Futuristic Clothes from the book 'Fear and Fashion'.

I found an awesome book in the library a few weeks ago called "Fear and Fashion in the Cold War" by Jane Pavitt. It was just what I was looking for. It's full of photos of futuristic fashions, mainly made in the 1960s. I scanned some of the most interesting:

Frank Horvat, American man and woman in spacesuits. 1963: The kid makes me laugh, he looks like he just wants to get away from his 'weirdo' parents hehe!


Alice Edeling, tunic and boots in metallic fabric. the Netherlands, late 1960s:

Emilio Pucci, 'Space bubble' helmet for Braniff airlines, 1965: When I saw this I thought it was just some futuristic fashion shoot but no, the book says that this was actually worn by the air hostesses for a while (until they found it annoying)!! The idea was though that it would stop their hair from blowing all over the place when they got onto the run way, how cool is that!

Giji Bakker, neck ornament shoulder piece aluminium, 1967:

Paco Robanne, "Everything is made of steel", 1968:

Gijs Bakker. Emmy Van Leersum and Tiny Leeuwenkamp. 1970:

Models in metal sheets from the film Qui etes-vous, Polly Maggoo, 1966:

Vaclav Cigler, Circle Framing Face, 1968:

Haus-Rucker Co (Laurids Ortner, Gunter Zamp Kelp and Klaus Pinter), Environment Transformers, 1968: This just looks so awesome and weird! I put it on the cover of my dissertation :D

Alan Fletcher Exhibition @ Cube

Yes thats right Alan Fletcher..
Nooooo not ^that^ one (unfortunately)! I have actually been to see THE GOOD Alan Fletcher and his band play ^_^. He reached over into the crowd and I reached over and touched his hand. yeahhhhhhhhhhh. [In case you didn't know..Neighbours is one of my top 3 tv shows, the other two being Home & Away and STAR TREK!]

Anyway the exhibition was about the 2nd best Alan Fletcher - the graphic designer.
It was pretty good. You could take photos aslong as you didn't use flash, so the photos are pretty poor but you get the idea. Here are some of the pieces i found most interesting:





There was a series of these called 'This is a drawing' 2004. They just really interested me. I like that it's black and white, a line drawing, a pattern, confusing and the fact he says "Writing is you on paper". That very day i'd just posted a letter. Even though i don't like my handwriting but it doesn't matter because it's more personal however scratty my handwriting is. I did tryyyy to write neater. Ooh and look there's my reflection:

I like seeing inside artists sketchbooks, i like seeing personal and free things like this, it's good to know other designers do crazy scribble-y drawings too:
I really like this, so cool! -
This was interesting, really makes an impact. It said he was in NYC when 9/11 happened and purchased lots of postcards then later did this to them:

I like how unpolished this is, at first glance it looks like a kidlet could have done it, but it made me laugh. I like it being all muddled up with the colours and names, it's just random and cool :p:

a nosey at MOSI

I visited MOSI (Museum Of Science and Industry) on Monday. I'd never been before, but had been meaning to go for a while. The first time I heard about it was in first year of uni, from a German girl visiting Manchester, she went and thought it was awesome!
I didn't look around it all, mainly just the Air and Space hall. There wasn't that much space stuff anyway. There is a Chinese space exhibit on at the moment on the upper balcony thing. I didn't like the crappy typography they had, and the fact i could see loadsa cellotape on all the banners :S. I took a few photos before my camera died ¬_¬.
Can't remember what it said this is..but it looks damn cool! I love how angular it is and the little rivet/bolt things! I makes me think of some sort of alien/futuristic bomb/weapon! I think it spins around (a bit like the Xindi superweapon but not as advanced) and shoots lasers and dematerializes people/aliens/cats/penguins.

Here's a crappy picture in bad lighting of some models of rockets, they were a bit crap and look like they would topple over if you stood on a floorboard too close, they didn't though:

THE BEST thing I saw, Enterprise NCC-1701-D model! I nearly missed it as well. Deffo brought a grin to my face! My trekkie friends said it's left over from the Star Trek exhibition they had there about 10-15 years ago! Wish they had that again now!

I also went in the mini planetarium they have in there for a show of the stars, £1.50 thats alright to say the rest of the place is free to get in. I sat next to a mannequin in a astronauts suit and he was perched on a wheely computer chair, a bit weird. He wouldn't survive very long in space though because his arm was hanging off...

The Unknown

I've been getting kinda freaked out recently because soon it will be the end of uni and I have no idea what I'm gonna do. But It's ok because I just watched DS9 and listening to Sisko trying to explain human existence and linear time to the worm hole aliens made me feel better. If you look at it one way, not knowing what will happen is exciting.

"That may be the most important thing to understand about Humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day. And we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you with weapons or ideas, but to co-exist and learn."
- Commander Benjamin Sisko

Clip from the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, episode "Emissary Part 2".

"Day and night the same - blank. Precisely like death."

