kdesign

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Palavras-chaveDesign; Pele; Morfologia; Performance; Experiência

A necessidade do culto da imagem e o exponencial aumento do consumo, a urgente intensificação da dimensão moda são tendências que nada parecem ter em comum a não ser o facto de se revelarem hoje manifestamente em algo que se expressa à flor da pele. Se em tempos a pele foi entendida como algo estanque e imutável, como produto de um acaso da natureza, como algo perene e eterno, parece aos poucos ter vido a perder essa dimensão axiomática. Em vez de uma obrigatoriedade, a pele encerra-se cada vez mais como uma possibilidade, como uma alternativa, como algo fruto de uma escolha individual e contex-tual.As crescentes possibilidades de alterar a sua forma e feitio, bem como a sua dimensão em-inentemente reactiva e interactiva, fazem com que o conceito de pele se aproxime cada vez mais do design: na sua forma potencialmente mutável (morfologia), na íntima relação que o sujeito desenvolve com o tempo e o espaço em que se insere (“espumas”), na construção de um acontecimento e acção constantes (performance), na possível experiência que dela se pode retirar (experiência e uso). Neste sentido, pele e design remetem, ambos, para algo que determina e é determinado, que julga e é julgado, que molda e é moldado proporcionando, a todo o instante, uma pos-sível realidade e experiência centrada no design e no utilizador.

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Introdução

Qualquer trabalho mais ou menos aca-démico que se inicie sobre design, parte da con-victa aceitação do pressuposto que se irá falar de temáticas diferentes, procurando sempre alcançar uma complementaridade multidisciplinar total. Se falar em design pressupõe falar em sociedade e em cultura, em ergonomia e em antropologia, em percepção e utilização, pressupõe também um especial compromisso e responsabilidade em falar daquilo que dele e para ele se torna o motivo cen-tral: as pessoas. Criadoras ou consumidoras, acti-vas ou passivas, inventivas ou dissipadoras, são estas que determinarão a ténue barreira entre um design útil e um design fútil, entre um lixo e um luxo, entre usar e abusar. Falar de pessoas é falar de individualidade, de experiências, de possibi-lidades, de contactos, de relações, de imprevisi-bilidade, de algo eminentemente vivo que cresce e evolui constantemente, de algo em permanente construção e metamorfose. Assim se fala também em design. As pessoas e o design desenvolvem-se portanto segundo príncipios comuns.Este trabalho prende-se à noção de design epidér-mico, realidade que deambula do uso à experiên-cia, da apropriação à personalização, da versa-tilidade à flexibilidade, contendo em si todo um conjunto de competências centradas no utilizador e na experiência real que este retira do mundo que o rodeia. Procurar-se-á ainda analisar a dimen-são eminentemente comportamental, relacional e experiencial que parece persisitr hoje na cultura contemporânea. A cultura contemporânea do século XXI é uma “aldeia global” (McLuhan, The Medium is the Mes-sage: An Inventory of Effects, 1967) caracterizada por hábitos de consumo exponenciais, onde as necessidades básicas apresentam uma linha cada vez mais ténue. A “aldeia global” foi o nome dado à terra quando esta se constitui numa única co-munidade que comunica à distância. O paradoxo da “aldeia global” reflecte-se num hiperlocal, por oposição ao hiperglobal, em que tudo é perto, tudo é aqui, tudo é agora (Kerckhove, 1997). As-siste-se hoje a um consumo exacerbado e muitas vezes indiferenciado de produtos e bens variados, transformando o indivíduo singular numa massa uniformizada de consumidores. Este pensamento capitalista de consumo global e imediato reflecte-se num aumento do consumo, das vendas e da produção de produtos, verificando-se uma infini-dade de ofertas para as mais diferentes necessi-dades. A constante actualização da capa e da pele da realidade e dos objectos, parece já não ser sufi-

ciente para corresponder com o paradigma so-cial vigente. A sociedade deixou de ser encarada como um conjunto generalizado de pessoas, com gostos e interesses comuns, para cada vez mais, ser entendida como um conjunto diferenciado de individuos, onde a soma das partes se torna mais importante que o todo no seu conjunto. Mais que um conjunto estruturado e organizado de pes-soas e bens, falar de cultura é agora falar de uma opção, de um conjunto de individualidades e singularidades, de um agregado de experiências abertas, contínuas e únicas. Esta questão assume especial pertinência, na medida em que a cultura é então “a forma actual de reconstruir a uni-dade da experiência (…)” (Miranda, 2002, p. 24) e “apesar de todas as ambiguidades que a noção de experiência envolve, por estar presa das vivên-cias individuais e, portanto, de um certo psicolo-gismo, a situação actual não dispensa que a ela se recorra” (Miranda, 2002, p. 27).Nesta fase o problema parece incidir numa dis-cussão onde se pretende entender ou descortinar essa experiência ao mesmo tempo tão actual e tão pessoal, procurando perceber os dois lados da moeda: o de quem projecta e o de quem experi-encia. Ainda que a barreira produtor/ consumidor se tenha esbatido, o que aqui se procura perceber é a génese que está por trás da experiência: a for-ma como essa experiência pode ser experienciada e o modo como essa experiência se pode manife-star. Falar em pele, rosto, membrana, superfície, capa exterior é falar em algo eminentemente ad-aptativo e sujeito a diversas inferências; é falar de um elemento sensível, performativo e reactivo; é falar no órgão que por excelência percebe e deci-fra o mundo e o possível conjunto de experiências que nele se podem viver. Esta experiência, por sua vez, encontra-se entre o sujeito e o objecto, enquadra-se num aqui e num agora, insere-se numa bolha dentro de uma multiplicidade de out-ras bolhas: é aquilo que francamente se manifesta à flor da pele e que se pode definir como design epidérmico. Neste sentido, procurando contextualizar e en-quadrar a dimensão experiencial, centraliza-remos o nosso estudo numa dimensão material eminentemente portátil, numa realidade nómada, em objectos e/ ou espaços que justifiquem visual-mente as opções tomadas. Se por um lado o re-curso visual a objectos nos parece pertinente para justificar a dimensão portátil, intrinsecamente relacionada com o corpo humano e facilmente manipulável, por outro parece-nos importante o recurso visual a determinados espaços específicos para perceber conceitos como flexibilidade, habit-abilidade, liberdade e transição. Ainda que sejam duas realidades diferentes, são também duas re-

