Research - 12 Articles

thesis research articles by wikipedia for katie deangelis sept 19 @ 12:10pm

(i still dont know what i am doing)

contents page page page page page page page page page page page page

5 yves klein “the void” 11 japanese ma (negative space) 15 visual perception 21 tokyo population 29 horror vacui 33 friedrich nietzsche 37 emptiness 43 the color white 49 french surrealist “un chien andalou” 55 helvetica 59 typeface 65 “light and space” by doug wheeler

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“the void” yves klein Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art.

He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau realisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to, and as a forerunner of, Minimal art, as well as Pop art.

Klein was born in Nice, in the Alpes-Maritimes department of France. His parents, Fred Klein and Marie Raymond, were both painters. His father painted in a loose Post-Impressionist style, while his mother was a leading figure in Art informel, and held regular soirees with other leading practitioners of this Parisian abstract movement.

From 1942 to 1946, Klein studied at the Ecole Nationale de la Marine Marchande and the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales and began practicing judo. At this time, he became friends with Arman (Armand Fernandez) and Claude Pascal and started to paint. At the age of nineteen, Klein and his friends lay on a beach in the south of France, and divided the world between themselves; Arman chose the earth, Pascal, words, while Klein chose the ethereal space surrounding the planet, which he then proceeded to sign: “ With this famous symbolic gesture of signing the sky, Klein had foreseen, as in a reverie, the thrust of his art from that time onwards—a quest to reach the far side of the infinite. “ Between 1947 and 1948, Klein conceived his Monotone Symphony (1949, formally Monotone Silence Symphony) that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence– a precedent to both La Monte Young’s drone music and John Cage’s 4’33”. During the years 1948 to 1952, he traveled to Italy, Great Britain, Spain, and Japan.

In Japan, at the age of 25, he became a master at judo receiving the rank of yodan (4th dan/degree black-belt) from

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the Kodokan, which at that time was a remarkable achievement for a westerner. He also stayed in Japan in 1953. Klein later wrote a book on Judo called Les Fondements du judo.

In 1954, Klein settled permanently in Paris and began in earnest to establish himself in the art world. “the void” For his next exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery (April 1958), Klein chose to show nothing whatsoever, called La specialisation de la sensibilite e l’etat matiere premiere en sensibilite picturale stabilisee, Le Vide (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void): he removed everything in the gallery space except a large cabinet, painted every surface white, and then staged an elaborate entrance procedure for the opening night; The gallery’s window was painted blue, and a blue curtain was hung in the entrance lobby, accompanied by republican guards and blue cocktails. Thanks to an enormous publicity drive, 3,000 people queued up, waiting to be let into an empty room.

The art historian Olivier Berggruen situates Klein “as one who strove for total liberation,” forming connections between perverse ritual and a disdain of convention. Klein had studied judo in Japan between 1952 and 1954, and also displayed an interest in Zen Buddhism. According to Berggruen, he used ritual as a means not to attain belief, but rather as a forum through which to reach abstraction - transcending worldly vestiges temporarily, and returning to earth as a new being. “ Recently my work with color has led me, in spite of myself, to search little by little, with some assistance (from the observer, from the translator), for the realization of matter,

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and I have decided to end the battle. My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner, in my next Parisian exhibition at Iris Clert’s. ” Later in the year, he was invited to decorate the Gelsenkirchen Opera House, Germany, with a series of vast blue murals, the largest of which were 20 metres by 7 metres. The Opera House was inaugurated in December 1959. Klein celebrated the commission by travelling to Cascia, Italy, to place an ex-voto offering at the Saint Rita Monastery. “May all that emerges from me be beautiful,” he prayed. The offering took the form of a small transparent plastic box containing three compartments; one filled with IKB pigment, one filled with pink pigment, and one with gold leaf inside. The container was only rediscovered in 1980.

Klein’s last two exhibitions at Iris Clert’s were Vitesse Pure et Stabilite Monochrome (Sheer Speed and Monochrome Stability), November 1958, a collaboration with Jean Tinguely, of kinetic sculptures, and Bas-Reliefs dans une Foret d’Eponges (Bas-Reliefs in a Sponge Forest), June 1959, a collection of sponges that Klein had used to paint IKB canvases, mounted on steel rods and set in rocks that he’d found in his parents’ garden.

Anthropometries Despite the IKB paintings being uniformly coloured, Klein experimented with various methods of applying the paint; firstly different rollers and then later sponges, created a series of varied surfaces. This experimentalism would lead to a number of works Klein made using naked female models covered in blue paint and dragged across or laid upon canvases to make the image, using the models as “living brushes”.

This type of work he called Anthropometry. Other paintings in this method of production include “recordings” of rain that Klein made by driving around in the rain at 70 miles per hour with a canvas tied to the roof of his car, and canvases with patterns of soot created by scorching the canvas with gas burners.

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Klein and Arman were continually involved with each other creatively, both as Nouveaux Realistes and as friends. Both from Nice, the two worked together for many years and Arman even named his son, Yves Arman after Yves Klein who was his god-father.

Sometimes the creation of these paintings was turned into a kind of performance art—an event in 1960, for example, had an audience dressed in formal evening wear watching the models go about their task while an instrumental ensemble played Klein’s 1949 The Monotone Symphony (a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence).

In the performance piece, Zone de Sensibilite Picturale Immaterielle (Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility) 1959– 62, he offered empty spaces in the city in exchange for gold. He wanted his buyers to experience The Void by selling them empty space. In his view this experience could only be paid for in the purest material: gold. In exchange, he gave a certificate of ownership to the buyer. As the second part of the piece, performed on the Seine with an Art critic in attendance, if the buyer agreed to set fire to the certificate, Klein would throw half the gold into the river, in order to restore the “natural order” that he had unbalanced by selling the empty space (that was now not “empty” anymore). He used the other half of the gold to create a series of gold-leafed works, which, along with a series of pink monochromes, began to augment his blue monochromes toward the end of his life.

Aero works Klein is also well known for a photomontage, Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void), originally published in the artist’s

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book Dimanche, which apparently shows him jumping off a wall, arms outstretched, towards the pavement. Klein used the photograph as evidence of his ability to undertake unaided lunar travel. In fact, “Saut dans le vide”, published as part of a broadside on the part of Klein (the “artist of space”) denouncing NASA’s own lunar expeditions as hubris and folly, was a photomontage in which the large tarpaulin Klein leaped onto was removed from the final image.

Klein’s work revolved around a Zen-influenced concept he came to describe as “le Vide” (the Void). Klein’s Void is a nirvana-like state that is void of worldly influences; a neutral zone where one is inspired to pay attention to one’s own sensibilities, and to “reality” as opposed to “representation”.

Klein presented his work in forms that were recognized as art—paintings, a book, a musical composition—but then would take away the expected content of that form (paintings without pictures, a book without words, a musical composition without in fact composition) leaving only a shell, as it were. In this way he tried to create for the audience his “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility”. Instead of representing objects in a subjective, artistic way, Klein wanted his subjects to be represented by their imprint: the image of their absence. Klein’s work strongly refers to a theoretical/arthistorical context as well as to philosophy/metaphysics and with his work he aimed to combine these. He tried to make his audience experience a state where an idea could simultaneously be “felt” as well as “understood”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Klein

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Ma (negative space) japanese Ma is a Japanese word which can be roughly translated as “gap”, “space”, “pause” or “the space between two structural parts.” The spatial concept is experienced progressively through intervals of spatial designation. In Japanese, ma, the word for space, suggests interval. It is best described as a consciousness of place, not in the sense of an enclosed three-dimensional entity, but rather the simultaneous awareness of form and non-form deriving from an intensification of vision.

