generative humanists: thinker/designers writer/programmers teacher/fabricators

varieties of visual intellectuals & generative humanists: thinker/designers writer/programmers teacher/fabricators essayist/filmmakers

varieties of visual intellectuals & generative humanists: thinker/designers writer/programmers teacher/fabricators essayist/filmmakers academic/producer

post-print+

PresenterPresentation NotesBut first, I few thoughts on what brings us together, the digital humanities.

mediawork

PresenterPresentation NotesTo move from theory to practice, I’m now going demo a collection of strange attractors uploaded over the past five years, an initiative I’ve labeled the Mediawork project. My point of entry was the book, a form that I love, which I believe in, a medium that will never go away. I’m not even interested in the by now bankrupt argument about the ”death of the book,” trust me, they will survive us all. This is not to say that hypertexts, cybertexts, technotexts, e-books, networks, Webs, electronic paper and printing on demand won’t have effects on the book, just that the book is an extraordinarily adaptable object. In fact, technology can lift certain of the obligations that books have felt constrained to fulfill over the centuries, and open spaces for experimentation and new potential for the medium, much as photography lifted the weight of representation off painting in the 19th century and allowed the older medium space to explore abstraction. So, I started with the book, and then expanded into what I call a hypercontext, incorporating the Web and reinventing the academic apparatus. The Mediawork Pamphlet series pairs writers with designers, to create compact, visually compelling texts. Their designation as pamphlets counters the bloat that affects so much contemporary theory and criticism, ensuring concision and demanding rigor from authors and designers alike.

PresenterPresentation Notes

I drew from a range of inspirations, I’ll mention just two here. The first was the 1960s collaboration between media theorist Marshall McLuhan and designer Quentin Fiore that resulted in the marvelous distillation of McLuhan’s major work, Understanding Media

PresenterPresentation NotesThe second comes from the early 1980s, when Sylvère Lotringer’s group Semiotext(e) inaugurated their Foreign Agents book series by publishing Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations

that small black volume which ignited a fury of theoretical activity. Lotringer describes them: “The books were small, black and thin…They could be read on the subway, a few pages at a time, like the newspaper. [They were] hard and portable, compact and cost-effective.”

PresenterPresentation NotesSchott Leath Jacket – perfect for junkies, hot in the summer and cold in the winter.

Lotringer has discussed how he began the project as an exercise in industrial design. * Semiotext(e) books were sized to fit directly into the vest pocket of a [Leather Jacket] “Their place was in the pockets of spiked leather jackets as much as on the shelves…”

PresenterPresentation NotesPatti and Lou

PresenterPresentation Notes

I’m not sure that Mediawork pamphlets have that specific a destination, but I was thinking about those sling packs, messenger bags, and attachés that both men and women now shoulder to hold their pens, pads, pagers, phones, PDAs, and, of course, laptop computers. These pamphlets are the perfect size and weight to toss into one of these bags or slip into an outer pocket. I hope people page through them while they wait for their laptops to boot up. Interstitial times demand interstitial literature.

Utopian Entrepreneur (2001) by Brenda Laurel, designed by Denise Gonzales Crisp.

Web Take: “Idea Tree,” an on-line comic by Scott McCloud.

Writing Machines (2002), by N. Katherine Hayles,

designed by Anne Burdick. Web Take: “Hollowbound Book,” by Erik Loyer

Web Supplement: by Anne Burdick & Sean Donahue

Rhythm Science (2004) by Paul D. Miller

aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, designed by COMA Amsterdam/New York.

Web Take: “Hypnotext” by Peter Halley & Casey Reas

Shaping Things (2005) by Bruce Sterling,

designed by Lorraine Wild Web Take: “Macroscopes” text by John Thackara,

applet by Schoenerwissen/OfCD

PresenterPresentation NotesAs Editorial Director, I commissioned each of the authors on these specific topics, paired them with a specific designer, and then worked with each side of the equation to shape the final outcome. Utopian Entrepreneurculture work within capitalism, doing good, doing wellWriting Machinestechnotext, new forms of writing follow new technologies Rhythm Sciencethe dj as a model for creative, common, multi-mix-cultureShaping Thingsdesigning our way out of the problems we designed ourselves into

turning private theory into public discourse

media experimentation into cultural intervention

turning private theory into public discourse

Design COMA Amsterdam/New York

PresenterPresentation NotesI’d like to go into greater detail on Rhythm Science, which was featured in a recent Smithsonian’s Design Triennial at the Cooper Hewitt in New York.

