stay!

STAY!!, by dr.quitti

Verweile doch refers to a quote by Goethe taken from “Faust”

Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
– which makes part of Faust’s wager with the devil.

If I should bid the moment stay, or try
To hold its fleeting beauty, …

Translation taken from this article: Passion and art: the story behind Faust in the Guardian, which also explains why Goethe cannot really be translated into English, as evident from this translation –  it cannot evoke the literal immediacy of Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! which would mean: Stay! You are so beautiful!  but using a poetic expression, not used in contemporary German. Here it makes a neon invitation to linger in front of the “Deutsches Theater in Berlin”. I don’t know, is this supposed to be art or advertising? Does it matter?

feeling good

Great music video of Nina Simone’s “Feeling good” by Tamara Conolly using just type and typographic elements in black and white.

Paul Rand

Exposition Paul Rand à Chaumont, byBureau L’Imprimante

Everything is design. Everything.
Paul Rand

A Flickr Group of Fans of designer Paul Rand is here:
PAUL RAND modern graphic design fan club

An animated hommage to Paul Rands work can be found here Paul Rand Tribute video.

All via grain edit with plenty more 1950-1970 illustrations, graphic design, typography, childrens books, album covers, you name it.

Hommage to Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana – NY, ursprünglich hochgeladen von Graham Hutchinson

 

love in lisbon by marcia devesa

 

robert indiana – love, red outside, blue inside, in Chatsworth by niinka

 

LOVE, in Madrid by mitue

 

The Opposite of Love, in Philadelphia Munguent

 

There is a current exhibition about Robert Indiana at the Museum in Wiesbaden, Germany. However, I love to see how people interact with art and go to Flickr: So many of my favourite things. Best word. Sixties pop art. Street Sculptures. Gardens. Over 1600 images tagged Robert Indiana.

Come rain, come snow, summer and winter, in the day and in the night, in the country and in the city, all over the world – LOVE prevails! :-)

more new literacies

Ein Sommer, der bleibt. Peter Kurzeck erzählt das Dorf seiner Kindheit represents a new kind of literature genre only available in the form of an audiobook, a novel which was never written down, but can be listened to in the course of five hours or four CDs; Peter Kurzek narrates stories about the village of his childhood, unscripted and spontaneous, a Zeit review of the book ahh … work in German is here.

new literacies

Literacy as a metaphor has been applied to wide set of practices, however it works better in some instances than in others. Digital practices, such as making video, should they be seen as s form of literacy or not? Burn and Durran state here that: „there are times when the literacy metaphor seems less appropriate.“ Referring to the making of videos, creating animated voices for animated or computer games characters or role playing they state „These forms and representations resemble print literacy less than they resemble traditions of oral composition and performance.” pointing to the work on Walter Ong. “The scholar of language, literacy and literature, Walter Ong, laments the demise of oral tradition as print literacy comes to dominate the cultures of developed societies, but he also argues that residues of oral culture persist, and even transmute into new forms through new technologies of communication, a phenomenon he terms‚ second orality.“

An interesting account of this is given by visual anthropologist Marcus Banks. Anthropologist Lawrence Turner had been working with the „Kayapo, a Brazilian indigenous group since the 1960s, had on various occasions facilitated access for British television crews wishing to make ethnographic film on Kayapo life.”

As a result the Kayapo eventually acquired their own video cameras in the eighties and editing facilities a few years after that and started to produce their own videos. They used video for complex purposes as documented by Turner, partially summed up here: