Portfolio 2006 Q1 v2

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Type & Logos


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Icon Set Developed for the iEAR Studios Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York March 2003

A a B b C c D d E e F f G H h I i J K L l k M m N n O o P p Q q R r S s T t U u V v w W Xx Yy+Zz 45 67 89 These icons were created throughout the development of the RPI iEAR website. They serve as a part of iEAR’s identity and visual language.


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Sans-Serif Typeface Developed for Liquid Design Group New York, New York February 2001

This typeface was developed as part of a comprehensive internal rebranding initiative at Liquid Design Group.


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Hair Alphabet Developed for Form & Communication studio Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island October 2004


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The assignment that led to these letterforms was to produce an alphabet using forms found within the human body. Our group chose to work with hair.


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Concentric Rectangles Records Logo Developed for Conrex Records Troy, New York July 2003

CONREX RECORDS This logo was developed for Concentric Rectanges (nĂŠe Conrex), a small record label headquartered in Troy, New York.


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iEAR Studios Logo Developed for the iEAR Studios Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York March 2002

iEAR

integrated electronic arts [at] rensselaer

This logo was developed as part of the interim redesign of RPI’s iEAR website. See the Web section for a design into which this logo has been integrated.


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Workfont Developed as part of “Work/Bathroom� video (See the Video & Interactive section) Melbourne, Australia June 2001

This typeface was custom-made for a video project in which a modular and geometric set of letterforms was needed for titling and credits.


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Posters & Printed Matter


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OP:FIX Perspective 02 Developed as part of the OP:FIX project (See the Web section) Troy, New York April 2004

Discussions over coffee with a few of my like-minded designer, architect, law-student, and photographer friends led to the creation of the OP:FIX project, which is described in the Web section. We were trying to conceive of mechanisms, both technical and ideological, that could reënable valid criticism under the great aegis of “design.”

Before the project evolved into what it is today, we went through a spate of enthusiasm for the ideas behind it, and some of our sketches were of value in their own right.


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contenders include

02

at

a thejessestiles3000 v nobody creative flip one dj panzah zandahs seth cluett (rural)

saturday may

P4*

03

FI$H 2000 FI$H2000 mr. ray

http:// www.goodship.net/tuesdays/ http:// www.djpz.com/ http:// www.televaw.com/ http:// www.empire86.com/ http:// www.pitchcontrolmusic.com/ http:// www.onelonelypixel.org/ http:// IRUNRAP.com/

*

also known as “B.R. Finley’s”, located at 87 4th Street, Troy, NY

Poster for second Audio/Video Battle, a competitive performance in Troy, New York

a/v battle royal


Poster for Goodship Tuesdays, Troy, New York

29 APRIL 2003. EVIDENCE+THEJESSESTILES3000+FLIPONE. FISH. POSTIVELY 4TH STREET. aka B.R. FINLEY'S. NONE. HTTP://WWW.GOODSHIP.NET/TUESDAYS/

(d) (a) (v) (p) ($) (u)

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Poster for Goodship Tuesdays, Troy, New York

op pt a l a a tor sd ith jec .. e w o . tu rs pr les is e h k ic ab t o an ron e c w e w o m o d e vi n m e m so r k o s om be ve s ay ne m ou y y:

”,

e. re f s. oo ay .g d : w es so w al /w tu e / : se ttp h

ay sd e u /t et n p. hi ds

i p eu th ns n r o e i e o c d gr cks sti au l a ja ta dj cid ss a ca m

s/

in F . .R NY “B y, s a ro n t, T ow ree n n w k St do w y: ro so th da th s al 7 4 n e io tu 8 an n s

s y’ e l

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http://conrexrecords.com/dome/

music or film.” Or in this case, a giant brick dome full of gizmos.

face-melting as “a temporary loss of identity or ego (facelessness) through a medium, such as

Pressed on the event’s peculiar name, performer Jesse Stiles defined the concept of

sound and light through multi-channel sound and LED systems.

will exploit the architectural and sonic properties of the Gasholder House, catapulting

Kevin McCormick. All three artists have created computer-based performance systems that

be dramatically lit by dynamic light sculptures designed by the Boston-based light artist,

Todd Reynolds, and local laptopist, Jesse Stiles (a.k.a. The Jesse Stiles 3000). The event will

Topics in Advanced Face-melting will feature music performances by NYC’s premiere violinist,

• FREE

• Doors open at 8:30 pm. Show starts at 9:00.

• Friday, October 17th, 2003

• 1115 5th Avenue, Troy, NY

McCORMICK

FEATURING THE JESSE STILES 3000, TODD REYNOLDS, and KEVIN

TOPICS IN ADVANCED FACE-MELTING: An Evening of Light and Sound

Figure 26 & 27.

Gashouse Extravaganza!

Poster for RPI MFA thesis performance show, Troy, New York 14


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Figure 01: Music of the Spheres: A Concert Series.

Penelope Cotton

(The jts3k and Alan Rosenblith) audio

Adam Invisible video

(Complete Top View)

$2.50 Students and Members $5.00 All Others See Also: http://www.rpi.edu/~vargaa/spheres/ Or call the museum: 518/235.2120

Poster for audio and video performance, Troy, New York. Original flyer was 8.5" x 11" for easy Xeroxing.

This Friday, April 4th, 8 pm at The Junior Museum Planetarium


http://www.goodship.net/tuesdays/

Denim and Diamonds. Max Nix. Caulk and ATW. lmnopf.

or, “B.R. Finley’s” at 87 4th Street

THIS TUESDAY, the 6th of May, at P4:

Proudly supporting the free manipulation of data since 2001.

GOODSHIP TUESDAYS.

Poster for Goodship Tuesdays, Troy, New York 16


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Train postering Developed as a personal project New York City April 2000 – October 2000

The service notices that festoon the halls of the New York subway are very easy to replicate. Until redoubled security efforts rendered it a futile task, I waged an ongoing campaign of nonsense, in which I fabricated absurd service notices and affixed them to the walls, among their authentic counterparts. The signs were identical to MTA service notices in every way, except for their message.

Sometimes, it only takes a very small unexpected thing to make a person start to think.


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ituated in the external zone of the Milky Way, the Sun takes about two hundred million years to make a complete revolution of the Galaxy.

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Right, that’s how long it takes, not a say less, —Qfwfq said—once, as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later, when we went by the next time around. What sort of sign? It’s hard to explain because if I say sign to you, you immediately think of a something that can be distinguishable from anything there: you immediately think if a sign made with some implement or with your hands, and then when you take the implement or you hands away, the sign remains, but in those days there were no implements or even hands, or teeth, or noses all things that came along afterwards, a long time

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So as the planets continued their revolutions, and the solar system went on its own, I soon left the sign far behind me, separated from it by the endless fields of space. And I couldn’t help thinking about when I would come back and encounter it again, and how I would know it, and how happy it would make me, in that anonymous expanse, after I had spent a hundred thousand light-years without meeting anything familiar, nothing for hundreds of centuries, for thousands of millennia; I’d come back and there it would be in its place, just as I had left it, simple and bare, but with that unmistakable imprint, so to speak, that I has given it.

Slowly the Milky Way revolved, with its fringe of constellations and planets and clouds, and the Sun along with the rest, toward the edge. In all that c i rc l i n g, o n l y

In other words, considering it was the first sign ever made in the universe, or at least in the circuit of the Milky Way, I must admit it came out very well. Visible? What a question! Who had eyes to see with in those days? Nothing had ever been seen by anything, the question never even arose. Recognizable, yes, beyond any possibility of error: because al the other points in space were the same, indistinguishable, and instead, this one has the sign on it.

While this reeks of “in the beginning there was the word and the

word was God,” I find this bit far more ap-

plicable to the nature of computer language

the sign still remained still, in an ordinary spot, out of all the orbit’s reach. (to make it, I had leaned over the border of the galaxy a little, so it would remain outside and all those revolving worlds wouldn’t crash into it), in an ordinary point that was no longer ordinary since it was the only point that was surely there, and which could be used as a reference point to distinguish other points.

design. A computer, you see, can only process one “bit” of information at a time. That, of

course, is a simplistic statement, considering

what the machines are capable of these days, but at their very core, computers can only

handle the one classic dichotomy of “on” and

I thought about it day and night; in fact, I couldn’t think about anything else; actually, this was the first opportunity I had had to think something; or I should say: to think something had never been possible, first because there were no things to think about, and second because there were no sign to think of them by were lacking, but from the moment there was that sign, it was possible for someone thinking to think of a sign, and therefore that one, in the sense that the sign was the thing you could think about and also the sign of the thing thought namely, itself.

