#no social media is kind to horizontal composition

[monwillica]

Happy 10th Anniversary Exo!! 🧡✨ This is a piece I did for the anniversary ExoPlanet Zine on Twitter! Each contributor chose an era and I did For Life <3 (which included the 5 year anniversary! I tried to put in cute era references in the details)

[architectnews]

Cun Panda Nana Control Bar Zhangzhou

Cun Panda Nana Control Bar Zhangzhou, Fujian whiskey bar building, New Chinese Architecture Photos

Cun Panda Nana Control Bar Zhangzhou, Fujian

22 May 2022

Architects: Panda Nana

Location: Zhangzhou, Fujian, Fujian Province, South East China

This CUN PANDA NANA l Control Bar in Zhangzhou

Photos by INSPACE, FEATHER VISION

CUN PANDA NANA l Control Bar in Zhangzhou

Joy is never under our control, but happiness is another thing. We can take control of the predictable happiness tonight, the aimless journey tonight, the plot of a story, and the direction of the future.

What is the future? The present is the future of the past; the future is the future of the present. Based on the brand concept of CONTROL, PANDA NANA extracts the city spirit of Zhangzhou to interpret the alcohol culture exclusive to CONTROL through an extremely mechanical, technological, and futuristic space experience.

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We must have the courage to rebel against everything. ——Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, by Umberto Boccioni

Roughness, Avant-garde, Fearlessness will be the essential factor of space

Breaking the traditional definition of ‘Cocktail & Whisky Bar’, the project reflects the rough, avant-garde, and fearless aesthetics derived from futurism through the interior constructed by artistic sense and technology, creating an illusion of being in a future world. Starting from the facade, the twisted network has been transformed into a part of the building, where the two-dimensional wall brings a three-dimensional visual effect, thereby transforming the ordinary facade into a beautiful sculpture. At the same time, it adds more positive visual appeal to attract more consumers and promote consumption.

The entire space breaks all frames and definitions. From the exterior to the interior, round curves and grids fill the entire space with a modern digital atmosphere. In addition, whether it is the astronaut at the entrance or the “unborn human beings” at the bar, the installations are specially created for CONTROL. The design has increased space recognition and provided consumers with an internet-famous place to take the perfect moments and post on social media, thus attracting more young curious customers.

The magnificent world has acquired a new beauty The beauty of speed becomes rich and graceful

Just like futuristic paintings, the interior design presents dynamic aesthetics, using organic curves and changing light to bring an immersive multi-sensory experience. The three-dimensional visual network wall composed of organic curves breaks the sense of boundary and axial relationship in the space. It also breaks the horizontal and vertical composition and presents a pioneering visual experience.

Light and color are the themes of the space. The lighting can change the color and flickering frequency according to different music styles and scenes, giving consideration to all kinds of consumers. When the light is reflected on the stainless steel wall, the whole light spreads in every corner of the space, making the space experience completely immersive. The whole space is endowed with a sense of transformation and movement brought by light and color.

Time has stopped since yesterday

No matter what the design method is, it needs to present a simple state from the commercial perspective. Let time stop here so that consumers are willing to stay in the space for a longer time. When consumers who have come are willing to go again and even invite more guests, a highly sticky commercial space is achieved.

In order to meet this purpose, the first thing to be satisfied is the sense of place identity, and belonging in accord with the lifestyle in the new era. At the beginning of design, the design team has considered the maximization of functions, operations, and scenes. In addition to the space design themed with controlling the future, the designers have also taken over the brand design, which extends the sense of blur, vanguard, and sci-fi in space design. With materials of different textures and saturation, supplemented by various retro technological elements, the brand design presents a visual effect in keeping with space.

The project fully integrates space and brand design, so that it can not only satisfy the basic functional and psychological needs in experience level, but also bring consumers a sense of social identity including wealth, status, and achievement, as well as a sense of identity belonging including class, ethnicity, and socializing from the social level. Thereby, it has the core driving force to arouse identification, liking, and even loyalty of customers to the brand.

Cun Panda Nana Control Bar Zhangzhou, Fujian Province – Building Information

Project Name: Control Bar in Zhangzhou Main Function: whiskey bar Project Location: Zhangzhou, Fujian Design Company: PANDA NANA Chief Designers: Lin Jiacheng, Cai Xuanna

Design Time: 2021.03 Complete Time: 2021.11 Area: 300㎡

Photography: INSPACE, FEATHER VISION

Chinese text:

寸匠熊猫NANA l 漳州CONTROL酒吧

喜悦，从来不在我们的掌控之中，而快乐常常都是可以掌控的。我们要掌控，掌控今晚可预测的快乐，掌控今晚去向迷离的旅⾏，掌控故事流动的方向，掌控未来的方向。

什么是未来？现在，是过去的未来；未来，是现在的未来。寸匠熊猫NANA基于CONTROL品牌概念，提取漳州的城市精神，以极具机械感，科技感，未来感的空间体验，诠释专属于CONTROL的酒文化。

我们将竭尽全力的和那些过时的、盲信的、被罪恶的博物馆所鼓舞着的旧信仰做斗争。我们要反抗陈腐过时的传统绘画、雕塑和古董，反抗一切在时光流逝中肮脏和腐朽的事物。我们要有勇于反抗一切的精神。 ——《未来主义绘画宣言》翁贝特·波丘尼

粗野、先锋、无畏 将是空间的本质因素

打破COCKTAIL&WHISKY BAR的传统定义，将源自未来主义的粗野、先锋、无畏的美感，通过艺术感与科技力构筑的室内场景加以体现。营造出身处未来世界的空间错觉。设计从建筑外立面开始发力，将扭曲若水的网路转译为建筑的一部分，二维的墙面带来出三维的视觉体验，从而把商业的普通立面转变成一座极具美感的雕塑。同时为商业提供更加积极的视觉吸引力，吸引着来往消费者的眼球，进一步吸引消费者进入空间促进消费。

整个空间打破所有框架和定义，从建筑立面到室内空间，无处不在的圆润曲线与网格，让整个空间充盈着现代化的数字氛围。除此之外，无论是玄关处的太空人，还是大吧台的 “孕育中的人类”，都是专门为CONTROL创作的。除了增加空间的辨识度之外，也是为消费者提供“打卡位”，消费者可以装置为背景拍照发布于社交平台，吸引更多其他年轻的猎奇客群。

宏伟的世界获得了一种新的美 速度之美 从而变得丰富多姿

如同未来主义绘画一般，在室内设计上我们也试图呈现具有动感美学的空间，利用有机的曲线，变幻的光线，带来多感官沉浸式的空间体验。

有机的曲线构成的三维视觉网络墙面，打破空间内的硬质边界感与轴向关系，也打破横平竖直的构图并呈现具有先锋性的视觉体验。

光与色彩是空间的主题。灯光可以根据不同的音乐风格、场景需求改变颜色和闪烁的频率,也最大限度兼顾不��的消费人群。当灯光反射至不锈钢墙面，整个光线遍布空间各个角落，空间体验也转变成为完整沉浸式体验，整个空间赋予一种由光线、色彩带来的变换与动感。

时间已于昨日停滞

无论何种设计方式，都需要从商业命题出发去呈现一种简单的状态。让时间在此停止，让消费者愿意在空间内更长时间地停留，让来过的消费者愿意再次前往甚至引流。从而营造高粘性的商业空间。

为了满足这一目的，首先需要满足新时代背景生活方式的场所认同感和归属感，在设计之初，考虑功能、运营、场景的极致化，以CONTROL（掌握）未来为核心进行空间设计之余，我们也进行了品牌方面的设计。品牌设计上我们沿用了空间设计中的迷离、先锋、科幻之感，不同纹理材质、高饱和色彩、辅以各类复古科技元素，呈现同空间知行合一的视觉感染力。

让空间设计与品牌设计进行通力合作，让消费者在满足基层的应用、心理（体验感）层面之外，还从社会层面给消费者带来的社会身份认同感（财富、地位、成就）与社会身份归属感（阶层、族群、社交）。从而驱动消费者对品牌从认同到喜欢乃至忠诚的核心驱动力。

项目名称：Control 主要功能：威士忌酒吧 项目地点：漳州 首席设计师: 林嘉诚 蔡泫娜 设计公司: 寸匠熊猫 设计时间：2021年3月 完工时间：2021年11月 项目面积：300平方米 项目摄影 纳信 羽视觉

Cun Panda Nana Control Bar Zhangzhou Fujian Province images / information received 200522 from Panda Office

Location: Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China

Xiamen Architecture

Buildings in Fujian Province, South East China – selection:

Poan Education, Zhangzhou Architects: Panda Office photo : GL YANG Poan Education, Yunxiao, Zhangzhou

Vankely Xiamen North Station Complex Masterplan design in China by NL Architects building image from architects

Xinhee Design Center Offices in Xiamen by MAD architects image courtesy architects

Hotel WIND in Fujian Province Hotel by TEAM_BLDG building image from architects

Architecture in China

Chinese Architecture Designs – chronological list

Chinese Buildings

Beijing Architecture Walking Tours

Chinese Architect

Hengqin CRCC Plaza, Zhuhai, southern Guangdong province, southern China Architect: Aedas picture from architecture practice Hengqin CRCC Plaza Zhuhai Buildings

Black Soul, Fuzhou, Fujian, southeastern China Architects: JST Micro-design Laboratory photograph : Li Di Fuzhou Building

Architecture Tours Hong Kong by e-architect

Comments / photos for the Cun Panda Nana Control Bar Zhangzhou, Fujian Province page welcome

The post Cun Panda Nana Control Bar Zhangzhou appeared first on e-architect.

[michaelandy101-blog]

Every part You Must Know In regards to the Ideas and Forms of Design

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-principles-and-types-of-design/

Every part You Must Know In regards to the Ideas and Forms of Design

 Furnishings. Clothes. Software program. Posters. Maps. Expertise. Buildings. Web sites.

These are all issues that may be designed. Heck, design has so many alternative meanings and utility you marvel if the time period might be outlined in any respect.

Reply: It could actually. Design has a wide range of definitions, however in its easiest type, it may be outlined as each a verb and a noun: It could actually consult with the act of making a composition or or to the composition itself.

Design is about creating possible, useful options to a wide range of issues, and all the time occurs with a selected purpose in thoughts. — Amanda Chong, HubSpot designer

As ambiguous because it appears, design might be outlined … significantly on the subject of the way it applies to marketing. That’s why we compiled this information — that can assist you higher perceive design and it’s rules and kinds. Bookmark this information for future reference, and use the chapter hyperlinks to leap forward to any part that pursuits you.

Design has many alternative connotations relying on its utility. It’s is an extremely fluid business. Briefly, design might be no matter you need it to be — so long as you don’t neglect a few of its predefined tenets. These are referred to as the rules of design.

The Ideas of Design

The rules of design are common concepts that apply to design as an business and observe. These rules are tenets that every one designers are inspired to observe with a view to create an efficient, impactful composition. The basic rules embody stability, distinction, dominance, hierarchy, proportion, and unity.

There are a lot of extra phrases associated to those rules: motion rhythm, symmetry, and white house. These design ideas fall beneath and/or are based mostly on the above tenets and subsequently aren’t thought-about standalone rules.

Let’s break down every precept of design and their related design ideas.

Feeling stuck? Take our Design for Non-Designers workshop.

Stability

Stability is how objects in a composition are organized and what visible weight they carry. Stability might be achieved utilizing the next strategies.

Symmetry (Formal stability): When objects are organized evenly round a vertical or horizontal axis. Objects are organized round a central level (or a radius) is called radial symmetry.

Asymmetry (Casual stability): When objects are organized erratically round a vertical or horizontal axis. Usually, there’s one dominant facet or aspect in an asymmetrical composition.

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Distinction

Distinction refers to how parts in a composition differ. This precept is commonly paired with the precept of similarity, which is how composition parts resemble one another. Distinction might be established utilizing design parts like colour, house, type, measurement, and texture.

White house can be an essential aspect of distinction. Usually referred to as destructive house, which house refers back to the empty elements of a composition. White house might help manage the weather in a composition and emphasize crucial ones. It additionally creates an aura of luxurious and minimalism.

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Dominance

Dominance refers back to the various levels of emphasis inside a composition. Emphasis is usually achieved utilizing parts like measurement, font selection, and sure colour mixtures (which will create distinction). There are three important levels of dominance in design.

Dominant — The article of major emphasis. It’s given essentially the most visible weight and is usually discovered within the foreground of a composition.

Sub-dominant — The article(s) of secondary emphasis usually discovered within the center floor.

Subordinate — The article(s) of tertiary emphasis usually discovered within the background.

Enjoyable reality: The visible middle is the place we naturally deal with a chunk of visible design. It’s barely above and to the appropriate of the particular middle of a composition and is also known as “museum height”.

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Motion

Motion is the visible path a viewer follows when viewing a composition. With correct motion, a composition can create a story and supply a high-quality consumer expertise (UX). Motion might be established utilizing design parts like traces, shapes, and colours.

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Proportion or Scale

Proportion refers back to the visible weight and measurement of a composition’s parts and the way they relate to one another. This precept is often known as scale.

The relative measurement of 1 object to a different might help create a focus or motion alongside the composition. Additionally, various sizes of objects might help talk the significance and dominance of 1 aspect over one other.

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Unity

Visible unity has been stated to be the primary purpose of design, though that opinion differs amongst designers and sure design communities. Unity, or concord, refers back to the relationship between the person elements and the entire of a composition. When a composition’s parts are in settlement, there exists unity; when the weather aren’t in settlement, a composition is claimed to have selection.

The next design rules are related to unity.

Alignment — When objects are lined up on a sure axis or cadence

Continuation — When a line or sample extends

Perspective — When there’s a distance between parts

Proximity — When objects are positioned shut collectively

Repetition — When objects are copied a number of occasions

Rhythm — When objects recur with a slight change or interruption 

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Whereas the rules of design are thought-about common, they give the impression of being just a little completely different as utilized to completely different design communities and practices. Beneath, we’ve reviewed the highest seven kinds of design in marketing.

Forms of Design in Advertising

Graphic Design

Branding and Brand Design

UI and UX Design

Internet (Entrance-Finish) Design

Multimedia Design

Environmental Design

Let’s break down every kind of design and the way they apply to the marketing business.

Grab 195 free visual marketing design templates on us.

Graphic Design

Graphic design might be what you image once you consider design within the marketing subject: social media photographs, e-mail marketing headers, infographics, postcards, and rather more.

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Since visible content material is a extremely beneficial and interesting marketing medium, firms depend on graphic designers to create property that signify their model and talk with their viewers.

Want templates that can assist you create content material for any online channel? Obtain our free library of over 195 visual marketing design templates.

Branding and Brand Design

Branding and emblem design is a subset of graphic design. It consists of the visible parts of a model and model identification, akin to logos, typography, colour palettes, type guides, and extra.

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Branding and emblem designers create property that signify a model, illustrate the model’s mission, imaginative and prescient, and values, and promote model consciousness for the corporate.

Be taught the elemental ideas of graphic design and the best way to use them to create high-quality graphics by taking the HubSpot Academy Graphic Design Necessities course.

UI and UX Design

Person interface (UI) and consumer expertise (UX) design deal with bettering how web site, app, and software program customers work together with and expertise a product.

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Whereas some roles mix UI and UX design, the 2 practices are fairly completely different. UI designers are chargeable for making a visually-pleasing, on-brand expertise for customers by net web page design, app design, and theme design on websites like WordPress and Shopify.

UX designers, then again, are chargeable for ensuring a product truly solves an issue by usability testing, consumer flows, and digital prototypes.

Internet (Entrance-Finish) Design

Internet design applies to the front-end (public-facing) facet of an internet site. Entrance-end designers are like UI designers outfitted with coding information — they design static UI mockups for an internet site after which translate them into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. (However don’t confuse this observe with front-end net improvement.)

Internet designers create property that produce a gorgeous and fully-functional web site, akin to splash pages, navigational parts, sitemaps and pages, scrolling and clicking options, and content material administration programs.

Multimedia Design

Multimedia (or movement graphic) design is designing graphics for a wide range of media, significantly video and animation. Due to its time and value necessities, such a design has traditionally been reserved for these in TV and movie. However with developments in expertise and a current rise in video content material marketing, movement graphic design has grow to be extra accessible than ever.

    Multimedia designers are chargeable for creating moveable property that talk and delight with an viewers, like moveable logos, GIFs, animated movies, tutorial movies, and animated web sites.

Environmental Design

Environmental design, often known as environmental graphic design, is meant to enhance an individual’s expertise by furthering the aim of an setting, whether or not that’s to be memorable, thrilling, informative, motivational, or simply navigable. The observe merges inside design, structure, graphic design, panorama design, and industrial design.

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Environmental designers create property that join individuals to their setting, akin to, murals, office design and branding, store interiors, event space design, and signage and interactive advertising.

Marketing Design Tips

We’ve covered the basics of the most common types of design in marketing: graphic, branding, UI and UX, and web, multimedia, and environmental. Now, we’re going to dive into some tips for the top four.

Note: Keep an eye out for the principles of design we discussed above … they’ll make an appearance in this section, too.

Graphic Design Tips

1. Start with the purpose

What type of content are you designing … a social media ad, email template header, or ebook? These are three different pieces of content with three wildly different purposes and goals. Before you create your piece of graphic design, jot down the purpose of the content. This can help keep your design goals aligned with your content goals as you create your piece of art.

