Victoria & Albert Museum: Zoomorphic Architecture
"Zoomorphic presents a startling new trend in architecture - buildings that look like animals. Animal resemblances arise for various reasons. An architect may wish to create a symbol, as architects have always done. Or, there may be a functional explanation for why a building comes to share elements of its design with that of some living creature.
Until now, the Art Nouveau was perhaps the high water mark of architecture's attempt to embrace nature. Today, with computers and new materials, architects are able to design and build more freely so they are exploring the natural world once more."
(Victoria & Albert Museum, 2004)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Gerald Scarfe: Drawing inspiration
"Gerald Scarfe is known for thirty years of brilliant caricatures that have appeared in Private Eye, the New Yorker and the Sunday Times, as well as his artwork for Disney's Hercules, the titles fo Yes Minister and Pink Floyd's The Wall. In this film, shot in his studio, the distinguished British illustrator and cartoonist draws us a picture and discusses the lasting influence of the V&A."
(V&A Channel)
Fig.1 video interview with Gerald Scarfe, published by the V&A Channel.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Alpha-ville 2011: International Festival of Post-digital Culture
London 22-25 September 2011: "Alpha-ville festival explores the intersection between art, technology and society and for this edition we are collaborating with various venues and spaces in London such us The Victoria & Albert Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, Space Studios, Vortex Jazz Club, Netil House, XOYO and Hearn Street Warehouse to bring along an extensive 4-day event featuring social media art, kinect art, interactive installations, open labs, workshops, performances, screenings, live music & A/V shows, a one-day symposium and more!
The 2011 edition provides an online and live platform to explore, test and disseminate new ideas, emerging trends, collaborations and groundbreaking works. Running from 22-25 September and taking place alongside the London Design Festival, the 2011 edition enables a network of satellite events spreading across different London boroughs and links with other European cities such as Madrid (Twin Gallery) and Brussels & The Hague (Todays Art).
The festival programme also connects east and west London thorough a link with the V&A Digital Design Weekend."
(Alpha-ville 2011)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
ISOTYPE: International System of TYpographic Picture Education
"Pictures had been used for the purpose of conveying information long before the development of Isotype. Picture language preceded the evolution of writing and a number of societies developed their own sets of rules in order to aid communication through pictures. Since the evolution of alphabetic writing in the western world pictures have, generally speaking, played a subordinate role to writing as far as communicating information is concerned. It is true that until the middle of the nineteenth century paintings usually told a story of some kind and relied on conventions of symbolism, composition, gesture and facial expression to convey their meaning; but there were few attempts to build up comprehensive picture languages before the present century. Comenius was not concerned with the structure of pictorial language, and even William Playfair, who developed a visual approach to the representation of quantities in the late eighteenth century which he called 'lineal arithmetic', does not appear to have adopted any firm conventions of treatment. Similarly, the numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-century designers who presented statistics and other information through pictures appear not to have considered the need to work out overall approaches. By the end of the nineteenth century many novel approaches had been adopted in the field of picture language but, in general, it was as chaotic as written language was in pre-classical times when early Greek and Latin characters assumed a variety of orientations and the direction of reading and writing were not fixed.
The real significance of Otto Neurath's contribution in the field of picture language is that he saw the need to establish a set of conventions in order to make communication easier and more effective. These conventions were developed over a number of years and were only settled upon after being tested thoroughly through use. However, two basic rules were formulated almost from the beginning of the Isotype Movement. The first of these related to the presentation of statistics by means of pictures and held that a sign should be used to represent a certain amount of things and a greater number of such signs a greater amount of things. The second was a general rule that perspective should not be used. Perspective involves making objects of the same size smaller or larger according to their distance from the viewer, which means that they cannot easily be quantified; when something needed to be shown in three dimensions the Isotype team used models or isometric drawings. In accepting these two basic rules Otto Neurath was returning to the conventions of some of the earliest formalised systems of communication, and particularly to Egyptian wall painting and hieroglyphs which had influenced him profoundly. Thereafter a number of other rules and conventions were established by Otto Neurath and his team. They are described briefly in the section of the catalogue called 'Principles of Isotype', and in more detail by Otto Neurath in his book International picture language."
(Michael Twyman, 1975)
Fig.1 Chart of motor vehicles in the United States and abroad. From Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft, 1930 (courtesy MAK Center).
2). Michael Twyman (1975). 'The significance of Isotype'
3). Otto Neurath (1930). 'Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft - Bildatlas'
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Computer Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum
"The V&A has been collecting computer-generated art and design since the 1960s. More recently, the Museum acquired two significant collections of computer-generated art and design, and together these form the basis of the UK's emerging national collection of Computer Art.
The Museum's holdings range from early experiments with analogue computers and mechanical devices, to examples of contemporary software-based practices that produce digital prints and computer-generated drawings. The earliest work in the collection dates from 1952 and is a long exposure photograph of electronic beams on an analogue computer, by artist Ben Laposky.
More recently, the V&A has acquired a large digital inkjet print from 2008, which is nearly two metres long and was created using pixel mapping software designed by American artist Mark Wilson.
The collection consists predominately of two-dimensional works on paper, such as plotter drawings, screenprints, inkjet prints, laser prints and photographs, as well as artists' books, from around the world. Early practitioners of computer art were working in Britain, France, Germany, and Spain, as well as the United States, Japan and South America."
(Victoria and Albert Museum)
Fig.1 Herbert W. Franke 'Oscillogramm' (1956)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