“off.” They can do that very fast, and in such a way that it is possible to construct layers

of abstraction on top of this simple system.

Computer languages are such an intermediary system; they enable a human to produce

“code,” which are directives to the computer written in a format that is then translatable

by another program (called a “compiler”) into

tives) to be named. Those names are converted

into comprable binary representations by the compiler. Naturally, those names must be

‡01

unique. If they are not, they will ultimately

confuse either the compiler or the underly-

Transported by the sides of the Galaxy, our world went navigating through distant spaces, and the sign stayed where I had left it to mark that spot, and the sign stayed where I had left it to mark that spot, and at the same time it marked me, I carried it with me, it inhabited me, possessed me entirely, came between me and everything with which I might have attempted to establish a relationship. As I waited to come back and meet it again, I could try to derive other signs from it and combinations of signs, a series of similar signs and contrasts of different signs. But already tens and tens of thousands of millennia had gone by since the moment when I had made it (rather, since the few seconds in which I had scrawled it down in the constant movement of the Milky Way) and now, just when I needed to bear in mind its detail (the slightest uncertainty about its form made uncertain the possible distinctions between it and other signs I might make), I realized that, though I recalled its general outline, its over-all appearance, still something about it eluded me, I mean if I tried to break it down into its various elements, I couldn’t remember whether, between one part and the other, it went like this or like that. I needed it there in front of me, to study, to consult, but instead it was still far away, I didn’t yet know how far, because I had made it precisely in order to know the time it would take me to see it again, and until I had found it once more, I wouldn’t know. Now, however, it wasn’t my motive in making it that mattered to me, but how it was made and I started inventing hypotheses about this how, and theories according to which a certain sign had to be perforce in a certain way, or else, proceeding by exclusion, I tried to eliminate all the less probable types of sign to arrive at the right one, but all these imaginary signs vanished inevitably because that first sign was missing as a

distinguish between multiple people named the same name in the same context, this is called a “namespace collision.” You would

think this wouldn’t be that much of a prob-

lem; after all, all one has to do is not give

two different things the same name, right?

However, modern compuuters are the result of work by thousands upon thousands of

individuals. Code written by one person must function without issue alongside the code

of many unseen others. Calvino’s sign sort

of like the “kernel,” which (in contemporary

computer nerd parlance) is the piece of code

that manages all others on the computer’s system. The kernel manages the names of all the

abstract signs and signifiers that exist in the

computer’s memory. Whenever you turn your computer on, the kernel loads first, and thus

all subsequent names and signs are possible.

term of comparison. As I racked my brain like this (while the Galaxy went on turning wakefully in its bed of soft emptiness and the atoms burned and radiated) I realized I had lost by now even that confused notion of my sign, and I succeeded in conceiving only interchangeable fragments of signs, that is smaller signs within the large one, and every change of these signs-withinthe-sign changed the sign itself into a completely different one; in short, I had completely forgotten what my sign was like and, try as I might, it wouldn’t come back to my mind.

Did I despair? No, this forgetfulness was annoying, but not irreparable. Whatever happened, I knew the sign was there waiting for me, quiet and still. I would arrive, I would find it again, and I would then be able to pick up the thread of my meditations. At a rough guess, I calculated we had completed half of out galactic revolution: I had only to be patient, the second half always seemed to go by more quickly. Now I just had to remember the sign existed and I would pass it again.

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Day followed day, and then I knew I must be near. I was furiously impatient because I might encounter the sign at any moment. It’s here, no, a little further on, now I’ll count up to a hundred... had it disappeared? Had we already

My only natural response to this can be: Oh yeah? And why not?

Mr. Calvino’s defensive little claim merely

draws attention to his more fanciful ideas. For example, “preceeding” and “successive” don’t

really mean anything in three dimensions,

unless one is implicitly constraining two of

those dimensions, which he is not. This kind of huffy, derisive tone is a common thread

throughout “A Sign in Space,” and it makes me sad.

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ing machine itself. While humans can, say,

“Phil,” a computer cannot. When things have

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So the situation was this: the sign served to mark a place but at the same time it meant that in that place there was a sign (something far more important because there were plenty of places but there was only one sign) and also at the same time that sign was mine, the sign of me, because it was the only sign I had ever made and I was the only one who had ever made signs. It was like a name, the name of that point and also my name that I had signed on that spot; in short, it was the only name available for everything that required a name .

number, say, or a variable, or a group of direc-

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the binary format required by the machine.

Programming languages allow concepts (a

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Typographic poster for RISD Typography 2 studio, Providence, Rhode Island, April 2005. Original printed size 4' x 12'

afterwards. As to the form a sign should have, you say it’s no problem because, whatever form it may be given, a sign only has to serve as a sign, that is, be different or else the same as other signs; here again its easy for you young ones to talk, but in that period I didn’t have any examples to follow, I couldn’t say I’ll make it the same or I’ll make it different, there were no things to copy, nobody knew what a line was, straight or curved, or even a dot, or a protuberance or a cavity. I conceived the idea of considering a sign a something that I felt like making, so when, at that point in space and not in another, I made something, meaning to make a sign, it turned out that I really had made a sign, after all.

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gone past it? I didn’t know. My sign had perhaps remained who knows where, behind, completely remote form the revolutionary orbit of our system. I hadn’t calculated the oscillations to which, especially in those days, the celestial bodies’ fields of gravity were subject, and which caused them to trace irregular orbits, cut like the flower of a dahlia. For about a hundred millennia I tormented myself, going over my calculations: it turned out that out course touched that spot not every galactic year but only every three, that is, every six hundred million solar years. When you’ve waited; the way was long but I wasn’t on foot, after all; astride the Galaxy I traveled through the light-years, galloping over the planetary and stellar orbits as if I were on a horse whose shoes struck sparks; I was in a state of mounting excitement; I felt I was going forth to conquer the only thing that mattered to me, sign and dominion and name . . .

I made the second circuit, the third. I was there. I let out a yell. At a point in which had to be that very point, in the place of my sign. There was a shapeless scratch, a bruised, chipped abrasion of space. I had lost everything: the sign, the point, the thing that caused me – being the one who had made the sign at that point—to be me. Space, with out a sign, was once again a chasm, the void, without beginning or end, nauseating, in which everything—including me—was lost. (And don’t come telling me that, to fix a point, my sign and the erasure was the negation of the sign, and therefore didn’t serve to distinguish one point from the preceding and successive points .) ‡02

I was disheartened and for many light-years I let myself be dragged along as if I were unconscious. When I finally raised my eyes (in the meanwhile, sight had begun in our world, and, as a result, also my life), I saw what I would never have expected to see. I saw it,

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Typographic poster for RISD Typography 2 studio, Providence, Rhode Island, April 2005. Original printed size 4' x 12'

‡05

One has to wonder if Kgwgk

and the narrator are not one in

‡06

wonders aloud, “Now is that a dinosaur egg,

human characteristics (forgetfulness,

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The contemporary vernacular phrase

“biting styles” embodies this idea.

According to UrbanDictionary.com, the

phrase originated in early hiphop (see Þ02).

the sign, but not that one, a similar sign, a unquestionably copied from mine, but one I realized immediately it couldn’t be mine, it was so squat and careless and clumsily pretentious , a wretched counterfeit of what I had meant to indicate with that sign whose ineffable purity I could only now—through contrast figure it out. Finally a plurimillennial chain of deductions led me to the solution: on another planetary system which performed its galactic revolution before us, there was a certain Kgwgk (the name I deduced afterwards, in the later era of names), a spiteful type, consumed with envy, who had erased my sign in vandalistic impulse and then, with vulgar artifice, had attempted to make another.

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It was clear that his sign had nothing to mark except Kgwgk’s intention to imitate my sign, which was beyond all comparison. But at the moment the determination not to let my rival get the better of me was stronger than any

While this is an amusing point, the fact does remain that the

dinosaurs were around for about 186 mil-

lion years. Humans, contrastingly, have

been around for only 2 million years, and

civilization as we know it is only 10,000

years old at the most. While the narrator is ostensibly überhuman, the fact that he (or perhaps she?) exhibits so many distinctly

§01

Such individuals are the same sort of people who will spoil special-effects

movie moments by leaning over and whis-

pering things like “That could never happen.

