Updates

New £2 coin commemorating the King James Bible

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:33:19 -0400

New £2 coin commemorating the King James Bible

From http://www.flickr.com/groups/513477@N22/

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:30:14 -0400

From http://www.flickr.com/groups/513477@N22/

emmaquirk: fly-eye kaleidoscope photography (set 3) (Work by...

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 06:38:37 -0400

emmaquirk:

fly-eye kaleidoscope photography (set 3)

(Work by my sister)

Playing with photocopied type

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:59:49 -0400

Playing with photocopied type

Element rings…!http://www.itsno.name/index.php Brings the...

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 14:56:00 -0400

Element rings…!
http://www.itsno.name/index.php

Brings the reality of matter to the forefront…

stevemartinsbanjo: Harbour- a thousand hour long exposure (by...

Sun, 31 Jul 2011 14:32:46 -0400

stevemartinsbanjo:

Harbour- a thousand hour long exposure (by Michael Chrisman)

Royal Mail rethink, by Mash Creative

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 13:57:42 -0400

Royal Mail rethink, by Mash Creative

Billie Holiday “Jazz at the Philharmonic” Verve...

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 18:12:51 -0400

Billie Holiday “Jazz at the Philharmonic” Verve Records David Stone Martin Cover Art - Vinyl LP

(From foxmusic on Flickr)

N.B. Some lovely bold futuristic Japanese type next to a sketchy illustration. The clash is strange. I like it.

Work by Subirachs, on the doors of the Sagrada Familia in...

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:49:20 -0400

Work by Subirachs, on the doors of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Img c http://m.flickr.com/photos/endymion120/

Overgrown ruins

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:01:38 -0400

After an inspiring afternoon in the British Museum… Some references for my degree show space from t’internet…!

Thu, 26 May 2011 10:30:22 -0400

Amazin’! (found on the internet — from Star Trek I...

Thu, 26 May 2011 10:04:00 -0400

Amazin’! (found on the internet — from Star Trek I think)

Outward travel must not be in the past

Wed, 25 May 2011 16:58:12 -0400

Process for each project

Sat, 21 May 2011 08:42:00 -0400

Hello tutors!

Have broken up my blog to make it easier to see each project’s process…

Memories of Home pt 1
Memories of Home pt 2

Aeroplane Instructions pt 1
Aeroplane Instructions pt 2

Miscellaneous projects that didn’t make it into my portfolio, but where the thinking may have influenced some of my portfolio projects.

Other blog posts not directly about my main portfolio projects but where my thinking gives a good indication of where I’m coming from.

Awe for the everyday - tribal influences

Thu, 19 May 2011 09:21:00 -0400

Photographed the following from a book bought a while ago, called ‘Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World’, by David Maybury Lewis (Publisher- Viking):

Huichol tribe, Mexico:

“…the shaman leads the pilgrims on the sacred hunt for peyote, the hallucinogenic food of the gods. The pilgrims yearn for the feeling of being at one with the Ancestors, of losing themselves in a state of fusion with the universe and their fellow humans.”

——

Wodaabe tribe, Niger (West Africa):

“A man can have many wives but Wodaabe women can leave their husbands without stigma to seek a happier marriage.”

——

Makuna tribe, Columbia:

“The idea of the interconnectedness of all things is central to the tribal way of looking at the world.” … “The Makuna believe that human beings, animals and all of nature are parts of the same One.”

——

Aborigines, Australia:

“The Aboriginal system rejects our separation of the visible world into discrete objects, just as it denies that matter is the primary level of reality.”

——

The Xavante, Brazil:

Talking of rituals that transform children into adults: “They act out the death and rebirth of the initiate, which is a stressful process. His old self dies and he is separated from his society. He is in limbo. While he is in this marginal state he learns the mysteries of his society, instruction that is enhanced by fear and deprivation, and by the atmosphere of awe that his teachers seek to create.”

“The initiate, stripped of his previous identity, is held in the shadow world of betwixt-and-between.”