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alidades complementares, pelo que se procurará neste estudo explorar uma temática híbrida de micro-arquitecturas: objectos que ampliaram e prolongaram de algum modo as barreiras físicas do corpo humano e espaços que se portabilizaram e se desprenderam de uma dimensão eminente-mente rígida, deixando de estar associados a um local preciso. Acima de tudo procurar-se-ão comportamentos que na sua génese possam ser entendidos como efémeros, flexíveis, transcendentes, pessoais, performativos, activos e reactivos.

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This session is about graphic intervention, or how designers critically redress the social, political and cultural grievances of the day. You will meet Robbie Conal, an artist/activist who uses poster sniping – the illegal posting of missives in public spaces – as a means to attack government’s fal-libility. And Teal Triggs and Sian Cook of Women’s Design + Research Unit who use design as a po-lemic tool in various ways. I’m here to give an overview of graphic dissent and offer a few com-ments on the here and now.

After 9/11 there was a moratorium on all loyal op-position.

Understandably, even the most trenchant satirists were not certain how to balance the enormity of such a tragedy with their right (and responsibil-ity) to critique official policy.When I asked a very well-known political car-toonist how he was reconciling critical instincts with patriotic emotions, he said he was temporar-ily shutting down.In the aftermath of 9/11 we heard that irony was dead; and we saw unambiguous heroic realism of a kind not seen since World War II had returned.Yet while we mourned the dead and celebrated the heroes, some of us – perhaps many of us – had a disturbing sense that not just irony but dissent was falling victim to fear, AND that the powers here in Washington would somehow exploit this opportunity to promote political and social agen-das that will have repercussions on many of our lives.Indeed President Bush and his circle have benefit-ed from the timidity of an opposition that has yet to separate the taboos imposed by the 9/11 tragedy from the everyday exercise of power.Bush’s policies are certainly not beyond criticism or satire. And while he has earned some stature under fire, he continues to the same agenda that he pushed when he ran for the presidency. While we cannot return to a pre-9/11 world, our leaders must still be held accountable for their actions. And this is the role of graphic intervention.BUT what is a graphic designer to do? Admittedly, our interventionist powers are limited though not insignificant.For example, during the dark days of the last presidential election the only bright light was on the computer screen. Internet sites and email queues were flooded with giffs, stuffits, and jpegs of digitally manipulated graphics skewering the presumptive president-elect for his real and im-agined deficits.

Despite the two candidates’ lack of vigor during the main bout, between rounds an energetic digi-tal leafleting campaign goosed the body politic.Well, at least this body’s politic.For me, these digital communiqués continued the tradition of satirical cartooning and protest-poster sniping that has been the basis of visual polemics since the Reformation. Owing to the cur-rent widespread use of digital cameras, Photoshop software, and Internet communication a new era of visual hijinx was launched with George W. Bush as its virtual poster boy.

Out of respect, I’ll lay off the President for now. But I can’t resist showing this Nation cover.On a personal note, I have been interested in graphic intervention ever since I was a kid. In fact when I was ten years old I worked at the John F. Kennedy election campaign headquarters in New York City. Basically I stuffed envelopes at main headquarters but after hours I took it upon myself to mosey on down to Nixon’s headquarters where I’d grab armfuls of Nixon leaflets, then took out my magic marker and defaced his humorless face then distributed them to passersby.What I learned stayed with me a lifetime. I car-ried on subversive activity eight years later when, during my last year in high school, I became a cartoonist and art director for underground newspapers.Underground is, however, something of a misno-mer since most of these newspapers were openly sold on newsstands. I was art director of the New York Free Press and contributed drawings and layouts to The East Village Other, The Rat, and Avatar. EVO was artsy and cultural with political undertones, Rat was SDS-oriented until a radi-cal Feminist group took it over. And Avatar was connected to a pseudo-religious hippie cult with socialist aspirations. But all addressed the zeit-geist in one-way or another, and the zeitgeist was political.

The hot button issues in the 60s were the Vietnam War and Civil Rights, which inspired countless graphic responses like these.{SHOW} Prior to the buildup in Vietnam and during the early stages of the civil rights movement, it was not easy to express and distribute oppositional political mes-sages.

Remember, the nation had just emerged quite scathed from the McCarthy Era and was still reel-ing from an ongoing Red Scare, which was as close as we came in postwar years to the repres-sion of free speech.