Don’t they know about special relativity??

Idiots.” See the movie Napoleon DynamiteÞ03 for a well-rounded character sketch of this

archetype.

human traits makes this comparison very funny if you’re the sort of nerd§01 who thinks about such things.

other desire: I wanted immediately to make a new sign in space, a real sign that would make Kgwgk die of envy. About seven hundred million years had gone by since I had first tried to make a sign, but I fell to work with a will. Now things were different, however, because the world, as I mentioned, was beginning to produce an image of itself, and in everything a form was beginning to correspond to a function, and the forms of that time, we believed, had a long future ahead of them (instead, we were wrong: take – to give you a fairly recent example – the dinosaurs ), and therefore in this new sign of mine you could perceive the influence of our new way of looking at things, call it style if you like, that special way that everything had to be, there, in a certain fashion. I must say that I was truly satisfied with it, and I no longer regretted that first sign that had been erased, because this one seemed vastly more beautiful to me. ‡04

But in the duration of that galactic year we already began to realize that the world’s forms had been temporary up until then, and that they would change, one by one. And this awareness was accompanied by a certain annoyance with the old images, so that even their memory was intolerable. I began to be tormented by a thought: I had left that sign in space, that sign

which had seemed so beautiful and original to me and so suited to its function, and which now, in my memory, seemed inappropriate, in all its pretension, a sign chiefly of an antiquated way of conceiving signs and of my foolish acceptance of an order of things I ought to have been wise enough to break away from in time. In other words, I was ashamed of that sign which went on though the centuries, being passed by worlds in flight, making a ridiculous spectacle of itself and of me and of that temporary way we had had of seeing things. I blushed when I remembered it (and I remembered it constantly), blushes that lasted whole geological eras: to hide my shame I crawled into the craters of the volcanoes, in remorse I sank my teeth into the caps of the glaciations that covered the continents. I was tortured by the thought that Kgwgk, always preceding me in the circumnavigation of the Milky Way, would see the sign before I could

�� ����

erase it, and boor that he was, he would mock me and make fun of me, contemptuously repeating the sign in rough caricatures in every corner of the circumgalactic sphere.

Instead, this time the complicated astral timekeeping was in my favor. Kgwgk’s constellation didn’t encounter the sign, whereas our solar system turned up there punctually at the end of the first revolution, so close that I was able to erase the whole thing with the greatest care.

Now, there wasn’t a single sign of mine in space. I could start drawing another, but I knew that signs also allow others to judge the one who makes them, and that in the course of a galactic year tastes and ideas have time to change, and the way of regarding the earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards; in short, I was afraid a sign that now might seem perfect to me, in two hundred or six hundred million years would make me look absurd. Instead, in my nostalgia, the first sign, brutally rubbed out by Kgwgk, remained beyond the attacks of time and its changes, the sign created before the beginning of forms, which was to contain something that would have survived all forms, namely the fact of being a sign and nothing else.

���

Making signs that weren’t that sign no longer held any interest for me; and I had forgotten that sign now, billions of years before. So, unable to make true signs, but wanting somehow to annoy Kgwgk, I started making false signs, notches in space, holes, stains, little tricks that only an incompetent creature like Kgwgk could mistake for signs. And still he furiously got rid of them in his erasings (as I could see in later revolutions), with a determination that must have cost him much effort. (Now I scattered these false signs liberally through space, to see how far his simple-mindedness would go.)

Observing these erasures, one circuit after the next (the Galaxy’s revolutions had now become for me a slow, boring voyage without goal or expectation), I realized something: as the galactic years passed the erasures tended to fade in space, and beneath them what I had drawn at these points, my false signs – as I called them – began to reappear. This discovery, far from displeasing me, filled me with new hope. If Kgwgk’s erasures were erased, the first he had made, there at that point, must have disappeared by now, and my sign must have returned to pristine visibility ! ‡05

¶ ¶

So expectation was revived, to lend anxiety to my days. The Galaxy turned like an omelet in a heated pan, itself both frying pan and golden egg ; and I was frying with it, in my impatience. ‡06z

But, with the passing of the galactic years, space was no longer that uniformly barren and colorless expanse. The idea of fixing with signs the points where we passed – as it had come to me and to Kgwgk – had occurred to many, scattered over billions of planets of other solar systems, and I was constantly running into one of these things,

pimply little repressed head and

to the agelessness of the platonic concept

self to display some of the more distinctly

the same, after these last two paragraphs.

The narraort has already established him-

��������

Again, the nerd in me rears his

personally would never say that... only my

vengefulness); it is there quite concievable that a pandimensional überbeing such as

this narrator could suffer from a human

������ ���

���

� �� ����

or a chicken egg, or what? Is he speaking

or a pair, or even a dozen, simple two-dimensional scrawls, or else three-dimensional solids (polyhedrons, for example) or even things constructed with more care, with the fourth dimension and everything. So it happened that I reached the point of my sign, and I found five, all there. And I wasn’t able to recognize my own. It’s this one, no, that; no, no, that one seems to modern, but it could also be the most ancient; I don’t recognize my hand in that one, I would never have wanted to make it like that... And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn’t found mine.

��������

of ‘egg,’ or some such shit??” Of course, I

inner nerd. Yup.

mental problem such as schitzophrenia.

This whole business of making signs all

over the place to distract one’s unseen en-

��������� ��� ���� ���������� �������� �������� ��� ������ ������� ��� ��

emy is quite remeniscent of, say, the men-

������������������������������������������������������������������

tal issues exhibited by the protagonists of

����������������������������������������������������������������������

Kenzaburo Oe’s The Day He Himself Shall

���������������������������������������������������������������������� �������� ��������� ��� ������� ����� ����� ������ ��� �������� ��������

Wipe My Tears AwayÞ04, or Sylvia Nasar’s

A Beautiful MindÞ05.

count less things that, before, were there, marking nothing in their own presence; they had been transformed into the sign of themselves and had been added to the series of signs made on purpose by those who meant to make a sign), the fire-streaks against a wall of schistose rock, the four-hundred-and-twenty-seventh groove – slightly crooked – of the cornice of a tomb’s pediment, a sequence of streaks on a video during a thunderstorm (the series of signs was multiplied in the series of the signs of signs, of signs repeated countless times always the same and always somehow different because to the purposely made sign you had to add the sign that had happened there by chance), the badly inked tail of the letter R in an evening newspaper joined to a thready imperfection in the paper, one among the eight hundred thousand flakings of a tarred wall in the Melbourne docks, the curve of a graph, a skid-

I’m not exaggerating when I sawy that the galactic years that followed were the worst I had ever lived through. I went on looking, and signs kept growing thicker in space; from all the worlds anybody who had an opportunity invariably left his mark in space somehow; and our world, too, every time I turned, I found more crowded, so that world and space seemed the mirror of each other, both minutely adorned with hieroglyphics and ideograms, each of which might be a sign and might not be: a calcareous concretion on basalt, a crest raised by the wind on the clotted sand of the desert, the arrangement of the eyes in a peacock’s tail (gradually, living among signs had led us to see signs in

���������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������������������� ���������������������������������������������������������������� ��� ������ ����� ������ ���� ����� ��������� ���� �� ������ ��� ������ �������� ����������� �� ��������� ��������� ������� ������ ��� �� ������������ ������� ������������������������������������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������������������������������������� ��������������������������������������������������������� ���� ������������ ���� ������� ���� ���������� ������ �� �������� ����� ���

mark on the asphalt, a chromosome . . . Every now and then I’d start: that’s the one! And for a second I was sure I had rediscovered my sign, on the Earth or in space, it made no difference, because through the signs a continuity had been established with no precise boundaries any more .

��������������������������������������������������������������� ���������������

‡07

����� ���� ���� ����� ����� ������� ����� ����� ����� ���� ��������� �������������������������������������������������������������������

In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space; it was constantly being dotted, minutely, a network of lines and scratches and reliefs and engravings; the universe was scrawled over on all sides, along all its dimensions. There was no longer any way to establish a point of reference: the Galaxy went on turning but I could no longer count the revolutions, any point could be the point of departure, any sign heaped up with the others could be mine, but discovering it would have served no purpose, because it was clear that, independent of signs, space didn’t exist and perhaps had never existed.

