NICK MATTAN & FRIENDS
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“There are almost no specialists any more, homo universalis 2.0 is in fact not just one person but several at once, linked by a network” - Mariëtte Dölle This network can enrich the design process, which is why I chose collaboration as the main focus point of my master’s project. Graphic design, like no other discipline uses, mutates and reinterprets other art forms. By collaborating with other artists/people, I wanted to graphically reconstruct different visions, visual languages, experiences and techniques. I worked with a playwright/actor, a video artist, two photo graphers, a carpenter, a DOP/director, my 100 favourite artists, a silkscreen printer and my knitting grandmother. With this multidisciplinary ‘team’ I worked on several projects, all of which evolved from or focussed on a central theme, namely Alan Turing and the computer.
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1.OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE + NICK MATTAN For this first project I used open source software, combined with the basic graphic designer's software kit; Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign. I tried to generate letters forms. I then made a poster with the ‘results’ of this research. The aim was not to make clear-cut nor finalized fonts, but rather to experiment and to expand my toolbox with free software that wasn’t necessarily created for making fonts.
2.MY 100 FAVORITE DESIGNERS, ILLUSTRATORS, PHOTOGRAHPERS, ARTISTS + NICK MATTAN Since the dawn of ‘the computer’, I believe we all have in some way become pirates. We all consume images, news, music, art and culture that we didn’t create ourselves. But where would a pirate be without a flag? I contacted my 100 favourite artists and asked them for a spontaneous visual response to that statement. I then used their responses to create ‘our’ flag.
3.ANGELE POLFLIET + NICK MATTAN Struck by Turing's sad love story, my grandmother and I decided in an impulsive moment of nostalgia to knit the man a sweater. The quote on the sweater refers to Turing's favourite movie: Snowwhite and it's iconic song "Someday my prince will come".
4.THOMAS VAN DE WATER + TIEMEN VAN HAVER + NICK MATTAN Thomas introduced me to the world of African and Indian studio photography. Concepts of realism, that in Europe derived from a painted portrait tradition, are markedly different in Africa and India. There they are linked to different conventions in textiles, sculpture, objects and proverbs. For instance, textiles or wellknown patterns referring to proverbs or celebrating certain events, functioned as integral subtexts within photographs. Thomas and I decided to interpret this tradition, with Turing’s life as inspiration.
5.GEOFFREY TOLARO + NICK MATTAN For a designer, I am pretty clumsy. So Geoffrey challenged me to make a 3D computer related object out of cardboard. It seemed fitting to create a smiley, since it involves going from a 3D emotion to a 2D emoticon and bringing it back to a larger than life smile. This project resulted in a gif animation in which our smileyman is shown at different locations.
6.DAVID WILLIAMSON + ANGELO TIJSSENS + NICK MATTAN Not only did Turing invent the computer, he also created the first artwork with it. His love letter generator, a machine that created sentimental love poems, was his way of mocking human love. With David's background in scenography and his love for TL lights in mind, we agreed on making a luminous poster. We found TL's that matched A4 dimensions. For the text, Angelo wrote the most corny, emotional love poem he could muster.
7.ALEXANDRA VERHAEST + ANGELO TIJSSENS + NICK MATTAN Inspired by Turing’s vision on artificial intelligence, we thought it would be fun to make a digital, talking ‘Turing’. This Turing could then, like a guide in a museum, guide the viewer through important and deciding moments of his life. The result was an Ipad application.
8.WALTER SIEMONS + NICK MATTAN Walter and I discovered that researchers have came up with evidence confirming Turing’s theory of how biological patterns such as tiger stripes or leopard spots are formed. We made a graphic interpretation of this theory using Turing’s handwriting and screen printed the result.
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Alan Turing was born at Paddington, London. His father, Julius Mathison Turing, was a British member of the Indian Civil Service and he was often abroad. Alan's mother, Ethel Sara Stoney, was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras railways and Alan's parents had met and married in India. When Alan was about one year old his mother rejoined her husband in India, leaving Alan in England with friends of the family. Turing became a towering figure in a generation of truly great mathematicians, Turing was an authentic Cambridge eccentric, a shy but committed freethinker. He was by nature a solitary person, but proved to be a great patriot when he helped England and its allies crack German codes during World War II. Turing was, in fact, a perfect example of how both sides in the conflict harnessed the greatest minds of their generation to do both basic and applied research for the war effort. For his brilliant code breaking, Turing won the Order of the British Empire in 1945. Written just before the war, Turing's master thesis, 'on Computable Numbers', was his greatest contribution to computer science. In it, he proposed the questions that still remain central to the discipline decades later. Turing suggested that it should be possible to make a 'Universal Machine', a computer that could simulate the performance of any other device. The fact that the analog machines of the late 1930s and early 1940s were far too slow to function as Universal Turing Machines did not affect his faith that such devices would come into existence. And with the stimulus of the war effort, they did. Within a decade, Turing was working on the Manchester Mark I computer - one of the first machines recognized as being a direct antecedent to the computers we use now. Turing proposed a universal machine that functioned as a stored computer program; in this setup, the programs, or software could be swapped and modified, improved and abondoned, just as hardware could and would be. But in combination, hardware and software have become ever-more adept at stimulating other machines. In Turing's work we see the origin of a dream: a quest for universality and creative potential, a founding paper on simulation. Yet Turing was also involved in spreading the use of the machine beyond the technical fraternity.