Ma is not something that is created by compositional elements; it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements. Therefore, ma can be defined as experiential place understood with emphasis on interval.

Among English loanwords of Japanese origin, both Ma (negative space) and Ken (architecture) are written with the same character.

This Japanese kanji “Chinese character” graphically combines “door” and “sun”. The earlier variant character was written with “moon” rather than “sun”, depicting “A door through the crevice of which the moonshine peeps in”.

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The diverse Japanese pronunciations of include on’yomi Sino-Chinese readings (from jian or “room; between; gap; interval”) of kan “interval; space; between; among; discord; favorable opportunity” or ken “six feet”; and kun’yomi native Japanese readings of ai “interval; between; medium; crossbred”, aida or awai “space; interval; gap; between; among; midway; on the way; distance; time; period; relationship”, or ma “space; room; interval; pause; rest (in music); time; a while; leisure; luck; timing; harmony”.

In his 2001 book The Art of Looking Sideways, Alan Fletcher discusses the importance of exemplifying “space” as a substance: “ Space is substance. Cezanne painted and modelled space.

Giacometti sculpted by “taking the fat off space”. Mallarme conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses... Isaac Stern described music as “that little bit between each note - silences which give the form”... The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission. “ Place is the product of lived space and lived time, a reflection of our states of mind and heart. In the original Chinese, the above poem ends with the character, which in Japanese is pronounced chiefly as ma. A blank surface of sand in front of a Buddhist temple or an empty sheet of white paper in Zen painting is not enough to trigger this insight. Architecture, gardening, painting or poetry, that is, some highly sophisticated setting of form and non-form, is necessary to “experience” the void in the above sense. Only a poet can put this paradox into words:

I dived down into the depth of the ocean of forms, hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_(negative_space)

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visual perception see also [sight] Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment by processing information that is contained in visible light. The resulting perception is also known as eyesight, sight, or vision (adjectival form: visual, optical, or ocular). The various physiological components involved in vision are referred to collectively as the visual system, and are the focus of much research in Linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and molecular biology, collectively referred to as vision science.

Visual System The visual system in animals allows individuals to assimilate information from their surroundings. The act of seeing starts when the cornea and then the lens of the eye focuses an image of its surroundings onto a light-sensitive membrane in the back of the eye, called the retina. The retina is actually

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part of the brain that is isolated to serve as a transducer for the conversion of patterns of light into neuronal signals. The lens of the eye focuses light on the photoreceptive cells of the retina, also known as the rods and cones, which detect the photons of light and respond by producing neural impulses. These signals are processed in a hierarchical fashion by different parts of the brain, from the retina upstream to central ganglia in the brain.

Note that up until now much of the above paragraph could apply to octopi, mollusks, worms, insects and things more primitive; anything with a more concentrated nervous system and better eyes than say a jellyfish. However, the following applies to mammals generally and birds (in modified form): The retina in these more complex animals sends fibers (the optic nerve) to the lateral geniculate nucleus, to the primary and secondary visual cortex of the brain. Signals from the retina can also travel directly from the retina to the superior colliculus.

The perception of objects and the totality of the visual scene is accomplished by the visual association cortex. The visual association cortex combines all sensory information perceived by the striate cortex which contains thousands of modules that are part of modular neural networks. The neurons in the striate cortex send axons to the extrastriate cortex, a region in the visual association cortex that surrounds the striate cortex.

Early studies There were two major ancient Greek schools, providing a primitive explanation of how vision is carried out in the body.

The first was the “emission theory” which maintained that vision occurs when rays emanate from the eyes and are intercepted by visual objects. If an object was seen directly it was by ‘means of rays’ coming out of the eyes and again falling on the object. A refracted image was, however, seen by ‘means of rays’ as well, which came out of the eyes, traversed through the air, and after refraction, fell on the visible object which was sighted as the result of the movement of

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the rays from the eye. This theory was championed by scholars like Euclid and Ptolemy and their followers.

The second school advocated the so-called ‘intro-mission’ approach which sees vision as coming from something entering the eyes representative of the object. With its main propagators Aristotle, Galen and their followers, this theory seems to have some contact with modern theories of what vision really is, but it remained only a speculation lacking any experimental foundation. (In eighteenth-century England, Isaac Newton, John Locke, and others, carried the intromission/intromittist theory forward by insisting that vision involved a process in which rays—composed of actual corporeal matter—emanated from seen objects and entered the seer’s mind/sensorium through the eye’s aperture.)

Both schools of thought relied upon the principle that “like is only known by like”, and thus upon the notion that the eye was composed of some “internal fire” which interacted with the “external fire” of visible light and made vision possible.

Plato makes this assertion in his dialogue Timaeus, as does Aristotle, in his De Sensu. Alhazen (965–c. 1040) carried out many investigations and experiments on visual perception, extended the work of Ptolemy on binocular vision, and commented on the anatomical works of Galen.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) is believed to be the first to recognize the special optical qualities of the eye. He wrote “The function of the human eye ... was described by a large number of authors in a certain way. But I found it to be completely different.” His main experimental finding was that there is only a distinct and clear vision at the line of sight—the optical line that ends at the fovea. Although he did not use these words literally he actually is the father of the modern distinction between foveal and peripheral vision.

Analysis of eye movement During the 1960s, technical development permitted the continuous registration of eye movement during reading in picture viewing and later in visual problem solving and when headset-cameras became available, also during driving.

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The picture to the left shows what may happen during the first two seconds of visual inspection. While the background is out of focus, representing the peripheral vision, the first eye movement goes to the boots of the man (just because they are very near the starting fixation and have a reasonable contrast).

The following fixations jump from face to face. They might even permit comparisons between faces. It may be concluded that the icon face is a very attractive search icon within the peripheral field of vision. The foveal vision adds detailed information to the peripheral first impression. It can also be noted that there are three different types of eye movements: vergence movements, saccadic movements and pursuit

movements. Vergence movements involve the cooperation of both eyes to allow for an image to fall on the same area of both retinas. This results in a single focused image. Saccadic movements is the type of eye movement that makes jumps from one position to another position and is used to rapidly scan a particular scene/image. Lastly, pursuit movement is smooth eye movement and is used to follow objects in motion.

Transduction Transduction is the process through which energy from environmental stimuli is converted to neural activity for the brain to understand and process. The back of the eye contains

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three different cell layers: photoreceptor layer, bipolar cell layer and ganglion cell layer. The photoreceptor layer is at the very back and contains rod photoreceptors and cone photoreceptors. Cones are responsible for color perception. There are three different cones: red, green and blue.

Rods, are responsible for the perception of objects in low light. Photoreceptors contain within them a special chemical called a photopigment, which are embedded in the membrane of the lamellae; a single human rod contains approximately 10 million of them. The photopigment molecules consist of two parts: an opsin (a protein) and retinal (a lipid).

There are 3 specific photopigments (each with their own color) that respond to specific wavelengths of light. When the appropriate wavelength of light hits the photoreceptor, its photopigment splits into two, which sends a message to the bipolar cell layer, which in turn sends a message to the ganglion cells, which then send the information through the optic nerve to the brain. If the appropriate photopigment is not in the proper photoreceptor (for example, a green photopigment inside a red cone), a condition called color vision deficiency will occur.

