Museum of Art and Design (MAD)

We went to the MAD on friday evening, 'pay what you wish' night, and we only wished to pay a few dollars each so saved a lot of money there! There was 4 floors altogether:

Random floor - can't find the name of this exhibition, it might have been a permanant collection. Quite a mix of things, mainly 3d like furniture and objects. Here's just a few things that caught my eye!

Bobby Silverman - stacked bowls with vase
Jin- Sook So - Steel mesh

Kondo Takahiro - Blue Mist Object

Ghost Stories

On the first floor there was an exhibition called Ghost Stories by Nendo designs. The main space was completely white with just these wooden chairs dotted around. They appeared to be floating as their white legs disappeared into the floor.

Then there were these strange bubble type things that looked like they were pockets of material blown up, but were actually hard material. I liked the fabric texture and look to them, they were very delicate and the lighting made them kind of beautiful.

Slash - Paper under the knife

Upstairs the main event across two floors was the Slash exhibition - every artist and every technique you can imagine ever applied to paper. Some of these things were truly incredible, I really appreciate detail and when it is painstakingly obvious how long and how much skill went into a particular piece of work, so I wasn't disappointed.

Adam Fowler, 74 layers. This was one of my favourite pieces. I liked it because it was more original than some of the others, the depth and detail to it amazed me.

A large scale piece by Andrew Scott Ross with tiny cut out men and animals like a secret world!

Ariana Boussard Reifel - Between the lines. Another one of my favourites, this book started life as a violent and racist white supremacist book.

Georgia Russell - The story of Art

Beatrice Coron

Brian Dettmer

Rob Ryan - Can we, shall we. Possibly one of the most famous paper cut out artists, it was really different to see his work in real life it was so fragile I was worried about it ripping just looking at it!

Carole Kunstadt

Chris Gilmour - Triumph of good and evil

Daniel Alcarla

Dylan Graham

Ed Pien - Night Gathering

Beatrice Coron - Heaven and Hell. The 'Hell' piece was on the lower floor against a tall window, then directly above it on the floor above was the 'Heaven' piece. Nicely exhibited!

Jane South - Wall

Judy Pfaff - Bougue Lusa

Kako Ueda

Mia Pearlman - Inrush

Sue Blackwell - Rapunzel

Tom Gallant - Rose window

This would have been a great exhibition for anyone now doing the paper brief. Personally paper playing is not really my thing, and I do find a lot of these artists a bit repetitive and indistinguishable from each other, but every so often there was one that blew me away so it was a good exhibition over all!

The Neue gallery

The puling factor to this gallery was the Klimt work on display - One of my favourite artists of all time, and ever since I missed the exhibition in Liverpool I have been desperate to see some of his work for real. There was some other stuff along the way, including some nice posters and drawings we saw.

Berthold Loffler - Poster for the art show Vienna

Klimt - 1st Succession poster.

Berthold Loffler

Erich Heckel - White horses

Lyonel Feininger - I never heard of this artist before but his work has a really beautiful aesthetic and style to it.

Koloman Moser

Otto Mueller - I was strangely drawn to these drawings by Mueller, I don't know why but I really liked them.

Max Openheimer - I loved these paintings as well, very unique and quirky style to his portraits.

Leopold Stolba

Aah the Klimt - Adele. Seeing it in real life was better than I expected. The colours were a lot duller over the years than any of the prints you see, including this photograph, I guess they are always enhancing them. It also looked completly different, I always think of Klimt's paintings as kind of flat, as though the people have been rollered over or something, but only when I stood back from it and it was so big did I notice the fact she is meant to be sitting in an arm chair - I just saw it as pattern surrounding her before!

The Dancer

It was a shame that there was only two of Klimt's famous paintings up, I was hoping there would be more, but there was also loads of drawings and sketches he did which were really beautiful. You could see similar shapes and poses coming out in them as ended up in the paintings. Unfortunately we couldn't take pics and I can't find any online!

Alfred Kubin - Beautiful, but never the less, quite disturbing drawings.

Cooper-Hewitt museum

Two exhibitions here as well:

Design for a living world

Ten leading designers have been commissioned to develop new uses for sustainably grown and harvested materials in order to tell a unique story about the life-cycle of materials and the power of conservation and design.

What I particularly liked about this exhibition was the layout/set up of it. All through the space giant photographs were printed on these recyclable steel sheets, all hung from wooden frames across the walls to create a large montage. Printing on the metal gave them a really gorgeous texture and sheen. It was nicely lit too.

