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rtf393q-latina · 5 years ago

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Journal 2

This last weekend, Andy rounded up a group of us to play arcade games at Oddwood Ales. As Carly Kocurek would put it, Oddwood Ales represents “games going back to where they came from, bars.” Much like in the descriptions Kocurek and Wolf give of arcade games emerging in the corners of laundromats or pizza parlors, as a sort of casual, surplus diversion, I have noticed singular arcade machines appear in places such as clothing stores, and indeed bars. Kocurek, however, places this re-emergence into a moment of nostalgia. Playing the assortment of arcade cabinets available at Oddwood Ales cannot function as nostalgia for me because I was too young. Even though I spent my share of birthday parties at Chuck E Cheese’s and David and Buster’s, I do not feel a childhood attachment to those spaces, and neither are they arcades as experience by those growing up in the 70s and 80s. Instead, it feels like novelty to boot up Ms. Pacman and Galaga.

In the spirit of Kocurek, I want to do a brief cultural history of Oddwood Ales to see if nostalgia is the intended function of their arcade cabinets. I was wondering if maybe the Oddwood Ales building has some sort of historic connection to arcades. An Austin Chronicle article reports, however, that Oddwood Ales started off as a small brewery borrowing space from the bigger Adelbert’s in 2015 and only graduated in early 2018 to opening its own storefront. The journalist describes the atmosphere of the first seven weeks of Oddwood’s opening:

From multiple visits to Oddwood, it's clear the brewery has cleverly customized an experience for both the contemporary beer drinker and a generation of nostalgia-consumed Austinites. Evidence: There are classic beer recipes manufactured with innovative technique; a rustic barroom accessorized by touches of nouveau design composition; an old tube TV set that hosts classic N64 games and vintage VHS tapes while a flat-screen showcases an NBA playoff series a mere glance away. And of course, there are healthy auditory doses of classic indie icons like New Order and Weezer intermingled with LCD Soundsystem and Childish Gambino. I'm half expecting an Edward 750mL-hands Revival Night.

There is no mention of the arcade games in the above description, just the N64, suggesting that maybe they were not part of the initial vision, although they have been there since at least October 2018, about 7 months later, when I first visited Oddwood Ales. Regardless, present or not, the arcade-game-ness of Oddwood becomes subsumed into a broader technology nostalgia, which includes VHS tapes, and an even broader generational nostalgia beyond that, which includes indie icons. This nostalgia functions to emphasize community and comfort. In the article, Oddwood co-founder Taylor Ziebarth is quoted saying, “My fondest beer memories are often linked to their surroundings [and] we really wanted to create a warm and cozy environment to serve our beers.” Meanwhile, descriptions of Oddwood on their official website say, “Our space was designed first and foremost as a cozy neighborhood pub. We are family friendly, have free arcades machines and patio seating that is pet friendly.”

Again, though, none of this Generation X nostalgia is my own, so I experience Oddwood in a flatter way as an aesthetic. The journalist notes a fusion of the “contemporary beer drinker” and “nostalgia-consumed Austinite” and his description of how the N64 games work with the flat-screen NBA playoff game, the old indies with the new, speaks to arcade games being employed not just as cozy, family-friendly nostalgia, but as taste. Kocurek motions toward arcade games being used to authenticate gamer identity, but I think Oddwood takes their arcade games outside of classic video game culture entirely and uses them to communicate a more general comfortable relationship and a knowing proximity to technology and its past. In other words, my theory is that Oddwood reflects a flattering image of/to hip, relatively affluent customers who have laudable taste in beer, music, sports, and mastery over a tech-inflected world. Arcade games stand in for technology culture writ large and perhaps childhood entertainment, not video game subculture. Supporting my bold claim here is one thing that stood out to me about the game I spent the most time playing, called Silkworm: I noticed the controls were labeled and little instruction cards were affixed on either side of the screen. This labeling signaled to me that Oddwood workers, instead of offering a proving ground for skilled players to demonstrate their mastery of what Wikipedia calls a classic side-scrolling shooter, wanted to invite a casual visitor to consider this outstanding piece of ephemera and partake in a passing entertainment.

A question would be whether the taste construct involving arcade games at Oddwood Ales is as male, youth, and white focused as the imagined arcade space. My inclination is both yes and no, but I want to set this issue aside and steer discussion back to questions more related to arcades as discussed in the readings. Like the annotated Silkworm cabinet, the other arcade machines do not function in a coin-op-at-the-arcade way. Kocurek calls attention to the low lighting in arcades that would maximize the appearance of the machine, and the blinking lights and chirping sounds of the attract mode of the machines while idle. Bar lighting can be as dark as arcade lighting, but this bar had a decent amount of light, and the idle mode of the arcade cabinets and N64 games did not have their full impact. Spatially, the machines are organized along the wall and corner by the bar, and in an adjoining 15’x15’ (approximately) room with a foosball table at the center of it. Even the small room does not have the arcade feeling that the corners of movie theaters manage to create; rather it felt more like someone’s basement, with several machines spaced out serenely rather than multiple packed into one row. This arrangement and lighting suggested that the games are to be approached casually, not as part of an enchanted alternate reality. Similarly, you were allowed to place drinks and food wherever you wanted on the machines. Kocurek emphasized that arcade managers would protect the sanctity of the games and consistently herd offending materials away, but here, no such care applied.

Most importantly, all of the games are free to play. When I played Hang-On, a motorcycle game, the game still had an end: I failed to complete a lap in the specified amount of time, I got the game over screen, then I had to restart. On the other hand, in the middle of playing Silkworm, giving new meaning to Rouse’s specification of endless play for arcade games, I began to wonder if I would ever die. As I was scrolling along the screen, shooting down various jets, missiles, and vehicles, I was shot down multiple times in turn, but I could just press a button and keep playing. Silkworm is a collaborative game and it wasn’t until both my partner and I died at the same time that the game finally ended. I highly doubt that the original game would let you play for that long. I’m actually convinced we ended up on the leaderboard (4th place!) only because we didn’t stop playing from boredom (and uncertainty about when it would end) halfway through. Meanwhile, the Ms. Pacman/Galaga machine was the very definition of infinite play: each time you died, it asked you to press the start button if you wanted to keep playing. I did so a few times in a row for both games, but felt a little bad about it because it felt like maybe I was cheating by letting my score keep growing even after multiple deaths. It was a silly thing to feel because I have a feeling the person who had the 999,990 score on the leaderboard probably played through many a death. I can say with certainty though, that without the fear of death and without the financial stakes, arcade games lose their interest faster. Though it was a nice surprise to hold 4th place in Silkworm, especially because it was a collaborative effort, I did not feel high scores motivated me much, but perhaps more than they would at a normal arcade. Usually, high scores do not motivate me because they are already so high as to be impossible to beat. Here, I felt like if I committed enough time, I could achieve something.