��������� ������������ ������� ��������������� ����������� ����� ������������������� ���� ������ ���� �� ����� ���������� ������ ���� ���� ����� ����� ���� ������� ����� ��� ������� ��������� ������ ���� ������ ��� ���� ��������� ���������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������ ������������������������������������������������� � ��������������������������������������������������������������� ��� ��� ������ ������������ �������� ���� ����� ���� ������������ ����� ����

���

�������������������������������������������������������������������� �������������������������������������

‡07

�� ����� ��� ����� ���������������������������������������������������������������������

In essence, the idea of the per-

fect sign has very much become

the author’s personal Zahir. The reader is

�������������������������������������������������������������������

hereby invited to consider this point when

���������������������������������

reading The Zahir, contained in the book

around which this version of A Sign in Space has been wrapped.

������������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������ ��� ������ �� ������ ����� ��� ����� ����� ������� ��� ������ ��� ����������� ��������������������������������������������������������������� ������������������������������������������������������������������ �������������������������������������������������������������������� ����������������������������������

19


20

CCA Posters Developed for Visual Systems studio Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island April 2005

Richard Neutra

Frank Gehry

Louis Sullivan

The International Style

Postmodern Deconstructivism

The Chicago School

“I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling “Architects must have a razor sharp sense of

“I want a color symphony and I am pretty sure I

and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user

individuality.”

am going to get it.”

brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can’t do that, I’ve failed.”

Neutra’s first impressions of Southern California were candid. He found Angelenos of the 1920s “mentally footloose” with cultural naiveté “bordering everywhere on mixup.” But he eventually grew to love his adopted city. With the support of friend and fellow Austrian-born Southern California architect, Rudolf Schindler, Neutra’s first major commission, the Lovell House (1929), announced the arrival of an important new architectural vision. Neutra responded to the Southern California climate by creating designs where extensive use of glass allowed indoor and outdoor spaces to flow freely together. A journalist once described his work as “...the most amiable relationship between science, technique,

1983 >

Temporary Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art; Los Angeles, California

1988 >

Sirmai-Peterson Residence; Thousand Oaks, California

1989 >

Schnabel Residence; Los Angeles, California

1989 >

Vitra International Manufacturing Facility & Design Museum; Weil am Rhein, Germany

1991 >

Chiat/Day Headquarters; Venice, California

1992 >

University of Iowa Advanced Technologies Laboratory; Iowa City, Iowa

1992 >

University of Toledo Center for the Visual Arts; Toledo, Ohio

1993 >

Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum; Minneapolis, Minnesota

1994 >

Vitra International Headquarters; Basel, Switzerland

1994 >

The American Center; Paris, France

1995 >

EMR Communication and Technology Center; Bad Oeynhausen, Germany

1995 >

Team Disneyland Administration Building; Anaheim, California

1996 >

Nationale-Nederlanden Building; Prague, Czech Republic

1997 >

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Bilbao, Spain

1999 >

The Vontz Center for Molecular Studies at the University of Cincinnati; Cincinnati, Ohio

industrialization and good taste.” 2000 >

DG Bank Headquarters; Berlin, Germany

2000 >

Experience Music Project; Seattle, Washington

2001 >

Bard College Center for the Performing Arts; Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

2002 >

The Walt Disney Concert Hall; Los Angeles, California

2003 >

The Peter B. Lewis Campus of the Weatherhead School of Management at

2003 >

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stata Complex, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Case Western Reserve University; Cleveland, Ohio

June 12 — July 10

Canadian Centre for Architecture

July 17 — August 18

Canadian Centre for Architecture

August 22 — August 29

Canadian Centre for Architecture

This is a trio of posters created as part of the RISD Visual Systems studio class. The process involved breaking down each architects’ body of work into a simplified formal expression, and subsequently rebuilding a coherent system from those parts. The same elements were used for a brochure, which I have included here in the Book Art & Design section.


21

Book Art & Design


22

Altered Pritzker Prize Book Developed for Printed Books studio Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island September 2004

The first assignment in the RISD Printed Books studio class is to alter a book. The logic is perfectly sound: to make a book, one must first explore its unmaking.

I chose to apply an iterative pleat fold technique to the awards program from the occasion of Rem Koolhaas winning the Pritzker Prize. Koolhaas’ famous S,M,L,XL was one of the first texts to directly utilize the ideas about generative architectural folding that had been put forth in a 1991 issue of Architectural Design, entitled Folding in Architecture.

It was a logical next step, then, to use such a folding process on a book celebrating Mr. Koolhaas’ achievements in architecture.


23

Transmodal Network-Enabled Bullshit Systems Ongoing writing and book design project Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island November 2004 — Present

I am in the process of writing and designing a book about bullshit language in architecture and graphic design discourse. Shown here is a recent prototype.

The main portion book is essentially two books in one. It is both a field guide to the bullshit terminology that pervades contemporary designspeak, and commentary on those terms. This prototype interweaves these two books with text on colored acetate, which is overlayed onto illustrations in the same color.

The book also includes several essays of mine on related topics, whose layout and design are more traditional.


24

Typographic Dual Book Developed for Typography 2 studio Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island April 2005

ii

Foreword

Foreword

iii

The Zahir

In the pages that follow, you will find a great many

footnotes and endnotes. In order to keep these non-

linear elements from overwhelming you, the reader,

the following signs and symbols have been employed to aid in their differentiation (and therefore in their ultimate enjoyment):

*

Asterisk. This indicates notes written by the

author himself, at the time of the book’s inception.

They appear in the margins.

§

June 7, at dawn, the Zahir came into my hands; I am

not the man I was then, but I am still able to recall,

and perhaps recount, what happened. I am still, albeit

The Zahir

Section Mark. This mark indicates a note I have

written on another note. Notes on notes have been

written on all types of notes, including notes on notes.

only partially, Borges‡02.

¤

magazines; that ubiquity may have had something to

identified have been specifically crafted to clarify

In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-

oblique language or references within the text. In

recompiled in Appendix II (found on page 21).

centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has

Þ

Thorn. This mark referrs to a URL. URLs have

‡01

scratched the letters N T and the number 2 ; the date

Figure 1: Argentine twentycentavo coin.

Figure 2: Same, with scratchings described by Borges.

been indexed in long form in Appendix I (page

stamped on the face is 1929 . (In Gujarat, at the end ‡01

of the eighteenth century, the Zahir was a tiger; in Java

it was a blind man in the Surakarta mosque, stoned by the faithful; in Persia, an astrolabe that Nadir Shah

20); when appropriate or possible, a shorter, casual

ordered thrown into the sea; in the prisons of Mahdi,

form of the URL has been included in place. All

URL references appear within notes.

Figure 1.

do with the fact that she was thought to be a very pretty woman, although that supposition was not

unconditionally supported by every image of her. But

no matter – Teodelina Villar was less concerned with beauty than with perfection. The Jews and Chinese codified every human situation: the Mishnah ¤01 tells

us that beginning at sunset on the Sabbath, a tailor

may not go into the street carrying a needle; the Book of Rites ¤02 informs us that a guest receiving his first

in 1892, a small sailor’s compass, wrapped in a shred

glass of wine must assume a grave demeanor; receiving

touched; in the synagogue in Córdoba, according to

Teodelina Villar imposed upon herself was analogous,

of cloth from a turban, that Rudolf Karl von Slatin

Dagger. This denotes comments by the editors

Borges frequently includes himself as a character in

his stories. This makes the act of

academically referencing his work

[the writer]” and “Borges [the

Imaginary Currency Mark. Notes thusly

addition to appearing in the margins, they have been

‡02

somewhat of a chore: one must

photographs of her had littered the pages of worldly

Zotenberg, a vein in the marble of one of the twelve

the second, a respectful, happy air. The discipline that though even more painstaking and detailed.

character]”. He similarly inserts himself in The Aleph , a story I

consider to be the polar opposite

of The Zahir. In The Aleph, Borges

¤01

of the text’s new context, within a short time of its

The Mishnah is a text

encompassing the oral

traditions of the ancient Hebrews,

and informs much of contempo-

publication. They appear in the margins.

rary orthodox Jewish custom.