2. Apply your style guide

When deciding on what design elements to include, consider your company’s branding style guide. (We’ll get into how and why to create a style guide next.) This guide will immediately show you what colors, fonts, and other design elements to use when designing your content. From there, you can make small tweaks depending on what type of content you’re creating.

3. Create order with lines and alignment

Lines and alignment in your graphic design can create movement and order. Align the text in your graphic to guide your viewer as they read, or incorporate horizontal lines to section off your text and imagery. Similar to how you format long blog posts in small paragraphs, lines and alignment make pieces of graphic design easier to digest.

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four. Pepper in some icons and illustrations

Colours, textual content, and pictures make for beautiful graphics, however don’t restrict your parts to these three. Icons and illustrations may also boost an in any other case textual content or image-heavy piece of content material. Icons may additionally be capable of illustrate ideas that images can’t, they usually function artistic bullet factors for lengthy lists.

Spruce up your graphic design at the moment with our 135 free icons to use in your marketing graphics.

Branding and Brand Design Ideas

1. Design the aesthetic of your persona

How do you visually current the persona of your model and firm? In case your model was an individual, what would she or he be like? Your branding design ought to mirror the solutions to those questions.

Earlier than beginning your design, make a listing of adjectives that describe your model, firm, and tradition. This may make it easier to select colour mixtures, photographs, fonts, and different design parts and convey out the important thing factors of your persona. Additionally, utilizing your model adjectives as steering, construct a set of photographs, graphics, colour samples, and comparable logos that signify the “mood” of your model — a.okay.a. a mood board.

2. Get just a little funky

Your emblem and model property don’t should be a simple illustration of what your organization does. Heck, HubSpot’s emblem has actually nothing to do with marketing, gross sales, or service software program. But, it represents our firm completely whereas being memorable and distinctive.

As you design your model’s visible identification, don’t be afraid to get just a little funky and incorporate some distinctive design facets. Doing so could assist your model stand out from the remainder.

three. Hold it easy

Your branding ought to talk your aesthetic in a less than a second. Impressions are made within the blink of a watch, and your emblem and model identification is not any exception. Customers will resolve in the event that they like, dislike, are impressed by, or need nothing to do together with your model in a cut up second, so maintain your design easy and to the purpose.

four. Prioritize consistency

That is maybe crucial tip on the subject of branding and emblem design: Be constant. You possibly can spend a whole bunch of hours and hundreds of dollars creating a stunning visible identification in your model — but when it’s not mirrored on each piece of print and digital content material, all of your assets have gone to waste.

Consistency applies on a pair completely different axes — horizontally alongside your content material parts, i.e. in your fonts, spacing, and colour mixtures, and vertically throughout your content material shops, i.e. between your social media, e-mail, web site, and print supplies. Create a mode information to encourage everybody to stick to your new branding. Right here’s HubSpot’s Style Guide for instance.

Be taught the important thing parts that you must create a powerful model by downloading The Essential Guide to Branding Your Company right here.

UI and UX Design Ideas

Be aware: UI and UX design are thought-about two various kinds of design, however as a result of they’re so comparable, we’ve collected a couple of ideas that may apply to each practices.

1. Adapt a consumer’s perspective

Whether or not you’re designing the interface or the expertise of an app, web site, or online instrument, all the time adapt the angle of a consumer. Why would somebody use your website? What would they hope to attain? What may their challenges be? It’s essential to analysis your consumer base and higher perceive how they’d strategy or your website or utility. Contemplate doing first-hand consumer analysis by a spotlight group or by speaking to present prospects.

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2. Anticipate errors

No matter a lot you discuss to customers, there’ll all the time be a handful (or extra) of people that’ll stumble by your web site or utility. Anticipate these errors by incorporating fool-proof mechanisms, akin to not letting somebody submit an online type in the event that they’ve skipped a field or having a consumer affirm they’d prefer to exit in case they by accident clicked off the display. These mechanisms might help forestall errors earlier than they occur and let your customers know you’ve received their backs.

three. Don’t neglect requirements and developments

Designers love paving a brand new path and “reinventing the wheel” with their designs. Whereas this will create one thing distinctive and memorable for the consumer, it might additionally confuse them for those who’ve gone too far. Contemplate sticking with recognized design patterns, requirements, and developments, akin to a navigation bar the highest proper nook or contact info alongside the underside of the web page. This might help your customers already subconsciously know the best way to navigate your website with out clarification.

four. Be mobile-friendly pleasant

Responsive design is a non-negotiable for web sites and purposes, however is your design mobile-friendly pleasant? Contemplate the spacing of your buttons, the dimensions of the textual content, and every other navigational or organizational parts that may be inconvenient in a responsive design. Additionally, have a look at how your website could change when seen on a desktop, pill, and varied kinds of smartphones.

Internet (Entrance-Finish) Design Ideas

1. Contemplate the fold

On an internet site, the fold is taken into account the underside of the display — the place your web page would “fold” if it had been a bodily merchandise, like a newspaper. Crucial info on a web sites ought to all the time be positioned “above the fold” (like in newspapers) so a customer doesn’t should scroll all the way down to see it.

2. Leverage white house to attract focus

Within the case of net design, much less is commonly extra. With numerous info to share with guests, it may be tempting to muddle all of it above the fold so people see it straight away. However much less cluttered web sites are simpler to learn, navigate, and digest. Hold your guests in your web site by placing loads of white house round your content material; it’ll be simpler for them to deal with studying and understanding your content material.

three. Use colour to information motion

Colour psychology performs a giant function in marketing. With out us even realizing it, sure colours can encourage us to do sure issues, akin to click on a button or proceed on to the subsequent web page of an online type. Use colours to information the identical kinds of motion in your web site. Make all your CTAs a daring colour to assist them stand out.

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four. Keep away from generic inventory photographs

There are many methods to make use of photographs in your marketing, however the one methodology to keep away from is utilizing generic inventory photographs. Generic, tacky inventory photographs make a model appear lazy and disengaged with their purchaser persona. The photographs in your web site must be a illustration of your viewers, and for those who can’t seize your precise viewers, it’s best to work arduous to search out inventory photographs that do. Tip: One nice method to accumulate viewers photographs is by operating a user-generated content material (UGC) marketing campaign.

Obtain our free guide to growth-driven web design for much more net design ideas.

Time to Design

Design is available in all sizes and shapes … actually. From web sites to print graphics to workplace house design, it performs a significant function in marketing our companies and types. Even for those who don’t take into account your self a designer, we encourage you to grow to be extra conversant in the weather and kinds of design. You by no means know when you will have to seek the advice of on a challenge or whip up a design of your individual.

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[f-o-r-m-e]

Overlap, Digital collage, Rosanna Li, 2019

The idea of the extended self has also come into play within the dialectic around the digital and analogue divide, suggesting that although our identities were pre-internet era, constructed wholly within the analogue realm, today with digital technology and social media, there is a new extended sense of self and identity borne of transmediated processes, those which bridge the digital and analogue environments. Although one could argue over the authenticity of such an identity, it is an observable social phenomenon that has been remarked by sociologists.

In discipline like fashion that deals with the creation of self-identity, this is a highly relevant article that looks at emerging technologies, the Internet of Things, our networked connectivity and ubiquitous computing world and how our sense of self and the way that is constructed now lies more in a liminal space between the virtual and the real. 

The resulting sense of self, Elwell argues, rather than a whole construct within an analog world, is a kind of existential blurred composite of digital and analog. Whereas in the early days of the internet, going online often meant putting on a mask within a psychological second self, one’s “online identity”, the Internet today is far more integrated into our lives making the experience qualitatively distinct, where offline and online identities are more closely linked within a single integrated habitat involving both physical and computation structures. 

The nature of this new sense of self includes a reversal of private and public spheres, whereby one’s innermost inclinations, likes and hates that form our private subjectivity are published into the public sphere, and is often a conglomerate of multiple digital selves from LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook and so on. 

Elwell then goes onto elaborate on the main characteristics of this new sense of self: integrated, dispersed, episodic and interactive. These characteristics will be useful as a framework for analyzing my own fashion work that must respond to the current zeitgeist, a world where users/wearer/consumers/individuals/transmediated real-analog identities crave interaction and socialize in new ways befitting of new analog-digital ecosystems. 

Implications for My Practice: 

As an analog practical experiment, I would like to try gathering pom-poms, representing enlarged particles, and have two people walk past each other transferring pom poms one to another… Any highly manual, non-technical, clunky system of transferral is fine. 

As another analog experiment that represents tags that store information, I might like to have information, messages, that get transferred from one garment to another.

As a third test, to have two garments which are mixed together, perhaps using weaving techniques in the vein of Victor and Rolf’s Vagabond Collection, but on a vertical plane rather than horizontal.

As a fourth practical experiment, digital collage, blending layers or garments to show how they might transfer in movement.

References:

Elwell, J Sage (2014). “The Transmediated self: Life between the digital and the analog”, The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 2014, Vol. 20(2) 233-249.

[sourabhdubey007]

10 WordPress Free Blogging Themes

To achieve success for an online business website is important. A good looking and attractive blog site took a part of positive outcome which means more number of visitors likely to spend time. So here, major task is to build a blog favourable to the user. There are many free blogging themes for WordPress and it is easy to choose which is apt for your business.

In this article, there are 10 WordPress Free Blogging Themes which you can use for a new blog. Make sure to select a suitable theme based on the business you run. These themes will provide free templates and also to help to grow faster.

10 WordPress Free Blogging Themes are:

GuCherry Blog:

GuCherry Blog

GuCherry Blog is a fabulous free WordPress blog theme with which you can easily create your blog website. It is a modern WordPress theme which is completely compatible with the Gutenberg. So, you won’t have any problem with using the block editor for your website. This theme is specifically targeted for blogs. As a result, it also has an author widget. This can come very handy if you have to mention one or more authors on a blog. Similarly, the social links and widgets are also available to enable sharing your blogs on social media. This can increase the reach of your blogs to even more audience. GuCherry Blog also has 3 different blog layouts that will make your work very easy. The blog layout consists of full width, left sidebar, and right sidebar formats. All of them are designed to give you the best appearance to your blogs. The post formats for your website are also available along with 2 post widget layouts.

Bento:

Bento is a versatile and multi-purpose free WordPress blog theme with tons of features. It works with the most page builder plugins and even recommends installing one upon activation. For a free WordPress theme, Bento comes with great customization options. All of them can be retrieved by using the WordPress theme customize. Bento 2.0 is a powerful and user-friendly free WordPress theme which is used for broadest range of web projects. It has premium-grade design and is packed with unique free themes with mobile-friendly (responsive), retina-ready, optimized for speed, and implements SEO (search engine optimization). The theme offers flexibility through the native WP Customizer interface as well as built-in layouts, including one-page template option. Bento is an ultimate tool for creating websites that are unique and tailored according to your needs.

Bento

Cali:

Cali is a professional looking Free WordPress theme that is preferably ideal for any type of blogs. The interface it features is amazing and stunning. It is fully responsive and retina ready and is sure to make your website stand out from the crowd. With minimal design, the major impact and attention are given to the content and the media files you display. If you are someone who loves sharing your experience or write about things you love, this theme is SEO friendly. This makes sure that your website ranks up higher on search engines reaching out to more audience scale. So, your website can be easily understood by many parts of the world. This can be really helpful for the growth of your website as well. Create an amazing blog or personal website within a matter of minutes with Cali.

Cali

Cambium:

Cambium is a modern, elegant and simplistic Free WordPress theme designed and created with magazines, news, and blogs in mind. The immaculate and well-thought-out design is fully responsive as well as mobile-friendly. If you are one looking to create an amazing looking website with intriguing contents, then this theme is the ideal choice for you.  The vibrant and dynamic feature of cambium theme will make your website stand out. It is also enriched with plenty of customizing options as well as design variation for Home Pages. You can add custom headers, backgrounds, menus and much more. But that’s not all, the content-focused theme is also SEO friendly. 

Cambium

Ashe:

Ashe is one of the free WordPress blogging theme. Ashe is a high flexible theme with features for every kind of blogging websites, from personal to lifestyle to photography portfolios. It helps to create impressive and stunning posts using its Multi-author design and the theme is more advantageous to beginners and provides easy customization features along a detailed documentation guide. It is used to build a website with multiple types of layouts using this theme with its Alternate left-right sidebar design as well as a double sidebar design. Ashe also provides useful and stylish designed features such as a boxed design, promo boxes for content preview, banner ads, shop layouts and formats. To grab more viewers this theme is amazing to construct a blog, make awe-inspiring portfolios, and convenient online shops using this highly flexible WordPress theme.

Ashe

Blog Kit:

Simple and beautiful free WordPress blog theme is Blog Kit. This theme is perfect for blog sites of all niche although it especially leans related to travel, food, lifestyle and personal entries. As it is compatible with the Elementor Page Builder, modifying and editing the elements to your preference is extremely easy. Another plus point of using this theme is that because of the simplistic approach, this theme is light-weight and fast-loading. It is completely responsive and retina-ready and automatically adjusts to every device screen size with ease. What’s more is that you also get easy customizing options with colour schemes, custom fonts, logos and more. It is also cross-browser compatible so that it loads faultlessly no matter which internet browsers you prefer. Great thing about this theme is that it also offers multiple blogs and single post layout options. This gives you the choice of choosing what works best for you and your site. It is also optimized for SEO which means that your website will rank higher on all the search engines.

Blog Kit

Type:

Type is to create professional blogs, impressive portfolios or a highly accommodating online magazine using this free to use WordPress theme. This theme is filled with various options. It has logo and menu customization to custom colour themes and accent colours. The beginner friendly theme lets you easily modify various elements on your website by using its live customizer. Type permits modification to many elements such as backgrounds, icons, logo, menus and more. The SEO optimized theme come up with header customizations as well as featured images sections for your posts. Create astounding sliders with its flexible slider options. The flexible header comes with 4 different styles, each suited for various purposes. This theme is extremely suitable for beginners and helpful to optimizations for improving SEO scores. 

Gist:

Gist is a feature enriched free WordPress theme which is great for blogging purposes. Gist is a highly creative WordPress theme that provides the admin with unlimited Google fonts, colour and font options, typography features, custom widgets and more. These features provide various options to enrich your blog, beautify your website and add your own personal sense of glamour to your content. You can add metadata to your content, copyrights, manage sidebar options and more while still maintaining the website’s visual characteristics for all platform with its cross-platform compatibility. The theme is highly blog accommodating with its multiple blog page, sticky sidebar, social media integration and more. The visitors on your website will have an easier time searching for relative information.

Gist

Everly Lite:

A free blogging theme for WordPress called Everly Lite which exactly responds to your business needs. Creating a WordPress site became very easy for anyone with or without coding skills. It becomes super-easy when you have a simple, minimalist and easy to use theme like Everly Lite. You don’t need any coding skills for using building a blog with this theme. It is fully responsive, and ready with eye pleasing, which is perfect for all types of screens. Furthermore, the theme features multiple homepage layouts/demos, typography options, Google fonts, custom widgets, SEO optimized design, short codes, and more. Well, Everly Lite is a great theme for you to start a new blog while you can anytime upgrade to its premium version for more advanced features.

Everly Lite

Flat:

Flat is one of the free blogging theme creative made with typography and minimalism in mind. This WordPress theme with a fantastic vertical sidebar for efficient navigation rather than the usual horizontal one. Using proportion based, flexible grids, adaptable page design, and balanced typography, Flat presents itself as a highly efficient theme that ensures an easy to read, accommodating experience for your readers. Cataloging, managing, and describing media have never been made easier than how Flat does it using its distraction-free theme composition. If you are a blogger who prefers to have an aesthetically pleasing, minimalistic designed website for your blogs then Flat is perfect for you. The theme supports vertical menu following widget areas. On the other side of this menu, your content is displayed beautifully.

Flat

The post 10 WordPress Free Blogging Themes appeared first on The Coding Bus.

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[plebeianadventures]

Take a Picture; It'll Last Longer

Like many people, I took a lot of travel photos in Europe--like, a ton.

It’s taken me a total of 61 hours over a period of 9 months, but I finally have ALL of my travel photos edited and catalogued. 

Not only did I take over 4,000 images while in Europe for 18 weeks, but I sifted through all of them and narrowed them down to 2,250+ (not to mention about 500+ low-quality images from my smartphone) that were worth my time to edit in Adobe Lightroom (my software of choice) where I then spent those 61 tedious hours editing each one. This usually consisted of going through each photo, cropping it for better composition, messing with the sliders for white balance, exposure, light, clarity, focus, etc, using the adjustment brush to whiten teeth, rotating it so that vertical or horizontal lines would be straighter, exporting it into organized files on my computer. 

On average, I was able to edit around 45 photos/60 minutes (would that be 45p/hr (photos per hour?)). I listened to a lot of music and podcasts, which has had an interesting effect on my memory, where if I see certain photos I immediately think of specific songs or podcast episodes that were playing while I was editing those photos as well as original memories that come up as I am transported back to the moment the photo was taken.

Since they were uploaded in chronological order, editing them for the past 9 months has been like reliving the experience all over again. Having such a well-documented visual collection makes writing that much easier. I now have photographic evidence of how hard it was to get photos of certain things just the way I wanted them to be captured. I have 10, sometimes more images of the exact same thing, trying to get it just right.

