This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion
(excerpts from readings, outlines of issues,
links to resources, etc.). The materials
are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page
is subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
2/7/03
)
Preliminary Class
Business
Web-authoring workshop
Tue. Feb. 18th, 1:30-3:30
South Hall 2509 (Transcriptions Studio)
Next time: interactive class on the
literature and art of new media
Ed Falco's Use of
New Media (continued from last lecture)
Self-Portrait as Child with Father
is a work that exploits the nature
of hypertext to say something about the
nature of memory and identity:
This is what memory
and identity are like: intense modular
units surrounded by blind links whose
associative order is a navigational
puzzle, lacks closure, is generically
indeterminate, distorts point of view,
etc.
A "hypermedia" version of
hypertext (images, graphic design and
typography, framesets, and animation/sound
in later "covers" of the work
by others)
Equivalent problems of navigation,
closure, narrative, point of view, interactivity.
Lialina's specific deployment of
the principles of new media underlying
these problematics:
Digital Modularity = constriction
of human relationships
Linking = the opposite of expansiveness,
freedom, and connection: exhaustion,
imprisonment, disconnection
From "Hypermedia"
to New Media Art
Limitations of the standard definition
of "hypertext":
George
Landow, Hypertext [excerpted
in Trend, p. 100]:
Hypertext . . .
denotes text composed of blocks
of text–what Barthes terms
a lexia–and the electronic
links that join them. Hypermedia
simply extends the notion of the
text in hypertext by including visual
information, sound, animation, and
other forms of data. . . .
Electronic links connect lexias
"external" to a work . . .
as well as within it and thereby
create text that is experienced
as nonlinear, or, more properly,
as multilinear or multisequential
Toward a renegotiation of text and image
(and multimedia) in the new media age
The Case of Graphic
Design ("Graphic
Design" = Graphics + Typography +
Layout)
Example of contemporary, mainstream graphic
design (from advertising):
Chanel ad
from Wired 7.09, Sept.
1999
(9 x 10.75")
Where the Allure of
Mainstream Graphic Design Came From (A
Short History)
19th-Century Typographic Design
Avant-Garde Typographic Experimentation
(see Johanna Drucker, The Visible
Word)
F.T. Marinetti,
from Zang Tumb Tuuum
(Milan, 1914)
F.T. Marinetti,
Bataille à neuf étages:
Mont Altissimo (Rome, 1916)
I. Zdanevich,
Soirée du Coeur à Barbe
(Paris, 1923)
T. Tzara, Bulletin (Zurich,
1918)
Main Features:
Assymmetrical layout
Use of diagonals in layout
Designed use of white space
Emphasis on contrasting
elements
Goals:
Intended to shock the bourgeois
(and its concept of art as "high
culture"); mimetic of the
WW I-era sense of culture
The Professionalization/Mainstreaming
of Avant-Garde Graphic Design Principles
(see Jan Tschichold, The New
Typography, 1928; excerpts):
El Lissitzky,
Two pages (poem titles) from
Mayakovsky, Diya golossa
(1922-23) (reproduced in Tschichold)
Piet Zwart,
from advertising leaflet (original
in Dutch) (reproduced in Tschichold)
Jan
Tschichold, display poster for
publisher, 1924 (l.), and cover
for "elementaire typographie,
1925 (r.)
Willi
Baumeister, invitation card
(example of "reading order"
reproduced in Tschichold)
Jan
Tschichold, examples of bad
and good layout from The
New Typography
Jan Tschichold, brochure for
The New Typography
Goals:
Informational "clarity"
(quote
1 | 2)
(a version of the Modernist credo
of "form follows function"
The naturalization of the look-and-feel
of avant-garde design (cf., Manovitch
on the "anti-montage"
tendencies of contemporary "compositing")
Corporate
style: Swiss Style, International
Style (migration of European designers
after WW II; the Container Corporation
of America; Paul Rand and IBM)
Thus was born the "look
and feel" of contemporary corporate
graphic design: a "designed"
form of immediacy:
Chanel ad
from Wired 7.09, Sept.
1999
(9 x 10.75")
New Media Graphic
Design (and Anti-Design)
Design in the age of media/information
saturation and digital principles:
The graphic design of David Carson,
1980s-1990s (Transworld Skateboarding,
Beach Culture, Ray Gun)
(examples)