He assisted Christopher Stratchey in producing what was probably the first artwork made with a computer: the love letter generator of 1952. Stratchey working from a thousand-line piece of software (the longest yet written for the Mark I), created a program that randomly produced such sentimental and vaguely meaningless missives as: Darling Sweatheart, You are my avid fellow feeling, My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully M.U.C.
*Lunefeld Peter, the secret war between uploading and downloading, tales of the computer als culture machine, Londen: The Mit Press, 2011
Here, the Universal Turing Machine stimulates mawkish Victorian sentimentality by choosing from a database of prewritten phrases that it then arranges into syntactically correct but stilted English. The love letter generator's intentional blurring of the boundary between human and nonhuman is directly related to one of the foundational memes of artificial intelligence: the still-provocative Turing Test. In 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', a siminal paper from 1950, Turing created a thought experiment. He posited a person holding a textual conversation on any topic with an unseen correspondent. If the person believes he or she is communicating with another person, but is in reality conversing with a machine, then that machine has passed the Turing test. In other words, the test that Turing proposes that a computer must pass to be considered 'intelligent' is to simulate the conversational skills of another person. Turing was not able to persue these ideas much further because the same government that was happy to tolerate his eccentricities and use his talents to decipher enemy communications prosecuted him after the war for his homosexuality -still a crime in England at the time- and put him on estrogen treatments, then thougth to reduce the effects of the 'perversion'. Turing died in 1954, his death ruled a suicide, but with a complication so heartbreaking that it bears repeating. Turing's favorite movie was Disney's Snow White, and he died from eating a apple poisoned with cyanide. He left no note.*
MASTER RESEARCH BLOG HTTP://DIALMFORMONKEY.TUMBLR.COM/
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OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE + NICK MATTAN
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For this first project I used open source software, combined with the basic graphic designer's software kit; Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign. I tried to generate letters forms. I then made a poster with the ‘results’ of this research. The aim was not to make clear-cut nor finalized fonts, but rather to experiment and to expand my toolbox with free software that wasn’t necessarily created for making fonts.
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A/C/M/U MADE WITH DMESH, DMESH is custom software that analyzes an image and generate triangle meshes with points. B/G/J/I/O/V/Z MADE WITH INKSCAPE Inkscape is an open source 2d vector graphics editor. D/E/F/I/K/N/P/Q/R/S/T/W/X//Y MADE WITH SCRIPTOGRAPHER, Scriptographer is a open source scripting plugin that allows the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones.
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MY 100 FAVORITE ARTISTS PHOTOGRAPHERS, DESIGNERS, ILLUSTRATORS,... + NICK MATTAN
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Since the dawn of ‘the computer’, I believe we have all in some way become pirates. We all consume images, news, music, art and culture that we didn’t create ourselves. But where would a pirate be without a flag? I contacted my 100 favourite artists and asked them for a spontaneous visual response to that statement. I then used their responses to create ‘our’ flag.
MAILINGLIST
aimee.brodeur@gmail.com mail@helmutsmits.nl info@ejhauser.org rr@newrafael.com owen@owenrichards.co.uk studio@andydenzler.com tim@timenthoven.nl hikarusaru@gmail.com info@artofdala.com andrewlewicki@gmail.com jonklassen@gmail.com odile@gneborg.org kim@holtermand.dk atelier@dreibholz.com contact@a--s.ch hello@moire.ch email@BCMH.CO.UK info@danny-osborne.co.uk mail@barbarahennequin.nl info@villagegreenstudio.com contact@tsto.org michiel@ixopusada.com dirk@studio-laucke-siebein.com
xavier@xavierbarrade.com james@yo-hello.com info@typefabric.ch info@iristarraga.com chirnside.sam@hotmail.com a@aes.info hello@emmi.co.uk
hello@mynameismelvin.co.uk mrchristianbrandt@gmail.com hola@andresrequena.es lea@pirol.org mail@klat.info mail@jonaswilliamsson.com info@dentdeleone.co.nz jackhenriefisher@gmail.com ronny.duquenne@hogent.be guillaumevallaeys@gmail.com joris.dockx@gmail.com hello@thisiscatalogue.co.uk vanessawlam@gmail.com hello@scottlanger.com job@letman.com studio@thisisforest.com daniel@metahaven.net info@animalbandido.com
un petitmot@benbenworld.com
hugo@visionandfactory.com welcome@a-is-a.name poke@mmmmmm.fr studio@drawswords.com bg@benditagloria.com angeline@aapoint.com ohrats@zutalorsinc.com
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fanettemellier@free.fr info@sagmeister.com dcarson888@gmail.com andreasmeinich@gmail.com b.w.schumacher@gmail.com jaakkopallasvuo@gmail.com elizabeth.corkery@gmail.com linuskraemer@gmail.com steve@thekunstkammer.com info@benbogeorge.co.uk info@seripop.com info@cloaca.be hello@chateau-vacant.com neal@nealfletcher.co.uk w(at)alexwdujet.net info@marcelhaeusler.de mail@jlindstroem.com