Interestingly, the high score culture that both Rouse and Kocurek are interested in survived in some way at Oddwood. Hang-On had a big chalkboard next to it with the top three scores in the game and the top scores from Ms. Pacman and Galaga (not quite up to date) as well as the first name of the competitor. It would be interesting to ask, though, whether Oddwood workers consciously wanted to invoke competitive arcade culture, or whether they were just extrapolating from the emphasis the machines themselves put on high scores (LEADERBOARD! FLASHING! ALL! THE! TIME!) and further creating a communal feeling at their bar because the chalkboard gives a sense that real people from the neighborhood have recently sat at those machines and that the bar is interested in/validates their customers’ ultimately unimportant achievements. In any case, Hang-On seemed like the best choice for fair comparison because of the game reset whereas the Silkworm and Ms. Pacman/Galaga could be played beyond normal limitations.

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reomanet · 6 years ago

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Dissecting the Bloodthirsty Bliss of Death Metal

Dissecting the Bloodthirsty Bliss of Death Metal By David Noonan, Scientific American Contributor | October 31, 2018 08:22am ET MORE Death metal band Cannibal Corpse. Credit: Steve Brown/Photoshot/Getty Images Brutality now becomes my appetite Violence is now a way of life The sledge my tool to torture As it pounds down on your forehead Shakespeare it’s not. Those lyrics, from “Hammer Smashed Face” by the band Cannibal Corpse, are typical of death metal — a subgenre of heavy metal music that features images of extreme violence and the sonic equivalent of, well, a sledgehammer to the forehead. The appeal of this marginal musical form, which clearly seems bent on assaulting the senses and violating even the lowest standards of taste, is mystifying to non-fans — which is one reason music psychologist William Forde Thompson was drawn to it. Thompson and his colleagues have published three papers about death metal and its fans this year, and several more are in the works. “It’s the paradox of enjoying a negative emotion that I was interested in,” says Thompson, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Why are people interested in music that seems to induce a negative emotion, when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion?” A number of studies have explored the emotional appeal of sad music, Thompson notes. But relatively little research has examined the emotional effects of listening to music that is downright violent. Thompson’s work has produced some intriguing insights. The biggest surprise? “The ubiquitous stereotype of death metal fans — fans of music that contains violent themes and explicitly violent lyrics — [is] that they are angry people with violent tendencies,” Thompson says. “What we are finding is that they are not angry people. They’re not enjoying anger when they listen to the music, but they are in fact experiencing a range of positive emotions.” Those positive emotions, as reported by death metal fans in an online survey that Thompson and his team conducted, include feelings of empowerment, joy, peace and transcendence. So far, almost all of the anger and tension Thompson has documented in his death metal studies has been expressed by non-fans after listening to samples of the music. In a paper titled ” Who enjoys listening to violent music and why? ,” published earlier this year in Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Thompson and colleagues sought to identify specific personality traits that distinguished death metal fans from non-fans. In the study, which involved 48 self-described death metal fans and 97 non-fans (all in their 20s), he deployed an arsenal of established psychological tools and measures. These included the Big Five Inventory (BFI) of personality — which assesses openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism — as well as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a 28-item measure of empathy. Notably, on measures of conscientiousness and agreeableness, the scores of death metal fans were subtly but reliably lower than those of non-fans. One possible explanation for this finding, the authors write, “is that long-term, persistent exposure to violent media may lead to subtle changes in one’s personality, desensitizing fans to violence and reinforcing negative social attitudes.” But Thompson emphasizes that we just don’t know. It is also possible that people with these personality traits are more likely to gravitate to death metal. Results from the IRI showed the fan group and non-fan group with similar scores on the four dimensions of empathy that the index measures. When listening to death metal, however, study participants with lower empathy scores were more likely to experience higher levels of power and joy than those with greater empathic concern. That was true as well, Thompson found, for people whose personality assessment showed them to be more open to experience and less neurotic. In the study, each participant listened to four out of eight 60-second samples of popular death metal songs (selected by the researchers from multiple online lists) and answered questions about the feelings the music evoked. The songs included “Slowly We Rot,” by Obituary and “Waiting for the Screams,” by Autopsy, as well as “Hammer Smashed Face.” In one set of responses, the subjects rated (on a scale of 1 to 7) the emotional effects of the music, using pre-selected terms such as “fear” and “wonder.” In a second step, they described in their own words how death metal made them feel. “With its repetitive, fast-paced tempo, down-tuned instruments and blast beats, it is virtually impossible not to be excited!” one fan wrote. “It sounds like messed-up teenagers making throaty, irritating noises about how bad their lives are,” wrote a non-fan. “It’s annoying.” The fact that the study relies on self-reporting by the subjects is a red flag for Craig Anderson, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has spent his career researching the links between media violence and aggression, and who was not involved in Thompson’s study. Self-reporting “may or may not reflect reality,” Anderson says. “People may be lying to you, or, more likely, people don’t have direct access to many of the kinds of effects that media have on them. They can construct an idea or hypothesis, and self-reports are essentially that kind of data. People may report that ‘Oh yeah, this makes me feel this way,’ without recognizing whether that’s really true.” The paper acknowledges the limitations of self-reporting. But the researchers add that “the convergence of evidence” from the personality assessments and other measures, along with the fans’ enthusiastic embrace of death metal, “suggest that the dramatic differences in emotional and aesthetic responses between fans and non-fans are genuine. Chris Pervelis, a founding member and guitarist of the band Internal Bleeding (whose songs include Gutted Human Sacrifice and em>The Pageantry of Savagery), is confident that the positive emotions he experiences when he plays and listens to Death Metal are the real thing. “When I’m locked into it, it’s like there’s electricity flowing through me,” says the 50-year-old, who runs his own graphic design business. “I feel really alive, like hyper-alive. And the people I know in Death Metal are smart, creative and generally good-hearted souls.” In an essay published in August in Physics of Life Reviews , Thompson and his co-author Kirk Olsen considered the possible role of brain chemistry in the response to violence and aggression in music. The high amplitude, fast tempo and other discordant traits of death metal, they write, may elicit the release of neurochemicals such as epinephrine — which “may underpin feelings of positive energy and power reported by fans, and tension, fear and anger reported by non-fans.” As for the central riddle of death metal — how explicitly violent music might trigger positive emotions in some people — Thompson cites a 2017 paper on the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences . The paper, from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, suggests a mental process that combines “psychological distancing” and “psychological embracing.” In other words, a lack of real-world consequences — it’s just a song! — may provide the distance necessary for fans to appreciate the music as an art form and embrace it. A large body of research, by Anderson and others, has established a clear link between aggression and multiple types of media violence including video games, film, television and music with violent images and themes. “But no one is saying that a normal, well-adjusted person — who has almost no other risk factors for violent behavior — is going to become a violent criminal offender simply because of their media habits,” says Anderson, whose research includes a 2003 study of the effect of songs with violent lyrics. “That never happens with just one risk factor, and we know of dozens of common risk factors. Media violence happens to be one.” One finding from Thompson’s research — that many death metal fans say they listen to the music as a catharsis, a way to release negative emotions and focus on something that they enjoy — is also familiar to Pervelis. “I call it the garbage can,” he says of the music he’s been involved with for decades, “because it’s where I can dump all my bad, emotional baggage. I put it into writing riffs and letting it all out on stage, and it keeps me level and completely sane.” In his ongoing study of violent and aggressive music, which includes a June paper in the journal Music Perception about the intelligibility of death metal lyrics (forget about it, non-fans), Thompson has found that the limited appeal of the form may be one its key features for fans—one at least as old as rock itself. He cites a 2006 paper by the late Karen Bettez Halnon, who found that fans of heavy metal (as has certainly been the case with many other genres and sub-genres over the decades) view the music as an alternative to the “impersonal, conformist, superficial and numbing realities of commercialism.” In that vein, one possible function of the gruesome lyrics that are the hallmark of death metal, says Thompson, may be to “sharpen the boundary” between fans and everybody else. Pervelis, who compares the violent imagery to the “over-the-top, schlock horror films of the 70s,” says feeling like an outsider and an insider at the same time is at the core of the death metal experience. “This music is so extreme and so on the fringe of the mainstream that people who listen to it and people who play in death metal bands belong to an elite club. It’s like we’ve got a little secret, and I think that’s what binds it all. It’s a badge of honor.” This article was first published on Scientific American . © 2012 ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow Scientific American on Twitter @SciAm and @SciamBlogs . Visit ScientificAmerican.com for the latest in science, health and technology news. Editor’s Recommendations

