C.O.P Lecture 6: Print Culture (Part 02)

CoP: Print Culture Part 2

-  ‘Late age of print’

-  ‘Aura’ – special sensation of art, art is superior. – product of genius’s and great men.

-  The aura of traditional art starts to wither away, becomes less special.

-  In order to smash that kind of pretentiousness, people making art themselves.

-  People organizing exhibitions themselves – entrepreneurial head on – forming independent collectives.

-  Right now were in the digital age of print.

-  There’s been a return of older methods of handmade production which are returning to the art industry – screen printing, letter press.

-  These methods are being taught now – there is an appetite for them.

-  Why are people still interested in these techniques?

-  We live in a world which is based on computer screens – when we create something by hand, touching the raw materials, feeling our ay through a recipe for example, tasting, adjusting, engaging ALL the senses, can be a shooting release.

-  People are discovering that doing things slowly often means doing them better and enjoying it more – living life instead of rushing through it.

-  Our obsession with speed, with cramming more and more into every minute, means that we race through life instead of actually living it. – we struggle to relax.

-  Use slowness to unlock your creativity – start by clearing space from your schedule for rest, daydreaming and serendipity.

-  Slow food manifesto – tedious-ness of fast food, everything is the same.

-  Learn how to cook your own meals rather than something being premade for you.

-  Fast fashion – ‘unbeatably cheap top’ designed like hamburgers to be traded in large volumes.

-  New styles copied by high street brands from high-end designers and catwalk.

-  Exploits consumer demand for novelty.

-  Slow design – not focusing on the product itself, not on the quick solution – thinking about how your practice relates to the people and world around you.

-  Print culture – handmade factors are very important – it has a human politic element to it.

-  Anthony Burrill – handmade artist

-  Theprintproject – based in Shipley – 500 year old print technology – revivalism – sustainability.

-  Richard Lawrence – pink milk float – mobile travelling print studio.

-  Nicolas Bourriaud – relational aesthetics. – move away from making things to creating artworks as ‘social interstice’

-  Forming human relationship within a particular social context. – Relational art.

-  Not just about the print – about the relations that are formed through that print.

-  Technological reproduction of art removes – creativity, genius, eternal value, tradition, authority, authenticity, autonomy, distance, mystery – AURA

-  Handmade techniques bringing this aura back.

-  Connecting and networking.

-  Time sensitive artworks to be experienced under specific conditions – a specific date or time.

-  Relational works aim to produce social relations rather than replicate or illustrate already existing ones.

-  We are returning to traditional techniques and production methods for quality – Glastonbury Free Press – The Print Project.

-  New handmade processes create an aura of design after being trashed by new technology.

-  We are in an era now where it has moved beyond print culture. – post digital aesthetic.

C.O.P Lecture 5: Print Culture and Distribution (Part 1)

Lecture 5 - Print Culture and Distribution (Part 1) 

‘Late Age of Print’ - the age began around 1450 - Gutenberg’s printing press - brings humanity out of the dark ages.

• Term comes from the media theorist Marshall Mcluhan.

• Somerset House - opened in 1780 aristocratic institution - art of this time for the rich/ruling class.
• Architecture, music, poetry.
• Separation between fine arts and other art disciplines.
• Only men were allowed to go to these events - gender separation.
• 1780-1832 - industrial revolution 1760 - 1840.
• The making of the english working class.
• Bourgeoisie / Middle class.
• Production stopped becoming about handmade things, was turning to mass mechanical methods.
• More labourers were needed to make more product and producing things in mass.
• There was a noticeable divide between the classes. - The nicer houses are always at the top of the city and the ‘slums’ where the factories are and where the smog is.
• Divide caused by development of industry. Sense of class and place in the world (us and them).
• Working class started to  form popular entertainment amongst themselves. They had communities.
• They used the industry to create these. - Created print work - very particular working class culture.
• Identity struggle - working class people coming together and saying ‘why are we living in these conditions, why are we deprived of such benefits?’
• Politicised working class culture.
• John Martin - instead of charging people for paintings, he would charge people entry fees to see the work instead. - very entrepreneurial artist approach.
• People would make money by copying other artists work - running off the back of them. - secondary market. Almost exploiting the market.
• Backlash from writers and theorists from the rich classes who say this is horrific - having cheap knock offs of these artists. (Matthew Arnold 1867)
• Snobiness about the working class culture.
• Culture has always been in minority keeping.
• Popular culture offers addictive forms of distraction and compensation - doesnt refresh your attitude to life, forces you to face the real world.
• One way fine art responds/preserves itself to the ‘popular’ works - saying art as being something internal. It has an autonomy - almost mysterious.
• New technology is using methods of ‘attack’ against traditional art - mona lisa e.g.
• Art of the people (popular art) against high art.
• Eidophusikon - opened leicester square 1781.
• With the invention of photography - overriding portrait paintings. Its cheaper and quicker - ordinary people could have their portrait taken, not just the rich and famous.
• The sublime - philosophic idea, staggered - mixture of fear and excitement. Greater than humanity.
• New markets - new ways of making art. Technologies destabilising art.
• Newspapers began to use images - pieces of art. Cheaply available - evolution of a technology.
• Photography - no need for portrait paintings anymore. (better, more realistic and cheaper).
• Anybody can have a portrait.
• Print Capitalism - images made for profit. - overtake traditional art - making more money.
• Print Capitalism is its own culture. - replaces culture with popular culture.
• Romantic form of anti-capitalism.
• William Morris produced complex, interesting craft and mechanical design. - ‘Art is a fruit growing from the conditions of society’.
• Revolutionary - he wanted a level culture, over through capitalism. - Wanted a culture based on equality.
• Political patterns - desire for a world better than capitalism.
• Mostly focused on nature - which is beyond grasp of capitalism.
• Merton Abbey Mills - run under social principles - a co-operative studio - combined effort (1881).
• Small scale croft - model of alternative to mass production which solely seeks profit.
• Move away from digital to hand made techniques - return to the small scale, collective, progressive. (Glastonbury free press, The print project).