——

Dogon, Mali (West Africa):

“The way in which tribal art is woven into the fabric of society is rooted in something that the modern world has lost, a cosmic confidence in ourselves and in the whole scheme of things. Tribal art is a means of reconciling what is otherwise irreconcilable, of making the painful crises of life manageable - even of overcoming the ultimate disjunction between life and death. The Dogon masked funeral dances are great communal rituals that are as much about life as they are about death”…”The masks come from the bush, the source of power and wisdom, the wild place that contrasts with the civility of Dogon communities. For the Dogon, art must be lived.”

——

Awe for the everyday - physical things

Thu, 19 May 2011 05:11:00 -0400

An experiment that’s a development from my ‘Poetry of Modern Life’ book from last year, where I gave strange definitions for everyday things.

The idea is that having the actual object there when confronted by the strange nature of it might somehow hit home more than seeing merely the illustration as the reader did in last year’s project.

—-

Spray-painting coins, my old phone, and my old watch:

Trying the same with a lightbulb that’d been painted blue, and getting the following strange result!:

It seems that the white primer spray paint works as paint stripper! Managed to wipe the blue off though:

Had masked off the face of the watch and the screen of the phone, as I imagined they would look great with those details unpainted. However, on removing the tape I felt that the screen and the watchface weren’t in-keeping with the feeling I was after, of making archetypes of ‘the watch’ and ‘the phone’.

So I painted over them:

For the coins, I wondered if I could simplify a textual definition that I might have had before, into a more subtle, stranger, symbol…

I also wondered if I could experiment with making a strange alphabet, that’d use my previous definitions but in a way that’d have to be decoded/discovered.

What came to mind was Sara de Bondt’s ‘ET’ adaptation of Futura, which she notes as the typeface for ‘The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art’!…

Also, one of Emigre’s fonts that I found a picture of a while ago:

Reading A B C D E N O P Q R.

——

Anyway, here’s my first try:

Watch: ‘Steadiness through slow and fast times’.
Lightbulb: ‘Reminder of our lonely star’
Phone: ‘The string of air that bonds us’

I used a Sharpie felt tip, as I felt the primary colours were inkeeping with the idea of an archetype. However, on actually trying it out I wasn’t all that keen. Ideally I wanted neatness, and the lettering style looks more gimmicky than what I had in mind.

Some of the coins work better though I think; the three with text on are the same as the other objects, with the definition instead of ‘Slice of earth passed around’. The three with images though, from top, mean:

- ‘This coin has the same value as this object pictured’
- ‘This coin is one of so many’ (the red dot amongst all the black dots)
- ‘Imagine the path of this coin over time’.

What I’m aiming for, though more like A6 than the A4 sheet seen...

Thu, 19 May 2011 04:27:00 -0400

What I’m aiming for, though more like A6 than the A4 sheet seen here.

This is another paper from Falkiners that I’ve had lying around for a while and in fact it feels far better than the Bible paper! It’s much thicker, and feels more substancial. The Bible paper feels cheap actually in comparison.

Considering that I’m only having 10 or so sheets, maybe this is a better option!

Paper choices

Thu, 19 May 2011 04:13:00 -0400

Left to right: The book paper I used for my ‘Poetry of Modern Life’ project last year, newsprint and Bible paper. The Bible paper, besides being relevant in its religious links, feels far better for what I want. It has a delicateness that matches the hazy photocopied pixels; both ideal for my urge to emphasise that the pixels have now been made physical.

Through pushing the tactility of the object (making the materials more noticeable/unusual) my hope is that the reality behind our relationship with Google is made more clear, and feels rightfully strange.

Updated blog entries

Thu, 19 May 2011 04:03:55 -0400

Have updated the following entry about previous experiments!:

http://blog.willquirk.co.uk/post/5484291745/google-as-god-book-shrine-text

Size tests. The top left two are printed 72ppi, and are set at...

Thu, 19 May 2011 02:23:00 -0400

Size tests. The top left two are printed 72ppi, and are set at 100%, and 200% scale in the print dialogue in Photoshop. The next two along and the bottom ones have been saved first for web and devices and blown up to 300%, 400% and 200% at that stage, meaning the pixels stay crisp (where they’d blurred in the top left two). The bottom three also show variations in the shade of grey that the text is in (where I’ve since tested which works best with gold pen on top: best being dark grey rather than black).