Graphic interventionSteven Heller

Originalmente publicado na Typhoteque

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In the early 60s, the national media was limited to three major networks, daily newspapers were either democrat or republican, and access to the masses by an opposition was severely limited. In this proscribed environment politically and socially alternative graphic art was one of the few means of addressing audiences. And to grab their attention, these works had to not only challenge the status quo, they had to kick it in its ass.In the 1960s the new Left pushed the boundaries of propriety through two magazines: Ramparts on West Coast and Ever-green on the East. These were clarions of a new aesthetics, politics, and morality. Ramparts was the voice of the political left and Evergreen was the soul of the cultural left. The former exposed CIA involvement in American colleges and univer-sities, the latter revealed the taboo side of the American subculture. In terms of design these were not the 1960s versions of 1920s Constructivist, Futurist, or Dada manifestoes, both Ramparts and Evergreen followed conventional design veri-ties – and legibility was the supreme virtue.

It was too easy for the mainstream to discount alternative media as representing a lunatic fringe. So the goal of these magazines was indeed to subvert the culture through an air of professionalism. The significance of Ramparts and Ever-green to design history as conduits for various graphic ideas that challenged politics and culture.Indeed publishing this draft card burning cover made the Ramparts staff vulnerable to federal prosecution.Another example of intervention was George Lois’s covers of Esquire. Here he used a mainstream men’s style magazine to shoot off blasts from the political canon with covers that skewered Richard Nixon, Racism, and the Vietnam War. Given that this was an advertiser supported, “establishment” publication, it was remarkable that Lois (thanks to the power of his editor, Harold Hayes) was able to make some of the most profound graphic statements of a generation.The Underground press, however, had no desire to be professional-looking. In fact, it would have been the kiss of death. Its young constituents would have rejected every hint of status quo. The underground was, in fact, a spontaneous com-bustion of mostly urban middle class kids and young adults against a power structure that included their parents and surrogates.

The undergrounds challenged propriety through word and picture. Written and visual obscenity was a lethal weapon.Historians often compare the Underground press to Futurism and Dada, the radical anti-art and political movements of the teens and early 20s. Yet few involved in the Underground Press were familiar with these art movements. The Under-ground editors and artists intuitively used cheap layout and printing technologies to communicate efficiently and im-mediately. Nonetheless, a relationship did exist, if only as a comparison in hindsight that reveals a rhetorical continuum throughout the 20th century.The radical Leftwing periodicals published in Germany between World War I and the advent of the Third Reich, were exemplary for their marriage of polemics, art, and design. That these publications failed to prevent Nazism is endemic to the limited power of any small-scale press facing the immense apparatus of government. Nonetheless, marshalling the talents of committed writers, artists, and designers, the German Left wing press attacked political foes with all the intel-lectual weaponry at its disposal.The Malik Verlag, a Berlin-based publishing house, was headed Wieland Herzfeld, John Heartfield, and Georg Grosz. In 1916, with Germany in the throes of war, Herzfeld assumed editorship of the anti-war arts periodical Neue Jugend (New Youth) to publish the work of “those who have encountered opposition [to their political ideas] and lack of understanding by the public.” And it was the wellspring of leading German progressive authors.

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After a few issues it was officially banned for its seditionist editorial policy — a few months later it defiantly resumed publication as a four page broadsheet-size format. The first issue was comparatively staid, the second was designed by John Heartfield with typography inspired by Futurism.Another paper titled Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (Every Man His Own Football), became one of central documents of Berlin Dada. The front page of Jedermann includes one of Heartfield’s earliest political photomontages, a fan with the sil-houetted heads of German leaders superimposed upon it, which was a facetious call for a beauty pageant of government and military men. Inside, a banner headline read: “Revolutions are the Locomotives of World History.”Germany was a petri-dish of critical culture, but Russian revolutionary graphics before after 1917 also exerted a huge influence on both the language and style of graphic design. The Revolutionaries understood that agitprop, including post-ers, movies, and railway trains, were key in swaying a largely illiterate populace. Typically, the graphics in the service of revolution were proscribed by the scarcity of paper, ink and type. They were often printed from stencils and displayed in the windows of telegraph and post offices. These window graphics were hybrids of comic strip and cartoon known as ROSTA, and were an effective means of communicating a narrative.

Photomontage was another propaganda tool. Manipulating the photographic image not only provided a melodrama, it en-abled the propagandist to trifle with truth in an impressionable way. Ultimately, however, the Revolution became a state, and the state became a reactionary Soviet regime. By the late 1920s, the revolutionary visual language, Constructivism, was denounced for having hidden agendas.

This revolutionary style aesthetic permeated the Sixties underground — which is not to say that all political graphics were derivative of Russian, Dada, or Surrealist art. But there was a spiritual link to revolution in these art forms and their suc-cessors. In addition, and no less important, technological considerations influenced the essence of political graphics.Two factors contributed to the plethora of printed material: Inexpensive offset lithography and Xerox technology.Offset lithography provided groups and individuals with limited resources the ability to produce newspapers, magazines, broadsheets, even cheap posters on inexpensive papers and with numerous colors. As primitive as it was then, photocop-ying brought the cost down even further and increased the ability of grass roots groups who did not have design knowl-edge or skill to reach the public with small bills and leaflets. Eventually ‘Quick Copy’ stores offered even greater opportu-nities as you will see in the next generation of political graphics.Throughout the 1970s social discontent continued, fear of nuclear war increased, racial strife escalated, and the environ-ment took center stage.

