How will the future objects and methods of graphic design and the industries it serves be reconfigured?
Thursday 07 and Friday 08 March 2013, Open, 20 Bank Plain, Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 4SF
"A two day symposium organised by Norwich University of the Arts that will explore the relationship between print and digital, and the coexistence of media in a wider sense; how they combine, and how they provide unique opportunities.
As the design industry embraces dramatic changes in technology, the Cowbird Symposium will look at graphic design as an output, a practice and a profession, exploring the relationships between print and screen-based communication. Guest speakers, all leading thinkers and practitioners themselves, will be invited to comment on the future of the distributed text – the book, magazine, newspaper and poster, as well as the challenge and opportunity afforded by new technologies, tablets, e-readers, smart phones, augmented reality, social media, digital displays, and new practices, crowdsourcing, coding, data sharing, and social reading."
(Norwich University of the Arts)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Computer History Museum: Selling the Computer Revolution
"The brochures selected here (just a fraction of the Museum's holdings in this area) show some of the more important technologies, companies, and applications in computing from 1948 to 1988. This covers the period from mechanical and relay-based computers to those based on the microprocessor - a remarkable transition that occurred over only 25 years. We hope you enjoy browsing through these historical documents."
(Computer History Museum)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The history of the UK Design Council
"The Design Council started life in 1944 as the Council of Industrial Design. It was founded by Hugh Dalton, President of the Board of Trade in the wartime Government, and its objective was 'to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry'. And that was to stay unaltered through half a century of social, technological and economic change."
(UK Design Council)
Fig.1 "1951 Festival of Britain", Graphic created by: Design Council/Council of Industrial Design | From University of Brighton Design Archives. [JRGS Alumni Society: http://www.mel-lambert.com/Ruskin/News/News_Archive/JRGS02A_News_Archive32.htm]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Towards a Performative Aesthetics of Interactivity
"I identify a two-decade period - roughly speaking 1985-2005 - as the pioneering experimental period of (computer based) interactive art. Crucial to the understanding of work in this period is the blindingly rapid development of the technological context. At the beginning of the period the graphical user interface was a novelty, the internet barely existed, the web was a decade away, interactivity was an intriguing concept. The production of acceptably high resolution illusionistic digital pictures (still frames) was an active research area and a megabyte of RAM was something luxurious.
The period neatly brackets the emergence of most of the major technological milestones which now undergird digital culture and ubiquitous computing: WYSIWYG, digital multimedia, hypermedia, virtual reality, the internet, the world wide web, digital video, real-time graphics, digital 3D, mobile telephony, GPS, Bluetooth and other mobile and wireless communication systems. It was a period of rapid technological change, euphoria and hype."
(Simon Penny, 2011)
Simon Penny (2011). "Towards a Performative Aesthetics of Interactivity", Fibreculture Journal, issue 19 2011: Ubiquity.
Fig.1 Sniff and Performative Ecologies were included in Emergence, a show of Artificial Life Art curated by Simon Penny and David Familian at the Beall Center for Art and Technology, University of California Irvine, December 2009 – April 2010. Regrettably Performative Ecologies did not function as designed during the exhibition.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Extensive collection of vintage pocket calculators
"1970s Vintage desktop and pocket calculators listed by company (131 identified brands, 613 calculators). ..., it is crazy to think that in many of these calculators you have a chip that is bigger in size than one of the Intel Core Family processors."
(Vintage Technology)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