Theories and observations of visual perception have been the main source of inspiration for computer vision (also called machine vision, or computational vision). Special hardware structures and software algorithms provide machines with the capability to interpret the images coming from a camera or a sensor. Artificial Visual Perception has long been used in the industry and is now entering the domains of automotive and robotics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_perception

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Tokyo Population Tokyo (“Eastern Capital�) officially Tokyo Metropolis is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan, and is both the capital and most populous city of Japan. The Greater Tokyo Area is the most populous metropolitan area in the world. It is the seat of the Emperor of Japan and the Japanese government.

Tokyo is in the Kante region on the southeastern side of the main island Honshu and includes the Izu Islands and Ogasawara Islands. Formerly known as Edo, it has been the de facto seat of government since 1603 when Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu made the city his headquarters. It official-

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ly became the capital after Emperor Meiji moved his seat to the city from the old capital of Kyoto in 1868; at that time Edo was renamed Tokyo. Tokyo Metropolis was formed in 1943 from the merger of the former Tokyo Prefecture and the city of Tokyo.

Tokyo is often referred to as a city, but is officially known and governed as a “metropolitan prefecture”, which differs from and combines elements of a city and a prefecture, a characteristic unique to Tokyo. The Tokyo metropolitan government administers the 23 Special Wards of Tokyo (each governed as an individual city), which cover the area that was the City of Tokyo before it merged and became the metropolitan prefecture in 1943. The metropolitan government also administers 39 municipalities in the western part of the prefecture and the two outlying island chains. The population of the special wards is over 9 million people, with the total population of the prefecture exceeding 13 million. The prefecture is part of the world’s most populous metropolitan area with upwards of 37.8 million people and the world’s largest urban agglomeration economy. The city hosts 51 of the Fortune Global 500 companies, the highest number of any city in the world.[8] Tokyo ranked third in the International Financial Centres Development IndexEdit. The city is also home to various television networks like Fuji TV, Tokyo MX, TV Tokyo, TV Asahi, Nippon Television, NHK and the Tokyo Broadcasting System.

Tokyo ranked fifth in the Global Economic Power Index and fourth in the Global Cities Index. The city is considered an alpha+ world city – as listed by the GaWC’s 2008 inventory – and in 2014, Tokyo was ranked first in the “Best overall experience” category of TripAdvisor’s World City Survey (the city also ranked first in the following categories: “helpfulness of locals”, “nightlife”, “shopping”, “local public transportation” and “cleanliness of streets”). In 2015, Tokyo was ranked as the 11th most expensive city for expatriates, according to the Mercer consulting firm, and also the world’s 11th most expensive city, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s cost-of-living survey. In 2015, Tokyo was named the Most Liveable City in the world by the magazine Monocle. The Michelin Guide has awarded Tokyo by far the most Michelin

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stars of any city in the world. Tokyo ranked first in the world in the Safe Cities Index. The 2016 edition of QS Best Student Cities ranked Tokyo as the 3rd-best city in the world to be a university student. Tokyo hosted the 1964 Summer Olympics, the 1979 G-7 summit, the 1986 G-7 summit, and the 1993 G-7 summit, and will host the 2020 Summer Olympics and the 2020 Summer Paralympics.

Geography The mainland portion of Tokyo lies northwest of Tokyo Bay and measures about 90 km (56 mi) east to west and 25 km (16 mi) north to south. The average elevation in Tokyo is 40 m (131 ft).[45] Chiba Prefecture borders it to the east, Yamanashi to the west, Kanagawa to the south, and Saitama to the north. Mainland Tokyo is further subdivided into the special wards (occupying the eastern half) and the Tama area stretching westwards.

Also within the administrative boundaries of Tokyo Metropolis are two island chains in the Pacific Ocean directly south: the Izu Islands, and the Ogasawara Islands, which stretch more than 1,000 km (620 mi) away from the mainland.

Because of these islands and the mountainous regions to the west, Tokyo’s overall population density figures far underrepresent the real figures for the urban and suburban regions of Tokyo.

Under Japanese law, Tokyo is designated as a to, translated as metropolis.[46] Its administrative structure is similar to that of Japan’s other prefectures. The 23 special wards, which until 1943 constituted the city of Tokyo, are now separate, self-governing municipalities, each having a mayor, a council, and the status of a city.

In addition to these 23 special wards, Tokyo also includes 26 more cities, five towns, and eight villages, each of which has a local government. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, which administers the whole metropolis, is headed by a publicly elected governor and metropolitan assembly. Its headquarters are located in Shinjuku Ward.

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Cityscape

Architecture in Tokyo has largely been shaped

by Tokyo’s history. Twice in recent history has the metropolis been left in ruins: first in the 1923 Great Kante earthquake and later after extensive firebombing in World War II. Because of this, Tokyo’s urban landscape consists mainly of modern and contemporary architecture, and older buildings are scarce. Tokyo features many internationally famous forms of modern architecture including Tokyo International Forum, Asahi Beer Hall, Mode Gakuen Cocoon Tower, NTT Docomo Yoyogi Building and Rainbow Bridge. Tokyo also features two distinctive towers: Tokyo Tower and the new Tokyo Skytree which is the tallest tower in Japan and the second tallest structure in the world after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Tokyo also contains numerous parks and gardens. There are four national parks in Tokyo Prefecture, including the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, which includes all of the Izu Islands.

Tokyo has enacted a measure to cut greenhouse gases. Governor Shintaro Ishihara created Japan’s first emissions cap system, aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emission by a total of 25% by 2020 from the 2000 level. Tokyo is an example of an urban heat island, and the phenomenon is especially serious in its special wards. According to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government,the annual mean temperature has increased by about 3C over the past 100 years. Tokyo has been cited as a “convincing example of the relationship between urban growth and climate.

In 2006, Tokyo enacted the “10 Year Project for Green Tokyo” to be realised by 2016. It set a goal of increasing roadside trees in Tokyo to 1 million (from 480,000), and adding 1,000 ha of green

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space 88 of which will be a new park named “Umi no Mori” (sea forest) which will be on a reclaimed island in Tokyo Bay which used to be a landfill.[73] From 2007 to 2010 436 ha of the planned 1,000 ha of green space was created and 220,000 trees were planted bringing the total to 700,000.

By 2014 road side trees in Tokyo will increase to 950,000 and a further 300 ha of green space will be added.

As of October 2012, the official intercensal estimate showed 13.506 million people in Tokyo with 9.214 million living within Tokyo’s 23 wards.During the daytime, the population swells by over 2.5

million as workers and students commute from adjacent areas. This effect is even more pronounced in the three central wards of Chiyoda, and Minato, whose collective population as of the 2005 National Census was 326,000 at night, but 2.4 million during the day.

In 1889, the Ministry of Home Affairs recorded 1,375,937 people in Tokyo City and a total of 1,694,292 people in Tokyo-fu. In the same year, a total of 779 foreign nationals were recorded as residing in Tokyo. The most common nationality was British (209 residents), followed by United States nationals (182) and nationals of the Qing dynasty

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Tokyo has the largest metropolitan economy in the world. According to a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Tokyo urban area (35 million people) had a total GDP of US$1.9 trillion in 2012 (at purchasing power parity), which topped that list.

51 of the companies listed on the Fortune Global 500 are based in Tokyo, almost twice that of the second-placed city (Paris).

Tokyo is a major international finance center, houses the headquarters of several of the world’s largest investment banks and insurance companies, and serves as a hub for Japan’s transportation, publishing, electronics and broadcasting industries. During the centralised growth of Japan’s economy following World War II, many large firms moved their headquarters from cities such as Osaka (the historical commercial capital) to Tokyo, in an attempt to take advantage of better access to the government. This trend has begun to slow due to ongoing population growth in Tokyo and the high cost of living there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo

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horror vacui visual art In visual art, horror vacui (;from Latin “fear of empty space”), also kenophobia, from Greek “fear of the empty”), is the filling of the entire surface of a space or an artwork with detail.