(This is a before/after edit of a photo I took of a door in Strasbourg that I thought looked cool)

Don’t worry. I didn’t really do any severe photo manipulation. I didn’t photoshop pretty trees or birds in flight. It always bothers me when I see heavily edited photos on social media and see people comment on them with things like “wow, can you believe this exists in real life? How cool that this photo exists!” This is the same humbug attitude that I get when I see day-glo blue orchids in grocery stores and see people buying them and saying how beautiful they are and how amazing nature is. Yes, nature is amazing, but Phalaenopsis orchids in bright blue do not exist and are dyed artificially.

I probably annoy my friends because I’m always quick to point out that something is photoshopped. I don’t know if I do it more because I get a condescending thrill or more because I hate when gullible people are duped by people who have more information or skills than them. Either way, I want to be perfectly transparent with everyone when I say that my photos are edited. However, they are not artificial. Everything I’ve done is to enhance what was already there; to make the photo look more like what my physical eye saw that the camera could not adequately capture.

If you were to scoff and say “Well, a true photographer wouldn’t need to do all that post-editing to get a beautiful image,” you must not be a photographer. I’m not saying that I am either; I’m just an amateur who tries to capture things in an interesting way with very little formal photographic education. If you ever see an amazing photo on the internet somewhere, chances are you can achieve something very similar with an inexpensive camera and the ability to drag sliders around until it “looks good.” Of course, there are many other things that go into professional photography, especially if you are still using film or if you are doing HDR or manipulations. But don’t be discouraged if your photos don’t look as cool as a “professional’s”. 

When I was done with all my photos, I went back and looked at some of the first ones I ever edited and was surprised to see how “horrible” they looked compared to the ones I had finished more recently. One one hand, I was frustrated that I had to go back and re-edit some of them to bring them up to my current personal standards, but on the other, I was really pleasantly surprised to see how much I had learned about editing and software. Anytime I couldn’t get a photo to look quite right I would research the kind of effect I wanted, and these skills would compound and compound on each other until I had a toolkit that was much larger than when I first started. I guess I would be shocked if I went through editing 2,750 photos and didn’t learn anything from it.

Overall, I think the photos turned out well and I’m excited to share them all with you in the coming months.

[simikaurblog]

Artist and designers who use colour, Pop Art and aesthetics.

Polly Apfelbaum 

Apfelbaum is an American contemporary and visual artist, who is best known for her colourful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces. They are referred to as "fallen paintings". 

The artist is influenced by music, art history, popular culture, and cartoons. When looking at her work I believe that Apfelbaum brings in the high and low by using different mediums. There is a lot of experimentation through Apfelbaum’s work and she describes her self as a hybrid. The mediums the artist works with include fabric, paint, dyes, wallpaper, plasticine, and ceramics—her work has dissolved spatial, plastic, and temporal boundaries. 

The Ikon Gallery presented Polly Apfelbaum’s work, which featured a large scale colourful installation of textiles, ceramics and drawings. Her practise is framed in a wider social and political context and the legacy of post war American art. The background behind her work has allowed Apfelbaum to create pieces of art that are expressive through the visual element of colour, shape, form and movement. This is why it is important to have a lot of research and context behind your work. From experience this has helped me as a artist / designer to create expressive pieces. 

The artist was intrigued by the space, obsession and otherness. This was emphasised by the way the gallery was put together. It was a visual experience and made me think that i was apart of the art. 

I really liked the work of Polly Apfelbaum and the use of different mediums and techniques she included in her work to create something different and innovative. She has explored the visual element colour successfully. Moving forward, I too would like to open my mind to using materials I wouldn’t use in order to be experimental and innovative. 

Josef Alberts

Josef Albers is an artist and educator who uses the use of colour to express the most important element in painting. Albers was influenced by Minimalism, colour field painters, Abstract Expressionism, Op Art and has influenced me as an artist / designer to use colour to explore aesthetics and rule breaking in design. This is an area I am interested in and would like to explore again during my time at University. 

Some of Albers’s work is intriguing to view as some colour choices are not suppose to be paired together. For example dark green and black, pink and red or tones of colours . In my opinion, I like these colour choices. 

Albers wanted his audience to understand the complicated ways the human eyes perceive eyes. I want my audience to open their eyes when they view my art and to analyse what is really there. Albers was interested in the way colours interacted with each other, and the effect that interaction had on human perception. I will take inspiration of how effective I can use colour and composition because I want to improve and develop my skills. 

Aesthetics 

Aesthetics is the philosophical study of beauty and taste. The term stems from the Greek word “aisthetikos,” meaning “of sense perception,” and is related to the study of sensory values. In design, aesthetics refers to the visual attractiveness of a product. Studies have proven that creating good aesthetics in a product leads to better usability and user experience. 

Gunta Stolzl 

Gunta Stolzl was a German textile artist who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school's weaving workshop. 

The artist uses colour and shape to create successful composition and visual excitement. I like the harmony of the curvilinear and horizontal lines and vertical grids. The materials and techniques used to create these vibrant colours without any digital editing is amazing. Stolzl ideas are from the color theory, Paul Klee visual thinking, and Wassily Kandinsky abstract art. This knowledge was then used into the method of weaving. Lack of technical guidelines allowed the artist to question and experiment with different materials and techniques, allowing her to make the step from traditional textile techniques and weaving done by generations before to the new weaving that would become admired by generations after. 

It would be interesting to experiment with these materials and techniques to combine it with visual designs. I like how the lack of technical guidelines allowed Gunta Stolzl to experiment with techniques and materials to create textile designs that is still admired and loved generations after. 

Shelia Hicks 

Shelia Hicks uses colour to create fibre art sculptures. Her methods include knitting, knotting, bonding, felting and tufting. I love her vivid use of colour, experimental and innovative approach using natural materials. Her work is refreshing, for the reason that it allows me use the inspiration of texture and colour in my work and use it in a style to express myself as a designer. Hicks doesn’t just use one shade of colour, the artist uses different tones and shades to convey a particular feeling or mood. 

Again, I like how Shelia Hicks is another artist who uses colour differently and explores it using materials that require the artist to put it together using their hands and not relying on digital techniques. 

Morag Myerscough 

Morag Myerscough is a design agency based in London. The work is characterised by an engaging boldness, creating specific, local responses to each distinct audience that will see and experience the design, using it to create community and build identity. 

I love the designs, use of colours within these designs. The use of strong colours, big type, stripes, spots and puzzle-like arrangements of geometrical elements creates scale and drama. This is what I call visual excitement! 

The artist states that she ‘likes interpreting spaces; by ‘putting narrative into spaces that don’t exist’. What I really like about this design agency is that they are not just creating pictures or art for aesthetics; the art has a use for places and people. For example, train station, cafe, installations, exhibitions and interpreting buildings.  Myerscough works with community groups to develop ideas that reflect the identity of the users. This is successful approach used and allows design to be shared between cultural history and heritage of the local area.

Morag Myerscough states that ‘’ I’m not a graphic designer, illustrator, architect or a sculptor, but maybe I’m all of those things. It’s about mindset and trying to create something for people to feel they are part of. My mantra is the Chinese proverb - make happy those that are near and those that are far will come’’. 

This research has opened my mind to think about what I communicate and how I do this. I realised that there isn’t a limit and through experiments and opening your approach, you can achieve something wonderful. Looking at the work within this agency I first thought that it doesn’t really have any meanings or use. After some researching my opinions have now changed. I love how the agency use bright colours and other elements, which in a way hypnotises and consumes you. 

Philip Stearns

Philip Stearns is a Brooklyn based artist and designer, who is well known for using glitch and combines this technique with textiles.

The work has been developed by a curious exploration of visual technology through corrupting the hardware of digital cameras. This then creates distorted images that show unnatural acidic like colours and shapes. Stearns then went onto explore glitch as a textile concept; now producing rugs and blankets. 

Stearns has achieved bring contemporary technological rebellion and traditional weaving into a new concept together. A viewer might not feel ready to be exposed by this art, however once you understand it, it starts to become less intimidating. When I look into the art I feel memorised by the mix of colours and this visual experience and human interaction is what a lot of artist and designers are starting to use. By enjoying and embracing the aesthetics of technological mistakes, the beauty of art becomes a deep feeling of complex streams of information, visual media, and our own lives converge in the chaos of art. I believe that bad designs has some kind of control and we can’t help but amend bad design.

Sam Coldy 

Sam Coldy is a graphic designer, surface designer, filmmaker, animator and art director. This artist is successful in using colour and composition. 

I decided to research into Coldy’s work as his designs have intrigued me. Sam Coldy has used elements of hazy, blurred and strong geometric textures and forms. These elements overlap within each other to create a bright and noticeable piece. Analogous and complementary colours have been used to create harmony within in the piece. Different tones and shades are used to highlight the colour scheme and it becomes dramatic. 

Coldy states that it is good to try something new and unique for each project; hence why Coldy’s designs vary. I have learnt to incorporate this professional advice into my experimentations, as I feel it is important to try new things, even though might make mistakes. I think this is why I am really intrigued by art that is experimental and uses other techniques and materials. I believe you should embrace this and accept it as art; this can be achieved by pushing the boundaries and trying something new and developing visual elements you never know what the outcome is. 

Pop Art 

The technique of screen printing became a popular printing method in the 20th century, in the commercial and artist printmaking sector. This technique has produced some of the most successful print images and greatly influenced the silkscreen print production, graphic design, poster works, and garment printing of the present. 

Colour plays an important part in this historical art movement. The colours used were yellow, red and blue. In contrast to other art movements, pop art does not reflect the artists' inner sensation of the world. Instead, they refer to the popular culture.

Examples of this include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Peter Blake. 

Screen printing is a form of stencilling that first appeared in China during the Song Dynasty (920-1279 AD). It was then adapted by other Asian countries like Japan. It then came west in the late 1780s when silk mesh started being traded. Early in the 1910s, several printers experimenting with photo –reactive chemicals with glues and gelatine compounds. The medium changed to photographic techniques that influenced art and print. Not only did it influence art and print the Industrial Revolution had its impact on this art form as well, as the frames and presses started to become mechanised. The end of the 19th century brought about the first 'silk-screen' patent.

Looking at how successful this historical movement has been, the method and technique of screen printing has appealed to me. In my opinion, I believe that these artists chose the medium of screen printing because it allowed them to maintain bold, bright colours when reproducing their works. Boldly colourful and novel, screen printing has become one of the basic techniques of postmodernist art and contemporary art. The versatile in design and technique makes screen printing different and is perfect. 

Other examples I have found that use colour in the creative industry. 

W&Q is the work of two young Chinese designers who are exploring the relationship between classic Chinese bamboo handcraft and modern Chinese design, using bold colour in unexpected ways - vibrant blues, emerald greens and sunburnt oranges mix with intricate woven pattern.

Splitz Popsicle's brand identity is visually pleasing and features popsicle packaging with graphic and geometric details. They feature three flavours that are designed for the health-conscious consumer with a sweet tooth. 

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: In Memory of Dump.fm, an Endlessly Collaborative Image Poem

Screenshot of a typical dump.fm visual collage by dumper kiptok (image courtesy of dumper larsdk)

Dump.fm died a quiet, seemingly definitive death last month, after having survived a number of rumored deaths over the years. This pleasant monster would sometimes sputter and refuse to take on all the junk it was fed — seemingly without remuneration or institutional support. But never would it definitively enter unto the 404 and scroll no more. Until now.

Dump.fm was a real-time imaging sharing site that took its cue from the transmissional aesthetics of radio, perhaps ham radio in particular. Since its inception in 2010, the ragtag group of amateurs and auteurs of digital junk space who participated fulfilled the site’s mission of “talking with images” by adding these images to a single chat stream, much as one would add multiple mixing channels to a single broadcast mix. The gifs, pngs, and jpgs inevitably became spliced, remixed, broken, minced, enlarged, interlinked, and eroded, elaborately arranged in gif altars or parsed into animated rebuses by the site’s semi-anonymous users.

Screen capture from dump.fm window. Online users, both those participating and lurking, can be seen on the right; hearts on top of an image indicates that a fav has been made. In this image, a troll is in the process of posting long Christian rants below. (image courtesy of larsdk)

Unlike the multiply niched and customizable web at large, there was only one window for adding dumps. You could change it to black-screen or full-screen mode, you could mute users if boring or offensive, and there were some secret and rarely used alt rooms (the /art room, the /sex room, the /lisafrank room), but that was about it. At the bottom there was a field in which you could paste image urls end-to-end to form a collage, plus an upload button, and a webcam button. To the right, you could see all the users currently online and their dump score based on accumulation of favs, access to their favs, their top dumps, and the entire dump stream of each. A leaderboard greeted new logins with the best dumps of the day. Most of the time, even the best of the best barely reached ten favs.

Image of the dump.fm front page/leaderboard (courtesy of dumper goatmilk)

Depending on one’s taste — and one’s interpretation of the site’s raison d’être — you could say that this scrolling image flow was either interrupted or enhanced by more typical chat conversations, trolling, and obsessive webcamming. (A common, and sometimes ironic, dump was “this is an art space, not a teenage hangout.”) But the charm of this window was that it merged both webcam cheesecaking and intricate net-arting into an improvisational mega-assemblage, a particular exploitation of the real-time potential of the web that one surprisingly sees very little of. In an email to me, veteran surf-club denizen and dump regular tommoody described the difference between the “live”-ness of dumpspace versus that found in more regulated and infinitely scalable online spaces, “Dump had horizontality — the ability to compose ‘inline’ image groups on the fly, writing a sentence in pictures — and there is no surrounding framework for posts, such as Twitter’s … which imposes a kind of rigid logic and reminds you at all times that someone else is the boss.” Everybody present on dump had to share the chat window with everyone else, with speed of response being more valuable than quality. Whether or not you decided to directly communicate with others, you were all together in one compositional space, “fave”-ing with hearts that did not seem a creepy imposition (as with Twitter) but a show of genuine affection for those with whom you shared this space, at all hours, for years. Neither an art-world-ish “internet surf club” nor a monetized zeitgeist sump pump, dump seemed to harken back to a pre-1997 internet era, when it was possible to imagine that the users you met online were a small enough cohort to seem communitarian, but not large enough to merely replicate the social structures and hierarchies of the world at large.

Dump chat (courtesy of larsdk)

Consequently, while the site was in conversation with the world of the meme and social media, it seems to have developed in ways that challenged the blithe replication of meme products and also worked against the slicker aesthetic of the cinemagraph gif or the Tumblr-ready net-art object. (The majority of makers of the latter use Tumblr more as an aggregator and exhibitor than a compositional and performative space.) Dump did have its standalone classics, like the following, which seems to parody a kind of 4chan conspiracy meme but clearly marks itself, perhaps only half-seriously, as for-dump-only:

Standalone dump gif by user reneabythe puts itself “outside the spin zone”

The fact that reneabythe’s dump object sets itself apart, in however tongue-in-cheek a manner, from the “sharing” culture of Tumblr and the web at large is important on a number of levels for thinking about the particular magic of dump. As an insider remix joke that doesn’t release itself into the mass-culture of remix memes and multiply recontextualized images, the dump opts for the “democracy” of a small community rather than the chaos of the commercialized web that threatens to detour détournement at every turn.

You were more likely, however, to see dumps like the one that heads this article, which is a combination of premade repeating units, screenshots, screenshots of screenshots, gifs, and collages of gifs. What started in the above example with user tommoody posting science gifs of squiggly protein-folding simulations soon became, through additions by five or six other dumpers, a kind of asemic poem on the question of language in general and dump language particularly.

Gif or gif collage of originally by user pepperII. Each object here has its own url, so the pieces can be instantly rearranged with other urls to form a new dump. (images capture by the author, gif by Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)

Weird fragments, heavy dithering, pieces of images or text floating without context. Inaction gifs as opposed to reaction gifs. The quasi-syntactical combinations of these crappy objects were only possible if participants were more interested in treating the combinations like a language — one for which they would both have to amass the vocabulary and then be willing to speak with it. The rapidity of these combinations allowed for the unexpected, as if Breton’s automatic writing had finally found its imagistic counterpart. While many dumpers were content to aggregate their dumps out of appropriated urls and other dumps, some artists, like anndunham, have created vast archives of images from scratch to combine and recombine new image fields, pulling on this idiosyncratic dataset with miraculous speed and energy — what he described in a Facebook message to me as “rapid serial moods.” You can get a sense of what this dump grammar could look like when expanded to other media via his “open field” web-based projects.

Screenshot from anndunham’s DUNP in the link above, and also accessible here

Here, on a vast scrollable field of white — which turns out to be a YouTube video containing a tiny window with a dump poem en-abyme — we see anndunham’s signature dump style and, among other self-recycled images, some of his most popular dump combinatorials. We also see some reference to dump space — the open white field, sometimes crossed with pink stripes to signify that a “fav” has been made — becoming like the prismatic blanks of Mallarmé’s notorious spaced-out poem “Un Coup de Dés.” In this, anndunham is uniquely exploiting (or perhaps the better term is “de-exploiting”) the negative space of dump. One of the reasons the dump process differed from meme products is that in meme creation, any blank space is filled, translated, detoured, morphed. It’s no longer that the emperor has no clothes but rather that the queen’s coat is a green screen. With viral culture, overloading the space of composition and exploiting any void in image and attention is key. Conversely, what we saw on dump was that there was a communicative modesty in letting the blank be — not manically informatic but rather, even in its speed and overload, pointing to the whole, the absolute creative duration in things. In the strangest of ways, dump seemed to approximate the ideals of experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, who thought of the relation of images neither as narrative nor montage, but rather based on a spacing, an “aeration.” The single live chat thread calls for indiscriminate dumping, yes, but also for collaboration, call and response, spacing, a rhythm. This is what Dorsky calls “intermittence” — to be closer to the rhythm of the being of the spectator. To create a “vibration.” To respect the gaps of life. Between a media object that rudely imposes its reality and one that imposes the egotism of the artist, intermittence provides a third way. “It occurs through someone’s inspiration to put something into the world that is uncompromisingly present, which, in turn, invokes our innate ability to share in that presence.” But the trick is that this presence comes from absence and incompletion.