Figure 2.

¤02

The Book of Rites is a

Confucian text that elabo-

rately stipulates ritual and behavior, very much as Borges describes here.

superlative ajective

years before; her features recovered the authority that arrogance, money, youth, the awareness of being the

expression “the cream of the crop.” Before the advent of mass-market

crème de la crème ¤04, restrictions, a lack of imagination,

farming, when people interfaced

with their cows directly, the most

and stolidity can give. My thoughts were more or less

coveted part of the cream was

these: No version of that face that had so disturbed me

the part that floated to the top

during the cow-extract fractioning

shall ever be as memorable as this one; really, since it

process. Teodelina Villar is not

could almost be the first, it ought to be the last. I left

being described here as a dairy

extract; rather, the phrase serves to

her lying stiff among the flowers, her contempt for the

indicate her high status in society.

world growing every moment more perfect in death. It

[the character] finds an object in his

was about two o’clock, I would guess, when I stepped

friends’ basement that shows him,

in one blinding flash, everything in

into the street. Outside, the predictable ranks of

the entire universe (including you,

the reader). This object is an Aleph.

The fact that he has put himself in

both stories makes for a fascinating

armchair philosophy session when you consider one of the things he

necessarily saw in the Aleph is the

Zahir, as you will see after reading

The Zahir.

‡03

Teodelina Villar did not exist. The Google

query

‘“Teodelina Villar” -borges’ returns only one result, where it appears

her name was used as a test entry

for a database.

§01

Collected Fictions, Jorge

Luis Borges (Andrew Hur-

ley, translator). Penguin Books,

1999. Available from Amazon .

of the text from which this document was

transcribed. Presumably, they were written in service

Jorge Luis Borges

Villar magically became what she had been twenty

Crème de la crème: A

phrase, comprable to the English

constantly write things like “Borges

On June 6, Teodelina Villar‡03 died. Back in 1930,

They appear in the margins.

6

¤04

of a well.) Today is the thirteenth of November; last

general comments I have written to supplement

the text. They appear in the margins.

A Guide to This Book

3

hundred pillars; in the ghetto in Tetuán, the bottom

Double Dagger. Notes marked in this fashion are

§02

Google.com , a general-

purpose web search engine

available to the public. It is cur-

rently in vogue to use the term “to

google” to mean “to look up on the internet”, such is the usefulness

of the site.

†02

one- and two-story houses had taken on that abstract

On the corner of Chile and

Tacuarí: A corner in the

air they often have at night, when they are simpli-

Barrio Sur, or southern part of

fied by darkness and silence. Drunk with an almost

Buenos Aires, as the story says; it

is some ten blocks from the Plaza

impersonal pity, I wandered through the streets. On

Constitución and its great station.

†03

the corner of Chile and Tacuarí†02 I spotted and open

Truco: A card game

indigenous, apparently, to

bar-and-general-store. In that establishment, to my

Argentina and played very often

misfortune, three men were playing truco †03.

in these establishments. Borges

was fascinated by this game and

devoted an essay and two or three

In the rhetorical figure known as oxymoron, the

poems to it, along with refer-

ences, such as this one, scattered

adjective applied to a noun seems to contradict that

throughout his œuvre. The phrase

“to my misfortune” indicates the

noun‡07. Thus, Gnostics spoke of a “dark light” and

inexorability of the attraction that

the game held for him; the

narrator could apparently simply not avoid going into the bar.

Truco’s nature, for JLB, is that

combination of fate and chance

that seems to rule over human life

‡07

as well as over games: an infinitude

of possibilities within a limited

number of cards, the limitations of the rules. See “Truco” in Borges: A

Reader.

Borges adequately defines

oxymoron here for the

purposes of his story, and as such I will allow this definition to stand

definitive. See †06 and ‡02 for

further (and less blatant) indica-

tions that the idea of oxymoron is a

core theme in The Zahir.

The culminating assignment for Typography 2, one of RISD’s principal typography courses, calls for the production of a book that contains two interleaved stories. I was given “A Sign in Space”, by Italo Calvino, and I chose “The Zahir” by Jorge Luis Borges as a complement.

I typeset the Borges book as you see here, and bound it in a Smythe-sewn volume. I reformulated “A Sign in Space” as a poster (included here on page XX, in the Posters & Printed Matter section), which was then folded and wrapped around the bound Borges volume. Each tale was thickly footnoted, and the footnotes corresponded to one another in their relevance and clarification.


25

The Zahir

7

alchemists, of a “black sun”. Departing from my last

visit to Teodelina Villar and drinking a glass of harsh brandy in a corner bar-and-grocery-store was a kind

of oxymoron: the very vulgarity and facileness of it

were what tempted me. (The fact that men were playing cards in the place increased the contrast.) I asked

the owner for a brandy and orange juice; among my change I was given the Zahir; I looked at it for an

instant, then walked outside into the street, perhaps

with the beginnings of a fever. The thought struck me that there is no coin that its not the symbol of all

the coins that shine endlessly down throughout history and fable. I thought of Charon’s obolus ¤05 ; the alms that Belisarius went about begging for¤06 ; Judas’

thirty pieces of silver¤07 ; the drachmas of the courtesan Laïs ¤08, the ancient coin proffered by one of the

Ephesian sleepers ¤09 ; the bright coins of the wizard in

the 1001 Nights ¤10, which turned into disks of paper;

Isaac Laquedem’s inexhaustible denarius ¤11; the sixty thousand coins, one for every line of an epic, which

Firdusi returned to a king because they were sliver and not gold ¤12 ; the gold doubloon nailed by Ahab to

¤05

The 1001 Nights: You know, I was supposed to have read this book

for my undergraduate thesis, but I can’t

¤11

Isaac Laquedem: A character created by 19 -century writer

Alexandre Dumas in 1853 in order to

remember anything about paper coins and

reënforce trenchantly malignant Jewish

whatnot. Maybe he’s making things up, at

stereotypes.

this point... that would even sortka kinda be congruent with the whole plot thing, when you think about it, erm.

¤13

In Melville’s Moby Dick, Captain Ahab uses a gold coin, dramati-

cally fixed to the boat’s mast, to transmute

Appendix II Cite #

Found on Page:

23

24

Colophon

primary biological fuels during the production of this book. Other

ferryman of Hades, would charge newly deceased souls one obolus to cross the river Styx and enter the afterlife proper. Hence, Greeks were customarily buried with coins placed over their eyes, to assure safe passage.

¤06

Belisarius: A legendary, perhaps even mythical, 5 -century

Byzantine general, Belisarius was condemmed by the emperor Justinian to

06

¤

Language and Reference Clarification Index

be blinded. Furthermore, he was to spend the rest of his days begging for alms (specifically, oboli; see ¤05) after a conviction of corruption temporarily unseated him from his command.

¤07

Cite #

Found on Page:

lowers of the Jesus, the Messiah

pieces of silver.

¤08

01

3

The Mishnah is a text encompassing the oral traditions of the ancient Hebrews, and informs much of contemporary orthodox Jewish custom.

02

3

The Book of Rites is a Confucian text that elaborately stipulates ritual and behavior, very much as Borges describes here.

Laïs: An infamous high-end Corinthian whore, who is said

03

4

Chapeaux vs. Caprices: Amusingly, the website Answers.com defines a chapeaux as simply as a hat, but a caprice as “an impulsive change of mind.” Perhaps some colloquial secondary meaning is at work here that I am unable to ascertain; a quote from a copy of Harper’s Weekly in 1857 states:

to have plied her trade around the 4

century.

¤09

Ephesian sleepers: I can’t really figure this whole thing out; you

“The fashionable female hat is nothing, after all, but a caprice. Let those who pay for it—fifty dollars, more or less—grumble about the cost. We, as spectators, shall be satisfied if it prove an ornament.”

can have a go at it yourself if you wish; see Þ07.

04

¤12

6

This episode went down pretty much as Borges says it did. If

you’re a stickler for the details, see Þ08. Or Þ02.

¤14

Note:

7

Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s monolithic Ulysses, spends

the entirety of the tale wandering around

the greed of his fellow seamen into fuel for

Dublin. The florin, a unit of Irish currency,

his fanatic, livid whalehunt.

crops up numerous times throughout Bloom’s day.

