This is a brilliant exhibition featuring some great visual thinkers Ken Garland, Ed Fella, Abram Games, Alan Fletcher, Saul Steinberg, Neasdon Control Centre to name but a few.
'I have discovered that it is impossible to see anything anything until you have made a deliberate attempt to draw it' milton glaser
There are endless readings despite the geographic size of the space to exhibit the sketchbooks and drawings. The real gem here is the designers/artists talking about why they draw and how it informs their practice. it really examines the transfer of thought to page to work.
'As a graphic designer who mostly works with text-based commissions, it is rare that I "draw" within my working practice context, though I do often map my thinking process visually ' catherine dixon
This is an excellent exhibition with great visuals but equally, if not better dialogue of analysis between the viewer and the artist/designer. Cant wait for the conference!
Working Drawings’ Exhibtion and Conference
Sheffield Hallam University
Conference: Friday 3rd December 2010 (11am to 4.30pm) SNOW disruption. 20 January 2011 now!
Where: Hallam Union, The Hubs, 6 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2UU
Exhibition: 4th – 23rd December 2010
Where: 153 Arundel Street, Sheffield S1 2NU
The exhibition includes drawings by Jill Calder, Roderick Mills, Ken Garland, Ed Fella, Abram Games, Alan Fletcher, Saul Steinberg, Jason Ford, Lee Ford, Frazer Hudson, Lydia Monks and Simon Spillsbury.
You can down load the two PDF flyers here:
Working Drawings Conference Flyer
Working Drawings exhibition Flyer
Online Registration and Information: www.shu.ac.uk/ad/workingdrawings/
Bookings for the conference are charged per attendee at £10 for non Hallam staff or practitioners and £5 for students. You will receive an email shortly after registration to arrange payment
Further information can be found at here: www.shu.ac.uk/faculties/aces/art/gallery/
Working Drawings
Stats Humour
variationsonnormal.com is such good humour and quirky visual thinking. I particular like the satirical look at website stats with the hugely necessary and important: Average visitor weight. Will regularly visit/be fed via google reader his other quirky inventions like a handle for biscuits to dunk.
'Website stats are an obsession for some people. How many visitors? What age
are they? How long do they spend on the site? The list goes on. Here is my
idea to take this statistical obsession one step further. A doorbell with
built in home visitor statistics display'. (C) Dominic Wilcox
Animated Face
People have fallen in love with word clouds that make pictures. Zoom in and you see a bunch of individual words. Zoom out and you see a famousperson's face, seen so many Obama '08 - vote for hope faces.
It is a dictionary or a portrait? Mystical. TBWA/Chiat/Day,an advertising agency in Nashville, Tennessee of all places, brings the concept to promotion for the 2009 Grammy Awards - in animated form. Float through thecloud of songs and lo and behold, it's Stevie Wonder.
great stuff
from: http://flowingdata.com/2009/01/19/fun-with-words-that-collectively-make-pictures/
Green Motion Map
Interesting animation, in the form of conceptual map in motion. The look is very "plant". This idea seems really interesting, ie, staging and movement of a map heuristic through video. I do not know of any software Mind Mapping, which proposes to export the map in animated form or video.
found here: http://www.heuristiquement.com/2008/08/plante-gode-la-carte-en-mouvement.html
Great to see it animated as i noticed it and catalogued a post card advertising it in a notebook that i created when visiting paris back in jan/feb. Featured on page 30 here:
http://issuu.com/visualthinkmap/docs/paris_notebook_visual_diary/30?zoomed=true&zoomPercent=125&zoomXPox=0.9993006993006993&zoomYPos=0.19980314960629922
Or view my notebook here:
My drawing is quick just to capture great works to remember and be inspired by. loved the drawings of Alfred Kubin, especially Auto Contemplation.
found here:
http://eltiodelsaco.blogspot.com/2007/07/alfred-kubin.html
Sweat Map
Measured Perspiration by Kanarinka.
These colourful, fluid lines & abstract series of drawings map an extroadinary terrain, visualising the 12 inches of weather on the human body by tracing perspiration, movement and time.
define:weather says: Weather is the specific condition of the atmosphere at a particular place and time.
Kanarinka states, 'It is measured in terms of such things as wind, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, cloudiness, and precipitation.
Weather is everyday and everywhere. For this project, I launched an artistic investigation by asking the question “Can a body (human, not planetary) have weather, too?”.