It might seem patently ridiculous to compare the types of devotional experiences Dorsky finds with experimental film to new media experiences that are more compatible with getting zonked on Red Bull. However, should we see the likes of dump.fm again, with images composed of mixtures of slices — moving, glitched, or almost-not-there — we might find that it is still the flicker that threatens to go out which calls our greatest care and attention.

Screenshot of screenshots of screenshots of an ill-fated navigational tool used for dump, recomposed in the dump window (courtesy larsdk)

The post In Memory of Dump.fm, an Endlessly Collaborative Image Poem appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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[bluetapes]

pre-order here: https://bluetapes.bandcamp.com/album/x-ray-five-the-sparrow-12

Deluxe ultra-clear 12" vinyl screenprinted with ‘moth’ artwork

The post-genre sounds Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records has mined and curated over the past couple of years might not immediately code as metal, but as early as our home-dubbed tape days we were exploring death metal’s potential as vocal-only music with blue ten: EyeSea.

Jute Gyte is unambiguously metal music and I genuinely believe that Adam Kalmbach, the sole musician and producer behind the project, is the most important musician in metal since Death’s Chuck Schuldiner, himself the most important metal musician since Tony Iommi, the man whose fingers created metal.

As a teenager into the Mortal Kombat soundtrack and Nine Inch Nails, Adam learnt metal guitar. Later, he studied composition at university, and had his brain nuked by early and baroque music, serialism and Sibelius, and the universes of potentials opening like wormholes in his head created Jute Gyte.

Jute Gyte applies microtonality and modernist compositional approaches to black metal. This isn’t in itself what makes Jute Gyte’s music great, though it does explode one thing that has slowly narrowed into a conservative musical tradition out into something new, that no one has heard before. New sounds and new feelings.

This is not dry, academic music. It is scientific, exploratory, but as physical as the most brutal splatters of 1991-era death metal, which - despite using gore as a convenient if slightly-knuckleheaded shorthand for the abstract, lurching new riff forms of the genre - had a transdimensional element even then.

Jute Gyte’s orchestra of microtonal guitars sounds as though it is vomiting blackholes. But maybe what initially scans as occult horror in Jute Gyte’s music is just seasickness caused by the unfamiliarity of this new terrain.

“I understand how stuff I've done sounds ugly to people,” Adam concedes, “but it doesn't sound ugly to me. Or, it doesn't sound exclusively ugly. It's just a different kind of language. If you haven't internalised that language, then you're going to hear a lot of things that sound like 'wrong' notes. I hear little musical jokes, I hear happy parts and sad parts, and I hear a lot of parts that don't seem to have any emotive content at all. It's not just uniformly ugly, just as Schoenberg's work is not intended to be uniformly ugly.”

For x-ray five, Adam has crafted two side-long pieces. The first of these, The Sparrow, is a kind of modernist black metal symphony that might share some signifiers with the despair-loaded blizzard hymns familiar to fans of Norwegian BM. But those beautiful flocks of guitars - sometimes they sound like they’re hovering, or scrolling back and forth, rather than ‘riffing’. A dazzling murmuration. And it wasn’t some grimoire that provided the lyrical inspiration for the piece, but Stoner author John Edward Williams’ 1965 poetry collection, The Necessary Lie.

The second piece, Monadanom, is from a suite of ambient microtonal guitar pieces that Adam began developing for us in early 2014. It is oceanic, not in the usual new age-y sense most often applied to ambient music, but in that it is raging with life and detail; unfathomable.

Self-released Jute Gyte albums like Perdurance, Ship of Theseus and Ressentiment are acknowledged as modern classics not only of metal or experimental music, but of any genre.

Adam doesn’t self-promote or use social media, play live or collaborate with other artists, but a fiercely loyal fanbase has already swarmed around him. This is his first full release with a label and I consider it to be one of the most important releases for Blue Tapes and X-Ray Records.

This is a metal record, but for me, it makes total sense that Jute Gyte would be on the same label as Katie Gately and Tashi Dorji, rather than Roadrunner or even Relapse. These humans are his peers - artists who are changing people’s perceptions of the possibilities of modern music at a cellular level.

Adam Kalmbach is influenced by Harry Partch, Xenakis, Penderecki, Gloria Coates, Mahler and Brahms; he regards Jute Gyte as belonging to a continuum of ‘late Romantic’ music.

Jute Gyte will appeal to any fans of Stockhausen, Morbid Angel, Sonic Youth, Gojira, Autechre, Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega, Slayer, Tim Hecker, Daniel Lopatin, Khanate, Ulver, Anaal Nathrakh, Liturgy, Mahavishnu Orchestra, King Crimson or Godflesh.

A FEW WORDS FROM JOHN DORAN, EDITOR OF THE QUIETUS:

"A house sparrow beats its elliptical wings up to fifteen times per second. This may seem paltry compared to the ruby-throated hummingbird which can flap 200 times per second but it simply isn’t. The beats are just slow enough for us to be able to discern the highly focussed power of passer domesticus - the most widespread wild bird in the world. No floating gracefully by on an invisible blur of feathers for the common sparrow just the powerful little upstroke, the powerful little downstroke and all of the other (half and quarter) positions that join them. One sparrow takes wing; then another; then another. Common, ungainly birds? Spiteful little pests? Not a bit of it. If you spent your life watching them perhaps you could frame the astonishing lattice of a meinie of these tiny creatures. Perhaps you could figure the calculus of a tribe of sparrows taking flight. A host that breaks apart on the ground and reassembles on the wing.

"The music of Jute Gyte, made by the visionary musician Adam Kalmbach, makes me feel sick. I hope there has been a distant civilisation somewhere along the way who have paid emetic tribute to their most revered cultural producers, as I do mean this as the highest of compliments to the chef. Because while the harsh, fiercely avant garde, black metal of microtonal progressions and complex time signatures he produces does genuinely make me feel quite queasy, I’d like to think any genuine regurgitation suffered by me would be the kind that precedes the ayahuasca vision or the state of satori triggered by a pure dose of MDMA. The churning thunder of albums such as Ship Of Theseus and Perdurance - and now this genuinely awesome 12”, The Sparrow, on X-Ray Records - is equally matched by a nagging aesthetic of pessimism. While this may well by umami to a depressive realist’s palate, as with The Silence Of Animals by John Gray, this music contains the very real possibility of transcendence. (This being the rare transformative state often promised by modern black metal, yet the most conspicuous by its absence.)

"There is a bird sanctuary on the West Lancashire Coastal Plain, near Burscough, called Martin Mere. In the foyer of the visitor centre there is a charity coin spinner, a large money collection device, sometimes also known as a coin vortex donation box. The device is essentially a large, smooth, downward-curving funnel, protected by a semi-spherical clear plastic dome. There is a slot into which you press a coin. Now sometimes, but not often, the coins don’t take and they slide, flat side down straight into the funnel and immediately out of sight into the collection box. Mostly however they circle. This happens slowly at first; a large graceful loop of the shallower edge of the funnel but because of gravity they never make a complete circumference, instead they always travel in a concentric circle, down the funnel, picking up speed as the spiral shrinks inwards. Each pass round the funnel becomes shorter and shorter until it essentially becomes a tube, round which the coin travels horizontally at great speed. It moves so quickly it is hard to tell what is happening.

"Whump, whump, whump, whump. The coin becomes more absence than presence. And then, just for a fraction of a second before disappearing into the dark for good, the coin is no longer touching the funnel wall.

"And at that moment, there is take-off. "

PRAISE FOR JUTE GYTE:

"Lurching, ascending, descending – ever moving in a time that doesn’t seem to resemble time at all. Sometimes the music of Jute Gyte sounds as though it is crawling around inside you, threatening to escape. Whether it is slowing up or speeding down sometimes seems not only subjective, but actually kind of irrelevant. This is genuinely transdimensional music. It obeys the rules of little other sound in our universe. In an era where the ‘psychedelic’ is much fetishized, but oft-misunderstood, Jute Gyte is making music that is beyond cosmic. It looks where space rock has taken us and laughs. Why waste time on sailing a backdraft of flanger up to the moon when you can wrench open reality itself and slide a rotten tentacle through the cracks? This isn’t for people who find black metal cute. And it isn’t for people who find black metal extreme. Microtonal metal might never inspire memeworthy fandom, but right now it sounds like the future. And the past. And the whole ugly present – all knotted together in a vipers nest of ouroboros." - 20 Jazz Funk Greats

"Jute Gyte's Perdurance is a modern classical black metal masterwork" - Noisey

"It's tempting to focus on this album's otherworldly guitar sound and various other unusual technical components, but its emotional charge is its most compelling feature. Many black metal acts address the idea that we're on our own in a blind, hostile cosmos, but rarely does the horror feel so real." - Stereogum

"If you can sit through it, you will be rewarded by relentlessly entertaining cacophony shot through with a warped sense of humour. If you don’t believe me, take my roommate’s word for it: “Could you never play that skronk album again? I really hate it.” So fire up the coals, put some brews on ice, then lock yourself in the basement and twitch to the summer sounds of Jute Gyte." - The Quietus

"Few recent artists have made such inimitable music as Missourian Adam Kalmbach, architect behind the protean madness of Jute Gyte" - Metal Sucks

"Adam Kalmbach has produced vast quantities of what is hands down the most forward-thinking and complex music metal has to offer" - Angry Metal Guy

"Jute Gyte is music for people who don’t necessarily want what they take in to make them feel better, or even good." - Heavy Blog Is Heavy

"Though not a “pretty” or “pleasant” album by any means, Kalmbach’s genuinely alien approach to harmony and composition coupled with a greater emotional weight than much of his previous work makes Ressentiment one of his best albums yet, and one of the best this year." - Toilet ov Hell

"We are hearing a truly original artist completely at ease with his medium" - Heathen Harvest

"Swirling, chaotic, virulent, black and maddening" - Cvlt Nation

"The guitar sounds like it’s being played by an alien" - Nine Circles

"Robin Thicke is a human. Jute Gyte could eat him." - Decoder Magazine

"The music Kalmbach writes is now top notch covering all the bases of brittle, spiteful black metal, creepy atmospherics and a contrasting, unique style that makes his music stand out above much of the like minded one man black metal out there today." - Teeth of the Divine

"Jute Gyte remains one of our most creative and challenging American black metal extracts." - From the Dust Returned

"Jute Gyte’s now signature hyperdissonance meets the ever-shifting polyrhythms of IDM, Gamelan’s chiming bells, and the shifting dread of early electronic music. Perdurance is a strange album whose penchant for the impenetrable verges on Dadaism" - Invisible Oranges

"Ears accustomed to Western 12-tone polyphony can barely process these sounds—they sink into your skull like red-hot stones into ice. It's like you're listening to a tape at the wrong speed, or to music warped by a black hole's gravitational lens on its way here from several galaxies away." - Chicago Reader

"cracked decrepit guitar tones creak against the maelstrom of drone swelling and spilling in harmonious fury, with buried drum machine marching through the void and anguished vocals recounting an ancient war of mass slaughter. electronics and treatments figure more prominently than on other BM projects, sure to piss off purists and blurring the divide between metal and noise: overwhelming buzzing distortion and delay" - KFJC

[baileymacias]

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[xiamenshinejoy-blog]

What problems have been solved by 3D assembled heavy + Light Steel Villas?

First: Quality problems

 The structural parts used are all made of heavy Iron and Steel + hot-dip galvanized steel plate. The welding technology is used in heavy Iron and Steel Structure. The self-tapping screw is used in the installation and assembly of EPS wall. The welding technology is not used to effectively protect the integrity of zinc film, so the corrosion resistance is excellent. EPS wall will not corrode, mildew and moth, the service life of buildings can reach more than 70 years.

 2. Heat preservation and insulation

 Through the combination of heavy steel structure, light steel skeleton and EPS thermal insulation board, 3D assembled Chonggang + light steel villas have formed a composite wall system with good performance and composite roof system, which has good thermal insulation effect. If there is a special requirement for thermal insulation in the area, we can increase the thermal insulation materials, such as adding an extra layer of Extrusion board in the northern area, the thermal insulation effect is better.

 The traditional brick-concrete has high heat transfer, general heat preservation performance and high energy consumption.

 Third: Quality Assurance

 The support and combination of the auxiliary parts play a reasonable bearing capacity. In addition, steel-structured buildings have been in existence for hundreds of years, and steel-structured houses appeared in the United States in 1900. The norm was established in 1976 and has been in use until today. So the development of 3D assembled Chonggang + light steel villas has been quite mature up to now, but the introduction of domestic time is relatively short, leading to insufficient understanding.

 Compared with traditional buildings, the use area of 3D assembled Chonggang + Light Steel Villa is 18% higher than that of traditional buildings. It is fast to install, rich in style, recyclable waste, small error of prefabricated main components and low comprehensive cost.

 IV: Waterproofing

 Foundation: laying thick moisture-proof film;

 Ground: Brush double-layer waterproof asphalt, place light steel structure with black waterproof membrane for waterproof;

 Wall: Moisture-proof breathing paper (waterproof breathable) is installed to ensure excellent waterproof wall, and has the performance of adjusting indoor relative humidity. The eaves are picked out from 300 mm to 600 mm, and the water is directly drained. There are special water supply and drainage pipes.

 Roof: Waterproof roll material is made on the whole surface, and the eaves are specially waterproof. Glass fibre cotton is placed inside the roof, which plays a role of heat preservation and insulation. Asphalt tile is a kind of tile with better waterproof in the world at present. Water drops directly along the asphalt tile. It can achieve 360 degree moisture-proof and waterproof treatment.

 Traditional buildings have no overall moisture-proof measures and poor air permeability.

 Fifth: Anti-rust, Anti-insect and Ant Problems

 As far as rust prevention is concerned, Chongqing Steel and special galvanized light steel are used as the structural framework. The anti-rust treatment of Chongqing Iron and Steel Co. is carried out in accordance with the North American international standards. Double-sided hot-dip galvanizing is 275g/. Domestic zinc plating requirements up to 120 g/can not rust for decades, let alone our zinc plating standards are more than twice the domestic level. Many experiments in Japan have proved that galvanized steel exposed to the outside is stainless for more than 100 years.

 As far as insect control is concerned, the 3-D assembled heavy steel + light steel structure adopts galvanized steel, and the maintenance plate is not eroded by termites and other insect pests.

 VI: Sound insulation effect

 Sound is a kind of wave, which needs medium to transmit. Transfer, reflection and absorption occur at the interface of the medium. Three-dimensional assembled heavy steel + light steel villa + EPS wall is a composite wall system, which passes through multiple media of different densities in the process of sound transmission, greatly reducing the frequency of sound wave transmission.

 Seventh: Ground Warming and Water Leakage

 Ground heating is the same as traditional brick mixing. Waterproofing treatment includes roof waterproofing: roof waterproofing material, asphalt tile itself has waterproofing performance, and an important node layer, equivalent to three layers of waterproofing; exterior wall waterproofing is moisture-proof breathing paper. Generally, there is little leakage. If it does, we will have after-sales service.

 Eighth: gale problem

 The special "plate rib structure" of 3D assembled heavy steel and light steel villas can effectively bear horizontal loads, and at the same time, a large number of pull-out parts are used to make the whole building and foundation connected reliably. Long tie rods and shear connectors are also used to connect the floor to the floor and between the floor and the roof to ensure the overall safety and stability of the building. Although the three-dimensional assembled heavy steel + light steel structure is light, but a house with at least a few tons of heavy steel + light steel, plus external panels and EPS walls, a house at least tens of tons of hundreds of tons, is not so easy to be blown away by the wind.

 Nine: Stability

 The main structure of 3D assembled heavy steel and light steel villas is heavy steel+high strength and high galvanized keel structure system, which is connected by high galvanized bolts to form a flexible structure. When natural disasters (such as earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, etc.), it can instantly unload external forces, release huge external forces, and shear or deformation of buildings. Stress, to ensure the overall safety of the building, even if larger earthquakes, typhoons lead to house collapse, deformation will form a flexible support space to protect the safety of life and property. EPS plate wall not only has good integrity, but also avoids secondary damage to human body caused by collapse of gas structure.

 However, the realization of long-span in traditional buildings is enough to consume materials, and the form is single.

 Ten: Natural Disasters

 In the face of natural disasters such as thunder and lightning, mountain torrents and hurricanes, the design and construction of 3D assembled heavy steel and light steel villas conform to the requirements of architectural design and construction, and also meet the building requirements on such issues as earthquake resistance and typhoon resistance; under the influence of other force majeure factors (such as war, mountain torrents, debris flow, etc.), the same is true. No type of building can be guaranteed. Note: 9 magnitude earthquake, 70 m/s hurricane, the whole 3D assembled heavy steel + light steel villa building and foundation connection, the overall structure is a good lightning protection system. Traditional houses need to be covered with galvanized lightning rods, and 3D assembled heavy steel + light steel villas are closely connected with the ground to form a complete lightning protection system. There is no need to take special lightning protection measures for 3D assembled heavy steel + light steel villas. First, the metal shell can shield the internal electric field, which is a physical knowledge. Secondly, the whole material is not exposed to the outdoor, outdoor decorative materials are insulating materials, will not conduct electricity. Lightning rods can be installed if you are not at ease.

