Disaster(ous) Logo(s)

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.

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

More triggers

When walls form  labyrinths…

I must self-confess: I have contracted an infectious compulsion. Like a paranoiac, I stumble upon seemingly random information that I automatically relate to this blog. Am I turning into Pynchon’s Oedipa? Which Oedipa, the crazy or the lucid one? Depends on your outlook.

In thinking about walls, experiences, and immersive environments, I came across something I was searching for in relation to a project on interactive cinema that I am currently working on.

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67

Cinema is a big part of my life. Sadly, not as big as it used to be because reading about cinema takes up most of my time, so I don’t really have that much time to actually watch films! Yes, this is frustrating me more and more every day.

Anyway, I was reading descriptions of the Labyrinth Project installation at Expo 67 in Montreal at the same time as I was reading Brandscapes. Perhaps the connections I have drawn are arbitrary and a simple consequence of concurrent events taking place in my mind at the same time.  In any case, I connected the cine-Labyrinth to a broader idea of cinema as architecture, cinema as an all-encompassing experience (an illusion enhanced by the immersive architecture of the project), and the Labyrinth as an experience cinematographed (rather than choreographed or orchestrated) around the installation’s traversers.

Any attempt to describe the Labyrinth experience is inevitably reductive.  Not even pictures and sketches can complement a language-oriented description. But alas, this is all I have in terms of accessing an event that cannot be – and does not wish to be -  recreated… and relived.

Floorplan of the Labyrinth building and of the vertical and horizontal screens in Chamber 1

Even though I had to imagine the experience of traversing the cine-labyrinth in an indirect manner – through descriptions, accounts, sketches and pictures – I still had an affective response to the idea of a cinematic labyrinth. All I could think of FEEL was a sense of panic creeping and building up inside me. I’m not quite sure why, but I think it has to do with the the fact that this is an experience that distorts certain expectations regarding cinema, architecture, and the concept of viewership. The labyrinth accentuates this feeling of panic… Panic when coming face to face with the unknown.  Panic intermingled with feelings of clastrophobia and disorientation… Loss of control.

But then I read the inevitable analysis of this maze-like space. Oooh, so this is supposed to be an experiment that lays the “sensory training ground for the new global citizen”… a space “where simultaneous information inputs create not confusion which numbs the senses but a new ‘oceanic consciousness.’ “

“This represents the world in all its plurality… [a] mythological cultural mosaic of humankind that was the basis for Pierre Trudeau’s new plan for Canadian federalism.”

Do these interpretations negate my visceral response? Do they undermine the affective sentiment triggered by the fragmentary views of the project that I had to piece together and also fill in the gaps with my imagination?

Analysis rationalizes and ultimately negates the possibility of a raw affective reaction

Cretan Labyrinth

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.