The term is associated with the Italian art critic and scholar Mario Praz, who used it to describe the suffocating atmosphere and clutter of interior design in the Victorian age.

Older, and more artistically esteemed examples can be seen on Migration period art objects like the carpet pages of Insular illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells. This feeling of meticulously filling empty spaces also permeates Arabesque Islamic art from ancient times to the present. Another example comes from ancient Greece during the Geometric Age (1100 - 900 BCE), when horror vacui was considered a stylistic element of all art. The mature work of the French Renaissance engraver Jean Duvet consistently exhibits horror vacui.

Some examples of horror vacui in art come from, or are influenced by, the mentally unstable and inmates of psychiatric hospitals, such as Richard Dadd in the 19th century, and many modern examples fall under the category of Outsider Art. Horror vacui may have also had an impact, consciously or unconsciously, on graphic design by artists like David Carson or Vaughan Oliver, and in the underground comix movement in the work of S. Clay Wilson, Robert Crumb, Robert Williams, and on later comic artists such as Mark Beyer. The paintings of Williams, Faris Badwan, Emerson Barrett, Joe Coleman and Todd Schorr are further examples of horror vacui in the modern Lowbrow art movement.

The entheogen-inspired visionary art of certain indigenous peoples, such as the Huichol yarn paintings and the ayahuasca-inspired art of Pablo Amaringo, often exhibits this style, as does the psychedelic art movement of the 1960s counterculture. Sometimes the patterned art in clothing of indigenous peoples of Middle and South America exhibits horror vacui. For example, the geometric molas of Kuna people and the traditional clothing on Shipibo-Conibo people.

The artwork in the Where’s Wally? series of children’s books is a commonly known example of horror vacui, as are many of the small books written or illustrated by the macabre imagination of Edward Gorey.

The Tingatinga painting style of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania

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is a contemporary example of horror vacui. Other African artists such as Malangatana of Mozambique (Malangatana Ngwenya) also fill the canvas in this way.

The arrangement of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs suggests an abhorrence of empty space. Signs are repeated or phonetic complements added to prevent gaps. There is an inverse relationship between horror vacui and value perception, and commercial designers favour minimalism in shop window displays and advertising to appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers, on the premise that understatement and restraint appeals more to affluent and well-educated audiences.

The term is also used as an analogy to the Aristotelian idea that a physical vacuum is impossible, and therefore the idea must be rejected. This was widely believed up to the time of Rene Descartes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui

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friedrich nietzsche abyss and god is dead “God is dead” (also known as the death of God) is a widely quoted statement by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It first appears in Nietzsche’s 1882 collection The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, also translated as “The science of joy”) However, it is most famously associated with Nietzsche’s classic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra), which is most responsible for making the phrase popular. The idea is stated in “The Madman” as follows: “ God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.

How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

— Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125, tr. Walter Kaufmann “ But the best known passage is at the end of part 2 of Zarathustra’s Prolog, where after beginning his allegorical journey Zarathustra encounters an aged ascetic who expresses misanthropy and love of God: “ When Zarathustra heard these words, he saluted the saint and said “What should I have to give you! But let me go quickly that I take nothing from you!” And thus they parted from one another, the old man and Zarathustra, laughing as two boys laugh.

But when Zarathustra was alone, he spoke thus to his heart: “Could it be possible! This old saint has not heard in his

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forest that God is dead!”

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale “ Although the statement and its meaning is attributed to Nietzsche, this was not a unique position as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel pondered the death of God, first in his Phenomenology of Spirit where he considers the death of God to ‘not [be] seen as anything but an easily recognized part of the usual Christian cycle of redemption’.[4] Later on Hegel writes about the great pain of knowing that God is dead ‘The pure concept, however, or infinity, as the abyss of nothingness in which all being sinks, must characterize the infinite pain, which previously was only in culture historically and as the feeling on which rests modern religion, the feeling that God Himself is dead, (the feeling which was uttered by Pascal, though only empirically, in his saying: Nature is such that it marks everywhere, both in and outside of man, a lost God), purely as a phase, but also as no more than just a phase, of the highest idea.’ Of course the spirit in which it is intended is a verily Nietzsche manifestation, however it is important to consider the material that gave rise to this idea.

The phrase “God is dead” does not mean that Nietzsche believed in an actual God who first existed and then died in a literal sense. Rather, it conveys his view that the Chris-

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tian God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral principles. Nietzsche recognizes the crisis that the death of God represents for existing moral assumptions: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.” This is why in “The Madman”, a passage which primarily addresses nontheists (especially atheists), the problem is to retain any system of values in the absence of a divine order.

The death of God is a way of saying that humans are no longer able to believe in any such cosmic order since they themselves no longer recognize it. The death of God will lead, Nietzsche says, not only to the rejection of a belief of cosmic or physical order but also to a rejection of absolute values themselves — to the rejection of belief in an objective and universal moral law, binding upon all individuals. In this manner, the loss of an absolute basis for morality leads to nihilism. This nihilism is that for which Nietzsche worked to find a solution by re-evaluating the foundations of human values. This meant, to Nietzsche, looking for foundations that went deeper than Christian values. He would find a basis in the “will to power” that he described as “the essence of reality.”

Nietzsche believed that the majority of people did not recognize this death out of the deepest-seated fear or

angst. Therefore, when the death did begin to become widely acknowledged, people would despair and nihilism would become rampant. This is partly why Nietzsche saw Christianity as nihilistic.

Nietzsche believed there could be positive possibilities for humans without God. Relinquishing the belief in God opens the way for human creative abilities to fully develop. The Christian God, he wrote, would no longer stand in the way, so human beings might stop turning their eyes toward a supernatural realm and begin to acknowledge the value of this world.

Nietzsche uses the metaphor of an open sea, which can be both exhilarating and terrifying. The people who eventually learn to create their lives anew will represent a new stage in human existence, the Ebermensch — i.e. the personal archetype who, through the conquest of their own nihilism, themselves become a sort of mythical hero. The “death of God” is the motivation for Nietzsche’s last (uncompleted) philosophical project, the “revaluation of all values”.

Abyss He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead

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emptiness empty physical space Emptiness as a human condition is a sense of generalized boredom, social alienation and apathy. Feelings of emptiness often accompany dysthymia, depression, loneliness, anhedonia, despair, or other mental/emotional disorders, including schizoid personality disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and borderline personality disorder. A sense of emptiness is also part of a natural process of grief, as resulting of separation, death of a loved one, or other significant changes. However, the particular meanings of “emptiness� vary with the particular context and the religious or cultural tradition in which it is used.

While Christianity and Western sociologists and psychologists view a state of emptiness as a negative, unwanted condition, in some Eastern philosophies such as Buddhist philosophy and Taoism, emptiness is a realized achievement.

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Sociology In the West, feeling “empty” is often viewed as a negative condition. Psychologist Clive Hazell, for example, attributes feelings of emptiness to problematic family backgrounds with abusive relationships and mistreatment. He claims that some people who are facing a sense of emptiness try to resolve their painful feelings by becoming addicted to a drug or obsessive activity (be it compulsive sex, gambling or work) or engaging in “frenzied action” or violence. In sociology, a sense of emptiness is associated with social alienation of the individual. This sense of alienation may be suppressed while working, due to the routine of work tasks, but during leisure hours or during the weekend, people may feel a sense of “existential vacuum” and emptiness.

In political philosophy, emptiness is associated with nihilism.