 Traditional buildings belong to brittle structures, which are seriously damaged under the influence of earthquakes.

 11: Self-decoration

 Owners can do their own decoration. When the house is completed and delivered, we will hand over the "Instructions for Use" to the owner. This document covers the special requirements and precautions of the interior, so as to ensure that the subsequent decoration goes smoothly.

 Villas can be decorated by themselves. For decoration, there are no special requirements, and the traditional decoration method is consistent. There is no special need for attention, because the interior wall EPS board, the quality of the board is hard and flat, can be directly decorated with wall cloth, ceiling and traditional home decoration can be the same material.

 Decoration can save half or more construction time than traditional buildings.

 However, the construction period of traditional buildings is long, and it can not be constructed in cold areas in winter, which is limited by the environment.

 Technology and environmental protection of the 3D assembly type Chongqing Iron and Steel + light steel villas will be popular, in addition to a variety of natural environments throughout the country, but also fully in line with the national concept of green environmental protection, so in the suburbs and rural areas, more and more people choose low-cost and high-quality 3D assembly type Chongqing Iron and Steel + light steel villas.

 In order to conform to the development trend of international construction industry and respond to the policy requirement of vigorously advocating green building, Xiamen Shinejoy have always taken the concept of "green, environmental protection and high efficiency" as their enterprise development concept, innovated the construction production mode in an all-round way by means of industrialized manufacturing, improved the quality and efficiency of construction, and practised resource saving and low carbon emission reduction for customers. Provide the overall solution of green building, devote to promoting the comprehensive innovation and sustainable development of China's construction industry, and realize the double harvest of economic and social benefits of enterprises.

 As an idealistic enterprise full of humanistic color, Xiamen Shinejoy always grasp the spirit of the times of architecture, innovate products and services, and lead the development trend of human settlements, so as to meet people's pursuit of a better life.

 Superior Architecture, Ingenuous Technology. Shinejoy will improve every process carefully and do every step well.

 Xiamen Shinejoy Housing Industrial Architectural Technology Co., Ltd.

Office Add.: 16-17F, Bld. B04, R&D Area, Software Park Phase Ⅲ, Jimei District, Xiamen, China

Tel.: +86-592-5026001

Fax: +86-592-5026090

E-Mail: sales@xmshinejoy.com

[nh935]

Creepy America Episode 4: Red Like Roses

Creepy America

Episode 4

“Red Like Roses”

Hurricane, West Virginia

Over the years, Zoey and I have faced a lot of dangers filming “Creepy America”. Towards the end, it came to be expected that an episode would threaten our lives in some way. It should have been anticipated; after all, “Creepy America” was the equivalent of regularly poking a starving bear with a stick to see what happened. But before we adjusted to it, it was harrowing. Considering some of the things we went through, it’s a miracle that we even decided to keep working on the show at all. And while we had a few close calls with “Worlds of Wonder” and “The Things We Leave Behind”, it was during the episode “Red Like Roses” that the danger of what we were doing truly sank in for both of us.

***

We had just left Ohio and had made our way into West Virginia. Our last two episodes were edited and ready to upload, but Zoey insisted that we wait a week before uploading the first episode (second if you’re counting “Worlds of Wonder”, I suppose) so that we could use the two episode buffer to try to keep a regular update schedule. In the meantime, whoever wasn’t driving was using the trip time to promote the show online: we set up the website and put a countdown on it, updated the youtube channel with “Worlds of Wonder” on it, and made official social media accounts to start talking about it. Zoey had also edited together a trailer to post, made with clips from our previous three episodes. It didn’t make too many waves, but we got enough bites to keep our spirits up.

As I passed the sign letting me know I had crossed state lines, Zoey was on youtube, refreshing the page with the trailer on it and reading comments to me.

“Oh, here’s another one! ‘Cool idea. Effects could use a little work, though.’”

“They think it’s fake?” I asked.

“I guess so.”

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

She thought about it, then shrugged. “Not really. I mean, if they like the show, who cares, right?”

“I guess.” A brief silence fell over the R.V.

“What’s wrong about that?” Zoey asked.

“Huh? About what?”

“The show. Why does it bother you if people think it’s fake?”

I sighed. “It’s just, I don’t know, doesn’t it seem like we’re doing our audience a disservice by letting them think it’s not real?”

“Why’s that?” she asked.

“Well, if they think it’s not real, then they don’t know to look out for it.”

“Look out for it?”

“Yeah, they won’t think it’s a threat.”

“Why would they have to worry about it?”

I could feel my face getting red. “Well, I mean, like what if they come across it in real life? Wouldn’t they not know what to do?”

“But if they saw the episode, wouldn’t they still know? I mean, they wouldn’t think it’s fake if it was right in front of them.”

“I guess not. Nevermind.” I saw a sign for the upcoming towns and exits. “Hey, Hurricane. Isn’t that our next stop?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah! Hold on a sec.” She flipped open her laptop and started reading off directions for the nearest R.V. park.

***

The R.V. park was a sight that was becoming increasingly familiar: a set of parallel roads with long parking spots set in the middle of a grassy field. I backed into a spot and began hooking up the various utilities to the corresponding tubes and plugs while Zoey left to pay for our stay and ask some questions about the town over.

I had just sat down inside the R.V. to rest when Zoey came back. She entered, flopped something on the table, and began rifling through drawers.

“What is this?” I asked, turning over an old black composition notebook, weathered and worn, in my hands.

“No idea. I found it in some woods not too far away.” Zoey said, plopping down our large over-the-shoulder camera. “But did you see what’s inside?”

I stared at her with an eyebrow raised, then opened the cover. Inside were the words ‘Jenny Walsh, English Notebook, 3rd Grade’ scratched through with one long line. Underneath in much larger letters read: ‘Jenny Walsh’s Notebook of Curses and Spells, TOP SECRET!’ I looked back up to see Zoey mounting the large equipment on a tripod. “Wait, we’re not trying to do an episode on this, are we?”

She glanced from behind the equipment. “Why not?”

“Because it’s a kid’s notebook. It’s probably just full of nonsense words and drawings of Patronuses. The only place this thing will work is on the playground.”

She shrugged. “Then we scrap the footage or put it in the bloopers.”

“But still, a kid’s notebook?”

Zoey ignored me and finished placing the cameras around: one positioned at each of us, and one to capture us both sitting at the small booth in the R.V. Hitting a button on the laptop, she sat down across from me. “So, do you want to try doing the introduction this time?”

I shook my head. “You are so much better at doing those.”

“Alright then,” she said. “Three, two, one, and… Hello ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to Creepy America. We’re in Hurricane, West Virginia today, a state with more local legends and lore than anyone else, it seems. In fact, this state is so full of darkened corners that we seem to have found something after being here for only a few hours.”

“Yeah, something.” I mumbled.

Zoey shot me a look of annoyance. “I found this in the woods around our R.V. park. As you can see” she said, flipping open the book to the first page, “it seems to be a homemade spellbook of some kind. We’re going to find out if it actually works.” She started turning pages. As she did, her brow furrowed and she squinted her eyes. “Rog… rojol… I can’t read this, it’s all in cursive.”

I sighed and outstretched my arm. Zoey handed it over to me.

I looked down at the pages. “Royal… Command. A charm and mind control spell, done in the form of ‘hanc vitam diligere plus quam se’. Strange.” I turned the next page. “Gilded Heart. A spell for acquiring riches. ‘Midas non indiget familia’.” I started flipping through page after page. “These are written like… I don’t know, some kind of medieval spellbook.”

Zoey hopped up on her seat so she could lean over and look at the pages. “What are you waiting for? Try one.”

I looked back down at the page I had stopped at. “Red like Roses, a death curse to put on your worst enemies, created in the style of ‘sanguis liberate’.” I glanced up, eyebrows raised.

She just gave me a look of ‘go on, read it’.

I shrugged and began reading aloud. “Based on the Hecate school of spellcasting. Needs no components; words alone are enough. Read the following loudly and clearly:

Red like roses, blue like breath White like snow, black like death I have been wronged, o demon lords My enemy lives, so draw your swords I call upon the dark and wrong To right me as I sing this song Red like roses, blue like fate White like cold, black like hate For all the things that gave me pains Deserve not the blood in their veins Liberate it now, let it flow free I ask you this on bended knee Red like roses, blue like chill White like flesh, black like swill I do affirm this as my will Use my eyes, make me kill

After reading, the next person the spellcaster sees will be affected by the curse, so be careful. Best read when the person you want to kill is nearby. A good stealth spell.”

I blinked a few times, then slowly put the book down. “Well, even if it was fake, that was certainly creepy. Especially in a kid’s notebook.” I looked back up at Zoey. “ I mean, what has to happen to you to…”

Zoey suddenly stopped smiling. Her eyes went wide and her hand went to her throat.

“Zoey…”

She started coughing. Horrible, gasping guttural sounds, bereft of air, filled the room.

I flung the notebook to the side of the room and flew over to her side of the table. “Zoey, hang on. Hold on, I just… I…”

She looked at me with bug eyes for a second, then the face of panic was replaced with a wide smile. She started laughing. “Liam… your face....”

I stood up. “You… you’re an ass.”

“Yeah, I know.” She grinned and walked over to the notebook and picked it up. “Guess someone’s not as skeptical as they’d like you to believe, huh?”

“Shut up.”

***

While we were excited to explore West Virginia so that we could find more subject matter for “Creepy America”, we were in Hurricane specifically for “Faces of America”. We still had to keep that project going, and that meant interviewing as many different demographics of people as possible. Zoey liked the area because “it’s the perfect example of small-town podunkville, complete with weird pronunciation.”

Her words, not mine.

Surprisingly, quite a few people took us up on our little project. I guess people will jump at the chance to ramble on about themselves. Even the store owners on Main Street were willing to let us interrupt their work day so we could needle them with questions.

We were at the local hardware store, talking to the large man behind the counter, listening to him go on about high school dances or railroads or… something. I can’t remember what. Zoey always managed to approach each interview with enthusiasm and rabid interest; I had problems just staying awake.

“...so that’s when I bought the place. This place is… well, it’s part of the landscape, as much as the trees or the mountains or even the sky itself. To let ‘em tear it down, it’d be akin to blasphemy, I’d reckon. We’d lose a piece of our souls.”

I remember that part, because I had a hard time stopping myself from rolling my eyes so hard they’d pop out of my skull. For heaven’s sake, the place sold nails. If Zoey was thinking the same, she didn’t let it show. “Wow. That’s quite a story there.”

The man beamed with pride.

“Well, thank you so much for your time, it was truly a pleasure.” She moved her hand horizontally through the air, a signal she gave to me when she wanted me to stop recording. “Thank you again for sharing your tale with us, we really do appreciate it.”

“No problem. To be honest, it was kind of fun.”

Placing the camera onto the ground, I started to collapse the tripod, only to hear a rustling sound. I looked down to see a sheet of orange and white paper, dirty and torn from residing on the ground, no doubt.

Curious, I bent down and picked it up. At the top of the page was “AGATHA SORIN'S GUIDE TO MAKING YOUR OWN SPELL!” in big bold letters. Cartoon witches with green skin smiled in the corners, while the page contained nonsense syllables and instructions on how to combine them.

The man saw me holding the page. “Oh! Sorry about that. Must’ve been a leftover from the Halloween activity books. A few of those pages always manage to hide before I can staple ‘em all together.”

“Agatha Sorin?” I asked, pointing to the name.

“Just an ol’ folktale. Accordin’ to legend, she was one of the first witches in Salem to be convicted, but before they could burn ‘er, she escaped. People say she made it here and spent the rest of her life up in a log cabin near Deadbear Falls.” He chuckled. “Some city folks came ‘round and disproved it all a few years ago, but that doesn’t keep ‘er from being a local celebrity every Halloween.”

Zoey and I looked at each other.

“Any chance you could tell us where this Deadbear Falls is?” she asked.

***

Deadbear Falls turned out to be a small creek that ran down a hill, situated deep in the thick West Virginian woods.

The forest it ran through was cold and quiet, the October air creating a soft hush on everything. Leaves covered the ground, but they had lost most of their vibrant oranges and reds since falling, instead taking on various shades of brown matching the dirt beneath. Our trek was only punctuated by the babbling of the small stream and the shuffling of disturbed foliage.

Otherwise, there was nothing up here. Especially not a log cabin.

I sighed. “So much for that.”

“He did say it got disproved a few years ago.” Zoey said, walking ahead of me. “At least it’s pretty. We could use this for woAH!” Suddenly she was on the  ground, face buried in leaves. I rushed over and helped her up.

“I’m okay, I’m okay” she muttered, sitting herself up.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Dunno. Foot caught on something.” She kicked towards a pile of leaves, and as her foot pushed them aside, we both heard a dull ‘thunk’.

We looked at each other, then started throwing handfuls of leaves away.

It was a small metal footlocker, black paint peeling away, replaced by spots of rust. In one corner was the name “Jenny Walsh”.

“Zoey…”

“Yeah, I see.”

We sat in silence for a while.

I put my fingers under the box lid and began to pull up. The lid rattled around a bit and there was a dull groaning sound of something being strained inside.

“Wait, Liam, that’s somebody…”

All of a sudden, the lid flew open with a resounding “POP!” and I fell backwards, catching myself as I did.

“Huh. Lock must be rusted away. This thing’s been out here for a long time.” Zoey looked at me, then reached into the box. She came out with a small bundle of black fibers, wrapped together with a red string. “What is this, a lock of hair?”

I reached inside as well, withdrawing tiny gleaming metal cufflinks, necklace pieces, and even a few forks. “Silver?”

I looked back over to Zoey. She was holding tiny pieces of chalky white items, long like sticks but far more smooth. “Liam, these are…”

“...animal bones” I finished. I hesitated for a moment, then put the items back into the metal footlocker. “Let’s leave these here. I don’t really like this, Zoey. We should head back to the R.V. and…” I turned back to her and stopped.

There was a small trickle of crimson coming from her nose.

A trickle of blood.

***

“You’re overreacting, Liam.”

Instead of heading to the nearest doctor like I insisted, we were seated in a booth at the local diner. There were only a few people besides us in the yellow-white building, which was just as well; I kept noticing the others making side-long glances at us while they thought we weren’t looking.

It was no doubt because of Zoey. She had her head tilted forward, a bundle of white paper held to her nose. Dotting the table were more bunches of paper, stained crimson with blood, and a large roll of cheap toilet paper next to Zoey’s right. The waitress had brought it out after apologetically telling us there “weren’t no tissues”.

“I mean, of all the people to freak out over a nosebleed, you are the last on my list.” She withdrew the bundle of paper, saw that had too much blood soaked through to be serviceable, and put it aside, unwrapping another length of toilet paper and wadding it up.

I looked at the paper now stained red. Red like roses.

I tore myself away from the tissue to look at Zoey. “You can’t tell me that you think that this isn’t weird, right?”

“This isn’t weird” she huffed. “Remember Griffith Park?”

I sat back in my seat a bit. When we were both in fifth grade, our class had gone on a field trip to the Griffith Park Train Museum. While we were waiting on the bus for our teacher to come back from the ticket counter, Zoey’s nose started bleeding. Some of the other kids started freaking out, and one of the girls told Zoey to pinch her nose and tilt her head back so that she wouldn’t start losing blood. Zoey, who had been pretty calm up to this point, shrugged and did so. After a minute, she complained about her stomach feeling funny.

Another minute passed, and she vomited up blood all over the bus floor.

The scene our teacher came back to was one of mass panic, bus driver included. To her credit, she handled everything well, even when Zoey had quietly asked if she was going to die. Obviously she didn’t, but she was attended to by ambulance paramedics who had to get the story about what had happened out of a bunch of freaked-out kids. When they did hear it, they calmed down and let our teacher know there was nothing wrong.

Turns out that you’re not supposed to hold your head back during a nosebleed. The blood will just go to the stomach, and because the stomach can’t digest blood, it’ll vomit it back out when too much gets in there.

Hence why Zoey was bent over and talking more to the table than to me.

“Alright, fine.” I conceded. “But after what happened this morning, we can’t take any chances.”

“What are you…” A sudden look of realization crossed her face. “Oh come on.”

“The spell said ‘the next person you look at’. That was you. And remember those words? ‘Sanguis Liberate’? I looked it up. It’s Latin for ‘free the blood’.”

“Liam, it was a kid’s notebook.”

“A kid who buries hair and animal bones out in the woods, apparently.”

“Yeah, fine. It’s a disturbed kid’s notebook. But not a witch-in-training.”

“Why not? There’s stories of witches all over early America in locations like this. There’s even a witch who relocated here.”

“Alright, first off, we were told that that legend was disproved by one of the locals. Not exactly accurate, now is it? And secondly, most of those stories of early witches ended up with them getting burnt alive. Something tells me if they did have some actual mojo, those stories would have ended differently.”

I stayed silent for a bit. “But… the timing…”

“What, you mean late Fall, early Winter? The time when the air is driest and my nose always bleeds?” She sighed. “Look, I appreciate the concern, I really do, but I’m fine. I swear. See?” She held up the last bundle of paper, much less red than white. “It’s stopped already.”

I looked at her for a few moments, the slouched. “Alright, sorry. I guess you’re right. I was just…”

“Y’all ready to order?” the waitress asked, coming around to our table.