For the last project I did, the brief I chose was the Don't Panic poster with the theme of 'Resistance'. I decided to look at resistance and time. The area of this I chose was memory. I had been inspired by a tv show I saw on BBC4 called 'Time' presented by Dr Michio Kaku. One segment of it was about a pianist called Clive Wearing, who for 25 years he has been suffering from anterograde amnesia. This is when new memories cannot be formed any more. Like in the film Memento, 50 First Dates, also what Archer had in the episode Twilight from season 3 of Star Trek Enterprise. Clive's is the worst case known, he can only remember things for about 30 seconds or less before forgetting again. Every time he sees his wife it's like its for the first time in years, it's really sad. Here's a clip of it:


For my poster i'd decided to draw Clive in profile then have a representation of his thoughts going through his head in a strip. As well as that I had the idea of having a sieve behind him (memory like a sieve), I thought it would represent him forgetting and look quite cool and sieves are a bit strange for on a poster. My first thought was a film strip for his memories, I added a quote his said on top:

"I've never seen anyone at all.
I've never heard a word until now.
I've never had a dream even,
Day and night the same - blank.
Precisely like death.
No thoughts at all.
Brain has been inactive."

The film strip wasn't quite working out. I then came up with a great alternative! Musical note lines..i'm not a musical person at all, can't remember what they are called but you know the things, 5 horizontal lines the notes sit on. It was perfect! It fit in much better with the style of the poster which was simple line drawings. I studied what the different parts meant of the sheet music and decided to just use the horizontal lines, treble bass and the end thin and thick vertical lines to show the end of the 'song' or memory in this case. I then had the cool idea to repeat the end lines 2 more times along the horizontal lines to represent that memory being forgotten and totally at its end. I placed the quotes in a way which looked like strike through because Clive sometimes writes in a diary but forgets after he has written a line then crosses it out as he doesn't believe he has wrote it. It's all there in my poster.


I'm really pleased with it. It shows his brain resisting new memories and himself trying to resist forgetting. His memory is resisting normal time, to him it is as if he has been unconscious for years and in a way he has time travelled to the future, resisting the normal passage of time. This was the personal project, and it was personal because I too took on the theme of resistance and resisted my usual urges to crowd pages and make them really colourful, this time I tried being more minimal and simple.

Snow-woman

I got back to Manchester yesterday and there was still loadsa snow in our backgarden so we went out and had a play. I stayed out longer though, 2 hours in fact, and built a snowoman :D








I was pleased how it turned out. In my head I had decided I wanted to make an Aenar just so I could put antenna on it but when i built the snow column tall enough and added shoulders and boobs it soon transformed and i decided to leave it sans head. It looks pretty freaky!
I recommend building a snowman for exercise, back and forth grabbing snow from all over the garden for 2 hours, i've bound to have burnt loadsa calories, awesome!

A Short History of my Christmas Holiday

Bird feet and cat paw prints in the snow!

22nd December 2009: With flash.

With flash again..

Without flash.. 1am, the sky was peach and illuminated, it looked so eerie and cool! I think we are on Mars, thats the colour the sky is there! It was like day time! It went dark after about half an hour though when it stopped snowing.

My cat Simba is bonkers. I had my suitcase in that same place and he sat on it, then my backpack too! I think he likes that location near me on the computer :)

I have a very intelligent cat:


New Years Eve, I wasn't out partying, I stayed in..well not quite..I went out in the back garden at about 8.30 in my dressing gown with my telescope and gazed at the moon. It was so bright and full, and the sky was so clear. It was freezing, I couldn't feel my fingers! I tried to hold the camera still and take a photo, this was the best outta the bunch, better than my usual attempts of photos of the moon anyway:

Today. I bought this plastic squirrel in a set with a mini plastic racoon from home bargains years ago, I wanted to screw them to the mantel piece in the living room but my parents wouldn't let me, pffft! My Dad put them in the garden instead, and so here is poor Mr.Squirrel covered in snow :(

I thought it would look nice to hang christmas tree baubles on snowy branches outside and add some colour to the ubiquitous white:

I started reading a new book on the train from Manchester to back home. The book is "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson. I'd been meaning to read it for a few years, I came across it in the charity shop a few months ago and ever since it's been in my book pile waiting for me to finish "In Search Of The Edge Of Time" by John Gribbin which took forever! I do like to read but it always seems to take me forever coz I read in bed and i'm always too tired so usually I manage about 5 pages then put it down and try and go to sleep. I've been trying to make more of an effort with this book and yesterday I came across some people who get through about 94 and 120 books per year! I really have to pick up the pace! So i've been trying even harder and read during the day instead of watching TV, and got through about 60 pages in the past 2 days, better than 10 in 2 days! I'm a third through the book now, it's really good. Next up after this book is "The Physics of Star Trek" which i'd wanted to read and finally found in a charity shop a few days ago for £1.99 :). Anyway back to the current book, I learn stuff every day from it, the other day I learnt what a Micron is, one thousandth of a millimetre (or equivalently one millionth of a metre or one thousand nanometres). There are lots of cool names for things, here's a paragraph I read last night:

"As physicists build bigger and more ambitious machines, they began to find or postulate particles or particle families seemingly without number: muons, pions, hyperons, mesons, K-mesons, Higg bosons, intermediate vector bosons, baryons, tachyons."