Also Reaganism was not just a callous response to the needy, it kicked off the age of the greedy.Sue Coe’s images at this time reflected, if not dramatically foretold, the growing economic divides. While so-called rul-ing class indifference had been a recurring theme in Coe’s work it acquired considerably more resonance when AIDS and homelessness entered the middle class’s reality. Coe was not a household word, but her work was becoming more com-pelling to those who yearned for alternative points of view.

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By the 1980s Ronald Reagan’s official indifference to social need trickled down to poor communities everywhere. The result of a decade of Conservative ideology and liberal inactivity was a growing underclass. Responding to local health, housing, and economic crises grass roots graphic groups emerged in urban areas throughout the nation. Artists and de-signers not only protested against national indifference but found the means to help their communities. Graphic guerril-las shot off countless paper bullets in battles against an enormous variety of social problems. The evidence can be found in any city where posters and leaflets are hung.When the AIDS crisis reached epidemic proportions during the late 1980s — when the death toll became comparable to that of a war, and almost everyone began to know someone touched by the disease — public awareness of guerilla graphic art on this and other ills increased. Agitprop groups like Gran Fury and Woman’s Health Action Mobilization employed conventional and unconventional design methods to stimulate awareness. Posters were found on traditional venues, including on buses, bus shelters, and billboards, but massive sniping offensives were also carried out on the streets. The AIDS and pro-choice campaigns marked another renaissance of visual protest.And so did the Gulf War. George Bush Sr’s attack on Irag was met more or less favorably in the United States, in part ow-ing to the specter of Saddam Hussein, in part because of the tight news strictures that allowed CNN to broadcast live pic-tures from Bagdad under fire, but restricted all other war news, which effectively lulled the public into a sense of security. The opposition had a tough time being heard, but graphic artists and designers returned to the copy-making machines to produce reams of protest material.The question for many of these artists was not whether Saddam was evil or that occupation of Kuwait was immoral, but WHO WAS GETTING HURT by the war? The imagery asked, and in some cases answered these questions.Throughout the 1980s, the street was the main stage for oppositional activity. The street, and by that I mean all outdoor, public forums, is routinely where any opposition carries on its campaigns. In recent years “culture jamming” or ad “cor-recting” has become the term most applied to ambushes on mass culture. Activists have co-opted billboards, transformed logos, and laid siege to World Trade Organization meetings.Many artists and designers engage in this, and Robbie Conal, has become its master. He calls his art ‘infotainment.’ How-ever, Conal is a trickster who sees his job as the subversion the status quo. A dada concept if I ever heard one.Likewise, Barbara Kruger is not a commercial artist, per se, but she is a graphic designer who exemplifies the continuum of activist designersRenegades like Kruger, use the language of commercial art to make critiques of gender, racial, cultural, and economic stereotypes promoted by mass media. Kruger embraced graphic design as a component of her art. And thanks in large part to her accomplishment, the definition of what art is has changed during past twenty-years to include virtually any imaginable medium.Well, I promised that this talk would not be entirely about Dubya. But as the second President of the Internet Age, opposi-tion to him represents the next evolutionary stage in political art. Bill Clinton was the first President to have his personal affairs “outed” on the Internet. Dubya is the first to be ridiculed via email.Immediately after the ballot controversy, a flurry of copies of the problem form and a few homemade comic parodies hit the e-waves. It was fast but not orchestrated. Actually, the majority of today’s virtual leaflets are resolutely ad hoc with most of them produced by amateurs and few professional graphic designers.Given the availability of sophisticated software and the need to maintain a level of unpretentious simplicity, the profes-sional and amateur approaches are usually indistinguishable.One specimen sent to me a week before the inauguration is this word-play produced by a designer who will remain nameless. But as a good e-sniper he sent this to thirty friends and acquaintances on his personal email list. Thus the chain began.In addition to receiving this original mailing I also got the same attachment from two other sources, each showing be-tween thirty to fifty names in the “send to” fields. Add to that the forty or so names that I forwarded to on my “intimate friends” mailing list and the resulting number of recipients is fairly sizeable.Considering that at least half of those recipients are likely to forward it to their respective e-lists, exponentially the po-tential distribution over the course of a month is large. As the election debacle raged this scenario was repeated over and over.Digital leaflets are not in the same league as the artfully caustic graphic commentaries of the past like these two classics.But they do serve to “out” political folly by ridiculing those in power. Sure, the anti-Bush leaflets tended to be more pranks than searing exposes yet taken en masse, like any effective advertising campaign, the cumulative effect of these digital leaflets in the public’s mind reinforced the perception of Bush’s natural shortfalls.The Internet is terra firma for the exchange of meaningful and trivial ideas. It is also a hotbed of anonymity, the attacks are hit and run, so attempting to track down the originators is usually futile.The new technology has breathed life into the venerable art of alternative satire. Okay, digital leafleting may not change the world - and design intervention can be more decisive - but it has opened a channel to be indignant.

