blogos

It’s about the process, not the result… the journey, not the destination…

… even though a satisfying outcome would still be ideal.

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon — do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,

as many sensual perfumes as you can; visit many Egyptian cities, to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.

Without her you would have never set out on the road.

She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.

Wise as you have become, with so much experience,

you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

chronologically inaccurate

Was trying to squeeze this in with some earlier posts but couldn’t successfully pull it off, so I’m just placing it here – suspended. It hypothetically fits everywhere, yet cannot practically be placed anywhere.

Visual triggers —>  bound to cultural myths, historical baggage, national identity, politics etc  < —

In researching my disaster, I inevitably came across images of what I now consider cliched, overused, misappropriated and, frankly,  bordering on kitschy. I am referring to images of classical Greek structures such as the Parthenon, whose rendering into a mass produced image (among other commodity forms) has now become similar to a tacky souvenir that ignorant tourists eagerly purchase in the midst of some kind of spiritual cultural consumption. Those images, to me, no longer bear any “real” connection to the past… they are merely attractors to the easily seduced and the easily misled.

I was therefore cautious in using the meander because its use can often become tacky. I did not want my logo to turn into a condensed equivalent of this tacky Greek house:

In any case, I feel as though an obligatory analysis (ala Macnab) is in order, so as to justify the image/shape I chose to extract from the montage/collage/ pastiche of images that has been created in my mind with the help of the Google image search engine.

Instead of choosing the most typical shapes characteristic of the three prevalent architectural styles in Ancient Greece (Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian order), I chose to focus on the meander-like shape that is perhaps a fusion of principles extracted from all of the aforementioned orders and -at the same time- a creative departure from all these styles and their functionality. The meander-like shape emerges from some recurrent shape/image-concepts in this blog, such as the labyrinth and the hypertext metaphors.

What is interesting about the meander is that it has made the leap from architecture (originally: Greek and Roman, e.g. used in temples) to art – from function and form, to aesthetics and conceptual design. Nowadays, the Key design is not only used in modern Greek design (sometimes to a fault, as in, for example, Greek restaurants in America), but also in products of other cultures (e.g. Mexican buildings).

Commonly, the meander symbolizes unity and infinity, or infinite potential.

Ironically (or, fittingly), a random snapshot of a meander reminded me of the swastika symbol. Not the spiritual and religious usage of the swastika, but the stigmatized version that is loaded with fascist overtones.

Of course, the meander-turned-swastika could be related to many aspects of the disaster, such as in relation  to concepts of anarchy, education, democracy, freedom, cultural myths, and progress.

In terms of my logo design, I wanted to transform and appropriate the meandering shape so as to touch on its classical undertones, but also transcend its overbearing significance.  However, with this transformation, some unexpected associations emerged that were unintended and beyond my control (see my aforementioned swastika symbolism).

In Decoding Design, Maggie Macnab cites the example of the swastika to illustrate how “subtle alterations [in design] can be used to influence belief and reconstitute the common meaning of a symbol.” She then goes on to mention how the positive associations of the swastika became overwhelmed by the propagandist appropriation of the symbol by the Third Reich. Despite Macnab’s assertion that an appropriated symbol can overcome its original meaning once it becomes redesigned and recontextualized (and, inevitably, de/repoliticized), I do not think the swastika can ever fully move beyond the negative signification it gained post 1920s.  These associations will continue to overwhelm the swastika symbol – at least for the Western imagination -  and no amount of amount of de/reconstruction and manipulation can help it surpass the baggage it is automatically associated with.

I am aware of this unspoken stipulation, and using it productively to stimulate my logo’s evolutionary progress and the branding of my disaster.

Rejects?

I-mage

Inauthentic Hybridity – is that all we can hope for?

“In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.”

– Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice

And with this inspiring remark in mind, I try to motivate myself to carry on designing…

Warm Up

NOTES: Fire as:

• recombinant force (in color theory, of primary colors red and yellow) – number 3
• an alchemical emblem because in its destructiveness, it also encapsulates the potential for re-generation and the resolution of conflict [see post about liquid/ Greek fire]
• mythical connotations: Prometheus as both the bearer and thief of fire
• The shape of fire as a triangle? the triad – religious connotations [Holy Trinity, conservatism, traditional & backward values and belief system].
• Triangle as a “metaphor for transforming destiny into choice, or repression into freedom” (Macnab, 95). This aspect of the fire could be compared with the energy movement of anarchy and/ or younger generations (at least the specific kind covered in this blog).
• But also: the fire’s energy movement as sprawling out of control, also manifest in the branching out of the distorted hexagonal heptagonal polygonal (?) shape of the crack in the wall.

Take One:

Integrating smaller concepts to a larger whole.

Take Two:

Adding value by cutting out distraction (e.g. easier to remember and reproduce)

Using paradox to discover unexpected connections –> Macnab asserts that the paradox allows for the possibility of resolution (in this case, also visually) between opposites.

Take Three:

Bansky

“Bansky” is a notorious British underground artist who uses graffiti (among other art forms) in a subversive way to deconstruct pervasive symbols and thus stimulate cultural and political commentary. Bansky’s identity remains a well-publicized mystery, along with a validated explanation of his works and his intent.  Bansky’s works can be regarded as creative destruction, that is, defacement of public property fior a higher/ self-serving purpose:  to introduce “alternative” public discourse through art.  Conversely, the canvals of his work (usually the walls of buildings in crowded public areas) can be seen as destructive creation because the creation of something new inevitably leads to the repurposing of the canvas itself through the newly-created artwork.  Bansky’s operating strategies  – usually a “design and dash” method – seem to follow similar energy patterns as those of anarchist activities (at least specifically speaking, i.e. during the Greek riots).  Moreover, Bansky-as-myth and rioters-as-symbol epitomize a state of liminality in the sense that they cannot be placed within a consistent framework. Their symbolic and mythical status oscillates between anarchy [[social marginality]] and organized political movement [[within the cultural/ capitalist logic]].

