OUGD401 - Context of Practice Lecture 7

Print Culture and Distribution – Part 2

Key themes from last lecture

- We live in the late age of print

- The Aura of a work, creates a sensation of superiority and mysticism. Art institutes do this with fine art elevating them to a higher level.

- The collective practice in independent studios as seen by William Morris

There has been a return to handmade production and a movement from digital work to mechanical modes of printing.

Why do people use these techniques when digital methods are quicker, more efficient and more reliable than other methods?

Handmade methods provide a retreat from the logic of the modern age and a life of instant gratification.

With digital techniques, anyone can do it without having the skills to do so. In modern day life, there is a constant need for quick turnarounds for clients, to make a quick profit. This has led to no one learning skills anymore because they are trying to do things quickly, which is dehumanising.

In Praise of Slow

The Slow Movement seeks to avoid rushing, encourages people to do less and increase quality. By clearing space in your routine you can take your life back.

Slow Food Manifesto

Seeks to avoid the monotony of fast food and return to locally proved produce, that is more environmentally friendly.

Slow Fashion vs Fast Fashion

In fast fashion companies sell the same product for a profit making little variation on the highstreet. They copy high end products and sell it for a cheaper price. Shops also ‘create’ your identity by showing you what works well together.

Slow fashion is made up of independent producers who use discarded or locally sourced products, with the focus not on being about profit.

Slow Design

There is little focus on the output or end product. Instead the aim is to think about the consequences of the designer’s actions. How can the designer affect an individual, the environment or socio – cultural issues?

Handmade techniques have a humanist politics within them.

Designers and projects

Anthony Burrill’s poster work talks about publicity and our society.

Experimental Jetset show the ephemeral quality of magazines and how they come and go.

The Print Project seeks to revive old printing machines and techniques that society has had no regard for. They also set up workshops to help people learn the processes. They also explore how traditional mediums can take on the digital world by testing the medium against the aesthetics of the digital age.

The Pink Milkfloat allows people to learn and share skills. This means the person is not just buying a product they are learning and investing in the work.

Nicholas Bourriaud suggests there has been a tendency in art to move away from making work about yourself or symbolising something. Instead it is about forming human relations. Whereas traditional art is just bought and sold.

Felix Gonzalez Torres created a work of sweets on the ground. Viewers were encouraged to take a sweet and do what they wanted with it.  They could of ate it, kept it , shared it etc. The art was the relationships created by the gift of the sweet and the actions that came from taking the sweet. In this instance the viewer becomes the collaborator. However, because of the institute it was in this made people unsure and frightened to take one.

The Helter Skelter in the Tate Modern encouraged social interaction between people. A plaque wasn’t needed to tell the viewer what it was, we have an understanding of human connection and fun.

The Galstonbury Free Press is made by the people for the people. Participants learn to typeset and print. The whole newspaper is co-authored and distributed for free.

Social relationships have been commodified. You have to buy something in order to have social interaction.

People are more bonded with you if they understand the process of how something is made. This adds a human value to the work. Returning to handmade processes is not just about the technical process, it is about rehumanising ourselves in the digital age and reusing what we have.

Post print culture?

With new technologies, we have infinite access to information.

Handmade techniques can be seen to be regressive and recreate an auratic sense around art / design. The aura of art has already been broken up by digital technology. Going back to handmade techniques introduces the idea of elitism and master craftsmanship again. It also has negative politics because work created on a smaller scale can be sold for more.

What is wrong with a world where anyone can become a designer? Could be seen as snobbishment and a return to old ways of thinking if we disagree.

Are there radical practices to be found in print? Where things can be circulated instantly and for free.

Digital Print Culture

Inside out is a project that puts large scale prints up in different places. The public can send ideas and images in to be used as the art. This makes the participants, authors of the work as well. Themes that have been explored are the idea of family within poor neighbourhoods in America and the positive role of women, in Indian communities, who are otherwise expected to be in the house.

Digital technology can exponentially enhance art and means we can steal knowledge to use in our own way.

There is an underlying politics to print culture. 

OUGD401 - Context of Practice Lecture 6

Print Culture and Distribution – Part 1

Culture has been created around technological progression. The age of print began around 1450 when the printing press was created. The age of enlightenment where knowledge was becoming accessible to a wider audience. We are now at an extreme endpoint with access to almost any information we want.