The post Dissecting the Bloodthirsty Bliss of Death Metal appeared first on TBNT Have The Solution.

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itbeatsbookmarks · 6 years ago

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(Via: Hacker News)

Brutality now becomes my appetite Violence is now a way of life The sledge my tool to torture As it pounds down on your forehead

Shakespeare it’s not. Those lyrics, from “Hammer Smashed Face” by the band Cannibal Corpse, are typical of death metal—a subgenre of heavy metal music that features images of extreme violence and the sonic equivalent of, well, a sledgehammer to the forehead.

The appeal of this marginal musical form, which clearly seems bent on assaulting the senses and violating even the lowest standards of taste, is mystifying to non-fans—which is one reason music psychologist William Forde Thompson was drawn to it. Thompson and his colleagues have published three papers about death metal and its fans this year, and several more are in the works.

“It’s the paradox of enjoying a negative emotion that I was interested in,” says Thompson, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Why are people interested in music that seems to induce a negative emotion, when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations that will induce a negative emotion?” A number of studies have explored the emotional appeal of sad music, Thompson notes. But relatively little research has examined the emotional effects of listening to music that is downright violent.

Thompson’s work has produced some intriguing insights. The biggest surprise? “The ubiquitous stereotype of death metal fans—fans of music that contains violent themes and explicitly violent lyrics—[is] that they are angry people with violent tendencies,” Thompson says. “What we are finding is that they are not angry people. They’re not enjoying anger when they listen to the music, but they are in fact experiencing a range of positive emotions.”

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Those positive emotions, as reported by death metal fans in an online survey that Thompson and his team conducted, include feelings of empowerment, joy, peace and transcendence. So far, almost all of the anger and tension Thompson has documented in his death metal studies has been expressed by non-fans after listening to samples of the music.

In a paper titled “Who enjoys listening to violent music and why?,” published earlier this year in Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Thompson and colleagues sought to identify specific personality traits that distinguished death metal fans from non-fans. In the study, which involved 48 self-described death metal fans and 97 non-fans (all in their 20s), he deployed an arsenal of established psychological tools and measures. These included the Big Five Inventory (BFI) of personality—which assesses openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness and neuroticism—as well as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a 28-item measure of empathy.

Notably, on measures of conscientiousness and agreeableness, the scores of death metal fans were subtly but reliably lower than those of non-fans. One possible explanation for this finding, the authors write, “is that long-term, persistent exposure to violent media may lead to subtle changes in one’s personality, desensitizing fans to violence and reinforcing negative social attitudes.” But Thompson emphasizes that we just don’t know. It is also possible that people with these personality traits are more likely to gravitate to death metal.

Results from the IRI showed the fan group and non-fan group with similar scores on the four dimensions of empathy that the index measures. When listening to death metal, however, study participants with lower empathy scores were more likely to experience higher levels of power and joy than those with greater empathic concern. That was true as well, Thompson found, for people whose personality assessment showed them to be more open to experience and less neurotic.

In the study, each participant listened to four out of eight 60-second samples of popular death metal songs (selected by the researchers from multiple online lists) and answered questions about the feelings the music evoked. The songs included “Slowly We Rot,” by Obituary and “Waiting for the Screams,” by Autopsy, as well as “Hammer Smashed Face.”

In one set of responses, the subjects rated (on a scale of 1 to 7) the emotional effects of the music, using pre-selected terms such as “fear” and “wonder.” In a second step, they described in their own words how death metal made them feel. “With its repetitive, fast-paced tempo, down-tuned instruments and blast beats, it is virtually impossible not to be excited!” one fan wrote. “It sounds like messed-up teenagers making throaty, irritating noises about how bad their lives are,” wrote a non-fan. “It’s annoying.”

The fact that the study relies on self-reporting by the subjects is a red flag for Craig Anderson, a psychology professor at Iowa State University who has spent his career researching the links between media violence and aggression, and who was not involved in Thompson’s study. Self-reporting “may or may not reflect reality,” Anderson says. “People may be lying to you, or, more likely, people don’t have direct access to many of the kinds of effects that media have on them. They can construct an idea or hypothesis, and self-reports are essentially that kind of data. People may report that ‘Oh yeah, this makes me feel this way,’ without recognizing whether that’s really true.”

The paper acknowledges the limitations of self-reporting. But the researchers add that “the convergence of evidence” from the personality assessments and other measures, along with the fans’ enthusiastic embrace of death metal, “suggest that the dramatic differences in emotional and aesthetic responses between fans and non-fans are genuine.

Chris Pervelis, a founding member and guitarist of the band Internal Bleeding (whose songs include Gutted Human Sacrifice and The Pageantry of Savagery), is confident that the positive emotions he experiences when he plays and listens to Death Metal are the real thing. “When I’m locked into it, it’s like there’s electricity flowing through me,” says the 50-year-old, who runs his own graphic design business. “I feel really alive, like hyper-alive. And the people I know in Death Metal are smart, creative and generally good-hearted souls.”