rhythm science offers four modes of

materialized meaning making

textual

(pull) textual visual aural

mediawork site &

webtakes (2001-)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/mediawork

USER as metalogue

PresenterPresentation NotesOne of the many things I was trying to do with first ‘User’ the column and then USER the book was to develop an aesthetics that acknowledges the market but that is not as susceptible to the vicissitudes of the business cycle. When art and cultural historians look back on the criticism produced at the turn of the millennium, I think they are going to wonder at the complete bifurcation between the techno-positive Utopianism of net.arts criticism and the bemoaning of the end of the avant-garde from the academy and the October-ites. The central issue of the emergence of an immersive, design conscious electronic environment still needed to be adequately explored. Colorful but stark, playful but rigorous, the design was uncompromising in the sense that it dared you to ignore it. Every page felt like a miniature poster from a more benevolent vision of 1984, where George Orwell’s Newspeak merges with Otto Neurath’s Isotypes and everything is set in Helvetica: MINIDES SAYS ALWAYS MAKING DOUBLEPLUS GOOD WEB IN OCEANA! I contributed to a few more of Mieke’s books, including Mobile Minded (Gerritzen and Lovink, 2002) and Visual Power (Gerritzen et al., 2004), each of which followed the format of multiple contributors intersecting with one, unique design intelligence. It was around 2004 that I began to think about what might result from bringing Mieke’s signature style to bear on more unified text by a single author. I would never have had the courage to team her with another author from the Mediawork series, simply because her voice is so strong. But I felt that the ‘User’ columns might make for a good fit – they too were muscular statements about contemporary visual and information culture. What might result from teaming up? When I broached the concept with Mieke, she got it immediately. We wanted to distinguish USER from the pamphlets, by using a slightly different trim size and making it a bit thicker. What emerged followed Mieke’s program for generating provocative ‘strategies’ through both constraint (Helvetica is the only font used) and provocation (joysticks become phalluses, color erupts off every page, and bombs have smiley faces imprinted upon them). The book is a riot of tweaked Istoypes and posturing aesthetics, but one that is tied directly to the content and, most importantly, intent. USER is indeed ‘a frontal assault’, as Johanna Drucker (2005) once categorized it.

book & kindle design by brian roettinger

gentext programming & concept

by chandler mcwilliams

textual affordances

81 writing to design

affordance theory

PresenterPresentation NotesThe impact, both quantitatively and qualitatively, of all of this augmentation has had an impact not only on our minds and bodies, but also on the aesthetics choices and systems that surround, inform, critique and delight them. To get a handle on these 21st century issues, I will turn yet again to the discourses of design, here the concept of “affordance” as we inherit it from industrial and then interface design.

The usability expert and cognative psychologist Don Norman drew from psychologist James Jerome Gibson, who was influential in changing the way we consider visual perception. According to Gibson, perception of the environment inevitably leads to some course of action. Affordances, or clues in the environment that indicate possibilities for action, are perceived in a direct, immediate way with no sensory processing. Examples include: buttons for pushing, knobs for turning, handles for pulling, levers for sliding, etc. says affordance "refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used."

Norman’s immensely popular book, The Design of Everyday Things (1990), moved these ideas squarely into the mainstream of industrial and especially interface design. Norman’s examples of "plates for pushing," and "knobs for turning" describe the typical course of interaction between a human user and a computer or any kind of machine.

exploring the affordances tablet computing can offer to text as a medium

gentext app

PresenterPresentation NotesThe Secret War is a transmedia phenomenon. The Book is designed by Brian Roettinger, who also created the first really “designed” text-only e-Book version for the Kindle. The associated site, http://secret-war.com directs you to Gentext, an innovative interactive text application that allows readers to access arguments at three levels – short abstract, single screen synopsis, and full selection – with the dynamic interaction offered by pinching and reverse pinching literalizing the metaphor of "zooming" between the levels in a text. GenText, designed by was media artist Chandler McWilliams, recounts the history of how the computer became our culture machine, and is adapted from “Generations,” the last section The Secret War. Finally, there’s the Directorate, which offers an alternate mode of accessing the book’s arguments. Not recommended for those with carpal tunnel, weak fingers, or short attention spans. Links to booksellers and the App store, a video of Gentext in action, and the Directorate are all available at http://secret-war.com (don’t forget the dash, or you’ll end up having to choose sides in the battle between Jebus and de Debil).