“Damn right I am. I’m starving.” Zoey said.

I pushed some of the bloody tissues away from me with a straw. “I think I’ll just stick with coffee, thanks.”

***

Fifteen minutes later, we were walking through a house with a tiny old widow and I was beginning to question my liberal use of the bottomless coffee deal. I had loaded up on caffeine to keep myself awake through the next round of interviews, but my body didn’t quite like the fact that I had downed cup after cup without real food, and it was rebelling by making my hands shake something fierce.

On top of that, the house was narrow, with hallways thin and small. We had left the cozy three or four rooms the widow regularly used and now were traveling through areas of the house she hadn’t gone through in years: corridors dusty with age and rooms filled with long forgotten memorabilia. The twilight had a hard time penetrating inside, making the shadows dark and deep. No heat filled this area, she had the vents blocked off, so I could feel the cold drafts of air brush against my skin as I awkwardly high stepped around tables and boxes.

All while trying to keep that damn camera still.

“We were doing our best to survive, but it wasn’t easy. William’s leg had forced him into disability and that money barely kept us afloat. Then Nixon announced the draft, and Kenny had to go to Vietnam. Just like that. He never came back.”

A few steps went on in silence. Zoey didn’t like to talk during these interviews; she said that her presence was supposed to be “as invisible as possible”.

We arrived in a small room, boxes stacked into corners with black sharpies. “These are his things” she said with a sigh. “I was supposed to give most of this away, but by the time I could finally face these items… well, it didn’t seem so important.”

She picked up a small pocket knife, unfolded it, and handed it over to Zoey. She took the blade almost reverently, looking it up and down, dancing her fingertips on the edge.

“Ow!”

She hissed and withdrew her hand. A small bead of blood was forming on the tip of her index finger.“Oh my,” the old lady said. “Hold on just one moment, I’ve got a kit in the kitchen…”

“No need” Zoey said, reaching into the camera bag. She withdrew a small box and undid some wrappings. “Got band-aids right here. If you don’t mind, though, could Liam and I grab those folding chairs in your kitchen? I’d really appreciate it if we could sit and discuss some of these items, and I think my cameraman could use the break.”

“Well, if you’re sure… I suppose I wouldn’t mind a little sit down.”

“Thanks. We’ll be right back.”

As we walked, Zoey tore off the little papers and stuck them in her pocket.

“Thank you” I whispered.

“No problem. I know how heavy those things get” she replied.

I looked back down to her hand. “Zoey, are you sure…”

She flashed me a look of annoyance that said don’t you dare bring up that stupid spell now, we’ve finally filming something good.

I stayed quiet.

We arrived back in the kitchen area, Zoey grabbing a folding metal chair while I picked up two more. “After this, I’m not sure how much more we need to film, Liam. I mean honestly, this old woman could fill up a movie herself.”

She stepped in front of me, leading the way. As she did, I heard a wet, dripping sound, and I looked down.

There was a trail of the stuff. I’m not kidding, an actual trail. At the front of it was the Band-Aid, soaked in red, floating in the liquid like a leaf in a pond. Leading onwards was a small trickle, a miniature macabre river, flowing. Literally flowing, like water. I could see the small ripples of motion in it, rushing forward as it pooled and pushed past in that strange jerky way liquid does when it runs over new ground for the first time.

I had never seen so much blood.

She turned around and smiled at me. Holy shit, I thought, I can actually see her turning white.

“Maybe it could be a short, y’know? We should go over what we have scheduled, if she…” she stopped and furrowed her brow at me.

I was so stunned I could barely speak. “Zoey… your…”

She looked down at her hand, seeing the flood of scarlet coating the chair and slowly dribbling its way down to the floor.

She whispered a very soft “oh”, and fainted.

***

It didn’t take long for the ambulance to arrive. My tone of voice on the phone probably assured that. 

I was riding in the back with the paramedics, watching in horror. It was unreal. Most of their time was spent winding and unwinding gauze; it seemed like as soon as they finished securing the hand in cloth, they had to undo it, cotton useless as it became dirty and dripping with blood. The frenzy of activity had smeared a good portion of it on the walls and medical equipment. The floor was slick with it. Once or twice one of them had to catch himself from falling.

How much was in there, I wondered, and how much could she afford to lose? I felt numb and sick to my stomach all at the same time.

“Sir? Sir!” one of them snapped at me.

“Huh, yes? What?”

“Do you know if she has any blood disorders?”

“Any… no, none.”

“What about medication? Any blood pressure, heart regulation, aspirin?”

“No, no. None of that.”

“Are you sure, sir? Any chance?”

“I’ve known her for all my life. There’s nothing.” I stared at her, then asked in almost a whisper “what’s happening to her?”

The man only gave me back a look of pure dread and confusion. It was the kind of look an atheist would have gave after seeing the devil.

***

Two minutes later and I was in the hospital waiting room. I had tried to follow Zoey as she was rushed around one hallway and then another, but I had been pushed back by an old but insistent nurse and deposited into this empty sitting room, a musty yellow and brown place buzzing with fluorescents. I had gotten a styrofoam cup from the coffee machine and sat in one of the chairs, mindlessly tearing it into tiny pieces.

I couldn’t relax. I couldn’t even think. All I could do was let the worry and dread sink onto my shoulders, becoming heavier and heavier and heavier.

Finally, a man in a lab coat came through the double doors. I shot up and walked over to him.

“What’s going on? Is Zoey…”

“Calm down” the doctor said. “She’s stable, at least, for now. We managed to stop the bleeding and get a blood transfer going, but she’s still pretty weak. To be expected, really, considering how much of it she lost.”

“Do you know what’s happening to her?” I asked softly.

“We were hoping you could help us out with that, Mr. Foster. On the ambulance ride over, you said that she didn’t have any blood disorders, correct?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Are you sure? Hemophilia, anemia, sickle cell… anything?”

“No, nothing. I’ve known her since we were kids, she’s never been diagnosed with any of that stuff.”

“What about other medical conditions? Has she ever been diagnosed with high blood pressure or hypertension?” I shook my head. “Has she been prescribed any blood thinners?” Another shake. “Has she recently taken any aspirin or alcohol?” Shake.

His shoulders slumped a bit and he wrote down some notes on his clipboard.  “Have she taken any… illicit substances lately?”

“What? No.”

He stared at me.

“She hasn’t,” I said with a glare.

He nodded, jotting down more notes.

“What’s happening to her?”

He sighed, then looked back at me. “We’ve... diagnosed her with Sudden Onset Hemophilia.”

I looked at him, then scoffed.“Sudden Onset? What, like a fucking cold? You don’t just develop blood disorders. Especially genetic ones.”

“Mr. Foster,” he said, voice becoming clipped and sharp, “we are doing the best we can with limited information. Now unless you have any suggestions...:”

“Red like roses.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing, nothing. I… I suppose you’re right.” My voice went even quieter. “Is she going to make it?”

He stayed silent for a few moments. “Honestly? We don’t know. She’s responsive, which is a good sign, but she’s weak, and the body can only handle so much. Right now, all we can do is wait and see.”

“Right… yeah… wait and see…”

“You can see her now, if you’d like. Please try not to excite her; the best thing for her is calm and rest.”

“Yeah… calm… got it…” I ignored the doctor, pushing open the doors and heading to the right.

There she was, lying in bed, paler than a sheet of paper, tubes hooked up to her nose and a red bag snaking its way into her vein. The room was devoid of sound, save for the soft beeping and whirring of machines. Her eyes fluttered open with effort, as if weights were attached to them, and she grinned in a weak, grimacing way.

“Hey, guess you were right about that whole spell thing, huh? Get to say I told you so.” She tried to force a chuckle, but it quickly turned into a coughing fit.

I said nothing, just sat down in the chair next to her and held her hand.

“Well, this is certainly embarrassing. Cursing myself. Makes for a good episode, though, right? I’m sure we’ll laugh about it once…”

“It’s not going away” I muttered. “It’s not going to go away.”

She stopped and turned to me, eyes wide. “W-what?”

“They diagnosed you with hemophilia, Zoey. It’s a permanent disorder; the platelets in your blood aren’t working. It’s not clotting.”

The weak smile came back. “Well, I’m sure they can fix it, if they know…”

“They can’t. It’s a genetic disorder. It’s in your DNA now. Even if they save you, your life has permanently changed. Any cut will be an emergency. Any injury will be life-threatening. You’ll have to live your life defensively, checking yourself. Protecting yourself. Worrying.”

The silence fell back into the room. Tears began to fall down Zoey’s face.

I rose to my feet. “It’s alright. I’m going to fix this.”

She clutched my hand tighter, trying to force me back. “Liam, don’t leave me alone.” I could feel how feeble the grip had become. “I’m scared. Please.” 

Her hands shook so much. 

“I have to. The doctors, they don’t know what happened. Wouldn’t believe me if I told them. They can’t fix it, so I’ll have to.” I gave her hand a small squeeze. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon. Everything will be fine. We’ll even laugh about this, I promise.”

“Liam!” I heard her cry, but I was already hurrying down the hallway.

***

I slammed the door to the R.V. open, hard enough to knock down the cheap wall clock hanging on the adjoining wall. “Alright Jenny…” I grabbed the notebook and began flipping through pages, “tell me how to fix this.”

I read as fast as humanly possible. “Lilith’s Kiss- to turn someone into a snake. Unluck on That! A curse to give your enemy misfortune. Night Air. An invisibility spell. Fetch’s Lullabye- a spell to inflict nightmares.”

“RRRGH!” I flung the book to the other side of the R.V., papers flying through the air with the force of the throw. As I collapsed into a chair, I noticed one of the papers by my feet. I picked it up and read it.

“Red like Roses, a death curse to put on your worst enemies, created in the style of ‘sanguis liberate’. Based on the Hecate school of spellcasting.” I stopped. “Based on the Hecate school…” I mumbled, “of course!”

I slammed the door open again and ran for my car.

***

All eyes were on me when I flung the door of the Hurricane Public Library open. They must have been expecting someone to enter dramatically; no doubt they heard the screeching of my tires when I flew in.

The small building was cramped, shelves forming narrow aisles labeled by subject. Bright lights overhead illuminated dozens of books stacked neatly on each row.

“Excuse me, sir, you can’t just...” the elderly librarian behind a barcode-scanning gun began. I ignored her and scanned the paper signs at the end of each aisle that organized the information by subject.

Jenny’s spells worked, no doubts about that. But how had she created a fully functioning spellbook? She sure wasn’t taught by any witch; the only source of witchcraft around here was Agathia Sorrin, an obvious fake. A small town like this would be buzzing with rumors if anyone else practiced something similar, and we hadn't heard anything like that while letting them prattle on about themselves. And she didn’t have inside information, either. She had hidden her little box at Deadbear Falls, a location that was a good hike outside of town. Jenny must have had to have gone there for a reason. She was probably looking for Agithia’s cabin. Maybe that’s even why she hid the box there; she thought the location was arcane or something.

Her notebook had also been written in cursive. That meant that she was in school at a time when cursive was still important enough to be taught, i.e., a time before computers handled most of our informational needs. No internet for Jenny. That left only one place where she could have learned how to cast magic, the original sum of human knowledge: the library.

I found the section titled “Parapsychology and Occultism” and started running my finger along book spines, looking for something about witches.

The librarian stood at the end of the bookshelf. “Sir, please...” I didn’t respond.

Most libraries work on computers now, including this one. That’s why that little barcode gun was at the front counter. But before they did that, they used paper, and part of that process was to stamp a date and time of check-out and write the person’s name in a little card inside the book cover; that way, if anyone damaged the book, they knew who to blame. Most have gotten rid of or lost the cards a while ago. After all, why protect something that’s no longer necessary? But if the town wasn’t big, if the library wasn’t used often, if I just had just a little bit of luck…

My finger rested on a large hardcover. “The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft”. I dragged the book down and cracked it open.

There, on the first page, was a tiny paper pocket. Inside was a small card, with neat letters that spelled out “Jenny Walsh, 3-18-88”

I sighed with relief. “Thank heavens for small-town podunkville.”

I tossed the book over to a nearby table, where it landed with a heavy “WHUMP!” I pulled out more books and flipped the covers open, dropping those that didn’t have Jenny’s name and tossing the ones that did over with the Encyclopedia. Once I had gone through every book on witchcraft, I dashed over to the table, pushing past the librarian as I did so.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave. You’re making a scene.”

I opened the Encyclopedia and turned to the table of contents, finding the section on “Spells”. I flipped the pages, hard enough to rip some and started scanning passages.

“...believed that incantations could curdle milk and…”

“...danced ritualistically around large pyres…”

“...contracts with devils, evidence left behind as moles…”

“...a list of herbs and other plants to be ground up, then…”

I closed the book hard enough to create a resounding “BANG” and shoved it to the floor. The librarian behind me gasped. “Now you’re damaging the books!”

Without looking at her, I withdrew my wallet and threw it at her. I heard a gasp of surprise and frustration as it hit her, and then footsteps stomping away.

I picked up the next book and opened it to the table of contents, repeating the process over and over again with each one.

“Familiars, in the form of small animals…”

“...accusations in public court…”

“...a magic salve rubbed over brooms…”

“...able to curse people from miles away…”

“...blamed for the deaths of loved ones taken away by sickness…”

I closed another book and slid it off the table. It was empty now; that was the last book on witches that Jenny had checked out, and not a single one held any answers for me.

I banged my head with the meat of my palms. “C’mon Liam, think! What else was there?”

Well, there were animal bones…

I bolted out of my seat, knocking over the chair, and ran to the shelves again. I had to search row by row to find what I wanted; I wasn’t sure what section it would be in, but eventually I found a large book titled “The Trapper’s Bible”. I flipped it open and took out the card.

There it was. Jenny had checked this book out three times in the span of one year.

So she used other books to supplement the occult books. She would have to if she wanted to find spell components. But the only ingredients in “Red Like Roses” were words.

I ran back to another section. “Language”. More spines.

“Latin: The Tongue That Won the West”

Open, pull down. No Jenny on the Card.

“History of Old English”

Skip.

“A Comparative Study of Germanic and…”

Skip.

“Silent Sounds: The Cultural Significance of Words”

Open, pull down. Jenny’s name, printed over seven times on the little card.

I ran back to the little table, pouring over the table of contents. “Religious Rites... Fairy Tales… where is it where is it…”

There, “Spells and Curses”. And underneath, “The Hecate School”

I had to grab the pages multiple times just to turn them. My hands had developed such fierce tremors that I had trouble just gripping them.

“The Hecate School was a discipline of magic that focuses on magic phrases spoken in rhyming couplets. Named after the Greek god of...”

I skipped ahead several paragraphs, trying to find the thing I wanted.

“...making the spells popular. Hecate spells have several elements in common; first, the spell is told in rhyme and rhythm. This is commonly done in iambic pentameter, but not always. Second, the spell should contain some common theme, of which the spell revisits in variations as it continues. Finally, the spell should appeal to a supernatural power. Demons and devils are most often invoked, though spells exist appealing to faeries and even angels.

Section VII- THE MACBEATH SCHOOL”

I stared at the book. “That’s it?” I slammed my fists into the table. “THAT’S IT?”

The few people who were still inside scurried off.

I sat in silence. My trail was cold.

What do I do now?

I felt a vibration from my pants pocket. Someone was calling.

I took my phone out. “Hello?”

“Mr. Foster? This is Hurricane General…”

“How is she?”There was a moment of stuttering on the other end. 

“She, uh, well… She’s not looking too good. We think it might be best to come back, just in case the worst comes to pass.”

I said nothing. My eyes were glued to the pages in front of me.

“Mr. Foster? Hello?”

“If Jenny could figure it out…”

“I’m sorry?” the voice on the phone asked.

“How much time can you give me?” I grabbed a near-by pencil and strip of paper, left in convenient bunches at the center of each table.

“What?”

“I said how much time can you give me? Before she goes critical?”

“Well, I’d highly suggest coming within the next twenty minutes…”

“That’ll have to do.” I hung up and bent over the paper, scribbling down my thoughts as quickly as they would come to me.

Bright as light and pure as snow That’s the Zoey I love and know A gift of happiness and joy As treasured as a child’s toy

I shook my head at the weird imagery, but kept going. No time to be a critic.

Bright as light and pure as snow But here on earth hurt by a foe Angels above, if you are good

“What the hell rhymes with good?” I thought for a second, then crossed the line out

Angels above, if you are upright Deliver her from evil tonight Bright as light and pure as snow

I stopped again. “Why did I have to pick fucking snow?” I grumbled. After an agonizing minute, I moved the pencil again.

Preserve the magic in her glow I beg you please, save her now Keep her alive, I don’t care how.

I stood up, looking over the poem. I took a deep breath, and in the loudest, clearest, most commanding voice I could muster, I read the words of my homemade spell. After finishing the last line, I dropped my speech down to a whisper. “Oh please, oh please oh please…”

The papers of the overturned books were rustled by a breeze. After that, there was nothing but silence and calm.

I stood back up and headed over to the library doors.

The older librarian was there, brandishing my wallet like a dagger at a nonplussed and slightly amused looking police officer. “He’s disturbing the peace! Criminal mischief! Assault!”

“By throwing money at you?”

I cleared my throat. The two turned and looked at me.

“I’ll make you a deal” I said to the officer. “Take me to the hospital, and you can arrest me after I check on someone there.”

