form because function / function because form?

Verluchte initialen bevatten interessante vormen van tekst-beeld combinaties. Daarmee zijn het treffende voorbeelden van de onderlinge verbondenheid van vorm en inhoud.

In informatie-technologie, en dan vooral in digitale communicatie langs meerdere kanalen/media wordt gestreefd naar een zo strikt mogelijke scheiding van vorm en inhoud (search “separation of content from presentation”). Een zo neutraal mogelijke notatie van de inhoud maakt het mogelijk om de presentatie ervan aan te passen aan de specifieke context waarin deze plaatsvindt.

Dit principe maakt veel mogelijk maar lijkt ook een aantal zaken uit te sluiten. Welke scheiding tussen vorm en inhoud kun je maken in het geval van een verluchte initiaal? Waar eindigt de letter, waar begint het beeld? Welk deel van de letter is inhoud, welk deel is decoratie? Waar houdt de een op en begint de ander? Is het zinvol om in dit geval deze scheiding uberhaupt aan te willen brengen?

Is het niet juist interessant dat beiden tegelijkertijd het geval zijn? De ene component heeft de andere nodig om zelf als zodanig geduid te kunnen worden. De ene component bepaalt tegelijkertijd mede de indentiteit/ervaring/expressie van de andere componenten.

Inhoud want vorm, vorm want inhoud?

form follows function, or form because function, function because form?

presentation because content, content because presentation?

Goldfinch, organisational knowledge management and that remarkable absence of the true representation of nature.

It was the week of snow and cold and ice in The Netherlands. I walked instead of cycled to the studio each day. Takes a bit longer of course, but those 25 minutes are good for switching the home/work/home contexts.

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Finished the edition of twenty of the European goldfinch print. The first two have already been sold as well. Cool, it turned out well indeed. Graphically a very interesting bird with clearly marked areas of color. Not one to start out with, but at thirty designs in, it was time to tackle this one.

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I sent out the first actual newsletter with printmaking updates to my small list of subscribers. In dutch, but it you’re so inclined, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page.

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Kim Goodwin speaks truth about organisational knowledge management challenges. Good little thread for your inner information architect.

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Besides illuminated intials and margin decorations and illustrations, there’s also the numerous patterns medieval book illuminators used for filling solid areas of color/space. Here’s another example. Want to start catalogueing these in some way, or find out whether that’s been done already.

_ Mister George Charles Williamson wrote this sentence in 1911 for the entry on miniature painting in the Encyclopedia Brittanica and it captures very well what I find so fascinating about medieval imagery: “Landscape, such as it was, soon became quite conventional, setting the example for that remarkable absence of the true representation of nature which is such a striking attribute of the miniatures of the middle ages.”

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What is drawing? Why do it?, pairs well with why we should draw more.

_ Sounds:

• Backpatches and elbowpatches, on metal and academia.
• On angrymetalguy.com the first perfect score of the year was awared to quite the inaccessible album full of avant-garde and dissonant music. Lots of commentary there. I added my two cents here and reposted here. Check out Ad Nauseam - Imperative Imperceptible Impulse.
• I’m still hooked on spirit world field guide

#weeknotes 2021-06

In Calligraphic Space no. 3 this abstract piece is one of the more interesting results to me. I’m looking into the history of the codex, the illuminated manuscript and within that, the illuminated initial. It’s a specific format where text, image and decoration intermingle.

I want to work within similar parameters for the next phase of the Calligraphic Space programme. Not only on paper, but on the screen as well.

Completed the edition of the European Goldfinch print today. Five print runs each to create this end result.

Illuminiation, collage, css pseudo-classes

Using this preliminary reading list on Medieval illumination, I scoured the online inventories of second hand book stores and had a few books sent my way. And so I’ve been reading up on the history of the book, codex, manuscript. It makes for fascinating reading and looking. Seeing the endless combinations of script, drawing and decoration unfold within the new format of the page (papyrus rolls were the standard in Antiquity) is a uniquely medieval innovation in the visual arts.

