On Design

As some of you may know, I am working on a new online journal.  Myself, and the members of this project, have been sharing our favorite online journals and blogs.  Sharing these sites, we’ve been considering their content, style, and design, and trying to get a sense of what rhetorical and design strategies work in the online sphere.  It’s been an interesting process as I try to apply the critical eye to my favorite online spaces.  What do I value in a website?  What do I like to read online? How do I feel about a site’s design?
 

Design is perhaps the most unfamiliar terrain for me. I have always enjoyed the visual arts, have taken my fair share of art courses, and like to dabble in the world o’ crafts.  Yet, I find my ability to critically assess design is not quite up to speed with my ability to tear apart a student’s paper or a scholar’s book. The sticky part about assessing design, for me, is the way good design can seem both highly present and nearly invisible.  Consider the many objects around you, how often do you notice the design?  Typically, it seems we notice design when either:  1) it goes wrong and the design is flawed enough to disturb your use of the object, or 2) when the design is visually impressive or presents something ‘new.’   There seems a duality here. Design should be visually present and invisible at the same time. How is this possible, and how do we use this understanding to assess and create design in our own world?

Yesterday, I watched the documentary Helvetica on Netflix Instant, which considers the history of the font Helvetica and its impact on our contemporary sense of design. 

http://www.helveticafilm.com/images/sm.frankfurt.jpg

The film features interviews with several typographers and designers who each talk about the ways they perceive the design of Helvetica and its effect on our collective imagination.  The film features a range of responses, from designers praising the font’s “neutral,” “modern,” “efficient,” “streamlined and fresh” appearance, to others who criticize that same “slickness” and suggest that its ubiquity in the corporate world creates a conformist atmosphere in our design culture.  But, despite these contending views on Helvetica, the documentary illustrates how design “invites open interpretation,” “allowing us to attach meaning to it.”  This point shows both the possibilities and challenges of design.  How do we design for a vast range of human subjects?  How will we tailor our design to suit the meaning and purpose of our journal?  These are challenging, but exciting, questions for me as I begin to enter this new realm of digital design.

Share your thoughts on visual design. What websites do you admire for their design? Share the links! 

Review: Cindy Sherman: A Retrospective

Sherman, Cindy. Cindy Sherman: A Retrospective. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Print.

Amazon.com

Looking through a retrospective of Cindy Sherman’s work is a strange journey through the photographic history of American identity and perception.  Cindy Sherman:  A Retrospective (1997) begins with Sherman’s series of Untitled Film Stills, images she produced throughout the late 1970s.  In this series, Sherman dresses up in different outfits, makeup and wigs, and photographs herself in a variety of locales and situations.  Nearly all the photographs depict only Sherman, but seem to imply a human presence just outside the frame of the photograph.  In this unseen, but palpable, presence, there is an implied narrative action to the images.  In each image, Sherman performs the role of a film heroine, and we, as spectators, are invited to fill in the film’s narrative around the image. 

Untitled Film Still #3
moma.org

As many scholars have noted, her performances recall a cinematic history of black and white early Hollywood, film noir and B horror movies.  If a film still serves as an advertisement for the full length film, what does Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills advertise?  As art critic Arthur Danto points out, “the still must tease with the promise of a story the viewer of it itches to be told” (4).  In Untitled Film Still #3 and #50 seen here, Sherman’s gaze toward a presence out of frame suggests such a story, but leaves the viewer to construct that narrative.  Sherman plays with the viewer’s relationship to the represented female identity in each image. We are implicated by how we construct narratives around represented images of the female subject. 

Untitled Film Still #50
moma.org

In the 1980’s, Sherman continues her performance work, but along with her turn to color photography, Sherman’s images become increasingly grotesque and disquieting. 

Review: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

I recently reread Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451  and was immediately struck by the parallels to our contemporary moment.  Bradbury's novel, first published in 1953, follows the personal  transformation of Guy Montag, a fireman whose job is to set fire to houses that contain books. Set in the not-so-distant American future, the novel depicts a society that "dreads the unfamiliar" and so bans books and makes "the word 'intellectual'" into "the swear word it deserved to be" (58).  Books were not initially banned because of state censorship, but by the effects of advancements in media technology and a waning public interest in critical thinking.  As the Fire Captain Beatty explains, the decline of a book reading public coincided with mass population booms, an accelerated sense of time, and the popularization of television and film.