Literary critic Georg Lukacs (born in 1885) argued against the “spiritual emptiness and moral inadequacy of capitalism”, and argued in favour of communism as an “entirely new type of civilization, one that promised a fresh start and an opportunity to lead a meaningful and purposeful life.”

The concept of “emptiness” was important to a “certain type of existentialist philosophy and some forms of the Death of God movement”. Existentialism, the “philosophic movement that gives voice to the sense of alienation and despair”, which comes from “man’s recognition of his funda-

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mental aloneness in an indifferent universe”. People whose response to the sense of emptiness and aloneness is to give excuses live in bad faith; “people who face the emptiness and accept responsibility aim to live ‘authentic’ lives”.[6] Existentialists argue that “man lives in alienation from God, from nature, from other men, from his own true self.” Crowded into cities, working in mindless jobs, and entertained by light mass media, we “live on the surface of life”, so that even “people who seemingly have ‘everything’ feel empty, uneasy, discontented.”

In cultures where a sense of emptiness is seen as a negative psychological condition, it is often associated with depression. As such, many of the same treatments are proposed: psychotherapy, group therapy, or other types of counselling. As well, people who feel empty may be advised to keep busy and maintain a regular schedule of work and social activities. Other solutions which have been proposed to reduce a sense of emptiness are getting a pet or trying Animal-Assisted Therapy; getting involved in spirituality such as meditation or religious rituals and service; volunteering to fill time and bring social contact; doing social interactions, such as community activities, clubs, or outings; or finding a hobby or recreational activity to regain their interest in life.

Fiction, film, design and visual arts A number of novelists and filmmakers have depicted empti-

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ness. The concept of “emptiness” was important to a “good deal of 19th–20th century Western imaginative literature”.

Novelist Franz Kafka depicted a meaningless bizarre world in The Trial and the existentialist French authors sketched a world cut off from purpose or reason in Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausee and Albert Camus’ L’etranger. Existentialism influenced 20th century poet T.S. Eliot, whose poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” describes an “anti-hero or alienated soul, running away from or confronting the emptiness of his or her existence”. Professor Gordon Bigelow argues that the existentialist theme of “spiritual barrenness is commonplace in literature of the 20th century”, which in addition to Eliot includes Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and Anderson.

Film adaptations of a number of existentialist novels capture the bleak sense of emptiness espoused by Sartre and Camus. This theme of emptiness has also been used in modern screenplays. Mark Romanek’s 1985 film Static tells the surreal story of a struggling inventor and crucifix factory worker named Ernie who feels spiritually empty because he is saddened by his parents’ death in an accident. Screenwriter Michael Tolkin’s 1994 film The New Age examines “cultural hipness and spiritual emptiness”, creating a “dark, ambitious, unsettling” film that depicts a fashionable LA couple who “are miserable in the midst of their sterile plenty”, and whose souls are stunted by their lives of empty sex, consumption, and distractions. The 1999 film Ameri-

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can Beauty examines the spiritual emptiness of life in the US suburbs. In Wes Anderson’s 2007 film The Darjeeling Limited, three brothers who “... suffer from spiritual emptiness” and then “self-medicate themselves through sex, social withdrawal, and drugs.” The 2008 film The Informers is a Hollywood drama film written by Bret Easton Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki and directed by Gregor Jordan. The film is based on Ellis’ 1994 collection of short stories of the same name. The film, which is set amidst the decadence of the early 1980s, depicts an assortment of socially alienated, mainly well-off characters who numb their sense of emptiness with casual sex, alcohol, and drugs.

Contemporary architecture critic Herbert Muschamp argues that “horror vacui” (which is Latin for “fear of emptiness”) is a key principle of design. He claims that it has become an obsessive quality that is the “driving force in contemporary American taste”. Muschamp states that “along with the commercial interests that exploit this interest, it is the major factor now shaping attitudes toward public spaces, urban spaces, and even suburban sprawl.”

Films that depict nothingness, shadows and vagueness, either in a visual sense or a moral sense are appreciated in genres such as film noir. As well, travellers and artists are often intrigued by and attracted to vast empty spaces, such as open deserts, barren wastelands or salt flats, and the open sea.

In visual arts emptiness and absence were recognized as phenomena that characterize not only particular works of art (e.g. Yves Klein) but also as a more general tendency within the history of modern art and aesthetics. Following Davor Dealto’s argument on the modern concept of art, the gradual elimination of particular elements that traditionally characterized visual arts, which results in emptiness, is the most important phenomenon within the history and theory of art over the past two hundred years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emptiness

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the color white White is an achromatic color, a color without hue. An incoming light to the human eye that stimulates all its three types of color sensitive cone cells in nearly equal amounts results in white. White is one of the most common colors in nature, the color of sunlight, snow, milk, chalk, limestone and other common minerals. In many cultures white represents or signifies purity, innocence, and light, and is the symbolic opposite of black, or darkness. According to surveys in Europe and the United States, white is the color most often associated with perfection, the good, honesty, cleanliness, the beginning, the new, neutrality, and exacti-

tude. In ancient Egypt and ancient Rome, priestesses wore white as a symbol of purity, and Romans wore a white toga as a symbol of citizenship. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance a white unicorn symbolized chastity, and a white lamb sacrifice and purity; the widows of kings dressed in white rather than black as the color of mourning. It sometimes symbolizes royalty; it was the color of the French kings (black being the color of the queens) and of the monarchist movement after the French Revolution as well as of the movement called the White Russians (not to be confounded with Belarus, literally “White Russia�) who fought the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922).

Greek and Roman temples were faced with white marble,

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and beginning in the 18th century, with the advent of neoclassical architecture, white became the most common color of new churches, capitols and other government buildings, especially in the United States. It was also widely used in 20th century modern architecture as a symbol of modernity, simplicity and strength.

White is an important color for almost all world religions.

The Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, has worn white since 1566, as a symbol of purity and sacrifice.

In Islam, and in the Shinto religion of Japan, it is worn by pilgrims; and by the Brahmins in India. In Western cultures and in Japan, white is the most common color for wedding dresses, symbolizing purity and virginity. In many Asian cultures, white is also the color of mourning.

The white color on television screens and computer monitors is created with the RGB color model by mixing red, green and blue light at equal intensities.

Etymology The word white continues Old English hwit, ultimately from a Common Germanic also reflected in OHG. The root is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European language *kwid-, surviving also in Sanskrit Eveta “to be white or bright”[5] and Slavonic “light”. The Icelandic word for white, is directly derived from the Old Norse form of the word. Common Germanic also had the word *blankaz (“white, bright, blinding”), borrowed into Late Latin as *blancus, which provided the source for Romance words for “white” (Catalan, Occitan and French blanc, Spanish blanco, Italian bianco, Galician-Portuguese branco, etc.). The antonym of white is black.

Some non-European languages have a wide variety of terms for white. The Inuit language has seven different words for seven different nuances of white. Sanskrit has specific words for bright white, the white of teeth, the white of sandalwood, the white of the autumn moon, the white of silver, the white of cow’s milk, the white of pearls, the white of a ray of sunlight, and the white of stars. Japanese has six different words, depending upon brilliance or dullness, or if the color is inert

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or dynamic. White is the color the human visual system senses when the incoming light to the eye stimulates all three types of color sensitive cone cells in the eye in nearly equal amounts. Materials that do not emit light themselves appear white if their surfaces reflect back most of the light that strikes them in a diffuse way.

Optics and white light In 1666, Isaac Newton demonstrated that white light could be broken up into its composite colors by passing it through a prism, then using a second prism to reassemble them. Before Newton, most scientists believed that white was the fundamental color of light.