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Intervista Joana ParadinhaMiguel Marques

Originalmente publicado na Typhoteque

1. Como surgiu o interesse pela técnica da serigrafia?Quando estudei nas belas artes, no 4º ano os alunos tinham de escolher uma tecnologia para estudar. A que eu escolhi foi serigrafia pois era a que se assemelhava mais ao meu interesse pela pintura e pela cor, logo de seguida no 5º ano entrei no segundo nível de serigrafia e por ultimo participei também em workshops com o professor José Paiva e desde então nunca mais parei.

2. Que formação teve nesta área até hoje?Bem para além das Belas Artes como disse tive também os workshops com o Paiva, que para mim foi muito importante quer para ganhar interesse pela técnica, quer pela aprendizagem da técnica em si.

3. Em que locais relacionados trabalhou?Depois da faculdade trabalhei ainda na Esap e nas Belas Artes como professora, e só mesmo à cerca de 4 anos é que me instalei no atlier que agora tenho.

4. Com quem e para quem trabalhou, e como essas pessoas a influenciaram?Trabalhei com o professor Paiva como ja disse e com vários outros artistas como o Angelo de Sousa. Fiz também e faço trabalhos em conjunto com pessoas da faculdade como fanzines, cartazes ou ilustrações. Em termos de influência, para mim, há 3 tipos de pessoas, aquelas que não sabem quase nada de serigrafia e que me pedem para imprimir um trabalho e eu por isso tenho de fazer uma abordagem mais pessoal do assunto para o aproximar ao da pessoa, aquelas que já se desenrascam e em que eu ainda tenho de dar dicas, mas há um constante dialogo entre o trabalho inicial e o da serigrafia final, e aquelas pessoas que já sabem muito de serigrafia como o Ângelo Sousa em que eu apenas sirvo de quase ajudante a pessoa trabalhar. Não quero com isto dizer que nenhum dos tipos seja melhor que os outros, mas não há duvida que tra-balhar com o Angelo Sousa foi fantástico pelas coisas que aprendi com ele.

5-Que “técnica dentro da técnica” que prefere trabalhar?-Brinco muito com o processo fotográfico e com o erro e o acaso que acontece nas próprias redes. Uso uma foto ou tinta sobre o acetato e depois trabalho sobre a rede directamente para aproveitar o acaso, indo sempre estabelecendo uma relação entre a imagem e a sua própria construção.

6-De que maneira influencia o trabalho dos outros em você?Digamos que não é bem o trabalho dos outros que me influencia, mas será mais sim a maneira como eles abordam a ser-igrafia. Isto sim é muito importante para mim.

7-O que acha do panorama da serigrafia em Portugal?Eu acho que a serigrafia é vista muito dum modo comercial e pouco artística. Há uma inundação de serigrafia de má qualidade no mercado e que mesmo as próprias pessoas não prestam muita atenção a isso. Há uma termeda falta de parte artística, e parece haver ainda um preconceito do “não original” que eu pensei ja termos passado isso a frente com a gra-vura que já à tantos séculos temos ou até mesmo a pop arte que visava mesmo descontrair este “problema” da originali-dade. Acho que a serigrafia está a cima disso. Penos então que o panorama não é muito agradável, apesar de ter vindo a melhorar nestes últimos 5 anos com a vontade de criar fanzines e livros de artista etc.

8-Que projectos futuros tem?Tenho sempre projectos futuros. Está me sempre a apetecer fazer mais e mais coisas em serigrafia e não consigo parar. Ando de momento em doutoramento e tenho de me conter imenso para não trabalhar em serigrafia e concentrar me em escrever. Mas para além disto há sempre novos projectos que aparecem e sempre coisas novas para aprender.

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Joana Paradinha

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From Art to Design and back again... a proposed lecture on theory and practice

Students of the School of Graphic Design at London College of Printing recently gave the theme of 'Relay' to their graduation show. ‘Relay’ acts as both a metaphor and an adjective for Graphic De-sign and its role in visual culture. The modern city is a matrix of information, mediated through sound, text and image. Graphic Design provides the syntax or visual language for relaying this in-formation. In this guise, it provides a simple interface between ‘us’ and the world we inhabit. In ad-dition, Graphic Design is also the baton which passes between the worlds of Art and Commerce. It is the signage that directs us through the museum, the logo that glows above the art gallery door and uniquely, ones perception of Graphic Design can pass from mere branding and instruction, to ob-ject, to artefact, finally reaching full apotheosis as a piece of Art. This sequential passing of ‘mean-ing’, is dependent upon many things, curatorial choice, practitioner’s intent, history and econom-ics.

Visual Culture & Theory, provide a workspace where designers are both encouraged and enabled to see Graphic Design within its historical context. Art is explored both as a methodology and a criti-cal context for modern Graphic Design practice. It is not just an historical cupboard full of visual booty to be plundered and appropriated, but a dynamic, formative, landscape where Graphic De-sign can be seen to (re)establish itself under the influence of, Futurism, Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus etc. This influence, allows Typography/Graphic Design to became a more distinct presence on the modernist skyline. Following on, with the arrival of the 1960s, Fluxus, Pop Art, Op Art, and Kinetic Art, influence and reignite the role of Graphic Design in the public and Art sphere, which in turn is passed on to the Punk generation and its postmodern descendents. So the process goes on, the baton moving from hand to hand…

Looking at Warhol’s iconic silkscreen print ‘Electric chair’ 1971, the chair empty, the next man on ‘death row’ absent, the man who throws the [relay] switch remains outside of the frame, anony-mous. We begin to see Warhol’s image as text, the image diminishes and the critique embellishes – weeks later, the image sparks an idea in the designer’s mind, not as image but as method…a way of seeing. Importantly, both the Warhol image and work inspired by it, remain separate and intact, the former as Art and the latter as Design.