In an essay published in August in Physics of Life Reviews, Thompson and his co-author Kirk Olsen considered the possible role of brain chemistry in the response to violence and aggression in music. The high amplitude, fast tempo and other discordant traits of death metal, they write, may elicit the release of neurochemicals such as epinephrine—which “may underpin feelings of positive energy and power reported by fans, and tension, fear and anger reported by non-fans.”

As for the central riddle of death metal—how explicitly violent music might trigger positive emotions in some people—Thompson cites a 2017 paper on the enjoyment of negative emotions in art reception, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The paper, from the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, suggests a mental process that combines “psychological distancing” and “psychological embracing.” In other words, a lack of real-world consequences—it’s just a song!—may provide the distance necessary for fans to appreciate the music as an art form and embrace it.

A large body of research, by Anderson and others, has established a clear link between aggression and multiple types of media violence including video games, film, television and music with violent images and themes. “But no one is saying that a normal, well-adjusted person—who has almost no other risk factors for violent behavior—is going to become a violent criminal offender simply because of their media habits,” says Anderson, whose research includes a 2003 study of the effect of songs with violent lyrics. “That never happens with just one risk factor, and we know of dozens of common risk factors. Media violence happens to be one .”

One finding from Thompson’s research—that many death metal fans say they listen to the music as a catharsis, a way to release negative emotions and focus on something that they enjoy—is also familiar to Pervelis. “I call it the garbage can,” he says of the music he’s been involved with for decades, “because it’s where I can dump all my bad, emotional baggage. I put it into writing riffs and letting it all out on stage, and it keeps me level and completely sane.”

In his ongoing study of violent and aggressive music, which includes a June paper in the journal Music Perception about the intelligibility of death metal lyrics (forget about it, non-fans), Thompson has found that the limited appeal of the form may be one its key features for fans—one at least as old as rock itself. He cites a 2006 paper by the late Karen Bettez Halnon, who found that fans of heavy metal (as has certainly been the case with many other genres and sub-genres over the decades) view the music as an alternative to the “impersonal, conformist, superficial and numbing realities of commercialism.”

In that vein, one possible function of the gruesome lyrics that are the hallmark of death metal, says Thompson, may be to “sharpen the boundary” between fans and everybody else. Pervelis, who compares the violent imagery to the “over-the-top, schlock horror films of the 70s,” says feeling like an outsider and an insider at the same time is at the core of the death metal experience. “This music is so extreme and so on the fringe of the mainstream that people who listen to it and people who play in death metal bands belong to an elite club. It’s like we’ve got a little secret, and I think that’s what binds it all. It’s a badge of honor.”

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nofomoartworld · 7 years ago

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Hyperallergic: In Chelsea, Three Disappointing Art Exhibitions (And One Pleasant Surprise)

Paddy Johnson writes, “Is this painting evidence of Motherwell’s truly visionary thinking — a premonition of President Donald Trump staring into the eclipse?”

There’s a particular kind of artist that gets a pass for bad work. Typically, these artists have produced some truly iconic work in their careers — so iconic that these pieces give everything else a special sheen. Whenever we look at their new work, we see it through this lens. When the new work seems terrible, we hope we’re wrong — we don’t want anything to diminish the genius that created that heroically original piece; when the new work is great, it’s further proof that we were right about them all along. And ultimately, collectors reliably buy the new work either out of a genuine interest in the artist, a desire to increase their social status, or to protect previous investments.

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that as this fall art season gets underway, Chelsea feels overrun with A-list artists making middling work. Take Maya Lin at Pace Gallery. Her earthworks, public art, and memorials are some of the most moving works of the 20th and 21st centuries. This includes the Vietnam Memorial Wall, a piece that lists all the names of the fallen American Soldiers as its structure appears to sink into the ground, and her Wave Field series, a pair of Land art works (one at Storm King and another at the University of Michigan) that consist of undulating grassy hills resembling waves 10 to 15 feet high. These pieces create a sense of awe, enormity, and poetry through simple forms. Her work at Pace did none of that.

Installation view, Maya Lin: Ebb and Flow (photo by Kerry Ryan McFate, courtesy Pace Gallery © Maya Lin Studio)

For her show, “Ebb and Flow,” Lin created 11 forgettable works that explore the different states of water. The first piece a viewer encountered when entering the gallery, “Folding the Columbia,” is what appears to be a root system made from thousands of green marbles affixed to the wall and the floor. (It’s actually a map of the rivers in Colombia contorted to fit along the wall, floor and ceiling.) Another wall piece functioned the same way, only using recycled silver. The piece resembles something you might imagine Tara Donovan making if she were short on materials. Were it a work by Donovan, though, it would merely be a failed experiment in aesthetics; because Lin’s work is inspired by environmental concerns, whatever message there is gets reduced as well. In this case, that means representing a finite and more valuable resource (water) with a more common recycled material (silver), which isn’t exactly challenging the collector. Are the oil barons and princes buying the work and supporting Lin going to change their naughty ways now that they’ve been schooled? No.

While there was only one bad art show with a cause above 23rd street, there was more than one crappy exhibition by an A-list artist. Cheim and Read is showing new works by the 78-year-old artist Louise Fishman. She has been making work forever, and while I’ve never cared for much of it, I get why it’s popular: it looks a lot like the grandiose Abstract Expressionist work we’ve seen a million times in museums. She is best known for a body of iconic works: large abstract paintings that evidenced a love of the grid. Back in the 1990s, she created greyish paintings made with beeswax and ashes she brought back from Auschwitz. They packed a punch. Fishman’s new works do not.

Installation view, Louise Fishman (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

The exhibition at Cheim and Read features a group of her recent paintings, mostly indistinguishable from Willem de Kooning’s Abstract Expressionist work of the ’60s. Think thick, single-gesture brushwork against the canvas with a limited palette. In fairness to Fishman, I actually enjoy the openness of these new works, in contrast to her more densely-layered work. But they still have the same problem most of her works have: aside from the fun of identifying a few historical references (Joan Mitchell, de Kooning, Robert Motherwell), there’s not much else that sticks. Her worst works resemble mud. I left thinking about how much easier it must be to sell work to collectors that looks like what they already know, than to try to convince them to take the groundbreaking stuff no one knows they want yet.

Repetitiveness is a common problem, and at the higher levels this usually manifests in blue-chip artists making endless knockoffs of their most sought-after work. James Turrell, Damien Hirst, and Julian Opie are probably the worst offenders, but most artists have something they produce a lot of to pay the bills. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it suits some kinds of work better than others. Amanda Ross Ho, for example, has made more than one oversized t-shirt — and usually I find them quite funny. Not this time. Though there are no biggie tees at Mitchell-Innes and Nash, she still managed to turn a pretty good joke (the show’s title, “My Pen is Huge”) into a groaning one-liner.