GenText offers a leading-edge interface for reading on portable touch screen devices such as the iPad. It is a powerful and innovative interactive text application that allows readers to access arguments at three levels – short abstract, single screen synopsis, and full selection – with the dynamic interaction offered by pinching and reverse pinching literalizing the metaphor of "zooming" between the levels in a text. GenText exploits the affordances of our “print plus” moment, and will be of special interest for those working in new media, digital humanities, and the design disciplines. Gentext recounts the history of how the computer became our culture machine, and is adapted from “Generations,” the last section of Peter Lunenfeld’s new book, The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading.

evidence for why amateurs shouldn’t design book covers

essay as mediascript

city at the edge of forever

los angeles beyond the screen

PresenterPresentation NotesRespite from what I call “Nowcasting” City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Beyond the ScreenFor a hundred years, Los Angeles has been stereotyped as a city without history, a place in a continual state of becoming, embracing amnesia in hopes of perpetual renewal. Yet Los Angeles has seen a remarkable efflorescence of material cultures over that same century, and this largely unexplored legacy demands codification and celebration. The strongest signifiers the city has generated – Hollywood’s audiovisual entertainments – have so dominated the perception of Los Angeles that they have eclipsed the place of architecture, art, design, music, and those hard-to-identify attributes we label “lifestyle” within the historical record. I am applying for a Guggenheim fellowship in order to research and write City on the Edge of Forever, a book that is not a linear history of material cultures in Los Angeles, but rather – to borrow a geological metaphor – a deep core drilling that reveals previously unseen affinities between people, places and things, across time, discipline and temperament. The essay as media script: In other words, pregnant within the text-based essay is the potential for expression in other, digital media. I don’t see an interchangeability between the visual and language, but rather a complementarity. The question is how to use each to best effect meaning. The visual can free the imagination and create fluid connections, but it is not an “advance” over the capacities of text, it is a different mode of knowledge production. The best filmmakers and designers understand how to harness the powers of each of the specific forms they use in transmedia projects, creating compelling synergies rather than frantic muddles. The act of thinking and then making a record of that process can be seen as a multi-valent, open position, as opposed to the older notion of “writing” or “picture making.” If texts in their broadest sense can be thought of as “media scripts,” then the specific medium that instantiates that script can change, evolve, morph, and even turn back upon itself depending upon the situation. But to get to this kind of “visual intellectuality” takes new kinds of training, new ways of working, and, quite often, new partners.

iteration.performance from main street to the mansion: walt disney, hugh hefner and the transformation of sex and death

bvps organized by koert van mensvoort and mieke gerritzen

PresenterPresentation Notes* Visual Power Show in LA at the Million Dollar Theater* from main street to the mansion: walt disney, hugh hefner and the transformation of sex and deathTheory with back-up dancers

iteration.performance from main street to the mansion: walt disney, hugh hefner and the transformation of sex and death

iteration.video gidget on the couch:

freud, dora, no not that dora and the austro-hungarian roots of surfing

the believer, issue 56

PresenterPresentation Notes"Gidget on the Couch" uses the emergence of surfing in particular its transition from activity to lifestyle commodity as a way to think through the evolution of modernist architecture in Southern California, linking the nihilistic soul surfer Miki Dora to expatriate architect Rudolph Schindler via the "real" Gidget's family (which included one of Hollywood's first trans-media talent agents). In the way of many contemporary texts, the essay itself has been remediated in different ways already. You can read it in the June, 2008 issue, of course (which you can order here), or you can browse it on the magazine's site, or you can find it in the print collection, Read Hard: Five Years of Great Writing from The Believer (San Francisco: McSweeny's, 2009) available here, and you can even (re-?)read it in a reposting from the book atThe Rumpus.



believermag.com




read hard book




therumpus.net


iteration.video gidget on the couch

vectors: journal of culture and technology in a dynamic vernacular

PresenterPresentation NotesGoing back to John Baldessari, we were obviously inspired by the concept of video as a pencil, but other models came to mind, including, of course, John Berger and the illustrated essay that is Ways of Seeing, and also the far less well known but wonderful shaggy dog tales of Rayner Banham Loves LA.