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A first attempt at styling a decorated initial with CSS, based on the a.single.div approach by Lynn Fisher.

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The Open Etching Press looks great.

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Some of the short blurbs I write that go with my instagram posts want to be expanded upon as blog posts. Just like the items I write in these here week notes. So many threads, always more to weave.

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Yes, that New York Times piece on collage is great. The presentation format reminded me of this essay, which I linked to before.

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Collage is one of the topics I did not get to expand upon in the Bildung 1 zine. Collages can be funny, weird, disturbing, all of the above at the same time. It’s definitely a way of image making that is dear to me. Funny: cats of brutalism.

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Escobar – Designs for the Pluriverse Seminar.

_ #weeknotes 2021-05

Calligraphy, printing things from the web & digital self-care

Much of the week involved finishing up my part of a new (art) zine exhibition @gahilversum. Keep an eye on that instagram account. As part of that I’m experimenting with calligraphy (again). Medieval Calligraphy by Marc Drogin is the go to for the how to. I find a certain style of decoration fascinating, in which the versals (decorated capital letters) get these very long and thin lines extending along the margins of the text block (example). My own initial explorations of this are in Calligraphic Space Ⅲ.

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Titivillus is the patron demon of scribes, more images here. Ancestor to the printers’ “zetduiveltje” (“set devil”, as in type setting) for sure.

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In my Bildung zine I used a selection of blog posts made here. Because I remember things, that made me think back to Things our friends have written on the internet. Yay for people keeping up their blogs.

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I’ve linked to switching.software before. Here’s Kira McLean sharing her choices in moving away from google. (via) I’m not using gmail, but ProtonMail looks good regardless. I’m already happily using Nextcloud through thegood.cloud.

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“naming your files and figuring out your digital organizational structure is self-care” - @johngold. One of the replies calls for “more binder clip hacks”. I’ve been using my own version of a hipster PDA the last few weeks. Mostly because I promised myself to never try, let alone pay for, an online task manager ever again.

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This makes me want to play around with the cliché’s in our collection. (can’t find what the English word is for the metal plates that contain engraved illustrations for letterpress, in Dutch they’re called cliché’s)

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Sounds: Madlib doesn’t have a mobile phone. Sound ancestors made in collaboration with the also brilliant Kieren Hebden, a.k.a. Four Tet. Linked before, but now really listening a lot to Spirit world field guide by Aesop Rock.

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#weeknotes 2021-04

I’m using tome for two sites because I’m very lazy and should not be trusted with running databases and real live Drupals in production. Security updates are a hassle for this designerd so they tend not to happen soon enough. Which is less of a problem when that insecure site is only sometimes running locally on just my laptop.

So, yay for Tome, which lets me keep using Drupal for its powerful content modeling and clicky tools for site building. Then export to flat html and upload that as the live site.

Even between content updates months may pass. Which introduces other types of insecurites:

1. Do I still know how to run, update, export the thing?
2. In the mean time, did I not break something in the required tooling?

Point 1 is fixed by keeping notes with my own step by step how-to instructions based on the tome documentation.

Point 2 though is more tricky. For as much as possible I keep using the MAMP Pro application to keep the basic LAMPP stack up and running. Sometimes that clashes with some of the commands that want to run their own webserver, but I can work around that.

Composer, Drush, Git, Tome itself are tools that are primarily operated through the command line. I’ve become accustomed to (I’m not scared anymore of) using basic commands to make simple things work. But that doesn’t mean I actually know what’s happening. So when for example Drush throws error because database not found, I have very little knowledge on how to fix. It’s tricky business trying out possible solutions found on stackexchange and the like. I can’t always tell how applicable a proposed fix is to my specific situation and it may even further break things?

I guess my main worry is that running Tome and it’s underlying tools directly on my laptop potentially makes things brittle.

I think that’s where things like Docker come in? So that, among other things, a working version of all the required tooling is bundled up and kept somewhat immune from changes outside it’s container?

Yet more terminal commands to explore!

