“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.

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.

“Where We’re From”

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.

by Arturo Carmassi via gramatologia 

“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