Ezri Tarazi

Christian Meindertsma - sheeps wool

I also learnt a lot of random facts such as:

Bamboo produces more oxygen than trees, it can grow up to 50m tall, as fast as a meter a day, and it regenerates itself so you never have to replant it! I thought that was pretty amazing, when I have my own garden i'm going to have some bamboo in it!

You can make leather out of any kind of skin - and salmon leather is really good apparently. I have no idea why I didn't know this before, maybe just never thought about it. You could make human leather...

Design USA: Contemporary Innovation

'Not everything is design, but design is everything'

I havn't found much work that was actually on display in this exhibition online, but I scribbled down a lot of names and have been looking them up. Here's what I discovered:

Orla Kiely

Designer Chip Kidd lives in New York. I hadn't heard of him before but found this website about him. He designs a lot of book covers and some quite nice ones too.

http://www.goodisdead.com/index.php?/work/

Micheal Bieurut - A designer who works at Pentagram. Above are some poster's he designed for Yale University. He also wrote a book I wanted called '79 short essays on design' which I'm still hoping I can find in the library!

Photographer - Josef Astor. His photographs have a big surreal element in them. I love fashion photography, think the two arts go so well together, but so often, especially in magazines and advertising, it is so generic and boring. Why can't magazines be full of amazing concepts and art direction in their advertising as this!

http://www.art-dept.com/artists/astor/

I not only discovered one, but two great photographers at this exhibition, both who have done some amazing fashion stuff - below is also Ruven Afandor.

http://www.art-dept.com/artists/afanador/

'Liquid architecture' - Ned Kahn - wind silos.

''Covered with 80,000 small aluminum panels that are hinged to move freely in the wind. Viewed from the outside, the entire wall of the building appears to move in the wind and creates the impression of waves in a field of metallic grass. Inside the building, intricate patterns of light and shadow, similar to the way light filters through the leaves of trees, are projected onto the walls and floor as sunlight passes through this kinetic membrane.''

I like architecture as much as the next person - I appreciate it but it's not something I really look out for. This building amazed me though - just the description of the website of it is magical, imagine what the real thing would be like. All Kahn's work seems to be inspired by the natural elements, he creates buildings that mimic, reflect and interact with the very beauty of it.

http://nedkahn.com/portfolio.html

Bill Moggridge - Pioneer of interaction design, designed the first lap top computer.

Stephan Sagmeister:

Have seen this work so many times, but never for real so thought I'd put it in!

Milton Glaser:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/milton_glaser_on_using_design_to_make_ideas_new.html

In the exhibition, some of the artists on display were linked to videos and extra information you could get from an ipod (which were free to take round with you). This interview of Milton Glaser was especially inspiring.

''Social commentry is part of the process of design. If you have the ability to transmitt messages, then they should do no harm''

''If you lose your capacity for astonishment - that is terrible''

3rd year...

... is like an emotional roller coaster already... day to day, hour to hour even, I go from calm, its ok Ive done lots of work and some of it's good to OMG I havn't done anything, I don't know what I'm doing, this is rubbish.

I can't wait to leave uni it'l be great to finally be out of education and getting on with my life Vs SHIT what the hell am I going to do EVER?

I know what will help, go on my blog and write another essay, that'll take up some time and I can pretend to myself I'm doing work.

eek!

poster

Tutorial 24.11.09 - Competiton brief

Unfortunately I was still at the research stage yesterday in the tutorial. I've been trying madly to catch up this week but there is so much to do. Still, I thought I was wasting time researching but we chatted it over in the tutorial it helped me to sum up what I'd found and now I'm moving onto the ideas stage. Since I've been getting stuck into this brief I realise it is a much bigger challenge than I previously thought and actually the research that I've done was a vital starting point in order to come up with an idea that actually works, even if it's taken me a bit longer than it should have done. The age group of 13-16 is so difficult to reach and so varied that I don't even really know where to begin!

To sum up my research, the main things I'm going to work to and include in my ideas are:

1. I want it to be a positive message - not shock or negative consequences, but something young people can aspire to, offering an alternative to drinking.

2. Although I want the campaign to be partly informative, this is covered else where in the government campaign and information about alcohol can be found if they're pointed in the right way, so my main message is that it's ok not to drink, there are other ways to have fun, and it is ok to talk to people about drinking.

3. I want the tone of voice to be quite light hearted, not 'authoritative', but coming from someone young people aspire to.

4. I want to use ambient/guerilla or non traditional media, or a mixture of both to really connect to young people and interupt their daily lives.

