The Theory of Nevolution: Direct to Public

June 08, 2009

Direct to Public

One of the problems I have with exhibition openings is that it's always tricky to get some good shots of the work. There are always people in the way, and any clean shots are always too blurry. This usually means having to make a return trip; I'm always grateful for this as it gives me the chance to think about the works in between. This is especially the case with Direct to Public by Elizabeth Smith.

I initially wasn't sure how to approach this exhibition. The Landing at Ok Ok is a small space and seems to work perfectly for the exhibition. And herein lies the problem; I wanted more. Not out of some addiction to vernacular letterforms but because it didn't seem to be enough. I suppose after seeing the recent Tobias Frere-Jones exhibition at the Narrows this latest tribute to urban typography didn't seem to cut it. After being overwhelmed by wall to wall grids of glorious NY signage, I was looking at and evaluating this with having been in the presence of a god. His exhibition was a collection for the sake of documentation. The scale of the documentation proves that more is different, at the same time allowing us to view NY through his eyes.

Meanwhile, I'd only spent a few minutes there and didn't give it the chance it deserved. Thankfully, a quick reread of her blog and it suddenly made sense. In discussing the exhibition, the last little paragraph put it all in context:

Direct to Public is no dissertation; it's a small comment.

A huge sigh of relief as it gave me the permission I needed to go back there and look at it again.

What did Franco Cozzo say when he stepped in a can of paint?

Oh no, my foot is grey.

This would be funnier if the exhibition was about Footscray. But it's not, it's about Brunswick. And it has Brunswick in spades. And not the new Brunswick, but the old Brunswick. The unglamorous and ethnic Brunswick. Penny Modra in 3000 said it best: Brunswick, a suburb that knows how to write $2.99 on a kilo of bananas faster than you can write your name.

It's here where the exhibition really shines. Not content for it to just be examples of signage, she has gone to the trouble of reproducing charming examples of hand-painted lettering found in Brunswick. Most of these are fairly faithful hand painted reproductions of the typographic landscape. An impressive feat by any account; she has managed to capture the essence of Brunswickness not only in the choice of businesses (and therefore in the choice of signage) but in the exactitude of the shapes. Her skill doesn't stop at brushstrokes either. Several hanging signs have been cut out and hang from the roof, an obvious reference and ode to the hanging signs found under the awnings of Sydney Rd. By leaving the cut out characters lying around the floor she really makes her case for the temporality of business and commerce and the changing typographic landscape. Self referentially, a few photographs had fallen off the wall and onto the ground.

On top of being a small comment on the nature of commerce, it's also about the joy of letterforms. She really loves type, and it shows. Not just in the name of her website I Heart Type, but in her work Imaginary Alphabets, which Direct to Public is an extension of. Her latest alphabet, Wholesale, is on display throughout. While House Industries have created what seems like thousands of faithful reproductions from the golden age of American sign writing, none have the awkwardness that Wholesale does. This works in its favour, capturing the spirit of a suburb that's able to write $2.99 on a kilo of bananas faster than you can sign your name. One critique is the use of stencil to render the font. Considering how intimate she must have been with the letters in creating the font, a little bit of freehand would have gone a long way. But I digress.

Having created the opportunity by way of this exhibition, she's printed up some rather lovely A3 posters of the rest of her Imaginary Alphabets, which I regret not buying. But I suppose it gives me the chance to head down there again, doesn't it. They're great little projects and I'm mildly jealous that she beat me to the punch with Marguerite; if you remember, I'm a big fan of sheet music. Jealousy aside, each project has it's own little quirks that are worth looking at. The same could be said of the whole exhibition.

Direct to Public runs until the 30th of June. The Landing @ Ok Ok - Shop 16 @ Sparta Place, Hardwick Building 459 Sydney Road

Posted at 05:06 PM in Marvellous Melbourne, Signs of the Times | Permalink

Comments

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by: |

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Your comment could not be posted. Error type:

Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Post a comment

Elsewhere

Exposure Time
The contradictory “double image” is cubist; reality has no single truth. The additional photograph asks the question “Is this for real?”. “Readers — and especially television viewers — must understand the Heisenberg principle before they can understand the news. What is actually happening that is being described by the media?
Mind the Map
Beck’s map posits a city whose associations are limited and superficial but quickly assimilated. The tube diagram, like most diagrams, offers a tantalizingly powerful shortcut to comprehension. In the absence of other proposals for unraveling the complexity of urban life, the abstracted representation of a transportation system has shaped the collective understanding of the city.
She is beautiful, and I love her
The new Nintendo video game Duck Hunt is a game about hunting ducks, right? Wrong! It is so much more. In this deep, rich cultural narrative, we are the ducks and society the gun. Simply try to lift the pistol to the screen and you will have an existential crisis of conscience. Why kill? Is it because we are told to? Or is it because we are designed to? This video game has bested Nietzsche and trumped Sarte, all within the confines of its tiny plastic cartridge.
A Manifesto for Postindustrial Design
Mass production, as we know it, will soon be extinct. So say goodbye to heavy metals, huge warehouses, and durable goods. And say hello to the bearable lightness of living networks, metabolism, and code.
How to Make Your Client's Logo Bigger Without Making Their Logo Bigger
Like all con games, this one is based on the illusion that the sucker has the advantage. In this case, it's the conviction that this kind of client always has that it's your job to do as they say. Little do they realize that your final allegiance is not to them, but to the quality of the work, something that you cannot in good conscience permit them to jeopardize with their lack of taste.
A Good Argument
Many objects are designed not to be useful but to make an argument. And my contention is that every object is an argument of some sort, and its strength or weakness as an argument is a good guide to its value. But the most valuable effect of considering an object as an argument is that it allows us to look under the rhetorical hood and consider it not as an inevitable or neutral invention but as something that embodies a point of view. The Ford Model-T was an argument for personal transportation using fossil fuels.
Networks are Killing Science
Here's a prediction of my own, one that I'm willing to put to the test: if complex systems researchers don't get serious about the scientific method, their field is going to fizzle out, if not crash and burn. Because in the end you have to move the field forward. The computer models can be dazzling, but unless they produce a demonstrated string of successes that end up changing the way everyone in the field thinks - the molecular biologists, the sociologists, the economists, then the sciences of complexity will be dismissed as unfruitful. In the end, your model has to inspire a someone to pick up a pipette and design an experiment.
Learning to Measure Participation
Network value would describe the access that an individual or organization has to new ideas and opportunities. Brand value would describe reputation. Social value would measure influence. Knowledge would be measured through the number and quality of ideas and, finally, meaning measured through engagement. I suspect that we may have a hard time letting go of the measuring of cash, so I assume monetary value remains one of the dimensions of a participation economy. Personally, I think it would be an interesting thought experiment to imagine the first five replacing money rather than augmenting it. Are these the right things to measure in an economy based on participation--and could their measurement result in some kind of sustainable system of growth and wealth creation?
Why We Need Economic Dashboards
First, we need better tools for keeping track of various kinds of value at an individual, organizational and societal level. This seems like an interesting opportunity for new kinds of products and services--a kind of economic dashboard. Second, this all relies on information transparency. If you can't see the data, then you can't measure the returns. Ultimately managing our own social networks, our reputations, and our influence, and leveraging our ideas won't just be a cool pastime carried out by the technorati. It will be essential to survival in a participation economy.
Michael Bay Finally Made An Art Movie
Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world... but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core.

The Gentleman's Library

Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map

A street, a city, an epidemic and the hidden power of urban networks

Traversing through four different modes of experience the book centres around a cholera outbreak of 1854. Acting as the unifier, the map provides a visual thesis to the long zoom approach taken with both the story and the solutions needed to understand not only the disease, but germs in general.
Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

The power of organizing without organizations

As the printing press and radio had profound changes by amplifying the flow of one way communication, the internet is now having even deeper changes in the amplification of group communication. The impact that new modes of communication will create won't be properly felt until the technology ceases to be exciting and becomes banal and invisible.
Thomas De Zengotita: Mediated

How the Media Shape Your World

A sophisticated and highly inventive look at the affects of the saturation post-modernity has had on our daily lives, and possibly the last great book to do so. Immersed in options and unable to discern the authentic from representations, we're helplessly self conscious and unable to prevent ourselves from treating our lives as performance. Thankfully the book is loaded with satire and irony to help navigate the self-referentially loaded book.
John Man: Alpha Beta

How our alphabet shaped the western world

Tracks the history of the latin alphabet as it trickles down through history. At each transitory phase the alphabet is given new meaning and power, and in turn provides the culture with a new set of tools to define themselves with. The strength of the alphabet lies in it's simplicity and it's ability to adapt to new circumstances and environments.
Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is Good for You

How Popular Culture is Making us Smarter

While many show open contempt for the perceived dumbing down of culture by mindless entertainment, the book argues the opposite. Instead of looking at the content, the book looks at the increasing complexity and thinking needed to participate with today's video games, movies and tv shows. Our brains are happiest when searching for increased intricacy, adding to the feedback loop making our amusements much more interesting.
Steven Johnson: Emergence

The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software

The metaphor for the world has previously been viewed through the prism of the tree, mechanical clockwork and the atom. Now the humble slime mould with it's bottom up organisation will prove a fitting image for how we see the world in coming decades. As simple rules can account for breathtaking complexity that can be viewed across diverse disciplines, this book acts as a massive precursor to his theory of the long zoom.
Daniel Harris: Cute Quaint, Hungry and Romantic

The Aesthetics of Consumerism

A fairly thorough critique at not just the visual aesthetics of consumerism but the hidden nuance of scent, tactility, sound and many other details usually lacking from books of this kind. While limited to the low brow the book is scathingly sardonic across all fronts, not just those covered in the title.
John Henry Clippinger: A Crowd of One

The future of individual identity

Acknowledging the progress brought on by the Enlightenment, the author contends that its overbearing legacy of the Individual needs reconsidering. Looking at evolutionary biology,
game theory, self organising social networks and neuroscience, he makes a considered case for the need for a new type of commons; one that takes into account our ability and need for social emotions and interdependence.
More of his work can be found here.
James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds

Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations

While a bit of a love in for free markets, the book successfully manages to argue the assumption made in the subtitle. Looking at wide ranging anecdotes, he breaks up crowd wisdom into three distinct advantages – cognition, coordination and cooperation. Coupled with the four fundamentals needed for an intelligent crowd – diversity, independence, decentralisation and aggregation –
the central thesis seems more prescient as time goes on.
Robert Kinross: Unjustified Texts

perspectives on typography

Fairly heavy reading. The author deals with the ubiquitous yet hardly recognized or understood aspects of typography. More a series of readings and essays than a cohesive book; topics range from newspapers, paperbacks and road signs, while dealing with the notion of what constitutes a typeface.
Mark Buchanan: The Social Atom

Why the rich get richer, cheats get caught and your neighbor usually looks like you

Following the premise that it's the patterns, not people that dictate group behaviour. As physicists are able to anticipate patterns that emerge when looking at atoms, social trends can be viewed in the same way. While other books look at the connections between groups, this is a refreshingly scientific look at the forces and movements of human action.
As expected the author has set up a blog to further the ideas in the book.

The Theory of Nevolution

Categories

Archives

Sitemeter