White light can be generated by the sun, by stars, or by earthbound sources such as fluorescent lamps, white LEDs and incandescent bulbs. On the screen of a color television or computer, white is produced by mixing the primary colors of light: red, green and blue (RGB) at full intensity, a process called additive mixing (see image below). White light can be fabricated using light with only two wavelengths, for instance by mixing light from a red and cyan laser or yellow and blue lasers. This light will however have very few practical applications since color rendering of objects will be greatly distorted.

The fact that light sources with vastly different spectral power distributions can result in a similar sensory experience is due to the way the light is processed by the visual system. One color that arise from two different spectral power distributions is called a metamerism.

The International Commission on Illumination defines white (adapted) as “a color stimulus that an observer who is adapted to the viewing environment would judge to be perfectly achromatic and to have a luminance factor of unity.

The color stimulus that is considered to be the adapted white may be different at different locations within a scene.

The adaptation mentioned in the CIE definition above is the chromatic adaptation by which the same colored object in a scene experienced under very different illuminations will

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be perceived as having nearly the same color. The same principle is used in photography and cinematography where the choice of white point determines a transformation of all other color stimuli. Changes in or manipulation of the white point can be used to explain some optical illusions such as The dress.

Many of the light sources that emit white light emit light at almost all visible wavelengths (sun light, incandescent lamps of various Color temperatures). This has led to the notion that white light can be defined as a mixture of “all colors” or “all visible wavelengths”. This misconception is widespread and might originally stem from the fact that Newton discovered that sunlight is composed of light with wavelengths across the visible spectrum. Concluding that since “all colors” produce white light then white must be made up of “all colors” is a common logical error called affirming the consequent, which might be the cause of the misunderstanding.

Symbolism In Western culture, white is the color most often associated with innocence.[41] In Biblical times, lambs and other white animals were sacrificed to expiate sins. In Christianity Christ is considered the “lamb of God,” who died for the sins of mankind. The white lily is considered the flower of purity and innocence, and is often associated with the Virgin Mary.

White is the color in Western culture most often associated with beginnings and the new. In Christianity, children are baptized wearing white, and, wear white for their first communion. Christ after his Resurrection is traditionally portrayed dressed in white. Eggs, another symbol of the new, are used to celebrate Easter.

The Queen of the United Kingdom traditionally wears white when she opens the session of Parliament. In high society, debutantes traditionally wear white for their first ball. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White

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Un Chien Andalou french film Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali. It was Bunuel’s first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.

The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word.

The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.

The film opens with a title card reading “Once upon a time”.

A middle-aged man (Luis Bunuel) sharpens his razor at his balcony door and tests the razor on his thumb. He then opens the door, and idly fingers the razor while gazing at the moon, about to be engulfed by a thin cloud, from his balcony. There is a cut to a close-up of a young woman (Simone Mareuil) being held by the man as she calmly stares straight ahead.

Another cut occurs to the moon being overcome by the cloud as the man slits the woman’s eye with the razor, and the vitreous humour spills out from it.

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The subsequent title card reads “eight years later”. A slim young man (Pierre Batcheff) bicycles down a calm urban street wearing what appears to be a nun’s habit and a striped box with a strap around his neck. A cut occurs to the young woman from the first scene, who has been reading in a sparingly furnished upstairs apartment. She hears the young man approaching on his bicycle and casts aside the book she was reading (revealing a reproduction of Vermeer’s The Lacemaker). She goes to the window and sees the young man lying on the curb, his bicycle on the ground. She emerges from the building and attempts to revive the young man.

plates something happily while standing in the middle of the now busy street clutching the box. She is then run over by a car and a few bystanders gather around her. The young man and the young woman watch these events unfold from the apartment window. The young man seems to take sadistic pleasure in the androgynous young woman’s danger and subsequent death, and as he gestures at the shocked young woman in the room with him, he leers at her and grasps her breasts.

Later, the young woman assembles pieces of the young man’s clothing on a bed in the upstairs room, and concentrates upon the clothing. The young man appears near the door. The young man and the young woman stare at his hand, which has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge.

A slow transition occurs focusing on the armpit hair of the young woman as she lies on the beach and a sea urchin at a sandy location. There is a cut to an androgynous young woman, with bobbed hair and dressed in rather masculine attire, in the street below the apartment. She pokes at a severed human hand with her cane while surrounded by a large crowd and a policeman.

The young woman resists him at first, but then allows him to touch her as he imagines her nude from the front and the rear. The young woman pushes him away as he drifts off and she attempts to escape by running to the other side of the room. The young man corners her as she reaches for a racquet in self-defense, but he suddenly picks up two ropes and drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, two pumpkins, and two rather bewildered priests (played by Jaime Miravilles and Salvador Dali) who are attached by the ropes. As he is unable to pursue, the young woman escapes the room. The young man chases after her, but she traps his hand, which is infested with ants, in the door. She finds the young man in the next room, dressed in his nun’s garb in the bed.

The crowd clears when the policeman places the hand in the box previously carried by the young man and gives it to the young woman. The androgynous young woman contem-

The subsequent title card reads “around three in the morning”. The young man is roused from his rest by the sound of a door-buzzer ringing (represented visually by a martini

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shaker being shaken by a set of arms through two holes in a wall). The young woman goes to answer the door and does not return. Another young man, whom we see only from behind, dressed in lighter clothing, arrives in the apartment, gesturing angrily at him. The second young man forces the first one to throw away his nun’s clothing and then makes him with his face to the wall, as if in disgrace.

The subsequent title card reads “Sixteen years ago.” We see the second young man’s face for the first time (and discover that he is also played by Pierre Batcheff) as he admires the art supplies and books on the table near the wall and forces the first young man to hold two of the books as he stares at

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the wall. The first young man eventually shoots the second young man when the books abruptly turn into pistols. The second young man, now in a meadow, dies while swiping at the back of a nude female figure which suddenly disappears into thin air. A group of men come and carry his corpse away.

The young woman returns to the apartment and sees a death’s-head moth. The first young man sneers at her as she retreats and wipes his mouth off his face with his hand. The young woman very nervously applies some lipstick in response. Subsequently the first young man makes the young woman’s armpit hair attach itself to where his mouth would be on his face through gestures. The young woman looks at the first young man with disgust, and leaves the apartment sticking her tongue out at him.

As she exits her apartment, the street is replaced by a coastal beach, where the young woman meets a third man with whom she walks arm in arm. He shows her the time on his watch and they walk near the rocks, where they find the remnants of the first young man’s nun’s clothing and the box.

They seem to walk away clutching each other happily and make romantic gestures in a long tracking shot. However, the film abruptly cuts to the final shot with a title card reading “In Spring,” showing the couple buried in beach sand up to their elbows, motionless and perhaps dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_Chien_Andalou

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Helvetica typeface Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with input from Eduard Hoffmann.

It is a neo-grotesque or realist design, one influenced by the famous 19th century typeface Akzidenz-Grotesk and other German and Swiss designs. Its use became a hallmark of the International Typographic Style that emerged from the work of Swiss designers in the 1950s and 60s, becoming one of the most popular typefaces of the 20th century. Over

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the years, a wide range of variants have been released in different weights, widths and sizes, as well as matching designs for a range of non-Latin alphabets. Notable features of Helvetica as originally designed include the termination of all strokes on horizontal or vertical lines and unusually tight letter spacing, which give it a dense, compact appearance.

Developed by the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) of Munchenstein, Switzerland, its release was planned to match a trend: a resurgence of interest in turn-ofthe-century grotesque typefaces among European graphic designers that also saw the release of Univers by Adrian Frutiger the same year. Hoffmann was the president of the Haas Type Foundry, while Miedinger was a freelance graphic designer who had formerly worked as a Haas salesman and designer.

