Hitchcock graphic in the book

Our Hitchock infographic appears in the Taschen new Infographics book!

Infographic infamy at Graphic Towers! pic.twitter.com/wPDmBbAwmw

— Aimée Stewart (@NativesAgency) November 5, 2014

Notes from John Dewey: Art as Experience

• The Live Creature

  • Artistic object and the environment from which they emerge are inseparable.

• Having an Experience.

  • Experience (inchoate) and experience (reaches the fulfilment, resolution).
  • Continuous merging of experience (no holes, but sometimes pauses).
  • Unity of experience (a dominant property), train of ideas, which are subtle shadings of a pervasive and developing hue
  • Art denotes a process of doing or making. Craftsmanship (on the side of maker) and esthetic (on the side of consumer). For the making is artistic when it is controlled by its qualities /as perceived/.

• The Expressive Object

  • Consists of both action and its result. Action is not the only constitute, and the final object is not something that has expression on its own, although it is something new and distinctive.
  • (Matisse on representation: the camera was a boon to painters, because it relieved them from necessity of copying objects). Representation means that the work of art tells something to those who enjoy it about the nature of their own experience of the world.
  • The meaning of the work of art. Sign on the road vs the work of art (one states and the other expresses). Science: statements (meaning); art: expression (experience).

• Substance and Form

  • Artist -> work of art -> audience (triadic relation in the language, speaker, things said, one spoken to)
  • Substance and form /(What/ and /how/ is done). What comes first? Pure self-expression without any form vs pure form without any individuality
  • Material (public) and manner of using it (individual)
  • A work of art is recreated every time it is esthetically experienced (sheet music is a recorded work of art that has to be played to be experienced - but that is also true for othe form, e.g. The Parthenon)
  • A work of art elicits and accentuates the quality of being a whole and of belonging to a larger, all-inclusive, whole which is the universe in which we live (and there are no psychological grounds for such properties).

• The Common Substance of the Arts

  • In ordinary visual perception our experience is disperced, mixed with sounds and other colours - while in a painting colour is the only means and therefore it is brought to its extreme
  • Two types of medium: 'mere' medium (a CD player) and media (tones in music). Both of those types are vehicles, but media is something more, they artistically embedded (like movement of the hand and brush, types of paint to the painting)

• The Challenge of Philosophy

  • Esthetic experience is imaginative -> any conscious experience has of necessity some imaginative quality.
  • Steam engine is a physical operation brought into being by human contrivance. Work of art is not like that - it operates imaginatively. It is a challenge for the one who experiences it.
  • The often revealed weakness of an esthetic theory is that the system superimposes some preconceived idea about experience rather than allowing experience to tell its own tale.

  Source: John Dewey. /Art as Experience/. NY, Putnam, 1934.

Icons from garbage truck

Transition between an object and the drawing

The strong part of the drawing in space (and this goes back to my previous thoughts about constructing a Bach invention in C with thread and wire hanging across a room) is that it gives a strong experience of *being inside* the drawing, as opposed to looking at it from the outside.

With regards to this, experiments by Charley Peters with sunlight and drawing with white thread on the wall are of an extreme importance. The daylight moves across the room, instructing the behaviour of the drawing.

Listening to a musical piece, being in the music with attention of the mind, is, by analogy, a similar experience to being inside of the drawing. Having a drawing as a spatial object gives that extra bit of freedom to move around, - thus the audience's conscious decision instructs them on what kind of drawing they see.

As a note to self, further experiments have to carried out:

• thread and wire (different thicknesses) in space - smaller and bigger models;
• wall drawing and thread;
• use of tape (black or limited colour?)
• drawing and source of light

Link to Charley Peters' residency blog at Centre For Drawing https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/in-occupation-two-weeks-in-residence-at-the-centre-for-drawing/date/2013/01 .

Charley Peters - Drawings in Space

Drawing can articulate our relationship to space and location, and the experiential act of drawing in-situ is central to how we record the world and our encounters with it. Experiences of drawing on location also allow an exploration of the nature of drawing itself, its relationship with materials, processes and the drawing surface.

Charley Peters, Drawing in the Reality of Space, TRACEY, 2014

CHARLEY PETERS, LOGICAL ATOMISM (2012), ACRYLIC YARN AND FISHING WIRE IN SPACE

Artist website: http://www.charleypeters.com/

Ida, Pawlikovski, 2013

Lorenzo Martini, Allegory of Good Government, 1338-39

The Burghers of Calais

Charcoal

Icons from Post Office

Forming an argument

1. Drawing and graphic design have a lot in common. Therefore, a study in drawing has a big impact on graphic design practice.

2. Drawing is phenomenological, which means that it is capable of telling not only about the subject of drawing, but about the process as well. ->

3. Both the process and the subject are equally important for the drawing.

4. Drawing is rigorous in following its rules, therefore much of drawing is instructed by itself, as well as from the outside.->

5. Involvement into the drawing from the outside should be minimized, so that the inside rules of the drawing were stronger and easier to use.

Derek Beaulieu drawings for Flatland

Here's the author's description of the process: "For each page of Abbott’s novel I have traced, by hand, a representation of each letter’s occurrence across every page of text. The generated result is a series of superimposed seismographic images which reduce the text in question into a two-dimensional schematic reminiscent of EKG results or stock reports."

Source:Little Red Leaves

New Norwegian banknotes

Source: Norges Bank

A short film about Times New Roman and why we shouldn't use it

Source:Times

Iconography from Moscow metro ticket

Dubuffet drawing

Source: http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/155/w500h420/CRI_210155.jpg

A collection of visual responses to Matisse's cutouts

All of the Matisse's Blue Nudes combined into one:

[gallery columns="4" ids="7636,7637,7638,7639,7640,7641"]

Jerwood Drawing Prize, September 2014

Jerwood Drawing Prize is "the largest and longest running annual open exhibition for drawing in the UK" (Source: http://jerwoodvisualarts.org/jerwood-drawing-prize-2014) First prize this year went to Alison Carlier, the first time in history when a Drawing Prize is awarded to audio work. I've recorded an exerpt - but actually, forget my bad self-recording, here's a link to it on SoundCloud

Here's a fragment of work by Hilary Ellis, Enigma II (thread on paper)

A fragment of Zoe Maslen's The Absents Presence, Hair drawing (pencil drawing on Fabriano paper)