Art institutes like the Royal Academy were only for male elitists. They taught subjects such as painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry which were all classed as ‘fine arts’. Life was fixed into classes from peasants to the aristocracy. This was the age of change where handmade was turning to mechanised (industrial revolution) and people were moving from the country to cities. This led to an industrial boom to keep up with the increase in demand. Due to a larger population, segregation between classes became rife.

1780 – 1832 Bourgeois / middle class vs working class = class war / struggle

The working class communed in areas of the cities and started to create new cultures. Chartism increased and the working class became politicised because of their unhappiness at inequality between classes.

Art becomes commercial so it is now possible to become an artist with no state help, which made way for entrepreneurs. There became as mass image culture of recycled printed media.

Matthew Arnold ‘Culture and Anarchy’

The upper classes had lost control of the working class. Led to a politically fuelled snobbism, to keep them in their place and preserve the interests of their class.

Leavisism suggests that there was a need for minority elitists in order to maintain culture.

Popular culture was said to be an ‘addictive form of distraction’.

The school of design moved into Somerset House and the Royal Academy relocated. The function of schools of design was to get people into industry.

Walter Benjamin – The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Technological reproduction of art removes creativity, authenticity, tradition genius etc which are all part of the aura of art. Without these it makes the work seem less special.

When the work is removed out of a gallery it changes the work so it has a cult value rather than it being ‘worshipped’. New technologies were being used as an attack on the arts of the elite.

Neoclassical architecture is built so you have to go up steps to access the art, means you are physically raising yourself up to its level. This is to make the art seem more important than it really is. The sublime was art that was about deep and meaningful things. This was used to belittle people because it was about concepts that working-class people weren’t supposed to understand.

The Eidophusikon was created in 1781 and it was almost like the first moving image piece. This showed entrepreneurial skills and showed that things could be done better with new technologies.

The Panorama (of London) was a painting of London from the ‘painter’s platform’ above London. This however was created from a photograph and enabled people to see London from an alternative viewpoint.

The use of new reproductive technologies change art. The Duke of York’s Column allowed art to come to the public and made it widely available. Engravings were done from photographs which meant an expert wasn’t needed to draw the images anymore. The introduction of photography meant that portrait painters weren’t needed anymore, as photography was cheaper and more realistic.

Led to the introduction of print capitalism where images were made for the purpose of profit. This was responsive to the increase in technologies and meant art was being replaced with new forms of art which were cheap and affordable. This meant culture was being replaced with popular culture.

John Ruskin’s ‘Of Kings Treasuries’ had a romantic anti-capitalist view. William Morris had similar views and wanted to make craft design compete with art. The craft worker was being reduced to the labourer. Art is the ‘fruit’ growing from society, so society needed to change. He wanted to stop capitalism and bring about equality. His works have a political meaning which is why he based a lot of his designs on nature which is seen as a perfect paradise. He set up Merton Abbey Mills which was a cooperative studio. Practitioners worked in combined effort and the craft studio was freely available. This was a microcosm of the alternative of the mass-produced world and saw a shift back to handmade techniques rather than digital.

Was this a more auratic or cooperative approach?  

OUGD401 - Context of Practice Lecture 5

Chronologies 1: The History of Type – Production and Distribution – Part 2

By knowing the principles of design we can reassemble them into our own practise and determine what is appropriate and relevant to our work. By understanding things from the past we can redefine the future.

The Bauhaus had key principles such as ‘Form follows function’ and ‘Less is more’. There was a belief in reductionism and determining the purpose of why something is being made. The clarity of which something portrays something or fulfils a function was important.

Commerce soon began to drive design. The function now became promotion which meant design had to communicate something.

In 1957 Max Miedinger created Helvetica which was an idealised expressionism of modernism. He created a neutral typeface with great clarity which had no intrinsic meaning.

People were now needed to design type which was primarily created through drawing and assembling up to this point.

In 1990 Steve Jobs created the first Apple Mac under $1000 which meant creatives had access to computers and this led to the democratisation of design. The Mac became a design tool which was accessible to everyone which opened up digital type design and allowed type to be created in any form. The discipline was no longer a specialised process.

In 1994 Vincent Connare developed Comic Sans for Microsoft which was designed for easier reading.

In 1990 Tim Berners – Lee created the World Wide Web which led to mass globalisation online. There was a democratisation of design and the distribution of print, paper was no longer needed to communicate something.