To create the drawings for 12 Inches of Weather, I used paper to collect the sweat on twelve inches of my body during running outdoors in hot weather. Then, using an algorithm (a simple system), I hand-traced the contours of that sweat onto 1970’s computer paper using various colors of felt tip pen.
The algorithm would tell me how many minutes to spend tracing each color' Kanarinka
Very interesting project, curious as to what the algorithm was defining the time length but still very creative.
featured here: http://visualthinkmap.ning.com/photo/photo/show?id=2168552%3APhoto%3A1662
Communication Animation
Saw it and thought I do like the sketched animation look. always draws my attention. A Brief History of Communication, the new ad for The Carphone Warehouse, is a charming stop motion animation by Kristofer Strom, the Swedish artist behind You Tube hit Minilogue (equally as creatively brilliant).
There is a wonderful sequence of the development of the phone from the circular dial, to seperate buttons and then a quaint cultural script of the old 'brick' mobile phones. Then its decrease in size sequenced wonderfully in a clockwise twist from phone, to Ipod/Mp3, to mouse (with quirky/surreal ear phones as its wire) & to RSS symbol (blogging/feeds).
Still with more shifting directions/perspectives it continues fast and sharp until back to mobile with GPS mapping technology into a laptop finishing with the future technology of flying engine subtly anchoring that Chitty Bang Bang idea of flying automobiles.
If it was stop motion, there must have been a thousand photos, but it was worth every last one.
Excellant
cheers
Kristofer
found: on youtube
dugg here: http://digg.com/television/The_Carphone_Warehouse_A_Brief_History_of_Communication
(alas, never the first).
Nokia Map
The new Nokia 6220 advertisement promoting its mapping technology available on it with, a giant collaborative map. Contrasting close ups of people of varying ages with close ups of pencils/pens even a wonderfully kept one of the pencil nib breaking it creates an excellant mix of creativity, enjoyment and concentration.
No surprise of its brilliance from Wieden & Kennedy, they just do it, sorry about the pun.
Credits:
Agency: Wieden + Kennedy, London
Agency Producer: Lucy Russell
Creative Director: Matt Gooden, Ben Walker
Art Director: Dan Norris
Copywriter: Ray Shaughnessy
Production Company: Partizan, London
Director: Antoine Bardou Jacquet
Producer: David Stewart
DOP: Damien Morisot
Art Director: Chris Oddy
Editor: Bill Smedley, Work, London
Post Production: The Mill, London
Telecine Operator: Paul Harrison
On-line Operator: Barnsley
Music Composer: Wave, London
More at: http://advertisingpawn.com
featured here: http://visualthinkmap.ning.com/video/video/show?id=2168552%3AVideo%3A788
Mobile Phone Drawing Maps
Landlines is a multi-user collaborative drawing tool for GPS enabled mobile phones, in which users draw by moving in real space.
Mapper allows you to see routes as live drawings, in collaboration with other users. This is the application that they use for exhibitions and workshops.They have concentrated on the drawn quality of the line, keeping the whereabouts of users anonymous, and on the resulting map like drawings gradually revealing a place.
Visual Choreography Notes
These pages from his book Changes: Notes on Choreography by Merce Cunningham are fantastic visual thinking explorations of dance space. These wonderful pages of red topographic movement and complimentary weaving lines of type notes are great explorations of the notebook spread themselves.
They are very similar in style to the spreads from Kurt Schwitters & Theo Van Doesburg in 1920 - 30's De Stijl or even Dada from Picabia. Very abstract compositions with varying line qualities and shapes.
Merce Cunningham is one of the most influential and innovative choreographers of the twentieth century. His works, such as Summerspace (1958), are in the repertoire of internationally celebrated companies, including the New York City Ballet, the Paris Opéra, Zurich Ballet, and Rambert Dance Company, among others. Along with John Cage, Cunningham collaborated with other contemporaries, including Jaspar Johns, Andy Warhol, David Tudor, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg.
Cunningham is not interested in narrative and character development; his choreography investigates the formal elements of dance. Cunningham and Cage shared the belief that movement and music are equal. Accordingly, they created the choreography and music separately in their collaborations.
Merce Cunningham Info Source: http://www.artsalive.ca/en/dan/meet/bios/artistDetail.asp?artistID=165
Image Source: Cunningham, Merce and Frances Starr, ed. Changes: Notes on Choreography. New York: Something Else Press, 1968 featured in Creative Reviews - March 08 - p42.