Just as architectural practice changes when architects are freed from the confines of load sup-porting walls and we see the skin of the building float free from the underlying structure, so with Graphic Design. As its long term incarceration by the grid is broken, we see the white space of Swiss Modernism, smeared with the inks of technology and experimentation – Graphic designers, once anonymous and in the shadow of a Modernism which both created and obscured ‘Art’, (often making Graphic Design its ‘other’, or at most, the rational ground upon which the hallowed oils are applied), can now be visual authors, designers, propagandist, artist, professionals, naives etc etc…

So, Art and Design occupy not different spaces but the layered space we experience in our day to day urban lives, where the visual is made up from car number plates, street signs, graffiti, bill-boards etc etc… There, meanings multiply as our experience expands, the hierarchy of high and low culture changes each time the pack is shuffled.

Design can be, according to Prof. Richard Buchanan,…”the bridge between theory and the way we actually live our lives”. Theory, documents, records and translates, putting the flesh back on the traces of our lives whilst Graphic Design, informs, augments and generally directs our day to day experience of the world. Both help to construct our visual world, often only separated by the small-est of margins. This relationship is echoed in the phrase Theory and Practice.

Through the theory(s) of Art, Design, Film etc., theory strives to provide a space for the student/practitioner to develop the critical analysis and rationale already discussed vis a vis the param-eters of theory and practice.

Visual Culture and Theory oscillates between these two worlds, pulling at the threads of both. We look upon the relationship between the studio and theory, not as a formal relationship where didac-tic application of theory leads to material results in studio practice, but more as an acceptance that the relationship is always latent and materialises in serendipitous ways.

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Repensar o Design

José Bártolo

1. A Crise da Modernidade revelou a urgência do reconhecimento das debilidades de qualquer interpre-tação do projecto de Design contemporâneo baseada na homogeneidade. Consequentemente, considera-se hoje legítima a defesa e a promoção das diferenças nas propostas projectuais.

Todavia, tais diferenças são, muitas vezes, apenas epidérmicas, fruto de um declarado protagonismo da forma, que por um lado resulta autonomamente elaborada e, por outro lado, se apresenta como sendo indiferente a qualquer reflexão que ultrapasse a concepção de um estímulo simplesmente óptico.

Neste contexto, torna-se necessário o debate sobre os significados e os limites do pluralismo contemporâ-neo, na tentativa de construir as condições capazes de torna-lo expressão da resistência à afirmação do totalitarismo global, em contraposição, portanto, ao apático resultado da multidão formalista que de tal totalitarismo é eficaz instrumento.

Neste sentido, é antes de mais prioritário empenharmo-nos no aprofundamento dos verdadeiros prob-lemas que afectam a cultura material para consolidar um mínimo denominador comum das diferenças, que seja capaz de dar sentido aos horizontes possíveis que as diversas hipóteses de intervenção e de transformação poderão desenhar.

A autêntica discussão no âmbito da cultura do Design contemporâneo deve relacionar-se com um apro-fundar das razões que estruturam o próprio Design, entendido como expressão de uma "acção social-mente eficaz", ou seja, como construção de elementos cujo referente é o cidadão e não o consumidor. De resto, somente potenciando as condições que permitem relacionar objecto e utente, no âmbito de um declarado empenho para a definição de um pacto social mais convincente, poderemos verdadeiramente falar de projecto no Design.

2. Um certo pluralismo epistemológico faz-se hoje sentir no campo do Design. Ele manifesta-se, por um lado, na profusão de métodos e ferramentas criativas colocadas ao serviço do Design e, por outro lado, na adopção, no interior da prática projectual, de jogos de racionalidade dificilmente conciliáveis como métodos fechados.

Operou-se no Design um verdadeiro corte epistemológico, que conduziu a uma emotional turn, clara nas obras de grupos como Droog Design , New Ergonomics Design ou os Tomato. Associada a esta viragem vai-se impondo a perspectiva da obra de Design como significante aberto que se dá a ser preenchido in-teractivamente, isto é, em diálogo entre o utilizador e o utilizado.

Actualmente, é no aprofundamento do significado da interface, entendida como elemento que permite uma apropriada interpretação da lógica de uso por parte do utilizador, que se pode compreender a con-sistência do papel do Design na sociedade.Num ultrapassar de fórmulas que, no entanto, dão lugar a novas fórmulas dissimuladas por uma aparente abertura, a forma deixa de seguir a função para passar a seguir a emoção, surgindo neste contexto uma nova geração de artefactos cuja funcionalidade pode esgotar-se no seu carácter lúdico ou amigável.

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No interior de uma nova cultura material, interessa pensar a confusão, hoje cada vez mais instalada, entre projecto de Design e projecto de marketing, com muitos objectos a serem pensados como objectos para vender numa ausência de responsabilidade social por parte de quem projecta.

Como estas questões são enquadradas por um novo contexto, importa pensar o próprio quadro de in-scrição dos problemas. Identifica-lo-emos, provisoriamente, com o processo da Globalização, cujos efeitos no Design são evidentes, quer no reconhecimento da hegemonia de um Global Design como na transformação mental, de Designer e consumidores, que o vai consolidando.