Miedinger and Hoffmann set out to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage. Originally named Neue Haas Grotesk (New Haas Grotesque), it was rapidly licensed by Linotype and renamed Helvetica, being similar to the Latin adjective for Switzerland, Helvetia. A feature-length film directed by Gary Hustwit was released in 2007 to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the typeface’s introduction in 1957.

Influences of Helvetica included Schelter-Grotesk and Haas’ Normal Grotesk. Attracting considerable attention on its release as Neue Haas Grotesk, Linotype adopted Neue Haas Grotesk for widespread release.

In 1960, its name was changed by Haas’ German parent company Stempel to Helvetica (meaning Swiss in Latin) in order to make it more marketable internationally. It comes from the Latin name for the pre-Roman tribes of what became Switzerland. Intending to match the success of Univers, Arthur Ritzel of Stempel redesigned Neue Haas Grotesk into a larger family. The design was popular, and rapidly made available for phototypesetting systems as well as for the original metal type. Many imitations and knock-offs were rapidly created.

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In the late 1970s and 1980s, Linotype licensed its version to Xerox and then Adobe and Apple, guaranteeing its importance in digital printing by making it one of the core fonts of the PostScript page description language. The rights to it are now held by Monotype Imaging, which acquired Linotype; the advanced Neue Haas Grotesk release (discussed below) was co-released with Font Bureau.

Like many neo-grotesque designs, Helvetica has narrow apertures, which limit its legibility onscreen and at small print sizes. It also has no visible difference between upper-case ‘i’ and lower-case ‘L’, although the number 1 is quite identifiable with its flag at top left. Its tight, display-oriented spacing may also pose problems for legibility. In situations where this matters, other designs intended for legibility at small sizes above all, such as Verdana, Meta or Trebuchet or a monospace font such as Courier, which makes all letters quite wide, may be more appropriate. Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces.[15] Versions exist for Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, Khmer, and Vietnamese alphabets. Chinese faces have been developed to complement Helvetica.

Some fonts based on Helvetica are intended for different purposes and have clearly different designs. Digital-period font designer Ray Larabie has commented that in the 1970s “everyone was modifying Helvetica with funky curls, mixedcase and effects”. Indeed, in one 1973 competition to design new fonts, three of the twenty winners were decorative designs inspired by Helvetica.

Created by Aldo Novarese at the Italian type foundry Nebiolo, Forma was a geometric-influenced derivative of Helvetica with a ‘single-storey’ ‘a’ and extremely tight spacing in the style of the period. It was offered with ‘request’ stylistic alternates imitating Helvetica more closely. Forma has been digitised by SoftMaker as “Formula” and (in a much more complete version with optical sizes) by Font Bureau for Tatler magazine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica

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typeface In typography, a typeface (also known as font family) is a set of one or more fonts each composed of glyphs that share common design features. Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, ornamentation, and designer or foundry (and formerly size, in metal fonts). For example, “ITC Garamond Bold Condensed Italic” means the bold, condensed-width, italic version of ITC Garamond. It is a different font from “ITC Garamond Condensed Italic” and “ITC Garamond Bold Condensed,” but all are fonts within the same typeface, “ITC Garamond.” ITC Garamond is a different typeface

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from “Adobe Garamond” or “Monotype Garamond.” (These are all alternative updates or digitisations of the typeface Garamond, originally created in the 16th century.) There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.

The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers and are often employed by type foundries. In digital typography, type designers are sometimes also called font developers or font designers.

Every typeface is a collection of glyphs, each of which represents an individual letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol. The same glyph may be used for characters from different scripts, e.g. Roman uppercase A looks the same as Cyrillic uppercase and Greek uppercase alpha.

There are typefaces tailored for special applications, such as map-making or astrology and mathematics.

The term typeface is frequently confused with the term font.

Before the advent of digital typography and desktop publishing, the two terms had more clearly understood meanings.

Terminology In professional typography, the term typeface is not interchangeable with the word font (originally “fount” in British English, and pronounced “font”), because the term font has historically been defined as a given alphabet and its associated characters in a single size. For example, 8-point Caslon Italic was one font, and 10-point Caslon Italic was another. Historically, fonts came in specific sizes determining the size of characters, and in quantities of sorts or number of each letter provided. The design of characters in a font took into account all these factors.

As the range of typeface designs increased and requirements of publishers broadened over the centuries, fonts of specific weight (blackness or lightness) and stylistic variants (most commonly regular or roman as distinct to italic, as well as condensed) have led to font families, collections

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of closely related typeface designs that can include hundreds of styles. A font family is typically a group of related fonts which vary only in weight, orientation, width, etc., but not design. For example, Times is a font family, whereas Times Roman, Times Italic and Times Bold are individual fonts making up the Times family. Font families typically include several fonts, though some, such as Helvetica, may consist of dozens of fonts.

The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family such as roman, boldface, or italic type, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a “family” or related set of fonts. For example, a given typeface such as Arial may include roman, bold, and italic fonts. In the metal type era, a font also meant a specific point size, but with digital scalable outline fonts this distinction is no longer valid, as a single font may be scaled to any size.

The first “extended” font families, which included a wide range of widths and weights in the same general style emerged in the early 1900s, starting with ATF’s Cheltenham (1902–1913), with an initial design by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and many additional faces designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Later examples include Futura, Lucida, ITC Officina. Some became superfamilies as a result of revival, such as Linotype Syntax, Linotype Univers; while others have alternate styling designed as compatible replacements of each other, such as Compatil, Generis.

Typeface superfamilies began to emerge when foundries began to include typefaces with significant structural differences, but some design relationship, under the same general family name. Arguably the first superfamily was created when Morris Fuller Benton created Clearface Gothic for ATF in 1910, a sans serif companion to the existing (serifed) Clearface. The superfamily label does not include quite different designs given the same family name for what would seem to be purely marketing, rather than design, considerations: Caslon Antique, Futura Black and Futura Display are structurally unrelated to the Caslon and Futura families, respectively, and are generally not considered part of those

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families by typographers, despite their names. Digital type became the dominant form of type in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Digital fonts store the image of each character either as a bitmap in a bitmap font, or by mathematical description of lines and curves in an outline font, also called a vector font. Bitmap fonts were more commonly used in the earlier stages of digital type, and are rarely used today.

When an outline font is used, a rasterizing routine (in the application software, operating system or printer) renders the character outlines, interpreting the vector instructions to decide which pixels should be black and which ones white.

Rasterization is straightforward at high resolutions such as those used by laser printers and in high-end publishing systems. For computer screens, where each individual pixel can mean the difference between legible and illegible characters, some digital fonts use hinting algorithms to make readable bitmaps at small sizes. Digital fonts may also contain data representing the metrics used for composition, including kerning pairs, component creation data for accented characters, glyph substitution rules for Arabic typography and for connecting script faces, and for simple everyday ligatures.

Common font formats include TrueType, OpenType and PostScript Type 1, while Metafont is still used by TeX and its variants. Applications using these font formats, including the rasterizers, appear in Microsoft and Apple Computer operating systems, Adobe Systems products and those of several other companies. Digital fonts are created with font editors such as FontForge, RoboFont, Glyphs, Fontlab’s TypeTool, FontLab Studio, Fontographer, or AsiaFont Studio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface

Typographers have developed a comprehensive vocabulary for describing the many aspects of typefaces and typography. Some vocabulary applies only to a subset of all scripts.