05

7

Crème de la crème: A superlative adjective phrase, comprable to the English “the cream of the crop.” Before the advent of massmarket farming, when people interfaced with their cows directly, the most coveted part of the cream was the part that floated to the top during the cow-extract fractioning process. Teodelina Villar is not being described here as a dairy extract; rather, the phrase serves to indicate her high status in society. Charon’s obolus: An obolus was both a unit of weight and of currency in ancient Greece. Charon, the ferryman of Hades, would charge newly deceased souls one obolus to cross the river Styx and enter the afterlife proper. Hence, Greeks were customarily buried with coins placed over their eyes, to assure safe passage.

Belisarius: A legendary, perhaps even mythical, 5 -century Byzantine general, Belisarius was condemmed by the emperor Justinian to be blinded. Furthermore, he was to spend the rest of his days begging for alms (specifically, oboli; see ¤05) after a conviction of corruption temporarily unseated him from his command.

07

7

08

7

Laïs: An infamous high-end Corinthian whore, who is said to have plied her trade around the 4 century.

09

7

Ephesian sleepers: I can’t really figure this whole thing out; you can have a go at it yourself if you wish; see Þ07.

10

7

The 1001 Nights: You know, I was supposed to have read this book for my undergraduate thesis, but I can’t remember anything about paper coins and whatnot. Maybe he’s making things up, at this point... that would even sortka kinda be congruent with the whole plot thing, when you think about it, erm.

11

7

Isaac Laquedem: A character created by 19th-century writer Alexandre Dumas in 1853 in order to reënforce trenchantly malignant Jewish stereotypes.

Judas: One of the original fol-

worshipped by most Christian sects;

Judas allegedly betrayed Jesus, a wanted criminal, to the local authorities for 30

Colophon Bass Ale and Nong Shim Noodle Bowl Soup were the author’s

Note:

both a unit of weight and of

the mast¤13 ; Leopold Bloom’s unreturning florin ¤14 ;

¤10

Appendix II

22

Charon’s obolus: An obolus was

currency in ancient Greece. Charon, the

Judas: One of the original followers of the Jesus, the Messiah worshipped by most Christian sects; Judas allegedly betrayed Jesus, a wanted criminal, to the local authorities for 30 pieces of silver.

12

7

This episode went down pretty much as Borges says it did. If you’re a stickler for the details, see Þ08. Or Þ02.

13

7

In Melville’s Moby Dick, Captain Ahab uses a gold coin, dramatically fixed to the boat’s mast, to transmute the greed of his fellow seamen into fuel for his fanatic, livid whalehunt.

14

7

Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s monolithic Ulysses, spends the entirety of the tale wandering around Dublin. The florin, a unit of Irish currency, crops up numerous times throughout Bloom’s day.

15

8

Errr... this king, right? He was French? I think. Anyway, his whole government got, like, totally overturned and shit. So like he was running away? But all his gold fell on the floor. It was totally hillarious ‘cause his name was Louis, and the money was called louis too! What a retard.

16

11

Sigurd: sort of the Norse version of Hercules, or Agamemnon. He was more formally known as Sigurd the Dragon Slayer. Someone with far too much time on their hands has eulogized him in hypertext; see Þ10.

17

12

Idée fixe: an idea that dominates the mind; a fixed idea; an obsession .

18

14

Fakir: an ascetic vagrant. See Þ12 for a good definition and further reading.

assorted nutritional and/or pharmaceutical components were employed sparingly.

Colophon

Comments and notes marked with ‡, ¤, §, and Þ are © 2005 Alexander Bohn, and are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. More information about this license is available here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

This book has been set in the Caslon typeface. Caslon was first punchcut by its namesake, William Caslon, in 1722. Caslon is a solid Old Style face (although some would look at some of its elements and call it Transitional) with a wide range of variants, making it an ideal choice for this text and its many footnotes and comments. Several versions of Caslon have been used, to achieve maximum typographic concordance. The overwhelming majority of the text is set in the OpenType version of Adobe Caslon Pro; Adobe Caslon 3 and Adobe Caslon 540 make occasional appearances when specific old-style figures and other nuances are called for. This book is printed on Mohawk Superfine 40lb. book weight paper, presumably with an Epson 1280 inkjet printer... I will refrain from overt speculation about the printing process, as many things could change between the final edit of this file and the actual physical application of ink (or dye, or toner, what have you) to paper. The final assembly of this book will most likely render it somehow unsafe for archival purposes, despite all efforts to the contrary. All typesetting and layout was performed using a pirated copy of Adobe InDesign CS. Some extraneous doodads were composed or otherwise mangled with Adobe Illustrator CS or Adobe Photoshop CS, depending.

This license states that the licensed work may be used in non-commercial endeavors without permission from the author, provided he is given appropriate credit, and with the stipulation that any resultant derivative works that include the licensed work are thereafter released under the same terms. All other texts and comments are © their respective authors. These texts are subject to whatever terms under which the text in question was released. The production of this book was a culminatory assignment for Typography II, a core requirement of the three-year graphic design graduate program at the Rhode Island School of Design (née RISD). As such, I would like to take this moment to thank my professor, Heather Bohn, and the members of my class. I have learned much from the lot of you, and your support, criticisms, and good humor are the key factors that have prevented me from disintegrating into a gibbering wreck this week. Word.

25


26

Rubber-bound Weather Book Developed for Typography 2 studio Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island February 2005

Another Typograhy 2 assignment was to typeset weather forecasts in a coherent and telling manner. To highlight the utilitarian nature of this data, I bound my weather forecast book with rubber flooring material.


27

Craft Issues Pt. 2 Mix CDs and Case Developed for a girl I like Providence, Rhode Island March 2006

I love to design, and I especially enjoy the opportunities to do so that are afforded me by everyday life. I made this pair of CD mixes for a lady friend of mine.

The colored surfaces are all double-sided Epson matte prints of scanned plates of smeared gouache on paper, with type added in InDesign.

The name “Craft Issues” is a reference to the first mix I gave her. The brochure for the first installment of “Craft Issues” was a fairly rough one-off made in 5 minutes with an X-Acto. I assure you, this title is not any sort of prognostication.


28

CCA Brochure Developed for Visual Systems studio Rhode Island School of Design Providence, Rhode Island April 2005

This brochure is built from the same visual elements as the CCA posters; see the Posters & Printed Matter section for more details. The folded pleat system makes the brochure threedimensional, as is befitting an architectural retrospective. The folds between the pyramidal units are perforated, allowing each to be detached (and, say, stuck onto the fridge with a magnet, or what have you).


29

Video & Interactive


30

DVD Menus for Performance Systems Developed as part of Back2TheEssence A personal VJ system Troy, New York January 2002 (and ongoing)

Nowadays, any off-the-shelf laptop can process realtime video sufficiently for realtime video performances. As recently as 2002, however, this was not the case. Back then, I had to burn custom DVDs and carry several ungainly players to my VJ shows.

I devised these menus for my DVD systems. They were primarily for my eyes only, only making it through to the projection when a glitch in syncing routed the menu video to the screen.


31

Work / Bathroom Developed as a personal project (with Jesse Stiles as soundtrack producer) Melbourne, Australia August 2001 Work/Bathroom is a synchronized synasthetic short film, composed of digital photos shot in abandoned urban subspaces. The audio track is a refined reformulation of field recordings made during the photo shoots.

Work/Bathroom focuses on the anonymous and transient nature of urban subspaces. Although it was shot in Melbourne, spaces like those the video portrays exist in my American neighborhood, or yours.

I wrote custom rendering software to animate the photography. Letting the system run produced hours of footage, all of which was carefully hand-edited down. The final video is six minutes long. My collaborator, Jesse Stiles, utilized a similar process for composing the soundtrack. Our algorithmic methods allowed for a very tight synchronization between audio and video.


32

Branding and Interactive Systems Design Developed for Vidvox Troy, New York July – August 2004

VIDVOX GRID 2

PREFERENCES

MIDI SETTINGS

VIDVOX

DEVICE SETUP

09 DAVID LUBLIN LEAD SOFTWARE ARCHITECT 279 RIVER ST., SUITE 405 TROY, NY 12180

midi channel

DAVID @ VIDVOX.NET 518.274.0100

CONTROLLERS

HTTP://WWW.VIDVOX.NET

GRID 2

04 12 08 07

SPEED SCRUB FADE VOLUME

NOTE TRIGGERING

EXIT

Vidvox is a small company in Troy, NY. They specialize in building realtime video processing software for VJs and musicians. When they approached me, they had powerful software but no graphic identity. I consulted with them for two months, producing everything from logo treatments and business cards, down to the pixel-level minutia of their application interface. What you see here is only a small selection of the products of that consultancy.