iteration.video gidget on the couch

designer and producer dmitri siegel director matt nourse

iteration.object

central avenue jazz in the ‘40s riot on sunset strip in the ‘60s

“riots goin’ on: popular music, state power and the murder of culture”

lapd chief william parker la sheriff pete pitchess

PresenterPresentation Notes“Riots Goin’ On: Popular Music, State Power and the Murder of Culture” is the first scholarly analysis linking three moments of the annihilation of popular culture by direct oppression – Police Chief Bill Parker’s obsession with “race-mixing” leading to the destruction of the Central Avenue jazz scene in the 1950s; Sheriff Peter Pitchess fomenting the “Riot on Sunset Strip” in the 1960s when his department sided with organized crime to impose draconian curfews on teenagers and in the process forced rock-n-roll north to San Francisco; and a coda on the death of Chicano punk’s first great venue, the Vex, at the hands of rampaging Anglo skinheads who drove inland to East LA from their base in the Orange County beach cities.

iteration.object

create forms for historical markers for los angeles akin to paris’ “starck paddles” but augmented with micro-broadcasting capacities and installed as pirate actions

PresenterPresentation NotesPlan is to create forms for historical markers for Los Angeles akin to the "Histoire de Paris" panels which are also known as “Starck Paddles” but augmented with micro-broadcasting capacities and installed as pirate actions.[The "Histoire de Paris" panels (sometimes called Starck Shovels because of their shape and their designer) are information panels installed in the streets of Paris in front of some Parisian monuments. In 1992, the mayor of Paris at that time, Jacques Chirac asked the companyJC Decaux to install panels of information. 767 panels were designed by Philippe Starck. They appear to be shovel-shaped but are actually with shape of a ship paddle to recall the motto of Paris "Fluctuat nec mergitur".]

unimodern hedgefoxes

rather than early, high, or post, we produce and consume a

unimodernism. our moment is unimodern in the sense that it makes

modernism in all its variants universal via networks and broadcasts,

uniform in their effect if not affect, and unitary in terms of their

existing as strings of code. in the unimodern era, as bits, on-line and

in databases, a photo is a painting is an opera is a pop single.

rather than early, high, or post, we produce and consume a

unimodernism. our moment is unimodern in the sense that it makes

modernism in all its variants universal via networks and broadcasts,

uniform in their effect if not affect, and unitary in terms of their

existing as strings of code. in the unimodern era, as bits, on-line and

in databases, a photo is a painting is an opera is a pop single.

from:

the care & feeding of hedgefoxes

“the fox knows many things,

but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

archilochus by way of isaiah berlin

PresenterPresentation NotesLike Plato and Aristotle, and as he mentions in the text, Berlin is trying to categorize the ways artists and thinkers encounter and deal with the world. The hedgehog’s great depth is inspiring for its rigor, the fox’s curiosity astonishing in its energy. The computer has been critiqued quite a bit for forcing us into the role of the fox. How can we avoid the candy box approach at a place like the DMA. But can we consciously decide to meld what we can of these two transitions to become hedgefoxes? Capable of ranging wide, but also of going deep? This differs from Berlin’s assessment of Tolstoy as a fox who thinks he’s a hedgehog.

our technologies encourage us to range wide,

but can we also ensure that we are capable of going deep?

PresenterPresentation NotesThe Beginning off the Armildilloshttp://www.boop.org/jan/justso/armadil.htm“THIS is a picture of the whole story of the Jaguar and the Hedgehog and the Tortoise and the Armadillo all in a heap. It looks rather the same any way you turn it. The Tortoise is in the middle, learning how to bend, and that is why the shelly plates on his back are so spread apart. He is standing on the Hedgehog, who is waiting to learn how to swim. The Hedgehog is a Japanesy Hedgehog, because I couldn't find our own Hedgehogs in the garden when I wanted to draw them. (It was daytime, and they had gone to bed under the dahlias.) Speckly Jaguar is looking over the edge, with his paddy-paw carefully tied up by his mother, because he pricked himself scooping the Hedgehog. He is much surprised to see what the Tortoise is doing, and his paw is hurting him. The snouty thing with the little eye that Speckly Jaguar is trying to climb over is the Armadillo that the Tortoise and the Hedgehog are going to turn into when they have finished bending and swimming. It is all a magic picture, and that is one of the reasons why I haven't drawn the Jaguar's whiskers. The other reason was that he was so young that his whiskers had not grown. The Jaguar's pet name with his Mummy was Doffles.”

can the generative humanities of the unimodern moment teach us how to transform ourselves and our students into hedgefoxes?