There are interesting and funny facts and stories about crazy scientists and such like this

"John Dalton was an exceptionally bright student - so very bright, indeed, that at the improbably youthful age of twelve he was put in charge of the local Quaker school. This perhaps says as much about the school as about Dalton's precocity, but perhaps not: we knew from his diaries that at about this time he was reading Newton's Principia - in the original Latin - and other works of a similarly challenging nature. At fifteen, still school mastering he took a job in the near by town of Kendal and a decade after that he moved to Manchester."

And we have a building at MMU named after him! Now I know all about who it was named after. There are a lot of scientists who ended up in Manchester from all over it seems, from reading this book. And this next guy is from the same place as me:

"Owen had grown up in Lancaster, in the north of England, where he had trained as a doctor. He was a born anatomist and so devoted to his studies that he sometimes illicitly borrowed limbs, organs and other parts from corpses and took them home for leisurely dissection. Once, while carrying a sack containing the head of a black African sailor that he had just removed, Owen slipped on a wet cobble and watched in horror as the head bounced away from him down the lane and through the open doorway of a cottage, where it came to rest in the front parlour. What the occupants had to say upon finding an unattached head rolling to a halt at their feet can only be imagined. One assumed that they had not formed any terribly advanced conclusions when, an instant later, a fraught-looking young man rushed in, wordlessly retreived the head and rushed out again."

This is funny/weird:

"Brand became convinced that gold could somehow be distilled from human urine. (The similarity of colour seems to have been a factor in his conclusion.) He assembled fifty buckets of human urine, which he kept for months in his cellar."

He didn't find gold but instead found phosphorus.

I recommend the book anyway.

Posters of the Avant Garde Book

I found a cool book in the library the other week called 'Jan Tschichold: Posters of the Avant Garde', it's FULL of posters, it's great! I love art books full of pictures :p! They are also very cool posters :) which is even better. I love this style, great structure, and simple yet lots going on too. Here are some of my faves from the book -

Jan Tschichold:

Max Burcharz - Tanz Festspiele (dance festival):

Jan Tschichold:

Theo Van Doesburg & Kurt Schwitters (I'd liked this image for ages):

I quickly took some photos of pages to remember them for inspiration, there were too many to scan in, so they aren't great quality but you get the idea, here are some more from the book that I liked:

'School Trip' to Liverpool Tate Art Gallery

A week or 2 ago, a few of us from D&AD went on a 'school trip' to Liverpool to visit the Tate Art Gallery.
More photos of us lot in Liverpool


Yayoi Kusama - The Passing Winter, 2005. It was interesting to see another installation by her as i'd previously seen her 'Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees' (previous post). We weren't allowed to take photos in the Tate but I found images by someone else - Marshall Astor. It looked kinda weird and cool but not that impressive...


*UNTIL* I peered inside the box!! AMAZING! The box had mirrors on the inside as well and it just reflects everything and when you look into it you see your face multiple times and from different angles, it's so weird and awesome. It's like being in an infinate 'inbetween' kinda liminal space, with many directions and routes to take, doorways to alternate universes? I was just stood staring into it for ages and ages!


Something else it reminded me of was the part in The Beatles Film - The Yellow Submarine, which shows Mr Nowhere Man located in..'nowhere' I guess.


Another piece which I saw there and found interesting was Salvador Dali - Lobster Telephone, 1936.


I stumbled upon a piece and instantly recognised the artist it was by - Daniel Spoerri, it was called Prose Poems. I discovered this artists work last year and was interested in it. His work felt familiar to me because I have photographed tables from above at chance compositions. I like that everyday kinda thing which we take for granted, but it is usually ephemeral and then lost and replaced everyday, so it's interesting to capture it in an image. "Spoerri fixed or 'snared' objects found in chance positions on table tops or in drawers. These were hung vertically on a wall, like conventional pictures, and were intended to create visual discomfort in the viewer. In this work, the remains of a meal are preserved on a wooden board that the artist used as a table while living in a small room in a Paris hotel."


I really liked some photographs by Helen Chadwick, I can't really find many online only one, but it was a series of photographs of her 'Ego Geometria Sum' holding objects with her image on the objects, Heres one photo, and then i found some images of just the objects, I think they have an eerie and surreal quality about them, really nice though.





Victor Grippo - Energy of a Potato - 1972. This was quite weird and cool. You could see the potato discoloured where the probes had gone into it's skin and then where the potato had 'bled' and dripped onto the plinth. It was a real potato. poor thing. Cruelty against potatoes. I'm not guilty of killing potatos... nah i never eat chips or crisps.. honest .... not!


This was also cool.. by Gilbert & George - Happy, 1980.


It was nice to see some very well known pieces there too which i'd seen before but not in real life, like Jeff Koons - Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985, Marcel Duchamp - Fountain (replica), Antony Gormley - Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage, 1981, Mona Hatoum - Wheelchair, 1988, Bob and Roberta Smith - Make Art Not War, 1997, as well as some Cindy Sherman photographs 'Bus Riders', 1976.

I really enjoyed the Tate, I saw lots of things which I didn't expect to see there and found things to help with my Silence project :)