That title is the first thing you see upon entering the gallery. It’s a whole lot less funny once you get into the show and realize it’s a statement of fact, not a metaphor. Inside the gallery, there are two oversized, Ikea-type tables covered with ginormous pencils, pens, paint brushes, scrunchies, coins, cups, and wine glasses. Some regular-size objects are sprinkled in, too — some napkins and a comb, for example. And around the walls are several large paintings of clocks.

Many of the works in Ross Ho’s show were produced in the gallery over the month of August, when she used the space as a studio after losing the lease on her Los Angeles studio. There may be a story here about gentrification, but as a viewer I felt about as much sympathy for the artist as I did when Hauser and Wirth was forced out of its enormous location on West 18th Street. Sure, it sucks, but this is an artist whose livelihood will not be destroyed by displacement. As such, the exhibition reads more like a checklist of trademark features collectors were likely to seek out than an effective social message.

As I reflected on the shows I’ve seen above 23rd Street this season, it occurred to me that the most unexpected exhibition wasn’t by an art star who failed to perform, but rather one who for once didn’t disappoint. Specifically, I’m talking about Robert Motherwell’s paintings at Paul Kasmin.

Motherwell is an artist whose work I have come to dread due to the ubiquity of unbalanced abstraction in the secondary market. So it was a pleasure, a relief, and a great joy to see a collection of works that actually show off his skill as a painter. “Orange Personage” is an abstract painting in yellow and orange that depicts a stick figure staring into the sun. (Is this painting evidence of Motherwell’s truly visionary thinking — a premonition of President Donald Trump staring into the eclipse?) The palette undulates gently, suggesting a hot summer evening in the woods or a strange circus act. Nearby, “La Belle Mexicaine (Maria)” recalls the paintings of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso, minus the anguish. It’s a simple painting of a woman who also resembles a chicken. It’s very strange and kind of wonderful, in part because, whether woman or chicken, the figure seems perfectly happy.

Robert Motherwell, “Orange Personage” (1947), oil and sand on canvas, 54.75 x 37 inches (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

In the end, the Motherwell show made my trip to Chelsea pretty good. I like being surprised and, somewhat unexpectedly, he came through in that regard. But I also wondered if there might not be a lesson in all this. I had no expectations for Motherwell, so when I saw paintings I loved, I was happily surprised and humbled. Lin, Fishman, and Ross Ho are in a less enviable position. Artists like these have been lucky enough to have one or more breakthroughs. But with that good fortune come expectations that those artists will not just have one, but continued breakthroughs throughout their careers. These are unfair standards and it makes me think that lowering expectations just a tad might be beneficial. Doing so won’t transform bad art into good — it probably won’t even create more Motherwell experiences — but it will blunt the disappointment of seeing extraordinary artists make the same mistakes over and over again.

The post In Chelsea, Three Disappointing Art Exhibitions (And One Pleasant Surprise) appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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jpweb12 · 7 years ago

Text

The Worst Websites On The Internet. Ever.

We may not judge a book by the cover, but we always judge a business by its website. This is the reality and we have to deal with it.

Back in time, in the early days of the Internet, creating a website was something that only IT guys were capable of making. With today’s advancement of technology and increasing interest for better and easier solutions when designing websites, almost anyone can design websites without much effort or any coding know-how.

However, this also brings some inconveniences since not everyone understands the concepts and principles of website-building. Therefore, sometimes the creativity goes too far away either due to lack of knowledge or experience or simply laziness.

In order to solve this problem, some companies have created website builder apps. Most of them have pretty nice templates, responsive designs, many options for customizing them, and can be used to create attractive websites with a few clicks of a button. But what most people tend to forget is that a website builder is merely a tool. If you don’t have the right vision and you don’t know the design principles, then you will most likely fail to make your site eye-catching, functional, and efficient.

Instead of having a website conveying the right message to your audience, you will get something that will either make people laugh or ask what was in the designer’s mind. Either way, your visitors will leave your web page without giving you any second chance.

Before listing the worst websites I have found on the Internet, let me be clear about some things:

– Firstly, I don’t mean to cause any trouble or pain to anyone, and I am certainly not making fun of web designers. Therefore, I beg the developers of the listed sites not to take offense at my remarks. I am quite sure some of these sites are designed by beginner designers. We all have to start somewhere. Besides, mistakes easily occur if you don’t have any experience.

– Secondly, I’m not talking about those websites that are just too old and haven’t been updated since their inception. Those sites may look unappealing to us now, but surely, they were created while considering the design principles of their time. But if it happens to display some old designs, it may also be because there is something in the design that’s plainly terrible and hideous.

I have listed these websites keeping in my mind several design principles:

Easy to understand navigation;

Proper use of color;

Right use of animation;

An easy-to-use layout;

An aesthetically-pleasing model;

Appropriate to the topic;

The design elements do not hinder content;

Great content that’s easy to find, navigate, consume, and share.

Simply put, the main idea is that I don’t want to shame anyone. Taking into consideration that we are all used to finding and appreciating the best website designs, I think we should also analyze awful designs and learn from such painstaking mistakes.

With that being said, let’s take a look at some websites that are hilariously terrible:

1. Penny Juice (link to www.pennyjuice.com/htmlversion/whoispj.htm)

Penny Juice is a fruit juice concentrate that’s made specifically for childcare centers, preschools, etc. When you get to the website, the first thing you need to do is to choose which version you want to use: either HTML or Flash. Choose wisely!

Once you have chosen the version you want to use, you get to the next page with a simple menu structure and flashy colors that irreversibly hurt your retina. You will also find a copyright notice since 2001-2002. That should explain the horror, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

All of this looks pretty innocent until you click to visit a particular page on the site. That’s when your monitor bursts out. The color scheme is completely overwhelming and drowns the little information left about the product. It is also extremely challenging to navigate through this website, with small links hidden at the bottom of the page.

2. Yale University School Of Art (link to http://art.yale.edu/)

You would expect a college art school to have a lovely website that reflected the kind of education you could get from there. Therefore, you would assume Yale’s site was more appealing to your visual senses. Instead of this, the website leaves you wondering if you are really in the right place.

It uses Ruby on Rails, and it is updated by the faculty and students quite often. But the tiled images in the background and the horrible font choices are just inexcusable. The navigation is pretty user-friendly, but the ghastly use of animated backgrounds is enough to put you off.

3. Patimex (link to http://www.patimex.com/)

This website looks and sounds bad from the very beginning – starting with allowing running Adobe Flash player if you want to enter. OK, maybe if you take each element separately, that wouldn’t be too terrible. But if you put them all together and add the music, then YES – it’s THAT bad. If you go to their actual site (www.wegieldrzewny.pl), it looks quite normal. But this only makes you wonder: “Why is the devil grilling himself in a floating BBQ? What’s with that music? Why? Seriously… Why?”

