“The creative process is not performed by the skilled hand alone, but must be a unified process in which head, hand, and heart play a simultaneous role.” -Herbert Bayer
I cannot remember where I found this. Must be written in the tradition of Christian Morgensterns Fish’s Nightsong from 1895.
These Artist Trading Cards have been made by StephanieCake apparently using pictures from a 1960′s hairstying book and the words are from a 1930′s children’s reading primer. I have been researching reading primers and so I find these very funny.
Click here to see the animation: Merry Christmas from the Design Museum.
Many people, of course, have been aware of this for a long time, and I am not talking about conspiracy theorists. However, until recently this was never discussed in mainstream media: the fact, that real power today lies not with democratically elected politicians, but with global corporations. Here is an article regarding a recent and highly interesting study about the “the capitalist network that runs the world” published in the New Scientist.
And today Andrew Rawnsley from The Observer writes about the powerlessness of world leaders facing the economic crisis: The failure of the G20 summit has dramatically advertised the incapacity of the political elite to rise to the crisis.
Well sure, they could use the power that people have vested in them for enormous changes, if they decided to. But that would mean taking quite radical steps most politicians, I fear, are not prepared to take.
Here is a small collection of cartoons. Political cartoons, of course, are some of the most long-standing ways of using words and images combined to deliver a strong message. There is plenty more to be found in the Facebook group TRAP – The Real Art of Protest.
This one is for our son and his friends, facing difficult career choices, that is, if they have any choices, once the have left school.
“MISSING”. ”NEEDED”. “WANTED” Limited Edition Screenprints”.
I have been collecting new takes on Little Red Riding Hood for years. These posters are great fun, especially the wanted poster for Mr. B.B. Wolf! The screenprints can be bought from The Yellow House on Folksy.
TerrorDome custom creates images of people cut out from maps mounted inside a wood shadow box. What I love about the idea is that every person is cut out from a map from the place where they spent their childhood, and the exact location will always feature just above the heart of each figure. They can be ordered through Folksy, the UK based art and craft community similar to Etsy. This reminds me of other memory maps of childhood places, Sara Fanellis My Map Book, and especially of Margaret Mackey’s inspiring work on Space, Time and Literacy, as presented on UKLA conference 2010 and 2011, where she mapped out her childhood experiences tying physical places and texts. This is from her abstract:
The concept of literacy is often represented iconically in a schematic drawing of a head, a book, and perhaps a pair of hands. But literacy is always grounded, located in a particular place and time. At the same time, our literate behaviours are suspended in a network of multiple texts and other readers. Our interpretive lives are plural; the texts that we read, watch, hear, play, create, and exchange impinge on each other; we do not interpret a single text in cognitive and affective isolation from all the others that we encounter. Often we are also affected by other interpreters of the same material.
Where are we when we engage with a fiction? We enter an imaginary, interior world – a cognitive achievement we still do not fully understand. Actively or passively, we gain membership of a community, virtual and actual, of other interpreters of this text. At the same time, we remain “earthed” in the daily lives of our own senses, our own two hands and feet, our own political position and awareness. All of these factors are woven into the ultimate achievement of interpretive understanding. This presentation will offer a rich and complex two-part picture of situated literacies: a 360° portrait of a single literate child, and a broader look at the mental and physical spaces that affect contemporary literacies.
Anthropologist, philosopher and sleight-of-hand magician David Abram:
“Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!
It’s outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it’s animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.
In fact, it’s such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage — with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic.
….
I’m not trying to demonize the alphabet at all. I don’t think the alphabet is bad. What I’m trying to get people to realize is that it’s a very intense form of magic. And that it therefore needs to be used responsibly. I mean, it’s not by coincidence that the word “spell” has this double meaning — to arrange the letters in the right order to form a word, or to cast a magic. To spell a word, or to cast a magic spell. These two meanings were originally one and the same. In order to use this new technology, this new play of written shapes on the page, to learn to write and to read with the alphabet, was actually to learn a new form of magic, to exercise a new form of power in the world.
But it also meant casting a kind of spell on our own senses. Unless we recognize writing as a form of magic, then we will not take much care with it. It’s only when we recognize how profoundly it has altered our experience of nature and the rest of the sensory world, how profoundly it has altered our senses, that we can begin to use writing responsibly because we see how potent and profound an effect it has.”
from /www.scottlondon.com
by Marian Bantjes via gramatologia:
I’m all for it. Joining in on 15 October 2011.
(again I could locate the original source of the picture, sorry.)
Hey, I know, some people think Apple has turned into something of a religion, but these are good quotes. I have been using Apple products since more than 20 years – that is when a computer was more expensive than a new car and Apple Macs were produced for a tiny market. I remember the years before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, when lots of people were wondering if the company would survive at all, in a global market. Well it did. Thank you, Steve Jobs, for setting new standards in terms of marrying form and function.
Presentation by Effect Works
- not only that, I also could not find the source of the photograph.
from Reading: Gone too Far? – theory on demand.
It may be limited what ’distant reading’ (understanding literature through data aggregation) can achieve. However, creating social graphs for works of literature could be an interesting exercise for students. After all, the typical character descriptions, which have to be written for homework and in student essays can be copypasted from all over the internet. A “character graph” may lead to some interesting discussions and insights. It may help to keep track of all the characters in War and Peace too.
My grandfather (may he rest in peace) fell in love with a younger woman, back in the late 1940s, early 1950s – while being married and father of four young children. My uncle found out about this only a few years ago – through serendipity he got hold of some 40 passionate love letters, written by my grandfather to this young woman, who was well into her eighties by that time, and still heartbroken. I only learned about this a few days ago. There is something to be said for letters written with pen and paper. Is it likely that fifty, sixty years from now a family secret like this will be revealed, through the unexpected discovery of some cached facebook postings?
If you want to get in touch with people fond of analog letter writing, envelope stuffing and stamp licking go to Make Every Day a Good Mail Day.
Last year Boing Boing featured a book called The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects telling the story of W. Reginald Bray, “a stamp collector who experimented with mailing odd objects … through the Royal Mail. … Perhaps most remarkably, he posted himself, becoming the first man to send a human through the mail in 1900, and then, through registered mail, in 1903.” This idea seems to have caught on in other places, as we can see from this image posted on Flickr by the Smithsonian.
This city letter carrier posed for a humorous photograph with a young boy in his mailbag. After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples. Smithsonian Institution on Flickr via Kotke.org
Tupigrafia by Fefe Talavera via Gramatologia
Based on Jeff Brown’s Flat Stanley book illustrated by Tomi Ungerer, Dale Hubert, Grade 3 teacher in London, Ontario began the Flat Stanley Project in 1994. Flat Stanley provides the core for many literacy activities – drawing, writing, taking photos, sending letters and emails, etc. Similar to penpal activities, children send letters and flat visitors based on Flat Stanley or other characters from the Template Gallery: “it’s as if the sender and the recipient have a mutual friend, and writing becomes easier and more creative.” In 2010, Darren Haas, developed the Flat Stanley, a free app for the iPhone.
Quotables
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