***

I slowly walked back into the room. She was still lying there, eyes closed and motionless under the covers of the hospital bed. It seemed quieter than normal, and it took me a while to realize why: the oxygen tube and I.V. bag had been taken away, as well as most of the machinery. There was no medical systems supporting her any more.

I approached her bed. “Zoey?”

Her eyes fluttered open. “L-Liam?”

I threw my arms around her in a tight embrace.

***

The old nurse had shooed me out of the room after talking to Zoey for over fifteen minutes. I was approached by the doctor shortly after that. She’d made a full recovery, he told me. Their best guess was that she had accidentally ingested something that had been tainted by a massive amount of anticoagulants and the substance had just run its course.

I just smiled and thanked them for their expertise.

At this point, I had been running on adrenaline and caffeine for over ten hours with still no food in my system, and my body was letting me know it. I made my way over to the small vending machine and reached inside my pocket, only to remember that my wallet was still at the library.

I felt a small tap on my shoulder.

It was the officer from the library. He held out my wallet to me.

“Oh, thanks.” I took it. “Um, so about that promise…”

“You’re friends with the girl in room 12?” he asked. “The one who came in bleeding all over the place?”

“Yeah…”

“Whatever happened, whatever you did, I don’t want to know, but you’d better drift out the same way you came in.” Having said that, he turned and walked away.

I wished I had been with it more in that moment, or had known what I do now. Looking back on that memory, I can recognize the weariness in his face, the dull sheen of eyes that had seen too much. I wish I realized that he had witnessed something before. That he was the same weird breed of creature we were: those who know something they shouldn’t.

But I didn’t, and he left. I never saw him again.

***

“Quite a strange thing, isn’t it? Such power contained in something so small?”

It was night and the two of us were deep into the woods. Zoey was sitting on a log, illuminated by the light of a small campfire we had built. I was behind the large camera, standing it on its tripod once again, making sure Zoey’s words were being recorded.

She looked back down to the composition notebook held in her hands, several pages sitting in there loose. "Not hard to understand why we hated witches, is it? Such destructive forces, held back by only rhymes. And make no mistake, Jenny was a witch, and we’ll say goodbye to her the same way we’ve said goodbye to her kind for centuries.”

She took the notebook and dropped it into the flames. As she did, a breeze caught it and opened it, showing the paper turn black and curl.

“So the next time you damn something to hell, or curse someone for their actions, perhaps you should think twice about it, gentle viewer. Words have more weight than we give them credit for. Sometimes, much...much more.” She stared into the camera for a few seconds longer, then broke off and looked at me. “How was that? Too corny?”

I shook my head. “No, it was good.” I shut the camera off and walked around to the log, taking a seat next to Zoey. Together, we watched the fire crackle as the wispy ashes of the former notebook were swept up by the wind and carried away.

“There were worse ones in there” I said softly. “Ones designed to drive people mad, or kill everyone in their family but them. Quite a few that summoned monsters to torment people.”

Zoey shook her head. “What has to happen to you to do those things?”

“I don’t know.”

“I just wish you had your camera on you when you went to the library. I’m going to have to get creative to fill in that gap. We should probably invest in some tiny hand cameras, just so we have something filming.”

I stared at her. “Really? That’s what’s on your mind right now?”

“Better than the alternative” she muttered as another blackened page crumbled to soot.

The silence continued between us for a few more minutes.

“Zoey…” I began, “if we’re going to keep doing this, we need to be more careful.”

She turned to me. “Are you lecturing me?”

“And myself as well. After all, I was the one who picked ‘Red Like Roses’. I could have read any of them.” I poked one of the logs with a stick, turning it over in a shower of embers. “From now on, we have to treat anything we find like it’s dangerous. Even if it seems silly. And no more shrugging things off, like nose bleeds. If one of us is worried about it, we need to take it seriously.”

Zoey watched the fire. “Yeah. There should also have a ban on pranks and stuff. Make sure neither of us think the other is goofing around when something bad happens.”

“We should have a codeword of some kind, just in case. Something to say ‘hey, I’m in trouble. I need help now’.”

“What about Oxenfree?” she asked. It was the word we used when we were playing hide-and-seek and the other needed them to come out, usually because it was time to come home.

I nodded. “That’s a good one. We’ll use that.”

Another minute of quiet passed.

“Liam,” Zoey said, “I’m glad you came.”

“What, so I could curse you?”

She punched me in the arm .“Alright, Mr. Wise Guy, I’m not glad. There.” After giving me a second to rub my arm in mock distress, she rested her head on my shoulder. “Seriously, though. I am. It’s nice to know someone’s got your back.”

“And the same to you.” I said, enjoying the last of the flames as they began to die.

“The same to you.”

[tashmitchviscom]

UI/UX research // CHS

PEOPLE SCAN WEBSITES (THEY DON’T READ THEM)

Research shows that “users switch from scanning to actually reading the copy when web content helps [them] focus on sections of interest.” A study by Jacob Nielsen indicated that less than 20% of content is actually read. The brain wants to efficiently process web pages first via the scan, because they consist of text, colour, imagery before it spends energy to actually read. As a result, it’s important to make the website scannable to help users skip to sections or content they want to explore further.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN

Responsive design is designing the website or app to have a fluid interface for varying device sizes. Comscore reported in early 2015, 80% of internet users are searching from a smartphone, 47% from a tablet, and a growing number are searching from wearables like smart watches (9%) and wristbands (7%).

UX OF NAVIGATION

Good UX often starts with information hierarchy, and the navigation shapes the direction of usability and interaction of a website. Understanding the target user can help create a foundation for the navigation and it ensures the most important pages are exactly where users expect to find them.

WHITE SPACE IS A TOOL

In design, white space (or negative space) isn’t just an absence of something. It’s an active composition element that directs a viewer’s attention to what is most important on the page. It’s an important design tool that can be used strategically to foster focus, readability, and attention. On a webpage completely cluttered with text and visuals, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed.

SIMPLICITY AND CLARITY

Users want speed, functionality, and intuitive usability; the nature of their attention spans demands it. By keeping designs simple and keeping interfaces clear and straightforward, it increases the chance of satisfying the demand for speed, functionality, and usability.

ICONS

An icon is “a symbol or graphic representation on a screen of a program, option, or window.” Without relying on words, icons communicate meaning about what users should click on, how they can efficiently navigate a page, and how they can engage in a digital experience. They have to be used sparingly, be authentic, be scalable, enhance usability, and inspire interaction.

TABS

They are a navigation element used in web design that allow users to easily access different areas of a site or different parts of an individual page. Tabs are best used when: You need information to be highly scannable and simple to navigate. In these cases, including tabs can aid users in locating the specific information they need. A page could benefit from having a more organised structure. Using tabs can be efficient and lead to strong UX because the navigation scheme aligns with users’ expectations.

POWERFUL IMAGERY

Visual imagery plays a large role in determining the perceived quality and memorability of a website’s user experience. When users come to the webpage, they’ll have some kind of reaction. Whether it’s positive or negative, in large part, is determined by what they see. It’s helpful to use a gauge to determine whether the images are powerful and persuasive. Ethos, logos, and pathos are three classic rhetorical appeals that can help analyse the images to choose and create: Ethos = Foster Trust and Credibility with High-Quality Imagery / Logos = Drive Conversion with Relevant Imagery that Fits Your Message / Pathos = Influence Decisions with Persuasive, Meaningful Imagery

THE FOLD

‘The fold’ is the upper area of a website that is immediately visible to users when it loads on their screen. It is important to use this upper area of your web page effectively in order to draw users into your experience, regardless of the screen size on which it is being viewed. With compelling primary content – engaging visuals, key branding elements, attention-grabbing headlines – and clean navigation, it can ensure that the visitors will engage with the rest of the experience as it unfolds below.

BRAND CONSISTENCY ACROSS YOUR “HOME PAGES”

Social media is one of the effective methods of connecting with customers – especially so for B2C (Business to Consumer) customers. It is important  to ensure that how people experience your company is consistent and meaningful across all of your touch points, or “home pages.” After all, if done right, home pages have the capability to drastically improve your company’s attractiveness. Brands now have many home pages. It’s likely that a brand will have a website home page, a mobile home page, a tablet home page, a Facebook home page, and – depending on the business – probably another social related channel homepage such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram. Be consistent with brand imagery and messaging.

CHUNKING AND TEXT BOX WIDTH

It seems counterintuitive to break up information, but chunking leads to more focus and faster progression, ultimately leading to more comprehension end-to-end. The Nielsen-Norman group supports this when they write that “Chunking is a concept that originates from the field of cognitive psychology. UX professionals can break their text and multimedia content into smaller chunks to help users process, understand, and remember it better.” Text boxes that are too large – which affects readability – could mean a higher bounce rate or content that gets missed. This has an effect on UX. Exactly what width is ideal varies with devices, layouts, and fonts. Authoritative sources such as Smashing Magazine and the Baymard Institute suggest line length 45 – 85 characters. On a large screen, text should not fill all the horizontal real estate

Sources: https://www.freshconsulting.com/category/ui-ux-principles/

[deantemjitunit5unit13]

Research - Bauhaus

Where was the Bauhaus based? How long did the school operate for?

Bauhaus was a German school of design, architecture and applied arts that existed in Germany. Bauhaus in full was called, ‘Staatliches Bauhaus’ and was in operation from 1919 to 1933. The design school was based in Weimar until 1925, Dessau in 1932, and Berlin in its final months in 1933. 

The reason why the school was not in operation was that the liberals who had supported the Bauhaus were defeated, and the new conservative government cut off the school’s funding on 1 April 1925, precisely six years after it opened, the Bauhaus was forced to close.

What kind of changes to art education was the school credit for?

There are endless changes that the Bauhaus has made. It was just an art school, but not like any others. The way that students are taught for the art course for other schools would be drawing nudes and still lives. However, here in the Bauhaus, students were instructed to look at the world around them in an entirely different way.

It’s didn’t just made great influences on art education, but a modern threat, supposedly. The Nazis feel threatened by the Bauhaus because they made modernist furniture and kitchenware, but why does that make the Nazis feel so threatened? It represented a worldview which was the complete opposite of National Socialism. The Bauhaus was cosmopolitan and avant-garde. It international ethos made a mockery of Hitler’s racist fantasies. 

References: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20171109-the-endless-influence-of-the-bauhaus

References: https://www.widewalls.ch/bauhaus-art-aesthetics/ References: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bauhaus

What are some of the main design principles this school and design movement are credited for pioneering in Graphic Design?

According to what I’ve found on the internet, there seem to be 3 rules that the Bauhaus school of design seem to follow:

Rule 1: form follows function

It is a sentence that was created by Louis Sullivan, an American architect, who wanted to express the futility in excessive ornamentation. Professors at the Bauhaus strives to convey the idea that form had to reflect the function of the product. In other words, they didn’t want to sacrifice no message in place of the design choices.

Rule 2: typography matters

One of the most essential classes at the Bauhaus, school of design was typography. The Bauhaus concentrated on simplified fonts and avoided the much heavier renderings of the standard German typography of the time. 

Designers at the Bauhaus began experimenting - wrapping text around objects, and also learned to arrange type horizontally, vertically and even diagonally - which was not common at the time. Designers also refused to combine lower and upper case types in the same work and preferred to use sans-serif fonts.

Rule 3: geometry is king

Across many artworks produced at the Bauhaus - The Bauhaus showed a deep love of simple geometry. Students were well-acquainted with paintings of contemporary cubist artist, such as Picasso and Gris - which means that they are adapted to similar ways of seeing reality.

Designers at the Bauhaus began to experiment and started breaking down objects to its simplest form, the rawest geometric shapes, in which they considered the techniques to be the best way of designing, and creating new modern items. 

https://www.sitepoint.com/nailing-detail-bauhaus-design/

Find 3 examples of Bauhaus Graphic Design that reflect these design principles and state why? Credit the designer in your post.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers believed the important formal qualities of the day were: harmony or balance, free or measured rhythms, geometric or arithmetic proportion, symmetry or asymmetry and central or peripheral synthesis. 

I believed his works reflect one of these design principles - ‘geometry is king’ because of the simple uses of geometry in many most of his works. Not to mention, the emphasis that the colour and composition are inherently linked - which makes his work stand out even if they are the simple block of geometry.

Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was an Austrian-American painter, photography and typographer. He initially joined the Bauhaus as a student and, after some years, he was named director of the printing and advertising department.

Herbert Bayer’s works reflect the principle, ‘typography matters’ because of his created typography that is being simplified. The appearance of the font that Herbert Bayer created did certainly reflect on the Bauhaus’ principles, but it was also a font designed that is timeless and would work in the present.

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky taught form theory with an emphasis on colour theory. He encouraged his students to understand abstraction in his course ‘The Basics of Artistic Design,’ but it was in his colour class where Kandinsky most thoroughly developed his own theories.

The works that Wassily displayed reflect the Bauhaus’ principles because of his uses of simple geometry. Moreover, it wasn’t something that is randomly composed to create his work, but the most successful part about his work is the displayed of his understanding on his own colour theories, composition and simple geometry.

Find 3 examples of contemporary Graphic Design that reflect the design principles and guidelines explored by the Bauhaus and state why?

Christoph Miler

Miler is one half of the Zurich-based design studio Offshore, where their projects focus on editorial design, typography and storytelling.

I believed Miler’s works reflect on the principles of the Bauhaus as his work displayed the uses of simple geometry and typography and overall, the composition of the design work which makes it work out well.

Isabel Seiffert

Seiffert is the other half of Offshore which founded together with Christoph Miler. They explore “critical issues of design, media and globalisation” through side projects such as Migrant Journal, a six-issue print publication that critically explores space and migration.

Works are somewhat related to Miler’s which is why I decided to include this artist’s works here as well. Not only does the work successful, but I believed this artist was somewhat influenced by the Bauhaus as the works produce the results that reflect the Bauhaus’ principles such as typography and geometry.

Jennifer Morla

Morla is president and creative director of Morla Design in San Francisco, as well as a professor at California College of the Arts. Her work is part of the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Smithsonian Museum, the Denver Art Museum and the Library of Congress. 

Some of her works displayed above show and reflect the principles’ of the Bauhaus as throughout all of her works - she displayed the uses of typography and geometry, some of which was the creation of modernist furniture which was one of the influences of the Bauhaus.

Needless to say, these are just some examples of the artists’ works which I think showed some influence from the Bauhaus. But there are more contemporary artists out there who were inspired by the Bauhaus movements, and that just goes to show how powerful the Bauhaus school of design really was and how timeless it is.

References: http://www.howdesign.com/design-business/design-news/100-top-graphic-designers-and-creatives-working-today/

[contentmag]

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return is the largest solo exhibition of the renowned Vietnamese-American artist’s work in the United States in more than a decade. Dinh Q. Lê features five major video and photography installations, including the installation Vision In Darkness: Trần Trung Tín (2015), which has never before seen in the US, and rarely seen photo-weavings from 2006. The exhibition highlights the artist’s ongoing experimentation in narrative and storytelling through multimedia documentary video and found photography installations. The exhibition is organized by San José Museum of Art’s (SJMA) associate curator Rory Padeken and will be on view at SJMA from September 14, 2018 through April 7, 2019. A 120-page illustrated catalogue, will be published by SJMA in conjunction with the exhibition.

“We are thrilled to bring internationally renowned artist Dinh Q. Lê’s work to Silicon Valley as part of our ongoing commitment to exhibitions that reflect the diversity of our community and the exciting and important work being done by contemporary artists,” says Sayre Batton, Oshman Executive Director at SJMA.

While Lê is best known for his unique photo-weavings—interlaced vertical and horizontal strips of documentary photographs and Hollywood film stills about the Vietnam War—this exhibition highlights his ongoing experimentations in video and photography installation. He explores themes of departure and return, the role of the artist during times of war, and reimagining symbols of American imperialism and recent histories of Vietnam through documentary videos and multichannel cinematic presentations, delicate watercolors and abstract paintings made by his artist/subjects, and architectural structures that comprise thousands of photographs abandoned by families fleeing from the ravages of war. Engaged with other Vietnamese voices and perspectives, Lê reshapes and generates new memories and images of the conflict by giving voice literally and metaphorically to those marginalized by history.

The exhibition includes Light and Belief: Voices and Sketches of Life from the Vietnam War (2012), a multimedia installation of 101 paintings and drawings with a documentary video with animation. Originally commissioned by documenta for dOCUMENTA 13, Light and Belief uncovers how northern Vietnamese artists were enlisted to fight in the war by sketching scenes at the battlefront. Vision In Darkness: Trần Trung Tín (2015), Lê’s sequel to Light and Belief, comprises six abstract paintings and a biographical documentary of artist Trần Trung Tín (1933–2008). The work examines Tran’s disillusionment with repressive government policies and the solace he found in creating abstract painting— resisting established artistic and social norms of the time. The exhibition will also feature Lê’s major architectural installation Crossing the Farther Shore (2014), constructed with thousands of found photographs abandoned by families fleeing from the conflicts of war; his earliest video works The Imaginary Country (2006) and The Farmers and the Helicopters (2006); and a selection of rarely-seen photo-weavings of flowers from the series “Tapestry” (2006).

“Lê entwines unknown narratives of war and migration from people in North Vietnam, the Vietnamese diaspora, and refugees who have recently returned to Vietnam,” says Padeken.