4. Ling’s Cars (link to www.lingscars.com)

Ling Valentine, the owner of Ling’s Cars, first appeared on the BBC program Dragon’s Den in 2006. The Metro named Lingscars.com as “the worst and weirdest website on the internet” and taking a look at it, I can understand why. It’s filled with flashing graphics, gaudy patterns, and bubble writing.

5. ARNGREN (link to www.arngren.net)

OK, this is probably the ugliest and most confusing website I have ever seen. The enormous quantity of tiny pictures and links does not help us understand the purpose of this web page. When designing your site, remember that less is more. And this is the best example.

6. Uglytub (link to http://uglytub.com)

Are you thinking of replacing your old bath tub? Then you should do it because this website doesn’t really convince you to do otherwise. A combination of flashing poor quality imagery, tiny fonts, and garish colors in conjunction with the limiting frames minimizing the site to a small window in the center of the screen sure makes this the worst offenders on the web.

7. Jamilin (link to www.jamilin.com)

Jami Lin “Love Love, LOVES helping you to evolve” but maybe she could use a little of her own advice to revamp her website. Collages of images, videos, links, adverts, and copy are all crammed into the center of the site. This surplus of images and text is a little overwhelming and blocks the clear navigation

8. Gatesnfences (link to www.gatesnfences.com)

At first glance, this Florida-based company has a website that’s stuck in the past. And taking into consideration that you will find a copyright notice of 2004-2008, I think I’m right. At the same time, they’ve decided that the best way to increase the user engagement is to bombard them with A LOT (and I mean A LOT) of information straight on the homepage. Some small, low-quality images are scattered throughout the page, but nothing to break up the huge amount of text. It hurts. Badly. Maybe they should learn that sometimes less is more.

9. James Bond Museum (link to www.007museum.com)

For decades, James Bond has been gracing the silver screen as a charismatic, charming and ultra-slick secret agent. Yet, the website for the James Bond museum is SOOO FAR AWAY from the classy image of the secret agent that it’s offensive. Its stark background and Times New Roman typeface make it obnoxious. Barely expressing the character of Bond himself, the homepage is an overwhelming, sour and incomprehensible mix of menus, hyperlinks, and random imagery.

10. Rudgwick Steam & Country Show (link to www.rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk)

Although this may not be the worst website, it’s still terrible. I think the developers tried to have a responsive design, but they failed miserably. If you visit the website using a phone, it doesn’t look that bad, but if you use a laptop or a desktop, the website looks like an image placed in the center of the screen. What’s more, they’ve chosen a design packed with primary colors and a collage of random images. The relevant information is there, but it is confusing due to the busy layout.

11. Irishwrecksonline.net (link to www.rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk)

In contrast to many websites listed here, this one lacks not just a catchy title, but also text. Larger pictures, a new layout, and functional links would help make this website more inviting and visually-appealing.

12. Constellation 7 (link to www.constellation7.org/Constellation-Seven/Josiah/Index.htm)

OK, I think this is one of the ugliest websites I have ever seen. I’m not kidding. They use a blend of conspicuously bright colors throughout the entire site, bold and colorful typography, and some animations that are making you run as far as you can. Fortunately, they don’t have any music.

13. Mojo Yogurt (link to http://mojoyogurt.com/#/home)

Again, this is a website built using Flash. The whole design wouldn’t be that terrible, had it not been for that horrible, annoying background music, and sound effect that you can’t pause. Just to let you know, dearest Mojo Yogurt, people who visit your website are trying to look for your product, not listen to that awful music.

14. Industrial Painter (link to http://industrialpainter.com)

This company has chosen to have irritating music in the background with no option for you to turn it off. Along with Flash-based, horrible design and low-quality images you get the idea of a terrible-terrible site. I really don’t know how they plan on attracting customers with such a website.1

15. Superior Web Solutions (link to http://industrialpainter.com)

This is the company’s website that built Industrial painter. Taking into consideration that it’s a web design company, I can say it’s even worse than Industrial Painter. That’s mainly because you expect a web design company to know about the latest trends and design. Instead, we find annoying music, along with a non-responsive, flash based, and horrible homepage design. I cannot overstate how horrific this website looks.

Read More at The Worst Websites On The Internet. Ever.

from IT Feed https://webdesignledger.com/worst-websites-ever/

#IT Feed

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regulardomainname · 7 years ago

Text

The Worst Websites On The Internet. Ever.