In 1995 Bill Gates created Internet Explorer which introduced template based layout to the internet. This restricted and shaped how design could be distributed online. The introduction of the internet changed the way we read. The interface of reading by scrolling down a screen meant that we couldn’t read as much so information is distributed in smaller chunks. 

It also impacted on other forms of communication such as phone calls which declined. Instead people sent emails or texts. However texting is also on the decline with the introduction of social media. Letters and words have been replaced by emoji’s. By using symbols instead of letterforms, we are going full circle in the evolution of written language. Language is fluid anything can become type, this allows for individuality but has it replaced the community in language if everyone has their own language?

In postmodernism, anything goes, complexity, contradiction, appropriation are some ideas associated with it.

In 1977 Jamie Reid created the punk graphics associated with the sex pistols. These grew to symbolise subcultures and teenage revolt. This anti graphics style of design was non-conformist and anti-corporate, showing that design can be used to show resistance. However, this handmade and handcrafted anarchic style was an evolutionary style.

David Carsons work (1992) showed an aesthetic drive to change what type is by getting rid of the grid in an anti-graphic design style.

Everything has been democratised and the idea of a single approach has gone.

It is now about what we choose to do not whether you can do it. We are responsible for shaping the world and a culture of questioning should be encouraged in order to know where we want to take things next.      

OUGD401 - Context of Practice Lecture 4

Chronologies 1: The History of Type – Production and Distribution – Part 1

For language to exist there must be an agreement amongst a group of people, both the sender and receiver must understand meaning language is negotiable.

Type is the visualisation of the spoken word. Type is concerned with the make of letters e.g. weight, line, tone etc. The term typography originally was used to describe:

- The art and technique of printing with movable type

- The composition of printed material from movable type

- The arrangement and appearance of printed matter

The term type and typography are different things. Typography is more specialist whereas type is more general. Typography is the craft of endowing human language with durable visual form. Type is what language looks like.

Cultural aspects are represented by different features of type e.g. weight, style etc.

In order to experiment and come up with new things there needs to be an understanding of key principles.

The written word endures as the spoken word disappears. Physical representation of language has developed at different times to the spoken language.

Trade has been the primary cause for the development of type. It was originally used as receipts etc. for transactions between people. This is when oral language became phonetics, trade helped to formalise writing. It was only later that written language became more descriptive.

Language is not a linear process and there is not just one version of language. It is influenced by social, cultural and political development around the world. We divide the world into two halves when describing the development of language in an area. Occidental is the Western Hemisphere and Oriental is the Eastern Hemisphere.

Mesopotamia 3200 BC – Hieroglyphs and pictograms were used for trade

The cuneiform system developed which meant that pictograms lost their early form and became conventional signs. These signs could indicate an object or could be used for their phonetic value.

The Rosetta Stone enabled researchers to decipher other languages through comparisons with already known languages. Through trade, war and cultural factors languages came together in conformity making it possible to translate between different languages.

Alphabets are a robust set of symbols which are commonly used over years and become engrained within the psyche.We have a learned knowledge of language and a common interpretation of what a letter or word looks like, this is due to social and cultural conditioning.

Letterforms can be bent and broken but still retain their meaning. Single letterforms can be portrayed in different ways but still be interpreted in the same way. This means ideas can be communicated through letters.

The origins of type and letterforms was dependant on technology and the aesthetics of the time. The physical production process has determined how a symbol looks e.g. a brush or in clay. These tools affect the physical form of the letters as well as affecting the aesthetic development of type.

In 1436 Johannes Gutenburg created the first movable printing press allowing publications to move away from the written word. This was developed through trade routes with China who had been using this technology for some time. This allowed type to become a physical thing.

Typefaces represent technological developments in history and have been used as a means of mass distribution as they were made to be reusable. Type was then designed for different purposes.

In 1870 William Foster managed to pass the Elementary Education Act which meant it became mandatory for people to be taught to read. This meant it was no longer just the upper classes who had this ability which made reading accessible to all. After this production methods changed and the mass production of printed material was introduced to meet demand. Writing became less and less formal and more of a hobby for people.

In 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school. The institute drew together arts and crafts disciplines enabling collaboration between creatives. Informed by mass production methods there was a focus on the combination of artisan and industrial techniques.

‘Since typography is a communication method that utilises gathering of related subjects and methodologies that includes sociology, linguistics, psychology, aesthetics and so much more there is no single approach within typography that applies to everything’

Shelley Gruendler