Vivemos num período histórico que reflecte um conjunto de transformações originadas por um processo que devemos reconhecer ser, igualmente, contemporâneo.

O projecto de Design enquanto momento de reflexão e intervenção na sociedade confronta-se inevitav-elmente com este processo, mas, aparentemente, por vezes parece perder força perante ele, deforman-do-se em vez de o conseguir reformar.

No exercício do projecto todos os fenómenos se tornam nossos contemporâneos, numa contempora-neidade precária, marcada, pelo seu arremesso para o futuro enquanto desenvolvimento projectual, Gui Bonsiepe afirma, a este respeito, que "o futuro é o espaço no qual se desenvolve o projecto e so-mente graças ao projecto é possível apropriarmo-nos do futuro". Esta contemporaneidade, porém, en-volve sempre, o elemento histórico. Em relação ao processo de transformação contemporâneo torna-se necessário, para uma correcta compreensão, a sua integração dentro de um contexto mais amplo, que nos remete para a origem contemporânea do processo durante os anos 60.

O que se pode constatar é que todas aquelas contradições que colocavam em perigo o sentido do pro-jecto de Design nos anos 60 e 70 não só não foram eliminadas como se acentuaram, em certo sentido, enraizaram-se, institucionalizaram-se. Andreia Branzi afirma, no seu La Quarta Metropoli, que "Todas as diferenças, as contradições e as contraposições que ao longo dos anos Setenta pareciam levar o sis-tema ao limiar da explosão ficaram intactas; mas a energia arrefeceu e a violência tornou-se abstracta, fria. Uma violência interna ou deformante e não explosiva e, portanto, libertadora".

As consequências do processo, que hoje tendemos a identificar com a Globalização, deixaram de op-erar transformações essencialmente materiais para passarem a operar transformações essencialmente mentais.

O dever do Designer de deter o processo, de o enfrentar, de o dominar projectualmente parece hoje mais urgente, mas a dificuldade de o conseguir parece, também, mais evidente.

O sentido político do projecto não parece, na época contemporânea, realizável individualmente, mas por outro lado os mecanismos da globalização parecem ser deformantes em relação à possibilidade de desenvolvimento autêntico de um projecto colectivo.

Na contemporaneidade, as dificuldades, os problemas, os sinais de crise, as perversões do sistema, parecem dominantes, enfraquecendo esperanças e utopias, e no entanto é perante todas essas dificul-dades que o projecto de Design ganha razão de existir. Afinal, citando Hoderlin, "onde cresce o perigo cresce, também, o que nos salva dele"...

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First Things First Manifesto 2000We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art di-rectors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and ap-paratus of advertising have persistently been pre-sented to us as the most lucrative, effective and de-sirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.

Encouraged in this direction, designers then ap-ply their skill and imagination to sell dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel, cigarettes, credit cards, sneakers, butt toners, light beer and heavy-duty recreational vehicles. Com-mercial work has always paid the bills, but many graphic designers have now let it become, in large measure, what graphic designers do. This, in turn, is how the world perceives design. The profes-sion’s time and energy is used up manufactur-ing demand for things that are inessential at best.

Many of us have grown increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design. Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endors-ing, a mental environment so saturated with commer-cial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.

There are pursuits more worthy of our problem-solving skills. Unprecedented environmental, so-cial and cultural crises demand our attention. Many cultural interventions, social marketing campaigns, books, magazines, exhibitions, educa-tional tools, television programmes, films, chari-table causes and other information design pro-jects urgently require our expertise and help.

We propose a reversal of priorities in fa-vour of more useful, lasting and democrat-ic forms of communication – a mindshiftaway from product marketingand toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning. The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is run-ning uncontested; it must be challenged by oth-er perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of design.

In 1964, 22 visual communicators signed the original call for our skills to be put to worthwhile use. With the explosive growth of global commercial culture, their message has only grown more urgent. Today, we renew their manifesto in expectation that no more decades will pass before it is taken to heart.

Jonathan Barnbrook Nick BellAndrew Blauvelt Hans BocktingIrma Boom Sheila Levrant de BrettevilleMax Bruinsma Siân CookLinda van Deursen Chris DixonWilliam Drenttel Gert DumbarSimon Esterson Vince FrostKen Garland Milton Glaser

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Jessica Helfand Steven HellerAndrew Howard Tibor KalmanJeffery Keedy Zuzana LickoEllen Lupton Katherine McCoyArmand Mevis J. Abbott MillerRick Poynor Lucienne RobertsErik Spiekermann Jan van ToornTeal Triggs Rudy VanderLansBob Wilkinson

Background

Last year the Canadian magazine Adbusters took the unusual step of reprinting a manifesto, ‘First Things First’, written 35 years ago in London by Ken Gar-land and signed by 21 other visual communicators. As it turned out, Garland knew nothing about this renewed interest in his call for a ‘reversal of pri-orities in favour of the more useful and more last-ing forms of communication.’ Adbusters had come across the manifesto in a back issue of Eye (see ‘There is such a thing as society ‘ by Andrew How-ard, no. 13 vol. 4) and felt that its sentiments had become ‘more, rather than less relevant’ today.