 

C.O.P Lecture 4: The History of Type - Production and Distribution (Part 2)

 Lecture 4: The History of Type - Production and Distribution (Part 2)

“Since typography is a communication method that utilizes a gathering of related subjects and methodologies that includes sociology, linguistics and psychology.”

• The importance of ‘chronologies’
• The future is based on the past, we shape that future.
• Each typeface that we are using has a history.

• Type is a language based; comes from the spoken word.
• Transition from an oral traditions into something that happens physically, visually, in a written form.
• When we are talking about history and chronology, we have to be specific, where has it come from who has said it?

• True alphabets consistently assign letters to both consonant and vowels on an equal basis.
• Before 20th century - type was about production that determined how type looked and how letterforms were developed.

• After WW1 there was an opportunity to rebuild creativity.
• Common theme between form, what something looks like - what is it trying to achieve?
• Reductionist view of how you think about design, functionality and how something is made.
• Not everything is about form and function.
• When we start to look at the Bauhaus, it is really the first time that the industrial age had a visual language.
• Systematic, Pragmatic, increasing development of design.
• Helvetica was the epitome of type and the culture itself.
• Microsoft did the bare minimum of copying helvetica (Arial).
• 1990 - steve jobs - introduced the first apple macintosh - the birth of our use of type, the first computer we could design on.
• We moved away from brushes - we were using letterpress and digital technology.
• “By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product” -  Ellen Lupton Thinking with type.
• Within type, you have to have an opinion and a personal view.

1994 - Vincent Connare - COMIC SANS MS - worked for microsoft.

1990 - Tim Berners-Lee - created the ‘www’ - gave it away for FREE.

1995 - Bill Gates - Internet Explorer - he created a template for any internet browsers.

• Established the windows font set as a global standard for browsers - includes ARIAL and COMIC SANS.

“We realise now that long documents do not work on the web. We should never have thought otherwise….

But all those short documents we are reading instead are poisoning our ability to read long documents” - John Clark

• Relationship between spoken word and the written word are in a state of flux - the usage of calling was overridden by SMS.
• Emoji’s - global language, replacing words and phrases with pictures/smileys.
• Process of going through the oral, now going back to symbols instead of letterforms.

We have gone in a full circle - Simplicity.

“Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration” - Neil Postman

Postmodernism:

• Complexity, contradiction, dystopian/non utopian, appropriation.
• The language of protest

1979 - Barbara Kruger - Started to look at how to deliver a message effectively. - Who am I talking to, how do I want to communicate this?

Type in image - we can distribute our ideas through a whole range of media.

Not whether we can or can’t do something - whether we SHOULD do something.

• “With great power comes great responsibility” - we are responsible for the way people see the world - designers have a MASSIVE impact on people’s perceptions.
• If we are nice to the world - have a progressive view to the world, then we can impact and affect the way people act and think about the world. - if we don’t do that, we are leaving it up to chance.
• The context of practice that you are shaping is not just about YOU, it’s about the world around you - do not design in a bubble.

C.O.P Lecture 3: The History of Type - Production and Distribution (Part 1)

Lecture 3: The History of Type – Production and Distribution (Part 1)

-       “all that is necessary for any language to exist is an agreement amongst a group of people that one thing will stand for another”

-       it cant just be something that the sender understands, but the receive has it understand it as well.

Type is what language looks like – it is a visualization of language. It has tone, pace, weight.

Typography:

-       the art and technique of printing with moveable type.

-       The composition of printed material from moveable type.

-       The arrangement and appearance of printed matter.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

“the written word endures…the spoken word disappears” – Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death.

Logotypes – 7000BC

Type is speech made visible.

Development of language, how they expand and create other languages.

E.g. Europe – Alphabets in Europe: Greek, Greek + Latin, Latin, Latin + Cyrillic, Cyrillic, Georgian, Armenian.

3200 BCE(ish) – Mesopotamia –middle east. Occidental side (western).

Trade and Communication:

-       The rosetta stone – 196 BC (discovered 1799) – Egyptian, Demotic, Greek. – Represents those languages. – They were direct translations, gave us the opportunity to know how to translate languages.

The first true alphabet was the greek alphabet – pictograms.

We can understand something even if it isn’t spelt out correctly – we interpret what letters are saying without it actually saying it.

Use the recognition of shapes and piece them together to understand what it is.

Origins of type:

-       language doing one thing, production doing another.

1870 – William Foster:

-       Elementary education act – all children ages of 5-12 in England and Wales must go to school.

-       Learning to read

Production methods changed – things were still written but mass production needed something quicker – print.

Writing became a hobby instead of necessity.

Anything informative was printed.

1919 – 1933 - Walter Gropius – Bauhaus. – Industrialization – design as a discipline.

-       First point in time typography was born.

-       Type was a language that had a heritage but was also shaping the future.

“since typography is a communication method that utilizes a gathering of related subjects and methodologies that includes sociology, linguistics, psychology, aesthetics and so much more”

We navigate our whole lives using words – change and improve the words and I believe that we can change and improve life.