Published by SJMA, the fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will include documentation of the exhibition; a transcribed conversation between Dinh Q. Lê and Moira Roth, Trefethen Professor Emerita of Art History, Mills College, Oakland; and essays by Padeken and by Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, associate professor of Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis; and Nora A. Taylor, Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art History, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return is the fourth exhibition in SJMA’s ongoing series New Stories from the Edge of Asia, and the first of the series to represent the art of contemporary Vietnam. A tour of other US venues is planned. ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên, Vietnam, Dinh Q. Lê and his family immigrated to the US in 1978. He received his BA in studio art from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1989 and MFA in photography and related media from The School of Visual Arts, New York, in 1992. He currently lives and works in Vietnam. Recent awards include a Rauschenberg Residency, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York (2016); Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation, New York (2014); Visual Art Laureate, Prince Claus Fund, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2010); and Artist-in-Residence, Tokyo Wonder Site Aoyama (2009). He has had solo exhibitions at such venues as Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2015); Rice Gallery, Houston (2014); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Bellevue Arts Museum Washington (2007); Asia Society, New York (2005); and The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky (2000). His work is in the collections of Asia Society, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and San José Museum of Art.

PROGRAMS

Lunchtime Lecture WED, OCT 3, 2018 | 12–1PM

Artist Dinh Q. Lê, featured in True Journey Is Return creates mesmerizing floral photo-weavings that entrance the viewer in a manner reminiscent of Zen-like meditative mandalas.  Our guest speaker further explores the emblematic flower by looking at the proven health effects of flowers in offering positive emotional and behavioral benefits to humans.

Lunchtime Lectures take place on the first Wednesday of the month at noon in the Charlotte Wendel Education Center. Visitors are welcome to bring food and beverages. Free with Museum admission and to SJMA Members.

Gallery Talk: Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return  THU, NOV 8, 2018 | 12:30PM

Tour the exhibition Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return with Rory Padeken, associate curator. Free with Museum admission.

DIY Art: Festive Fun SAT, NOV 17, 2018 | 1–3PM

Experiment with collagraph, a fun and simple printmaking technique, in this drop-in workshop. Design a striking, mixed media composition inspired by the work featured in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return. All materials are provided. Free with Museum admission. All ages welcome.

DIY Art: Festive Fun SAT, DEC 8, 2018 | 1–3PM

Experiment with collagraph, a fun and simple printmaking technique, in this drop-in workshop. Design a striking, mixed media composition inspired by the work featured in Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return. All materials are provided. Free with Museum admission. All ages welcome. Stories from the Farther Shore: Southeast Asian Film March 2019 Coinciding with the exhibition Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, SJMA and the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco co-present Stories from the Farther Shore: Southeast Asian Film, a free program of approximately twelve films that will screen over a four-day period in March 2019. Showcasing recent documentary, short, artistic, and feature-length films by Southeast Asian filmmakers, topics range from transgender identity to the complexities of the diasporic experience. SJMA is also commissioning Robin Lasser, photographer and San José State University professor, to create a series of site-specific outdoor video projection mapping installations as part of her ongoing project Migratory Cultures. Titled Vietnamese Diaspora: San José Stories, Lasser is working with individuals from San José’s multi-generational Vietnamese-American community, video-recording their stories of migration to reveal a more nuanced narrative of the largest Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. Beginning in March 2019, her video portraits will be projection mapped at night onto SJMA’s building facade; onto trees in César Chávez Park in downtown San José; and at community gathering sites throughout the city. At a time of growing hostility to immigrant and refugee experiences in the US, the films and commissioned project in this program will join the exhibition in giving voice to complex, humanized stories of identity and homeland, loss and survival, and negotiating tradition and modernity.

This project is made possible with support from California Humanities, a partner of the NEH.

Organization and Funding Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return is made possible in part by grant support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Asian Cultural Council, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. The exhibition is sponsored by The Lipman Family Foundation, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Tad Freese and Brook Hartzell, Lucia Cha and Dr. Jerrold Hiura, and Evelyn and Rick Neely. Additional support comes from Lisa and Keith Lubliner. In-kind support for equipment is provided by Genelec, NEC Display Solutions, and BrightSign. About San José Museum of Art The San José Museum of Art celebrates new ideas, stimulates creativity, and inspires connection with every visit. Welcoming and thought-provoking, the Museum rejects stuffiness and delights visitors with its surprising and playful perspective on the art and artists of our time. SJMA is located at 110 South Market Street in downtown San José, California. The museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11 AM to 5 PM and until 8 PM or later on the third Thursday of each month. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors, $6 for students, and $5 for youth ages 7–18. Members and children ages 6 and under are admitted free. For more information, call 408.271.6840 or visit SanJoseMuseumofArt.org.

# # #

Programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by generous operating support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, a Cultural Affairs grant from the City of San José, and the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation.

  SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART (SJMA) PRESENTS

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return The largest solo exhibition of Dinh Q. Lê’s work in the US. September 14, 2018 through April 7, 2019

Written by San Jose Museum of Art

Dinh Q. Lê Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return is the largest solo exhibition of the renowned Vietnamese-American artist’s work in the United States in more than a decade.

[wagihyoussef]

Architectural Attitudes and Motives

Architectural Attitudes and Motives

Wagih F. Youssef

Abstract

The architectural attitude is one of creating a complete artistic autonomy and creativity within the field of architecture. The successful work of architecture involves the separation of the technical skill implied in the word architecture from the nontechnical realization of the work as involved in the act of artistic apprehension. The common-sense attitude to rationality of the action of design suggests that the architect considers those alternatives which are relevant to his action in his own situation and over which he may have some control. Rational action is within an unquestioned and undetermined frame of constructs of typicalities of the setting, the motives, the means and ends, the courses of action, and personalities involved.

Keywords: scientific attitude, artlessness, composition, emotional space, distortion

Introduction

In our age of television and easy facilities for travel, it is sometimes doubtful whether the copying of originals, or past styles, should be judged critically for quality. By comparing Romanesque with Gothic, Renaissance with Mannerism, Baroque with neo-Classicism, by finding out which was revival, and which was new, from the Renaissance to the architecture of our time, by tracing the Classic and Romantic tendencies that have existed throughout the ages, and by discovering the way in which function and beauty have been skillfully combined to create architecture, the architect will perceive the changing nature of attitudes to aesthetics. In this way the designer will learn from the past that he should design for today, or even for tomorrow, but not for yesterday. Also, he will have to meet the demands of modern society into which he is born, cultural, social, political, and economic. In any case, human nature has the desire to preserve the best of the past and to let the imagination travel into the past to enable him to study fully the origins of design and art, to put things right. By this experience the architect becomes inspired to create new form. A study of architecture leads to the discovery of an ever-changing attitude towards form; the preference, expressed in different periods, may be in striking contrast between a like for the monumental, for the rustic and robust, for volume and masses, for height and verticalism, for horizontalism, for the gracefully elegant and ornamental, for the theatrical, for historism and revival, an over cherishing of the past.

Architecture is not experience, but it may consist of the rearrangement and the selective heightening of elements that are possible in experience in order to create new forms and varieties of experience. The artlessness of architecture consists of the fact that the architectural product can be experienced without recourse to knowledge of methodology and technical procedures on the part of the consumer. If the artificiality of architecture is its predominant characteristics, then the work is usually judged as dry, dead or academic.

The Critical Attitude

Some artistic epochs have exhibited an emphasis on the effects produced by self-conscious stylistic experiments resulting from purely deliberate manipulations of materials, these tendencies called mannerism by art historians. As a result, any work of architecture has two faces. The one is a presentation of a world to be comprehended in direct, immediate, natural terms. The second is a complex, involved self-conscious systematically derived methodology in its manifest content to a natural world and allows itself to be treated as a natural world in the same way that the architect, using the scientific attitude, treats the natural world.

If architecture is treated by a critic as if it were the natural world, such that those elements in that world which give it its form, its content, its structure, and the functional relationship of its parts are dissected, we see the action of the critical attitude. It is different however from the scientific attitude in that the natural world of science has no author that is directly accessible to the observer. If the natural world were treated as having an author whose intensions and purposes are to be divined by the investigator, then the mode of investigation, we would postulate, would be critical in the sense to which we use that term. Thus, the age-old conflict between science and theology appears as a difference between a scientific attitude and a critical one; what the critic is to tell the audience what the artist did to achieve his effects. The critic can destroy the success of an architect by negative reviews, he can delay acceptance of a valuable work either by indifference, hostility, or by obtuseness. Thus, criticism falsifies relations between artist and audience. The attitude of the architecture consumer may or may not be affected by the critical attitude. Or, under the influence of the critical attitude, the consumer can look to the work of architecture to provide confirmation of current categories and standards of criticism that he has absorbed from media other than the work of architecture itself. In this sense, the consumer attitude infected by the critical attitude may feel that it has little to do with the design itself.

Criticism can replace creativity as the final product of the architectural enterprise. The critical can alternatively be called the academic attitude for the academic man frequently in attempting to explain the process of creativity, describing the techniques in and of themselves constituted a solution to the problem of creativity, since technique is the most objective and discernible part of the process of architectural creation. The academician, if he lacks these qualities can only reveal them through his critical work, for in architecture as in science, the work itself is a higher form of communication than the ex post facto explanation. The architect, to the extent that he feels his architecture is unique, must feel the act of explanation as a form of destruction depending on the value of the analysis.

Planning

Since the planning process emphasizes the rationality implicit in the planning process, the process of drawing up the final draft of a plan requires that the plan be stated as a logical, rational, systematic, orderly scheme for action. The form and style of the plan as a document always suggests the kind of substantive rationality that is always present in theories of planning and social policy. All logical alternatives are considered independently of the pressures of subjecting time used up in assessing these alternatives which are held to be open to rational analysis. Estimates of relative efficiency are then calculated. In this respect, the architect is scientific as he moves from the planning phase to the action phase. The action begins to involve attitudes and motives that are analogous to the natural attitude. Certain alternatives are discarded for reasons of economy of thoughts and action, and because they are either not situationally relevant or low in salience. The architect in his capacity as actor deals only with situations over which he has the possibility of exerting control.

Once a plan is formulated with respect to its overall goals and means, the problem of technical implementation emerges. At this point formal rationality is salient. However, even at that level the process of functional rationalization involves political considerations. Such conflict may emerge after the execution of the plan has been undertaken, when hidden and unanticipated implications of the plan become apparent and a new plan is proposed. If this does happen, means must be devised to cut back the scale and focus the plan. In working out a strategy of covering all bases, the plan that emerges is often an empty shell. In addition, the implementation of a plan requires estimates of the technical efficiency on which the plan depends. As a result, the success of the plan can only be determined. In such cases, the problem is not bureaucratic but narrow.

Those who have maintained that the attention to purely physical planning without concern for social relationships could produce plans whose effects were inhuman intensify urban problems. Because this is true, the compelling problems facing planners as professionals is how to deal with the violations of the ideology of planning wherever planning is undertaken. Contact with local politics may serve in part as a sobering experience, instead of making life difficult. The habits of mind and attitudes of men in various fields of endeavor determine the way they view the world and their occupation is an important ingredient in determining their consciousness.

Virtually all implementations of planning result in something other than that intended by the planners at the time of the inception of the planning. As a matter of fact, at the time that plans are adopted, it is most often necessary to forget or conceal the aspirations and intentions which governed the plan. If the planning is reasonably acceptable to its audience at the time of its realization, the audience will tend to forget a major part of the extremely complex steps, adjustment and readjustments which took place between conception and delivery. If the plan is conspicuously so successful that it surprises the parties involved, then awareness of the planning process will be salient and celebrated, though all the confusion, conflict, misunderstandings and inefficiencies will be repressed. If the plan, when implemented, is sudden, conspicuous, and an outset failure, then awareness of the planning process becomes an object for historical research. The intentions here are usually to distribute the blame and to create the confidence that such disasters will not reoccur.

Architecture, often planned by one generation, is not necessarily built according to plan by the next, because this next generation has already acquired an entirely different set of formal attitudes. The design of practical objects perhaps more directly expresses the needs and the spirit, the functional and artistic consideration of an epoch. Even fashion can disclose not only personal taste but also reflect social changes and mirror the tendency towards the conservatism of an age. The public will judge new things according to historical experience and established convention. An experience with classical architecture does not necessarily help in understanding contemporary architecture. If a new development of architecture demands to be judged by new rules, this does not necessarily mean that it condemns the past. An architect can create anew out of his very knowledge of the past. Experience of the past combined with experience of the present will enable the architect to find a language of his own more effectively. If a new form fails, the architect cannot escape and go back to a former safer design of the past and do his work on an earlier style which had long been surpassed by his actual visual attitude. This would mean ignoring the present and living in the past. Talent, instinct, and intellect are needed to achieve a satisfactory and aesthetically acceptable design.

Dynamic and Emotional Space

The architect who tries to capture space in his composition is required to go beyond Futurism by suggesting a fourth dimension in architecture. Trying to revive the restraint of Cubism, the architect sets out to search for dynamic space represented by fenestration and colored areas in his compositions thus giving the design a new dimension of volume closely related to Suprematism, an art movement founded by Malevich in 1913 who advocated the use of basic elements such as squares, circles and triangles to create a new approach to aesthetic space. The Dadaists of 1916 and the Surrealists of the 1920s movements with their own theory of time and the co-incident, are at the other extreme, they are the representative of emotional space. Both area and space make up a composition. In fact, this has no static but a dynamic asymmetrical structures and compositions. Goethe did not like the term composition at all. He analyzed it as com-position demonstrated that it really describes the putting-together placed in different positions, thus creating tension and interest. One main dominating space, where all the other spaces are mere variations of this, serves basically one function and providing one main facility to which all the others are related and coordinated. Those who are designing structures which are expected to provide shelter or to perform a service have to consider their practical value and application. The composition becomes apparent with the shifting position of the observer.

The pioneers of the modern movement in architecture were involved in working out modules to satisfy the demand for prefabricated units. The architect creates interesting compositions by establishing several focal points which lead the eye into the composition in the right sequence. The frontal view of a building, seen from a distance, makes the building appear as a part of the town, environment, or the landscape. By contrast a walk around the building can become an experience of space. Both physical nearness and physical distance can contribute to the right aesthetic experience of a work of design. The human eye continues to see horizontal and vertical lines and elements, even when these are not completely and consequently carried through in a work of architecture.

The pictorial and symbolic properties of lines, planes and solids have to be psychologically used by the designer. Direction, sequence and rhythm, interval, separation, tension, anticipation, surprise and revelation, harmony and contrast and graduation, must be considered and conceived in advance by the architect. The correct conception of space, depth, volume, the right measure of active and passive elements in the design assist in this. Although the nature of architecture is functional, space has to be arranged to satisfy emotionally was well as functionally. Contemporary architecture of the past can deal with these aspects. Modern architecture does not want to be hindered by classical orders and prescribed composition but experiments freely with space and rhythm in composing units and areas of various form and size, but to meet the basic needs of modern living. To create rhythm more than one element of form. The degree of harmony obtained will depend on the properties of these elements. Harmony or contrast can be created by variations of form and color.

Attitude Towards Nature

Distortion is often demanded by the creative mind. In architecture the decisive change to freely composed and distorted form took place only after the collapse of eclectic styles and was brought about by the pioneers of modern architecture. This way of thinking began with Art Nouveau which freely distorts Celtic form and plant-patterned ornament. The struggle of the architect in depicting nature has been recorded throughout the history of mankind, and the influence of nature in all fields of architecture. Mondrian is known to have turned his back on nature, and especially on the color of green. He refused to look at a garden. He just did not want nature to hinder him from finding a visual language of his own. The struggle of the architect in depicting nature has been recorded throughout the history of mankind, and the influence of nature in all fields of architecture is well known. In ancient Egypt the lotus plant served as a prototype for the development of form in column capitals. Almost every period finds in nature a different prototype for the decoration of capitals. A regularized form of acanthus appears in the Corinthian order of Greek and Roman architecture. This compelled the designer to abstract from nature for the purpose of decoration and ornament.

In Egyptian architecture, architecture proportions were always idealized giving to the human body proportions which are anatomically impossible. Egypt had had for too long a time a tradition of symbolic abstraction or distortion. We do not really mind this distortion because it is elegant. The material in the design of architecture achieves a life of its own ranging from the naturalistic to the symbolic, abstract, and nonfigurative. Materials are for the architect akin to the musical instrument for the musician. The visualizing in the architect’s mind takes place long before he thinks about the physique of the material needed to create the work. Stone or marble hint at possible shape. Properties and principles underlying the material used introduce new interesting features into a work of architectural design. Some architects have ideas which they have to put them into material terms. This is due to the gradual disappearance of ornamentation and decoration in contemporary architecture and design.

Conclusion

Today architecture is no longer a rational experience of imitation to satisfy intellect alone but is built upon ideas and upon perceptions to create a dialogue with the observer to gain a true understanding of an architecture that speaks. Each generation finds that if the emotion is not existing then the work of architecture is a sham. Requiring a fair knowledge of political, religious and cultural events is the best aid to understand and appreciate architecture, not only by pure sentimentalism. Whenever one favors or not the message, inherent in the subject matter, the final judgement of a work will rely on the aesthetic quality. Architects must establish the spiritual and creative expression of an age or of a specific school of civilization. The sequence of historical and creative experience is important. The architect is born into a certain civilization and has to work for it and is influenced by it. If the designer is a good architect, he will not content himself with existing conventions, but he will try to change things and explore the possibilities for change. Creative talent must be blended with modern technology. History, theory, and the aesthetic of architecture and design requires an ideal combination of knowledge and artistic imagination.