#drupal #tome

Publishing as artistic practice

The Design Research Society has launched their Digital Library. It is an open-access hub for all things design research.

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Graphic designers who publish, compare to publishing as artistic practice.

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Marshall McLuhan’s copy of Finnegans wake. Writing in books is ok!*

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Naming my abstract prints is hard. Sometimes a cool word seems to suggest a characteristic that resonates. Manifold, for example. Not exactly what I was looking for, but I remember seeing thesecrocheted manifolds in Helsinki some years ago.

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On publishing: the main job last week was wrapping up my new zines and sending those to the printer. Now to reflect on the proces and get ready to share bits and pieces. More soon.

I put the zines together using mostly open source tools. Scribus for page layout. For photo editing a la photoshop, there’s GIMP, but it’s very clunky. Glimpse improves on it considerably.

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Sounds: new for me sets from Acid Pauli.

#weeknotes 2020-03

Working on my zines. A 21st century European Bauhaus? Snow fight!

Nick Sousanics maps out a selection of books as a reservoir from which to derive his own course contents. I did a similar thing last year as a way to take inventory of topics and inspirations for my own artistic production. It’s become the main structure behind one of the zines I’m finishing up. More on that once those are done. _

I’m using a selection of blog posts I wrote on here over the last year. It’s super interesting to see how those small pieces of writing connect with the visual work I produced.

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I wrote up a small piece about the concept of forma formans and forma formata. In dutch. The forming form and the formed form and how the first produces the latter.

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Those zines are put together with Scribus, like InDesign, but free and open source. It really works quite well.

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Last september, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced a new European Bauhaus. A new cultural project for Europe. Unesco has a Futures Literacy programme. Compare/contrast with we’re all preppers now.

Optimism is work*. _
#weeknotes 2020-02

Een term die ik tegenkwam in Umberto Eco’s verzamelde lezingen Op de schouders van reuzen. In het stuk “Over enkele vormen van onvolmaaktheid in de kunst” parafraseert Eco zijn leermeester, de filosoof Luigi Pareyson:

“Omdat hij een hoofdstuk van zijn Esthetica wijdde aan opvullingen, dacht Pareyson blijkbaar dat structuur en opvullingen essentieel zijn voor het werk. Dat moest worden gezien als een organisch geheel waarin alles een functie heeft en in het voltooide werk (sterker nog, vanaf het eerste moment waarop het uitgangspunt het vormingsproces in gang zet) tout se tient, alles verband houdt met elkaar en wel vanuit het oogpunt van het organische ontwerp dat het werk draagt, van die “forma formans (vormende vorm) die er in het duister aan voorafgaat en het leidt in zijn ontstaan, en dan verschijnt als resultaat en onthulling van de forma formata (gevormde vorm).”

Cyptisch, maar het onderscheid tussen de vormende vorm en de gevormde vorm is een nuttig gegeven. In esthetica: is alleen de bloem zelf wat “mooi” is en de rest (steel, blad) niet? Maar ook:

Vormende vorm in grafiek

In de grafiek gebeurt dit heel expliciet: de graficus komt op indirecte wijze tot de gevormde vorm. De energie en aandacht gaat in eerste instantie naar de vormende vorm van de plaat, het zetsel, de stempel (matrix in het Engels).

Vormende vorm als thema

Daarnaast is de vormende vorm, de vormende energie, de vormende kracht een belangrijk thema in mijn werk. De onderstroom van waaruit de gevormde vorm kan ontstaan. De infrastructuur van het onderbewuste. Vooral in mijn abstracte etsen is het onderwerp en de aanpak gericht op het in beeld (in kaart?) brengen van de vormende vorm zelf, de onderstroom van het potentieel. __

In de steigers zetten

Maar ook vormende vorm als een manier om “in de steigers zetten”. De wellicht onzichtbare onderdelen die (ook) nodig zijn om de gevormde vorm te kunnen tonen.

(In complexe vraagstukken: scaffolding around coherence towards entanglement across all levels of the system, but that’s another post.)