mail@supercomputeratstudio.com
hello@patrickfry.co.uk mail@hellowman.nl info@eyebodega.com bonjour@romainandre.com studio@jameslangdonwork.net kevin@WillWorkforGood.org bonjour@aude-debout.fr michael@wesawthat.org
info@bfreeone.com thomas@olaf.ch hello@tillwiedeck.com dougstewart89@gmail.com hello@florencebamberger.com leslie@leslie-david.com martinmartonen@gmail.com info@morganstudio.co.uk info@anymadestudio.com shindohko@gmail.com moreytalmor@gmail.com madhav@magicbusstudio.com bmetcalf@mica.edu info@ritator.se hello@MrPataki.com martaniedbal@gmail.com hi.travisstearns@gmail.com vdkoning@gmail.com nicole@nylondip.com thiery.camille@gmail.fr
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ANGELA POLFLIET GRANDMOTHER + NICK MATTAN
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Struck by Turing's sad love story, my grandmother and I, decided in an impulsive nostalgic moment to knit the man a sweater. The quote on the sweater refers to Turing's favourite movie: Snowwhite and it's iconic song "Someday my prince will come".
Some day my prince will come Some day we'll meet again And away to his castle we'll go To be happy forever I know Some day when spring is here We'll find our love anew And the birds will sing And wedding bells will ring Some day when my dreams come true
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THOMAS VAN DE WATER PHOTOGRAPHER + TIEMEN VAN HAVER ACTOR + NICK MATTAN
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Thomas introduced me to the world of African and Indian studio photoÂgraphy. Concepts of realism, that in Europe derived from a painted portrait tradition, are marked differently in Africa and India. There they are linked to different conventions in textiles, sculpture, objects and proverbs. For instance, textiles or wellknown patterns referring to proverbs or celebrating certain events, functioned as integral subtexts within photographs. Thomas and I decided to interpret this tradition, with Turing’s life as inspiration.
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When the earth turns, in one way, and I run, in another direction, we're complemantary. We're life long friends.
If everything is here, there is nothing left there. That's why we must protect what is ours. And everything is ours if we want to.
When I break the tender peel, for that last taste, my breath will still, my blood congeal. But do not speak of fair Lands.
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When CM drank the wrong milk, on the wrong day, God's right to excist evaporated.
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One day my prince will come. One day my prince will stay. One day, on this side or another.
I can be here and you can be there and we can still be us. We can always be us, if we want to.
Honey, Dear, Affection, Beauty, Love, Adoration, Fellow, Feeling, Lovesick adoration, Cherry, Yours, Mine, Ours, Honey, Honey, Honey, Dear.
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Animals’ stripes and spots are caused by the interaction of a pair of chemicals. That's obvious. We can destroy continents if we like, with chemicals. But still, nobody can explain love.
Sansevieria hyacinthoides, Chhatrapur, Orissa, British India.
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GEOFFREY TOLARO PHOTOGRAPHER + NICK MATTAN
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For a designer, I am pretty clumsy. So Geoffrey challenged me to make a 3D computer related object out of cardboard. It seemed fitting to create a smiley, since it involves going from a 3D emotion to a 2D emoticon and bringing it back to a larger than life smile. This project resulted in a gif animation in which our smileyman is shown at different locations.
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DAVID WILLIAMSON DOP/ DIRECTOR + ANGELO TIJSSENS PLAYWRIGHT/ACTOR + NICK MATTAN
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Not only did Turing invent the computer, he also created the first artwork with it. His love letter generator, a machine that created sentimental love poems, was his way of mocking human love. With David's background in scenography and his love for TL lights in mind, we agreed on making a luminous poster. We found TL's that matched A4 dimensions. For the text, Angelo wrote the most corny, emotional love poem he could muster.
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ALEXANDRA VERHAEST VIDEO/PHOTO ARTIST + ANGELO TIJSSENS PLAYWRIGHT + NICK MATTAN
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Inspired by Turing’s vision on artificial intelligence, we thought it would be fun to make a digital, talking ‘Turing’. This Turing could then, like a guide in a museum, guide the viewer through important and deciding moments of his life. The result was an Ipad application.
TURING TALKING TURING
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TURING TALKING TURING
TURING TALKING TURING
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WALTER SIEMONS SILK SCREEN PRINTER + NICK MATTAN
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Walter and I discovered that researchers have came up with the evidence confirming Turing’s theory of how biological patterns such as tiger stripes or leopard spots are formed. We made a graphic interpretation of this theory using Turing’s handwriting and screen printed the result.
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