So now all I need to do is hit upon the idea!

Tutorial 24.11.09 - silence round up

Yesterday we had our weekly tutor group with Liz. Because we missed last week as Liz and I were both helping out with UCAS in London, we spent the first half recapping the silence brief.

My review was in the morning before we flew to New York in the evening. As soon as we got back I went home for the weekend and spent most of the time working on my essay, then as soon as I got back to manchester I went of to London to work at the UCAS fair for a few days. So really I felt like I'd had two weeks off and not got very far at all with anything, especially silence. At the weekend I had looked through my silence work for the first time in what felt like ages to try to re-evaluate where I was and what I needed to do and I totally began to freak out and worry that my moving image piece wasn't going to round up everything I'd done, worrying that I had bits of work that I wanted to include that just wouldn't fit into it.

A good chat with Helen and Liz got me back on track again though. I calmed down and realised that I don't have to include every little reference to what I've done and that my moving image piece will be contextualised to my work if I do it properly. I also finally got it clear in my head that I, personally, need to contextualise my work. I find it really difficult to just go off and do something for the sake of it just to see what happens if there is absolutely no link to my idea and work. This doesn't mean I can't experiment and push boundaries, but I need everything to be done for a reason otherwise I don't feel there is any point to producing it.

So, I decided with Liz that my plan of action is to brainstorm some narratives that can tie my work together into a moving image piece and begin to draw storyboards up. On Thursday I am going to see Gary about equipment and technical stuff, and then it'l just be a matter of a day in the studio filming. I know I have a lot of work to do to make this work, but it's manageble and I feel a lot better now I've got a definite plan!

Advertising is dead - Long live advertising

This is a really great book of alternative advertising campaigns that I've been looking at for my alcohol awarenedd brief. There's also some amazing amnesty international stuff in there too that I didn't find on the internet. Most of the campaigns I can't find on the internet so it's well worth looking through the book.

Some other inspirations

Most of the adverts I looked at before I didn't think were very successful so here's some stuff that I really like.

Frank anti-drugs adverts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LnA-xCz5U8

I really like the whole idea/campaign of these adverts. I think the tone of voice is perfect, the visuals are shocking but the sarcastic humour keeps you watching. There's more of a harsh reality to the advert. The use of David Mitchell in the voice over is a great choice - Young people recognise the voice and humour and his celebrity status is right - doesn't feel like he's preaching. I don't think this advert would have any effect on young people who heavily use drugs already, but I do think impressionable people who are thinking about it/worried about it/hanging round with people doing them would feel that Frank is somewhere they can get information and someone to talk to.

The 'Your eyes will give you away' Drug Driving campaign is also something I really like. I think a lot of young people are much more likely to drive when stoned than drunk - it impairs you in different ways and I think people think they will still be competent drivers. This advert is a very good incite into the minds of someone one who has taken drugs and their behaviour. They're not saying don't drug drive because you might kill someone, have an accident, end up dead. People don't think that will happen. They're saying don't drug drive because the police will be able to tell and you will get pulled over. This is a much bigger and more real consequence for most people. I think especially when this is viewed sober it would have memorable effect next time you think of getting in a car stoned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAevpklHrfg&feature=PlayList&p=4C75A5BC1B09E93D&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=2

This Drink Drive advert is also nicely done. It's a great simple way to highlight the chain of events that can take off if you get caught drink driving. I think a key point about the adverts that work is that they don't just try to shock, they focus on real consequences that people can really relate to, not minority, far fetched tragedies that people find easy to ignore because they just don't believe it applies to them.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQtTREndJKk

Alcohol Awareness Campaign

I saw this in a book of ambient advertising over summer and it's one of the best campaigns I'd seen in a long while. I just remembered it now I'm looking at the Alcohol brief. It is soo simple, but I bet for the women who found it in their drinks this has probably changed their behaviour completely. Sometimes with tricky and sensitive subjects such as date rape, the police campaign last year and now binge drinking it is almost impossible to get people to listen to a message, no matter how well executed or designed, when they don't think it will happen to them. Once bitten, twice shy though - this is what it takes to get people to realise that these serious issues can, do and will effect them if they do not change their behaviour.

Looking at the alcohol brief this weekend, I have realised just how difficult it is. I have come up with a few ideas, though nothing I think I'm going to go with yet, but it's a big battle between advertising and design for me. Virals and information packs and talks and social media are the solutions to the problems they want solving, but these are not things that I feel I can produce on this course or things that are going to look right in my portfolio. So I feel like I'm in a complete dilemma about how to start!