Serifs, for example, are a purely decorative characteristic of typefaces used for European scripts, whereas the glyphs used in Arabic or East Asian scripts have characteristics (such as stroke width) that may be similar in some respects but cannot reasonably be called serifs and may not be purely decorative.

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“light and space” by doug wheeler Light and Space denotes a loosely affiliated art movement related to op art, minimalism and geometric abstraction originating in Southern California in the 1960s and influenced

by John McLaughlin. It was characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomena, such as light, volume and scale, and the use of materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights, resin and cast acrylic, often forming installations conditioned by the work’s surroundings. Whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or by playing with light through the use of trans-

parent, translucent or reflective materials, Light and Space artists made the spectator’s experience of light and other sensory phenomena under specific conditions the focus of their work. They were incorporating into their work the latest technologies of the Southern California-based engineering and aerospace industries to their develop sensuous, lightfilled objects. Turrell, who has spread the movement worldwide, summed up its philosophy in saying, “We eat light, drink it in through our skins.”

The nature of the works was reflected in the title of the exhibition at UCLA which introduced the emerging movement in 1971: “Transparency, Reflection, Light, Space”. The show

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presented the work of Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, John McCracken and Craig Kauffman. Other artists associated with the movement are Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Eric Orr, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, DeWain Valentine, and Doug Wheeler. A famous group of abstract color theory artists were influenced by the Light and Space Movement, notably: Frederick Spratt, Phil Sims, Anne Appleby, and David Simpson. Notable contemporary artists practicing in the Light and Space Movement include Olafur Eliasson, Ann Veronica Janssens, Jennifer Steinkamp, Gisela Colon, and Sophia Collier.

Irwin and Turrell, for instance, investigated the phenomenon of sensory deprivation (which influenced the development of their similarly spare light works) as part of the art-and-technology program initiated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1967. Wheeler’s RM 669 (1969) comprises curved white walls encased by a floor and ceiling that seem to recede with every step one takes toward the square of light positioned on the far wall, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. For his series of works on the theme of alchemy, Eric Orr has used natural light as well as blood and fire in his environments that produce extreme retinal responses. Mary Corse’s large white-on-white glass canvases have glass micro-beads embedded in the acrylic paint to create a surface that shifts dramatically with the light. Helen Pashgian created acrylic spheres, globes with an unreal glow, seemingly lighted from within. More recently, Gisela Colon, who has been recognized in ArtForum as a next generation light and space artist, has created “irregularly shaped wall mounted acrylic orbs... scarab-like objects achieve their iridescence via the play of natural light, yet the sculptures appear to change color as one moves around them, as if lit by multihued bulbs.”

McCracken states the following. “I was always primarily interested in form alone, but then to make a form, you have to make it out of something. So color seemed a natural material to use, because color is abstract. If you make a form that appears to be composed of color, then you have something, an object, that’s pretty abstract. Just form alone would be more abstract, of course, because it’s just a mental idea, but

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you don’t have anything there for your perceptions to grapple with unless you make it out of a material. However, if you make it out of metal, or stone, or wood, or whatever, then you have something that to my mind may overemphasize the physical aspect and therefore be difficult to perceive as purely mental. An important thought behind this is that all things are essentially mental - that matter, while quite real on the one hand, is on the other hand composed of energy, and in turn, of pure thought.”

Light and Space art from California was shown at Germano Celant’s influential exhibition of environment-based art at the 1976 Venice Biennale, “Ambiente/arte dal futurismo alla body

art”. The movement has rarely been shown together, as Wheeler rejected to be included in major museum exhibitions, because of his doubts that the works would be shown in the way they were intended, and Nordman refuses to be in group shows on Light and Space. In 2010, David Zwirner Gallery, New York presented an historic exhibition titled “Primary Atmospheres,” a term coined by art critic Dave Hickey to describe the contributions of Southern California artists to the Light & Space movement. As part of a series of exhibitions funded by the J. Paul Getty Foundation during the 2011 Pacific Standard Time initiative, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego held the most significant survey exhibition of perceptual art titled “Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface,” organized by the Museum’s then curator Robin Clark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_and_Space

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(i still dont know what i am doing) thesis statement 1,000 words

White space fascinates me. Maybe it’s because I am a sucker for minimalism, or maybe because I never know how to utilize it. “It” not only being the white of a canvas, or the white of a digital document, but the space that is found within our own mental void. As I start a painting, the white canvas always haunts me. Unable to start due to the intimidation of breaking on to the white space, I deal with anxiety of the blank. Here in lies my main idea for thesis. Why is it that people are afraid, or intimidated, by blank spaces?

Blank spaces are perceived as a void; needing to be filled.

However, when surrounded by dense, overpopulated imagery, I find myself longing for a pause; a gap of space to breathe.

I aim to tackle this notion that blank space is seen as a mistake or not intended.

My goal for my overall thesis project is to bring beauty to whiteness; to showcase the beauty in plain space on a page; and to bring beauty to subtlety. The conceptuality of white space is hard to tackle; explanations seem to be lost in the abstract nature of space in both physical and mental existences. White space is physical, taking over a room with

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a single shade. White space is mental, involving different perceptions of what constitutes the shade of white. White space is a form of space that can be seen as spiritual; as a break in a sentence or a break in design flow. White space is many things, but portraying it as necessary and beautiful is difficult when the preconceived notion with white space is seen as blankness; or a void. By approaching the physical and mental aspects of white space, I aim to target the idea behind blank spaces to be less frightening, but rather, a breath of fresh air. Or hopefully something like that.

Space is defined as a continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied which all things exist and move. Space is associated with blankness; with the idea that it is constantly looking to be filled and available. Through the research within this collection of essays, space is associated with both positive and negative. Ranging from Japanese Ma, space is seen as purely that; a space that exists both mentally and physically. This article has been my inspiration in both graphic design work as well as how I live in my life, in that space is necessary for us to gather our mental happenings. Ma is a Japanese word which can be roughly translated as “gap”, “space”, “pause” or “the space between two structural parts.” In Japanese, ma, the word for space, suggests interval. This conveys how space can be more than a purely visual element, but rather a concept that explains our perception of time and what we do within that given time. Japanese ma is also seen as “another way of seeing”.

Giving space into our perceptions and already existing notions can open up space for ideas and learnings. This is the explanation as to why I am so keen on trying to portray the void as beautiful, due to its redeeming quality as a necessity.

On another hand, blank space can be seen as an empty being. I gathered this idea from my own anxiety that I once felt when looking at a blank canvas or word document. This anxiety stemmed from the need to fill it with something. This something was so vague that it led me to confusion as to why I felt the need to fill it. Why fill emptiness with something that isn’t even substantial? I see this important idea within everyday life. Conversations with people who are merely acquaintances; trying to fill the empty air in between words with nonsense conversation pieces that both you and I do not

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care to talk about. Filling the emptiness in our daily schedules; the fear of staying in at night alone is what drives us to go and stay out late surrounded by people who are conversing, but all share relatively the same reasons for being out. It is also found in food consumption; fast food filling the spaces of ingredients with mere shit that adds unwanted fats and taste that the company thinks we need. We don’t. Here in itself is an example of how the void can be perceived in many different ways, thus opening up my intentions for this project.

Diverging from the idea phase, the medium of my thesis is still unclear. I want to try to change the viewer’s preconceived notions that surround the void. I want people to start thinking of a void as beautiful, in that everyone has mental and physical voids that should be taken as they are rather than attempting to fill. This can be achieved through experiential design, whether it be within a blank gallery space, or an interactive book. My longing to stay connected to my fine art background is the basis behind my thesis. How can I incorporate fine art into the digital realm? And do this successfully?

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