Jacques Callot (1621)

invidia

PresenterPresentation NotesJaques Callot’s 17th century illustration of EnvyDanger – Envy Discourser’s Makings can be worse than anything Makers make – viz David Pagel’s Untitled of 1991, aka Toothbrush with Pubic HairDavid Pagel, an old friend and longtime art reviewer for the Los Angeles Times was invited to make a work for a gallery show, Sue Spaid, as I remembe, reventually and somewhat unbelievably made it into the Spence Collection and donated to the Laguna Museum of Art.

invidia to humanitas

PresenterPresentation NotesEnvy is one of the Catholic Church’s seven deadly sins, of course, and I find it’s inverse (one of the lesser known of the Seven Virtues) is “kindness,” or the Latin humanitas, which is alternately translated as culture, and it is that sense of the word, especially as developed by Cicero in the classical era and later by Petrarch at the start of the Renaissance, that forms the basis of the humanities, the development of human virtues. Greek paideia to Latin humanitas to Renaissance studia humanitatis, to 19th century German humanismus to 20th century explosion of humanities departments, to 21st century Digital Humanities.

invidia to humanitas

Leonardo da Vinci, (c1487)

PresenterPresentation NotesEnvy is one of the Catholic Church’s seven deadly sins, of course, and I find it’s inverse (one of the lesser known of the Seven Virtues) is “kindness,” or the Latin humanitas, which is alternately translated as culture, and it is that sense of the word, especially as developed by Cicero in the classical era and later by Petrarch at the start of the Renaissance, that forms the basis of the humanities, the development of human virtues. Greek paideia to Latin humanitas to Renaissance studia humanitatis, to 19th century German humanismus to 20th century explosion of humanities departments, to 21st century Digital Humanities.

dankon!

thanks!

dankje!

danke!

merci!

word map generated by many-eyes from uploading the text of the secret war a new way of analyzing one’s own work for coherence and structure

PresenterPresentation Notes(a tip o’ the hat to lev manovich)

the idea of the academic as

producer may bring

robert evans to mind

“I have always fantasized that what took a great deal of effort, cost a lot of sweat and money for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin, can now be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s, which used to fill large halls and expend vast amounts of electricity but are now accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail.” Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”

The Factory Model of Desire: Walt Disney and Hugh Hefner Moved to L.A. and Forever Changed Sex, Death, and Boredom in America

http://believermag.com/issues/201103/?read=article_lunenfeld

invidia’s curse: does maker’s envy result in the discourser’s making?

invidia’s curse: does maker’s envy result in the discourser’s making?

evidence:

makers across disciplines

institutionalizing the maker’s

discourse “just as heavy industry required the development of doctoral programs in engineering, so will creative industries require doctoral programs.”

practice-based ph.d. programs

Zadie Smith Micro Planner or Macro Manager Which are you?

the maker’s discourse

zadie smith charles & ray eames robert smithson

buckminster fuller scott mccloud also scott mccloud

Zadie Smith Micro Planner or Macro Manager Which are you?


As a group, we proposed both

undergraduate and graduate level

curricula in the digital humanities and

secured funding for prototype graduate and undergraduate

pilot programs.

We completed the first year of the undergraduate minor and graduate certificate in the spring of 2012

PresenterPresentation NotesNorman Bel Geddes' Flying Car, 1945

evidence for why amateurs shouldn’t design book covers

essay as mediascript

city at the edge of forever

los angeles beyond the screen

Not a linear history of material cultures in Los Angeles, but rather – to

borrow a geological metaphor – a deep core

drilling that reveals previously unseen affinities

between people, places and things, across time,

discipline and temperament.