Texts and Signs

Experimentation with the branching out stucture of (hyper)texts and signs is now commonplace in digital art practices (among other fields).  Artists like Jeffrey Shaw use this metaphor to forge varying cosmologies of  digital spaces.  Such cosmologies consist of visual, textual, and aural spaces, which are meant to be traversed by visitors/ users (in the case of “interactive” installations) in non-linear ways.  Art curator Soke Dinkla labels such works as “floating works of art” which create “the urban space of today not just as a moving, fragmentary and non-linear order, but also as a hypertext that can be perceived spatially and explored associatively.”

Urban spaces such as Tokyo have the capacity of turning the visitor into a traveler whose decisions structure the text/ space in new ways, depending on individual experiences, personal decisions, and associations.  If we look at Tokyo as a floating work of art, then we can say that Tokyo as an experiential space negotiates between physical experience and intellectual cognition. Any good example of brandscaping taps into its consumers cognitively, viscerally, and emotionally. Even though branding can arguably be seen as a homogenizing act of product standardization – through, paradoxically, differentiation – it can also be a customizable consumer experience simply because consumer responses are not quite uniform. A brand’s polysemy is achieved through the consumers’ varying emotional, intellectual, and visceral responses. Like the immersive installations above, each set of  eyes – and every singular mind – travels to different parts of the space.  Of course, this semblance of diversity is counterbalanced by the homogeneity of the producer-directed [or desired] response, which is always the same: spend money!

” The city of today can only be known by an activity of an ethnographical type: one cannot orientate oneself in such a city by means of the book, the address, but by walking and seeing, by familiarity and experience. Here every experience is intense and fragile. It can only be rediscovered through the memory of the trace left behind: to visit a place for the first time therefore means: beginning to wire it: since the the address is unwritten, it needs to create its own script.”  – Roland Barthes, Das Reich der Zeichen

Is Barthes’ analysis applicable to blogs and other kinds of websites? Can one orientate themselves by familiarity (of web navigation) and experience (both practical and emotionally-triggered) ?

Do blogs inevitably create precarious experiences which can only be rediscovered through digital traces? Is this the best response a blog can hope for?

A transient affective response

Show and (don’t) tell

Can we google images without the use of words? How would visual tagging work?

How can the source(s) of these images be traced without the speculative use of keywords?

Blogo(s)centric

Optimizing the Web processing of foreign languages:

Q? What are the design implications for this study:
Efti: We need better processing of language models for foreign languages: For Greek, process and understand the greek.
Q: However, would the text processing overhead hurt or help
Google’s existing algorithm?

Efti: Also, another need is better crawling of the greek webspace. Almost half of the 70,000 greek sites (collected by Efti a few years ago) were not indexed by search engines.

Q1: Do pages in Greek lack the meta-data that helps search engines? That might be another issue. the act of adding metadata to a site might be affected by cultural aspects, rather than the properties language itself. For example,
there are findings that show that US pages use more metadata tags than other language pages.
Q2: How significant is this for search engines: do they use them to index anymore?
Efti: On a related note, HTML editors are often Latin character-based. This changes how Greek pages are authored and, therefore, indexed.
Q1: For example, often, people use jpegs of text instead of fiddling with character-sets.
Q3: Supposedly, these are issues are all addressed by Google’s methodology, which is content agnostic: relying on page rank and links instead.

Random thoughts

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Nearly democratized internet access (at least in developed countries) and easy to use web production tools (such as our very own wordpress) make it easier for the average person to make their mark on cyberspace. However, this also facilitates the accumulation of “webjunk” – new media objects that are just a waste of webspace.

But, one person’s junk could be another person’s treasure, right? So, what qualifies as webjunk ? How do we assign value to digital creations? Is there still an implicit hierarchy under which information and content usefulness are categorized and accessed (not just through search engines like Google) ?

What exactly does democratization entail? Free (?) access, free sharing, creative commons, collective [media] intelligence, a free flow of information, a free flowing exchange of creative input, democratization of production tools, globalization, etc ….  ?

Ancient/ Classical Greek is not a dead language. At least not in the academia. Perhaps in parts of the the Greek academia it has already been buried, but not in schools in the U.S. and the U.K. This is not directly related to the ubiquity of the Internet, but it is nonetheless facilitated and accelerated by the advent of global and virtual networking. Now everyone can “speak” Greek thanks to electracy. You can google Greek, translate into Greek, and pretend you know Greek (or at least Greeklish).

But do you? I stumble upon so many misinformed definitions and uses of a language so close (yet so remote) to me, that I can’t help but wonder why some languages are conjured back from the dead.  Does citing Plato and Aristotle or tracing Greek roots legitimize one’s accumulation of knowledge? What purpose does the Greek ancient civilization serve in the academia, besides adding to its pretentiousness? Does it really help “us” understand and explain better? And don’t give me all that “founding fathers of our civilization” crap. Yes, this crap is true, but it is also what is keeping Greek culture from being internationally recognized as part of  a *modern* society. By remembering Greece, you are also forgetting it. Remembering means never knowing it at all.

I can’t really speak my language like I used to. The “native” has migrated to another language, another culture.