We may not judge a book by the cover, but we always judge a business by its website. This is the reality and we have to deal with it. Back in time, in the early days of the Internet, creating a website was something that only IT guys were capable of making. With today’s advancement of technology and increasing interest for better and easier solutions when designing websites, almost anyone can design websites without much effort or any coding know-how. However, this also brings some inconveniences since not everyone understands the concepts and principles of website-building. Therefore, sometimes the creativity goes too far away either due to lack of knowledge or experience or simply laziness. In order to solve this problem, some companies have created website builder apps. Most of them have pretty nice templates, responsive designs, many options for customizing them, and can be used to create attractive websites with a few clicks of a button. But what most people tend to forget is that a website builder is merely a tool. If you don’t have the right vision and you don’t know the design principles, then you will most likely fail to make your site eye-catching, functional, and efficient. Instead of having a website conveying the right message to your audience, you will get something that will either make people laugh or ask what was in the designer’s mind. Either way, your visitors will leave your web page without giving you any second chance. Before listing the worst websites I have found on the Internet, let me be clear about some things: – Firstly, I don’t mean to cause any trouble or pain to anyone, and I am certainly not making fun of web designers. Therefore, I beg the developers of the listed sites not to take offense at my remarks. I am quite sure some of these sites are designed by beginner designers. We all have to start somewhere. Besides, mistakes easily occur if you don’t have any experience. – Secondly, I’m not talking about those websites that are just too old and haven’t been updated since their inception. Those sites may look unappealing to us now, but surely, they were created while considering the design principles of their time. But if it happens to display some old designs, it may also be because there is something in the design that’s plainly terrible and hideous. I have listed these websites keeping in my mind several design principles: * Easy to understand navigation; * Proper use of color; * Right use of animation; * An easy-to-use layout; * An aesthetically-pleasing model; * Appropriate to the topic; * The design elements do not hinder content; * Great content that’s easy to find, navigate, consume, and share. Simply put, the main idea is that I don’t want to shame anyone. Taking into consideration that we are all used to finding and appreciating the best website designs, I think we should also analyze awful designs and learn from such painstaking mistakes. With that being said, let’s take a look at some websites that are hilariously terrible: 1. Penny Juice (link to www.pennyjuice.com/htmlversion/whoispj.htm) Penny Juice is a fruit juice concentrate that’s made specifically for childcare centers, preschools, etc. When you get to the website, the first thing you need to do is to choose which version you want to use: either HTML or Flash. Choose wisely! Once you have chosen the version you want to use, you get to the next page with a simple menu structure and flashy colors that irreversibly hurt your retina. You will also find a copyright notice since 2001-2002. That should explain the horror, but I wouldn’t bet on it. All of this looks pretty innocent until you click to visit a particular page on the site. That’s when your monitor bursts out. The color scheme is completely overwhelming and drowns the little information left about the product. It is also extremely challenging to navigate through this website, with small links hidden at the bottom of the page. 2. Yale University School Of Art (link to http://art.yale.edu/) You would expect a college art school to have a lovely website that reflected the kind of education you could get from there. Therefore, you would assume Yale’s site was more appealing to your visual senses. Instead of this, the website leaves you wondering if you are really in the right place. It uses Ruby on Rails, and it is updated by the faculty and students quite often. But the tiled images in the background and the horrible font choices are just inexcusable. The navigation is pretty user-friendly, but the ghastly use of animated backgrounds is enough to put you off. 3. Patimex (link to http://www.patimex.com/) This website looks and sounds bad from the very beginning – starting with allowing running Adobe Flash player if you want to enter. OK, maybe if you take each element separately, that wouldn’t be too terrible. But if you put them all together and add the music, then YES – it’s THAT bad. If you go to their actual site (www.wegieldrzewny.pl), it looks quite normal. But this only makes you wonder: “Why is the devil grilling himself in a floating BBQ? What’s with that music? Why? Seriously… Why?” 4. Ling’s Cars (link to www.lingscars.com) Ling Valentine, the owner of Ling’s Cars, first appeared on the BBC program Dragon’s Den in 2006. The Metro named Lingscars.com as “the worst and weirdest website on the internet” and taking a look at it, I can understand why. It’s filled with flashing graphics, gaudy patterns, and bubble writing. 5. ARNGREN (link to www.arngren.net) OK, this is probably the ugliest and most confusing website I have ever seen. The enormous quantity of tiny pictures and links does not help us understand the purpose of this web page. When designing your site, remember that less is more. And this is the best example. 6. Uglytub (link to http://uglytub.com) Are you thinking of replacing your old bath tub? Then you should do it because this website doesn’t really convince you to do otherwise. A combination of flashing poor quality imagery, tiny fonts, and garish colors in conjunction with the limiting frames minimizing the site to a small window in the center of the screen sure makes this the worst offenders on the web. 7. Jamilin (link to www.jamilin.com) Jami Lin “Love Love, LOVES helping you to evolve” but maybe she could use a little of her own advice to revamp her website. Collages of images, videos, links, adverts, and copy are all crammed into the center of the site. This surplus of images and text is a little overwhelming and blocks the clear navigation 8. Gatesnfences (link to www.gatesnfences.com) At first glance, this Florida-based company has a website that’s stuck in the past. And taking into consideration that you will find a copyright notice of 2004-2008, I think I’m right. At the same time, they’ve decided that the best way to increase the user engagement is to bombard them with A LOT (and I mean A LOT) of information straight on the homepage. Some small, low-quality images are scattered throughout the page, but nothing to break up the huge amount of text. It hurts. Badly. Maybe they should learn that sometimes less is more. 9. James Bond Museum (link to www.007museum.com) For decades, James Bond has been gracing the silver screen as a charismatic, charming and ultra-slick secret agent. Yet, the website for the James Bond museum is SOOO FAR AWAY from the classy image of the secret agent that it’s offensive. Its stark background and Times New Roman typeface make it obnoxious. Barely expressing the character of Bond himself, the homepage is an overwhelming, sour and incomprehensible mix of menus, hyperlinks, and random imagery. 10. Rudgwick Steam & Country Show (link to www.rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk) Although this may not be the worst website, it’s still terrible. I think the developers tried to have a responsive design, but they failed miserably. If you visit the website using a phone, it doesn’t look that bad, but if you use a laptop or a desktop, the website looks like an image placed in the center of the screen. What’s more, they’ve chosen a design packed with primary colors and a collage of random images. The relevant information is there, but it is confusing due to the busy layout. 11. Irishwrecksonline.net (link to www.rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk) In contrast to many websites listed here, this one lacks not just a catchy title, but also text. Larger pictures, a new layout, and functional links would help make this website more inviting and visually-appealing. 12. Constellation 7 (link to www.constellation7.org/Constellation-Seven/Josiah/Index.htm) OK, I think this is one of the ugliest websites I have ever seen. I’m not kidding. They use a blend of conspicuously bright colors throughout the entire site, bold and colorful typography, and some animations that are making you run as far as you can. Fortunately, they don’t have any music. 13. Mojo Yogurt (link to http://mojoyogurt.com/#/home) Again, this is a website built using Flash. The whole design wouldn’t be that terrible, had it not been for that horrible, annoying background music, and sound effect that you can’t pause. Just to let you know, dearest Mojo Yogurt, people who visit your website are trying to look for your product, not listen to that awful music. 14. Industrial Painter (link to http://industrialpainter.com) This company has chosen to have irritating music in the background with no option for you to turn it off. Along with Flash-based, horrible design and low-quality images you get the idea of a terrible-terrible site. I really don’t know how they plan on attracting customers with such a website.1 15. Superior Web Solutions (link to http://industrialpainter.com) This is the company’s website that built Industrial painter. Taking into consideration that it’s a web design company, I can say it’s even worse than Industrial Painter. That’s mainly because you expect a web design company to know about the latest trends and design. Instead, we find annoying music, along with a non-responsive, flash based, and horrible homepage design. I cannot overstate how horrific this website looks. Read More at The Worst Websites On The Internet. Ever. http://dlvr.it/PbGZZ6 www.regulardomainname.com

#Editors Pick #Featured #Inspiration #Reviews #UI

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totallymotorbikes · 8 years ago