PresenterPresentation NotesRespite from what I call “Nowcasting” City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Beyond the ScreenFor a hundred years, Los Angeles has been stereotyped as a city without history, a place in a continual state of becoming, embracing amnesia in hopes of perpetual renewal. Yet Los Angeles has seen a remarkable efflorescence of material cultures over that same century, and this largely unexplored legacy demands codification and celebration. The strongest signifiers the city has generated – Hollywood’s audiovisual entertainments – have so dominated the perception of Los Angeles that they have eclipsed the place of architecture, art, design, music, and those hard-to-identify attributes we label “lifestyle” within the historical record. I am applying for a Guggenheim fellowship in order to research and write City on the Edge of Forever, a book that is not a linear history of material cultures in Los Angeles, but rather – to borrow a geological metaphor – a deep core drilling that reveals previously unseen affinities between people, places and things, across time, discipline and temperament. The essay as media script: In other words, pregnant within the text-based essay is the potential for expression in other, digital media. I don’t see an interchangeability between the visual and language, but rather a complementarity. The question is how to use each to best effect meaning. The visual can free the imagination and create fluid connections, but it is not an “advance” over the capacities of text, it is a different mode of knowledge production. The best filmmakers and designers understand how to harness the powers of each of the specific forms they use in transmedia projects, creating compelling synergies rather than frantic muddles. The act of thinking and then making a record of that process can be seen as a multi-valent, open position, as opposed to the older notion of “writing” or “picture making.” If texts in their broadest sense can be thought of as “media scripts,” then the specific medium that instantiates that script can change, evolve, morph, and even turn back upon itself depending upon the situation. But to get to this kind of “visual intellectuality” takes new kinds of training, new ways of working, and, quite often, new partners.

Slide Number 1Slide Number 2Slide Number 3Slide Number 4Slide Number 5Slide Number 6Slide Number 7Slide Number 8Slide Number 9Slide Number 10Slide Number 11Slide Number 12Slide Number 13Slide Number 14Slide Number 15Slide Number 16Slide Number 17Slide Number 18Slide Number 19Slide Number 20Slide Number 21Slide Number 22Slide Number 23Slide Number 24Slide Number 25Slide Number 26Slide Number 27Slide Number 28Slide Number 29Slide Number 30Slide Number 31Slide Number 32Slide Number 33Slide Number 34Slide Number 35Slide Number 36Slide Number 37Slide Number 38Slide Number 39Slide Number 40Slide Number 41Slide Number 42Slide Number 43Slide Number 44Slide Number 45Slide Number 46Slide Number 47Slide Number 48Slide Number 49Slide Number 50Slide Number 51Slide Number 52Slide Number 53Slide Number 54Slide Number 55Slide Number 56Slide Number 57Slide Number 58Slide Number 59Slide Number 60Slide Number 61Slide Number 62Slide Number 63Slide Number 64Slide Number 65Slide Number 66Slide Number 67Slide Number 68Slide Number 69Slide Number 70Slide Number 71Slide Number 72Slide Number 73Slide Number 74Slide Number 75Slide Number 76Slide Number 77Slide Number 78Slide Number 79Slide Number 80Slide Number 81Slide Number 82Slide Number 83Slide Number 84Slide Number 85Slide Number 86Slide Number 87Slide Number 88Slide Number 89Slide Number 90Slide Number 91Slide Number 92Slide Number 93Slide Number 94Slide Number 95Slide Number 96Slide Number 97Slide Number 98Slide Number 99Slide Number 100Slide Number 101Slide Number 102Slide Number 103Slide Number 104Slide Number 105Slide Number 106Slide Number 107Slide Number 108Slide Number 109Slide Number 110Slide Number 111Slide Number 112Slide Number 113Slide Number 114Slide Number 115Slide Number 116Slide Number 117Slide Number 118Slide Number 119Slide Number 120Slide Number 121Slide Number 122Slide Number 123Slide Number 124Slide Number 125Slide Number 126Slide Number 127Slide Number 128Slide Number 129Slide Number 130Slide Number 131Slide Number 132Slide Number 133Slide Number 134Slide Number 135Slide Number 136Slide Number 137Slide Number 138Slide Number 139Slide Number 140Slide Number 141Slide Number 142Slide Number 143Slide Number 144Slide Number 145Slide Number 146Slide Number 147Slide Number 148Slide Number 149Slide Number 150Slide Number 151Slide Number 152

Documents

Faculteit Letteren€¦ · Baldessari is one of the ur-pedagogues of the art world. UCSD, CalArts and \ൕCLA. Originated the infamous “post-studio” class at CalArts, his first