"Picture it. Nineteenth century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your cameras. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.

Film Review: Birth of a Party

Birth of a Party (2010) is an experiential look at the contemporary American political system from the vantage point of three aspiring political activists working to create a third party, Conservative Party USA.  Inspired by the Tea Party's emergence in American politics, these three white, middle class men attend a three day convention in New Orleans. The documentary follows their travels and attendance at the convention.  Time spent consuming a surprising amount of booze, weed, and cigarettes to a comedic effect.  Surprising and comedic perhaps because of our mainstream preconceptions of the White Conservative American Male. We expect perhaps a more straight laced type, but Birth of a Party considers its subjects, Jesse, John and Brad, not merely as 'Types,' but as human figures prone to vices, losses of faith, small triumphs and illusionary hope.   Experiences we can all relate to, our politics aside.

It is the experiential quality of Birth of a Party that delivers the real delight. You are brought into the haze of the party- in smoky hotel rooms stocked with coolers of 'Heinies,' at the formal inaugural convention that verges on the absurd, and the delirious carnival swirl of Bourbon Street. It is a film about their collective political dreams and individual realities. The film watches as their ideals and expectations meet the stark reality of how the political system operates in America.  As the director, Emile Doucette, explains,

Let’s face it, the world of politics is an insider’s club. And since most of us don’t have a clue about how to get in, or even find the door, we either fall in along strict party lines, or chalk it up as a broken political system and walk away. Some of us pull our hair out in frustration; some of us simply don’t care. But our differences aside, I think most Americans agree that our country is in serious disrepair.

Birth of a Party shows both the roadblocks and possibilities of establishing alternate political parties in the United States.  It is about individuals coming together as a group, talking about their views and hoping to find some collective sense. In that way, no matter your politics, Birth of a Party, with all its comedy and despair, sneaks up and surprises you. In a modest way, it restores my faith in the power of a small collective to enact change.  Doucette's film makes you believe that, "despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are those among us that believe our democracy works, especially when they take it into their own hands."

Criticism Online

I'm an English PhD student and I'll admit that from a financial standpoint I've chosen the wrong career path. But I did not choose it for the promise of riches, but rather for the love of ideas and art.  I do it because I love it. But, the material realities of my life demand a certain level of financial stability (gotta pay those bills). Talk of career prospects in humanities  graduate departments tends to be highly pessimistic.  Our professors encourage us further in advanced degrees, yet warn of the hard road ahead.  Few tenured teaching positions at universities, few publishers interested in converting your dissertation on medieval literature into a book, few editorial positions at scholarly print journals.  We dread the coming day of graduation with anxious thoughts about the Death of the University, the Death of the Scholar.  "No one is reading anymore!," we lament and complain, blaming the problem on a disinterested public.

Reading "Howl"

Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" :



This weekend I read The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later, a collection of essays from poets, academics, and friends of Ginsberg's who recount their initial encouter with Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl."  A common thread throughout these accounts is the immense disruption that the poem caused to readers' understanding of themselves, of America, and of poetry. Edited by Jason Shinder, the volume includes essays from Frank Bidart, Sven Birkerts, Amiri Baraka, among others, which testify to the influence of "Howl" in shaping our contemporary sense of human experience.  "Howl"  speaks to a collective experience of both American dreams of "supernatural ecstasy" and capitalist nightmares of "sexless hydrogen" "Moloch."  But, "Howl" testifies to a collective experience that is on the fringe, the edges and extremes in the barely understood realms of human experience, of "Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!"  "dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!"  "Howl" validates that "sensitive bullshit" of our bodily, affective experience, resanctifying it as "Holy! Holy! Holy!" "Howl" speaks to those "who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity."  Yet, while Ginsberg speaks to those dwelling on the misunderstood edges of 'polite' and 'normal' middle-of-the-road American society, "Howl" also assembles a new community that understands humanity via its connectivity, one bridged in the recognition of experiences and ways of being that are conventionally partitioned off in those "buildings" of "judgment,"the "invincible madhouses" and "incomprehensible prison!"

In Process

The vision

Progress and Roadblocks