Link

Skidmarks: Universal Truth? Lead photo by: Cesar Godoy Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Here’s a sure way to get six conflicting opinions: put three motorcyclists in a room together and show them a photo of a bike. Some will love it, some will hate it, and then they start tearfully remembering all the bikes they used to have. Why did I ever sell my ’79 CB750K? That was the best bike ever! (No, it wasn’t.) I recently posted a photo of a particularly tasty Triumph TT custom on a local forum of a bike I loved from the moment I saw it. The builder, Spain’s Pepo Rosell, took the tough, brutal form of the blocky ’90s-vintage Triumph Legend TT and its three-cylinder motor, modernized it with Daytona 675 suspension and wheels and topped it off with a modified Suzuki Bandit gas tank (with old Laverda gas cap). The fairing and tailsection are vintage-racing bits, but I really like the custom monotube subframe that matches Triumph’s hulking monotube backbone frame. Rosell put “Rocket III” livery on it because… well, maybe just because F-you is why. Pepo likes it, and I like it too. Pepo Rosell’s clean-yet-brutish Triumph Legend TT-cum-BSA Rocket doesn’t have the universal appeal I thought it would have. Photos (top image and above): Cesar Godoy Not so the general public, though. The peanut gallery acknowledged it was sorta cool…but didn’t like it as much as I did. The seat was too stubby and looked uncomfortable, and the bike just lacked visual balance. But maybe the big sin for many was that it just didn’t look rideable. They missed the point, I thought! This is about aesthetics. For some more perspective, I headed down to Todd Chamberlin’s shop, Naked Moto in Hayward, California. Todd’s hardly some ordinary moto-shop owner – he worked for Polaris Industries’ Victory division, and though he lacks formal design training, he was closely involved in every phase of bringing Victory products to market, from clay mockup to manufacturing. He worked for four years alongside Michael Song on the Victory Vision and built a V92C roadracer (yes, for real), but most importantly, put a Ducati 900 mill into a DR-Z400 chassis, because somebody had to. That bike was stolen, and I wonder if the bike thief made it home unharmed and sane. Todd’s customizing skills are bona fide. His specialty is taking sportbikes – his favorites are SV650s and Honda CBR600F2s – and stripping them down to the essentials. When I asked him what he thought made a bike visually appealing, he wouldn’t talk about line or form or shapes – instead, he said it had to look like it would “run 20,000 miles before you have to do a major service.” Many in the general motorcycling public agree; a trained eye and brain, honed by many hours wasted towing, pushing or dragging stricken bikes to dealerships just knows if a bike looks tough and rideable, and you can spot the customs and factory designs that hew to that ethic. Back at the discussion forum, a rider named Russ wrote that “lightly modified bikes… add improvements to increase performance and usually the bike is well sorted.” That’s the only sort of “custom” he’s interested in: ones that look like you can ride them. Naked Moto’s Todd Chamberlin worked with designer David Song on the Victory CORE concept. That monocoque chassis is underneath the sculpted bodywork of the Victory Vision and Crossroads tourers, which do not have carved hardwood seats, don’t worry. When pressed, Todd told me that there “are no right choices” when it came to making bikes appealing. “You can’t build a universal bike – I’ve been trying for years – but if I did build one, it would be a naked supersport of some kind.” His perfect bike would be “cleaner: no fairings, no subframes, the seat just kind of floating out there.” And of course, it would run well, with long service intervals so you could ride and ride. Todd, like most customizers, can’t start with a totally clean sheet of paper, so I decided to talk to someone who had. Marc Fenigstein is the CEO of Alta motors, and if you haven’t heard of Alta, you will: it’s an American manufacturer, based near San Francisco International Airport, that builds competition-ready battery-electric motocrossers and supermotos that are also street legal. The company’s been around for a few years, like most automotive startups, but this is its first year of production. Alta Motors will unveil this Redshift ST concept at the One Moto show in February 2017. Again, I’d like to say I cornered Marc for a rare, exclusive interview as part of my relentless pursuit of world-class motojournalism. The truth is Marc lives a block from a restaurant that serves a hamburger with a doughnut for a bun, and I was hungry, so I invited him to join me. As we munched, I asked what made motorcycles appealing – and got a real education about some basic principles of moto-design. I told Marc how much I liked his company’s latest project, the Redshift ST. It’s a minimalist take on a street-tracker, with abbreviated bodywork and dirt-track style 19-inch wheels. Created by Alta co-founder and designer Jeff Sand, it’s a styling exercise showing what Alta could do with the basic platform. Like Rosell’s Triumph, the shape of the bike instantly grabbed me. That’s primarily because of something Marc and Jeff call “massing.” That refers to the basic proportion of the shapes, and Marc says “it’s the most important [element], and manufacturers get it wrong the most.” Compare the Ducati 916 superbike to Japanese superbikes of the same era – where the 916’s proportions look light and balanced, a Honda CBR900RR or Yamaha YZF1000R look bulky, hulking, “like a guy with short legs and a big torso.” They’re more like bulldogs than cheetahs, and bulldogs are cool, “but nobody associates them with going fast.” It’s the same for cruisers; the Japanese manufacturers as well as European ones seem to struggle with getting proportions just right, and even someone with limited motorcycle knowledge can spot a non-Harley cruiser from a block away. It just looks wrong. Fenigstein picked these two bikes – Yamaha’s new R1 (top) and MV Agusta’s F3 to illustrate the difference in Japanese and European motorcycle design. Also telling the story is “gesture,” the flowing lines that tell a visual story and give a sense of motion. Marc shows me an MV Agusta F3 as he makes his point. “Well done, it makes a bike look fast when it’s standing still and when done poorly, makes a bike look like it’s standing still when it’s going fast.” Gesturing guides the eye along the motorcycle without it getting lost or offended, and many American consumers have a tough time with modern Anime-inspired Japanese designs that shock the sensibilities with clanging Cubist features and distractions. Rounding out a motorcycle’s visual style is “detailing,” and that is where Alta has an edge, according to Marc. “Function comes first,” he tells me as we eye several doughnut-burgers headed to their doom. “There’s no room for flourish or excess for the sake of design.” Sand has a rare quality in a designer, as he knows manufacturing as well as design, specifying materials that he knows can be translated into practical, cost-effective end products. Japanese OEMs often use plastic covers and baubles to hide ugly parts or mimic the look of aluminum or steel. If you have to use plastic, says Marc, “design forms that are beautiful in plastic.” By manufacturing the part in the designer’s material, “Jeff’s final result is true, authentic. There isn’t a single part that’s trying to look like something it isn’t.” Oh boy. There’s that word: “authentic.” Hipsters have commoditized authenticity just for authenticity’s sake – my $400 Redwing boots and $250 Pendleton shirt show you I’m a real outdoor guy, even though I’m a marketing associate from Brooklyn – but motorcyclists actually need authenticity. A trained eye knows a thin seat will be uncomfortable for rides over 20 minutes, that you need fenders to avoid getting a skunk-like strip of mud down your back, and lights, turnsignals, mirrors and horns are more than just legalities – they keep you alive. So a bike doesn’t just have to look right: it has to look right to ride. After chatting with Marc and Todd, I understand that the naysayers didn’t like my pick because it simply didn’t look good to ride. And that may be the most important aesthetic of them all. Gabe Ets-Hokin is one of the principal deities of Hinduism, and the Supreme Being in its Vaishnavism tradition. He enjoys shattering worlds and plays jazz accordion. Skidmarks: Universal Truth? appeared first on Motorcycle.com.

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