It was particularly enjoyable to sculpt their products’ interfaces, as music and performance applications for the Macintosh have a rich history of deviating from accepted operating system norms. This enabled us to wholly integrate the Vidvox identity directly into the product.


33

Interface design for GRID2, a flagship Vidvox application


34

Video Stills from Live Perfomances Developed as a personal project Various places and dates

The above still is from a show I played in Bar Reis, a bar in Park Slope. It was winter, and the glass double-doors that led to the garden weren’t in use. I projected my video stream from the garden, behind the doors, effectively turning them into a massive screen.


35


36

Circle Grid Software Developed in collaboration with Lisa Maione Providence, Rhode Island June 2005

These are screenshots from a program I wrote in the Processing computer language. The program steps the user through the application of Lisa Maione’s Circle Grid theory, which she developed at the Rhode Island School of Design. The program is still in development, and its eventual release will accompany Lisa’s forthcoming book on the subject. The grid for the book you have in your hands was constructed with this program.


37

Web


38

IRUNRAP.com Music Distribution Site Developed for the Rap Foundation Troy, New York April 2002

03

thisproject faculty members jts3k fish

tyler

faculty members

04 Jun 2002

jts3k

please

000

thisproject

concentric rectangles

POSTDATE

see also

POSTDATE

tyler

the rdm 3000

04 Oct 2002

004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 MORE...

SELECT 01 02 03 archiv

archive

rAP FOUNDATION PROJECT

rAP FOUNDATION PROJECT

03

thisproject tyler

faculty members

04 Jun 2002

jts3k fish

tyler

concentric rectangles

POSTDATE 04 Jun 2002

project concentric rectangles by jts3k, fish, tyler

t

ou

ab

ks

lin

dia

me

dio

e ag

im

rAP FOUNDATION PROJECT

au

ks

dia

about concentric rectangles are a bunch of freaks. I don't like their music at all. why I even go to that stupid club is beyond me. it must be the cheap beer or something. sheesh.

lin

me

dio

pr

03

thisproject

concentric rectangles

POSTDATE

oj

jts3k fish

au

ec by t c jts onc 3k e c , f ntr ar onc is ic h, re d e e ty ct a on a nt le an st ll. w 't li bun ric r g m up h ke c re le be e. id y I th h o cta s sh er it clu e ei f f ng m v r mo ees or us b is en mu rea les re h. som t be be go t sic ks. I et th yo o at hi e nd th ng c at . he ap

faculty members

I mean really, let me elaborate here. I hate it when they drop those beats. why do they have to do that? did anyone say it was ok? and those laptops. like, clue phone, it's for you, guys! laptops just aren't cool. and what kind of video is that??! you just have no idea what's going on whatsoever! everything's all melted and stupid-looking. I really urge all of you out there reading this to throw eggs at the Concentric Rectangles if you see them. Thanks!

rAP FOUNDATION PROJECT

The IRUNRAP.com site facilitated the Rap Foundation’s goals for the global distribution of both music and sample-based material. It had an easy-to-use backend system, permitting non-web-savvy Foundation memers to easily share and access their music and information. The frontend (shown here) was in Flash, and heavily leveraged Flash’s XML parser, which was quite new at the time.


39

iEAR and EMAC Interim Websites Developed for the iEAR Studios Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York April 2002

iEAR hERE program facilities people events gallery links

EMAC

integrated electronic arts (at) rensselaer

What is iEAR?

About EMAC

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nullam et eros. Phasellus diam velit, placerat nec, interdum vitae, hendrerit sed, orci. Integer risus libero, gravida non, rhoncus a, lacinia et, eros. Mauris posuere euismod turpis. Donec sit amet nunc pulvinar sapien tincidunt viverra. Aenean euismod. Integer ut quam a metus euismod auctor. Sed mauris purus, suscipit quis, sollicitudin at, posuere ut, ligula. In nec sem. In a quam. Aliquam non nibh. Praesent ipsum tellus, luctus ut, placerat vitae, rhoncus ac, massa. Integer metus ligula, dignissim nec, posuere quis, fermentum vel, nunc. Proin ullamcorper hendrerit leo. Duis ultricies purus vel elit. Vestibulum id nisl ac augue commodo adipiscing. Morbi mauris ligula, tincidunt id, ultrices feugiat, cursus at, libero. Sed urna tellus, vulputate a, rutrum id, ultrices sed, turpis.

Curriculum Apply People Places

Donec quis quam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Sed imperdiet, neque in tempus ultricies, dui elit rhoncus felis, vitae varius ante elit eu mi. Vestibulum elementum urna at nisi. Ut dignissim dolor eu nisl. Pellentesque metus magna, pharetra et, lobortis vel, aliquet in, erat. Nunc risus eros, laoreet id, sodales sed, iaculis et, risus. Nam ultrices dui at nulla. Nam consectetuer tristique nibh. Ut eget nisl. Praesent imperdiet dapibus odio. Cras lacus. Suspendisse nisi. Ut aliquam, dolor vulputate volutpat semper, urna lacus tempor nisi, nec malesuada nisi tellus non justo. Mauris ac leo eu quam pretium mollis. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Morbi viverra interdum neque. Maecenas nunc. Pellentesque eu dui id lacus pellentesque accumsan. Nulla commodo lacinia purus. Integer vehicula sem at arcu. Donec sed dolor et tortor tincidunt convallis. Vivamus sollicitudin purus quis risus. Fusce sem mi, convallis in, euismod in, vestibulum sit amet, odio. Donec neque lectus, laoreet vel, sodales eu, porta in, neque.

FAQ iEAR LL&C

General Job Hunting

H&SS rpi.edu

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nullam et eros. Phasellus diam velit, placerat nec, interdum vitae, hendrerit sed, orci. Integer risus libero, gravida non, rhoncus a, lacinia et, eros. Mauris posuere euismod turpis. Donec sit amet nunc pulvinar sapien tincidunt viverra. Aenean euismod. Integer ut quam a metus euismod auctor. Sed mauris purus, suscipit quis, sollicitudin at, posuere ut, ligula. In nec sem. In a quam. Aliquam non nibh. Praesent ipsum tellus, luctus ut, placerat vitae, rhoncus ac, massa. Integer metus ligula, dignissim nec, posuere quis, fermentum vel, nunc. Proin ullamcorper hendrerit leo. Duis ultricies purus vel elit. Vestibulum id nisl ac augue commodo adipiscing. Morbi mauris ligula, tincidunt id, ultrices feugiat, cursus at, libero. Sed urna tellus, vulputate a, rutrum id, ultrices sed, turpis. Donec quis quam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Sed imperdiet, neque in tempus ultricies, dui elit rhoncus felis, vitae varius ante elit eu mi. Vestibulum elementum urna at nisi. Ut dignissim dolor eu nisl. Pellentesque metus magna, pharetra et, lobortis vel, aliquet in, erat. Nunc risus eros, laoreet id, sodales sed, iaculis et, risus. Nam ultrices dui at nulla. Nam consectetuer tristique nibh. Ut eget nisl. Praesent imperdiet dapibus odio. Cras lacus. Suspendisse nisi. Ut aliquam, dolor vulputate volutpat semper, urna lacus tempor nisi, nec malesuada nisi tellus non justo. Mauris ac leo eu quam pretium mollis. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Morbi viverra interdum neque. Maecenas nunc. Pellentesque eu dui id lacus pellentesque accumsan. Nulla commodo lacinia purus. Integer vehicula sem at arcu. Donec sed dolor et tortor tincidunt convallis. Vivamus sollicitudin purus quis risus. Fusce sem mi, convallis in, euismod in, vestibulum sit amet, odio. Donec neque lectus, laoreet vel, sodales eu, porta in, neque.

site questions? mailto:bohnal@rpi.edu

Upon arriving at RPI as the web manager for the art department, I was first tasked with quickly developing an identity and reskinning the existant sites, as the situation was rather dire, designwise. I coordinated the design of the iEAR site with its sister, the RPI EMAC site. They share typographic elements and a common grid, but they each maintain their own distinct aesthetic language.