After that, things started to move. Kalle Lasn, edi-tor of Adbusters, showed the issue with ‘First Things First’ to the late Tibor Kalman, who said: ‘We should do this now. ‘They met Ken Garland himself at their Vancouver HQ. Little by little the idea of a new ver-sion of ‘First Things First’, updated and rewritten for the twenty-first century, began to take shape. Garland gave the project his blessing, but left the writing and organisation of new signatories to Ad-busters. Earlier this year [1999] the magazine’s art director, Chris Dixon, read out a preliminary draft during a packed lecture at the Royal College of Art.

As the new version and list came together, oth-er magazines were approached to see whether they would act as co-sponsors of the initiative.

‘First Things First Manifesto 2000’ is being pub-lished in its entirety, with 33 signatories’ names, in Adbusters, Emigre and the AIGA Journal in North America, in Eye and Blueprint in Britain, in Items in the Netherlands, and Form in Germany. A poster version will be designed by Adbusters and dispatched to design schools around the world.

The aim is to stimulate discussion in all areas of visual communication – in education, in prac-tice, in the organisations that represent design’s aspirations and aims – as well as outside design. The changing relationship of advertising, graphic design, commerce and culture poses some profound questions and dilemmas that have recently been overlooked. If anything, these developments are ac-cepted as an unproblematic fait accompli.

In consequence, many young designers have little conception of the values, ideals and sense of respon-sibility that once shaped the growth and practice of design. The profession’s senior figures, who do, are for the most part quiet. Adbusters’ welcome initia-tive reasserts these considerations as fundamental to any sensitive interpretation of graphic design’s role and potential.

First published in Eye no. 33 vol. 9, 1999

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Françoise Nielly's painting is expres-sive, exhibiting a brute force, a fasci-nating vital energy. Oil and knife com-bine tsculpt her images from a material that is , at the same time, biting and in-cisive, charnel and sensual. Whether she paints the human body or portraits, the artist takes a risk : her painting is sexual, her colors free, exuberant, sur-prising, even explosive, the cut of her knife incisive, her color pallet dazzling.

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2010.Opera Gallery. Singapour2010: Galerie Menouar. Paris2010: Galerie Ville Delarte MIAMI INTERNATIONAL ART FAIRART FAIR PALM BEACH .GLASGOW ART FAIR2009:Galerie Ville delarte Barcelona2009:Galerie Claude Petit jean. St Tropez2008: Galerie Claude PetitJean. Aix en Provence2008: Galerie Opera. Monaco2008 : Galerie Villa Del Arte. Barcelone2008: ArtFair Newcastle. Galerie Villa del Arte2008 : AAF London. England. galerie Villa del ARTE2008 : ARTFAIR MIAMI. Galerie Villa Del Arte2008 : Galerie Anne Cros. Pézénas2007 : Les ELYSEES de l' ART. Paris2007 : Persona Grata. Paris2007 : Galerie Menouar. Paris2007 : Galerie de L'Europe. Paris2006 : Galerie Menouar . Paris (événement artycolor. Givenchy2006 : Galerie Mensirioux. Montréal. Fort lauderdale2006 : Galerie Lausberg. Toronto. (artfairs moscou 2006)2006 : Galerie Anne Cros.pézénas (artenîmes)2005 : Galerie Menouar. Paris2005 : Galerie Anne Cros . Pézénas2004 : Galerie Sibman . Paris2004 : Galerie Menouar. Paris2004 : Galerie Cinko. Paris2003 : Galerie Stephane Olivier. ST Ouen2002 : Galerie bdv . St Ouen2002 : Galerie Gagnon. Montréal2001 : Galerie Anne Cros. pezenas2000 : Galerie de Bièvre. Paris1999 : Galerie Michel Blais. Vancouver1999 : Galerie Artitude.paris1998 : Galerie Influences. Paris1998 : Galerie Stely. St Tropez1997 : Galerie Steglé. St Maxime

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Fernando Adam

Born in Caracas (1955), he studied art and design at the Instituto Neumann. He complemented his artistic studies with professional practices in carpentry and industrial design to be later integrated in the early stages of his art work. By overlaying diverse techniques in the use of industrial paints over wood supports, Adam seeks to ex-plore the limits of painting as construction in the creation of his first Objetos Límite (limit objects) as expressive media.

The same object becomes later a support for a dialectical relation with the pictorial space in his bi-dimensional work. From the initial paintings of weightless tension between the abstract environments and the objects, Adam evolves into a more representational proposal where the house —as a main theme— becomes the locus for exam-ining subjective notions of identity, displacement and temporality. In the creation of illusionary perspectives, the chair, the table, the stair, the window, or the door are stable presences to inhabit domes-tic space from which to regard the world and the existence. But the house becomes also an unfinished object floating into an ever chang-ing landscape to challenge essential human questions over the sense of time and permanence.

In his recent work Adam goes further in the investigation of these constructive and poetic qualities. The surface of the canvas is bro-ken into fragments to create a sense of something between two and three dimensions. The compositional values of light, weight and balance found in his refined pictorial technique are clearly set up in the assembly of the parts. The painting as an object becomes then a frame to rearm the scattered pieces together. But the dialectical tension between representation and materiality in this work seems to capture one photographic instant, a present built from different dimensions of time. This back and forward in the observation of the house as unattached object, but also as environment of architectural enclosure in the framing of landscape, creates a dual perception in a constant play between inside and outside, presence and absence, inclusion and exclusion.

Currently lives and works in Barcelona, Spain.

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