About EMAC

Etiam sed magna nec tortor molestie varius. Mauris condimentum nisi eget metus. Duis ut arcu in dui hendrerit adipiscing. Aenean aliquam nunc eu magna. Fusce id dolor id lorem

Etiam sed magna nec tortor molestie varius. Mauris condimentum nisi eget metus. Duis ut arcu in dui hendrerit adipiscing. Aenean aliquam nunc eu magna. Fusce id dolor id lorem

site questions? mailto:bohnal@rpi.edu

electronic media + arts + communication


40

Final iEAR Site Developed for the iEAR Studios Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, New York April 2002

S P A1

S P A1

S P C V

arts.

V R S P C V

iEAR :: People :: Tomie Hahn

people.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Nullam et eros. Phasellus diam velit, placerat nec, interdum vitae, hendrerit sed, orci. Integer risus libero, gravida non, rhoncus a, lacinia et, eros. Mauris posuere euismod turpis. Donec sit amet nunc pulvinar sapien tincidunt viverra. Aenean euismod. Integer ut quam a metus euismod auctor. Sed mauris purus, suscipit quis, sollicitudin at, posuere ut, ligula. In nec sem. In a quam. Aliquam non nibh. Praesent ipsum tellus, luctus ut, placerat vitae, rhoncus ac, massa. Integer metus ligula, dignissim nec, posuere quis, fermentum vel, nunc. Proin ullamcorper hendrerit leo. Duis ultricies purus vel elit. Vestibulum id nisl ac augue commodo adipiscing. Morbi mauris ligula, tincidunt id, ultrices feugiat, cursus at, libero. Sed urna tellus, vulputate a, rutrum id, ultrices sed, turpis.

arts.

people.

Donec quis quam. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Sed imperdiet, neque in tempus ultricies, dui elit rhoncus felis, vitae varius ante elit eu mi. Vestibulum elementum urna at nisi. Ut dignissim dolor eu nisl. Pellentesque metus magna, pharetra et, lobortis vel, aliquet in, erat. Nunc risus eros, laoreet id, sodales sed, iaculis et, risus. Nam ultrices dui at nulla. Nam consectetuer tristique nibh. Ut eget nisl.

facilities. people.

about. events.

Praesent imperdiet dapibus odio. Cras lacus. Suspendisse nisi. Ut aliquam, dolor vulputate volutpat semper, urna lacus tempor nisi, nec malesuada nisi tellus non justo. Mauris ac leo eu quam pretium mollis. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Morbi viverra interdum neque. Maecenas nunc. Pellentesque eu dui id lacus pellentesque accumsan. Nulla commodo lacinia purus. Integer vehicula sem at arcu. Donec sed dolor et tortor tincidunt convallis. Vivamus sollicitudin purus quis risus. Fusce sem mi, convallis in, euismod in, vestibulum sitclose amet, odio. Donec neque lectus, laoreet vel, sodales eu, porta in, neque.

about. news. events.

facilities.

iP!

gallery.

inside.

about. news.

V R

The “Back to School” Colloquium.

news.

colleen mulrenan, “daughter, september 13th”

events.

iP!

about. events.

please log in.

gallery.

inside.

Etiam sed magna nec tortor molestie varius. Mauris condimentum nisi eget metus. Duis ut arcu in dui hendrerit adipiscing. Aenean aliquam nunc eu magna. Fusce id dolor id lorem luctus pulvinar. Phasellus sed lectus sit amet

nisl pharetra login name. eleifend. Nulla non dolor sed turpis convallis ultrices. Cras in justo at turpis aliquet vulputate.

Monday, August 20th. Meet the iEAR Faculty and Staff.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Maecenas luctus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Sed vel tortor. Donec gravida lacinia enim. Sed ut est. Nulla facilisi. Vestibulum nec ligula. Nulla nibh. Phasellus lobortis felis eu felis. DonecGO. risus erat, sodales vestibulum, rutrum nec, consectetuer id, risus.

password. Morbi eleifend, magna vel ornare gravida, nulla mauris aliquet erat, et luctus nisi urna at lorem. Donec nec ligula

click for details.

ut pede cursus facilisis. Donec venenatis ultricies sem. Donec sagittis. Sed augue mi, semper a, rhoncus vel,

S P A1

S P A1

S P C V

S P C V

V R

V R

read the latest iEAR news.

arts. about. news. events.

facilities. people.

iP!

about.

events.

gallery.

inside.

iEAR :: News :: Recent News

news.

arts. about. news.

inside :: your personal home page your contact information.

news.

events.

facilities. people.

iP!

about.

events.

gallery.

your bio.

inside.

your blogs.

The design of the final iEAR site, which encompassed a complete identity overhaul and a new style guide, was merely the frontend to a multi-tiered database-driven system. One of its key visual features are the large icons that intrude into the HTML text during mouse events, which serve to disrupt the otherwise conservative layout of the site.


41

A

S P A1

S P C V

V R

people

arts. about. news. events.

The “Back to School” Colloquium.

news.

colleen mulrenan, “daughter, september 13th”

facilities. people.

iP!

about. events. gallery.

inside.

Monday, August 20th. Meet the iEAR Faculty and Staff.

click for details.


42

OP:FIX Project Proposal Developed for the FUSEDSPACE contest Troy, New York June 2004 http://www.fusedspace.org/edit_jury.php?id=117

OP:FIX

the distributed virtual <-> physical dialectic space bridge

01. OP:FIX Database The OP:FIX central database is built with a custom Java-based objectto-relational application framework capable of aggregating multiple datasources. Initial RDBMS for project will be postgreSQL, but the framework is database-agnostic and can scale seamlessly to work with other systems.

03. Web Criticism

Browser plugins enable simultaneous critique of the physical and virtual worlds, all within the OP:FIX system. Dialectic is preserved throughout, using common interface elements and conventions.

DESIG ISS N UE NO TIC E

ID #

7625

-871

2

Ent

Sum

02. Hotspot Labels

http://OPFIX.com/crit/crit.jsp?id=7756-3476

OP:FIX

the distributed virtual <-> physical dialectic space bridge

ity

Nam

ma ry

e (if

of Cri

app

lica

ticism

ble):

:

Crit labels contain circular barcodes that can be read by camera phones (or other similarly equipped mobile devices) to direct interested parties to the online criticism immediately. ID numbers are provided for those without such phones. Because a submission must, by definition, contain either an assoicated street address or GPS coordinates, labels can be actively sniffed out by the OP:FIX mobile device software.

* website name removed at the behest of FUSEDSPACE.org officials

The OP:FIX project is a global database system enabling offline criticism to take place as easily as online. On the web, I can use links as commentary. The OP:FIX project places links in the physical world, allowing members of the site to print out and deploy “design issue notices� where they see fit. These notices are tagged with machine-readable barcodes, which can be interpereted by camera cellphones running a small downloadable program. They also have an easy-to-read ID number, which can be manually entered into the site.


43

OP:FIX

the distributed virtual <-> physical dialectic space bridge

CAMERA DEVICE USERS: Aim camera at circular barcode to visit criticism online

ID# 7625-8712 DESIGN ISSUE NOTICE

The entity to which this notice has been affixed has been assessed by the issuer to bear attributes worthy of criticism. Not all criticism is negative. To view your criticism, please visit the website OPFIX.com at your nearest convienience and enter the ID number, or scan the circular barcode at left with your camera phone. You will have the opportunity to debate your criticism with the issuer and others directly.

Issued by Alexander Bohn OP:FIX User ID# 8021 (“fishea”)

Entity Name (if applicable): Summary of Criticism:

http://OPFIX.com

Fig. 02: The Design Issue Notice (DIN) label. These labels are generated as PDF documents by the OP:FIX server at the request of the crticising user. User’s ID, crit ID, and the barcode are filled in by the server prior to the printing of the DIN. * website name removed at the behest of FUSEDSPACE.org officials

Each notice is linked to a discussion about the design issues raised by the stickered item. Rebukes can be answered by the author, and the system employs meta-moderation to prevent spam.

I was a finalist in FUSEDSPACE, and I tied for fifth.


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