Anything that seems suspicious to you. Trust your instincts. Then call us.

Terrorists visit and research potential targets. We call this activity hostile reconnaissance. If you suspect you are witnessing

• hostile reconnaissance
• a suspicious vehicle
• an unattended bag
• any other suspicious activity
  Telephone the police without delay.

What is suspicious? - Filming, drawing, taking notes or photographs, or just watching for extended periods, focusing on security cameras, hallways, fire exits, access and egress routes.

Source: https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/advice-and-support/countering-terrorism/Pages/report-suspicious-activity.aspx

Notes from the meeting with Etienne Turpin

Gary Hall, 2014, Open Education: A Study in Disruption

Heather Davis, Community practice

Book as exhibition series (interpolations - points that carry the plot from one point to another).

Land&Animal&Non-animal

McKenzie Wark, Anthoropocene Denial

Tomas Saraceno, Working with Spiders (also: the spiders of Amazon that fly great distances together on their nets)

Hybrid semi-social solitary musical instrument Arp87: built by a couple of Cyrtophora citricola - one month - one Agelena labirintica - two months - one Cyrtophora moluccensis - two weeks - and one Tegenria domestica - 4 months- (turned 4 times 180 degrees on Z axis), 2015

Shiv Visvanathan, “Between Cosmology and System: The Heuristics of Dissenting Imagination,” in Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (London and New York: Verso, 2008).

Numeracy is putting numbers in series (Logic of series).

A Vast Machine (climate study).

There's no infrastructure of emancipation which is not an infrastructure of colonisation.

Michel Serres, The National Contract

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Alfred Wallace's Interrogation of Nature (his collecting of species in Indonesia) which comes as a basis for his and Darwin's theory of evolution. Tries to find out: can you still find evolution in nature?

wallacefund.info

Hallucination in reverse (colonial notion of not seeing what's in front of you. There is a difference between letters scientists wrote back home to their wives and mistresses and papers being published). Wallace's description of bird of paradise. Science is full of doubt and ambiguity.

---

Desire is the machine. Professionalism and machining desire keep us on hallucinating in reverse.

Ignorance is colonisation, solidarity is knowledge.

What is the mode of thought in colonisation? Possible action: you cannot confront the consequences if your thought is colonized.

---

Multistable image (democracy needs parameters in order to function). Data polity (?) How does life get parameterized? Who sets those parameters?

John Pretevi(?), deleuzian thoerist. Bestiary - Theater - Guillotine.
Clifford Geertz, Notes on the Balinese Cockfight;

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

Robin Mackay: The Barker Topos

p.268 - Polymath scientist Dr Daniel Barker, ejected from NASA under dubious circumstances,
is called out of retirement to assemble a crack team of specialists
(mathematician, cryptographer, cartographer, psychoanalyst, environmental
chemist) after an apparently commonplace homicide investigation opens
up wider and deeper complicities—firstly with the financial meshwork that,
beneath the everyday surface of capitalism, grotesquely binds together coltan
mines, art auctions, pork futures, and arms deals; and subsequently with the
history of modernity and its petroleum-lubricated time-travelling relationship
to the physical history of the planet, the sun, and the universe beyond. These
genre devices give the work a performative relation to the complex concept of
‘plot’—as a narrative thread and as a tract of space separated for a specific
work, but which retains unknown complicities with its original matrix.


The investigators’ forensic analyses take them back and forth across the
surface of the earth, to interrogate protagonists and suspects not limited to
human beings but also including built structures and synthetic objects which
must be coaxed into ‘speaking’.

Notes for Excerpt from Grant Kester: Conversation Pieces P. 104-1-7

Many of the cultural exchanges orchestrated by or on behalf of Western institutions ignore the specitivity and complexity of local art.. through an appeal to art as "universal language.

"Tomorrow is Another Day", an exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija (1996-97)

"Exchanging Thought", Koh, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: logos in legein: to lie with, to gather in, or to receive (opposes to "the assertive tradition of saying"). We are imbued with a logocentric culture in which the bearers of the word are predominately involved in speaking, molding, informing. We must begin to acknowledge the long-suppressed role of listening as a creative practice.

Koh: communication must begin with an attempt to understand as thoroughly as possible the specific conditions and nuances of a given site.... Western artists and institutions shoudl learn to begin by listening

Notes from J. Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies. Chapter 9: Ideology and Meanings

p.164 - Meanings are produced in the interactions between text and audience. Meaning production is a dynamic act in which both elements contribute equally.

p. 165 - The reader and the text together produce the preferred meaning.... this is ideology at work.

p. 165 - Definitions of ideology by Raymond Williams (1977):

• A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group.
• A system of illusory beliefs - false ideas or false consciousness - which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge.
• the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

p. 165 - Brockreide: 'attitudes have homes in ideologies'.

p. 165 - ... for Marxists, the social fact that determines ideology is class, the division of labour.

p. 166 - Intertextuality: the meanings generated by any one text are determined partly by the meanings of other texts to which it appears similar.

p.167 - the assumption that [ideological] values are so basic... so natural, that they do not need referring to is what Barthes (1973) calls 'exomination', and is ideology at work.

p.170 - Barthesian myth  ... [that] science is the human ability to understand and dominate nature. ... Counter-myth is amogst ecology/conservationist subculture.

Dominant ideology, history as progress is confronted by a myths that sees history as cyclical, not a progressive development (tradiition).

p. 171 - Signs give myths and values concrete form and in so doing both endorse them and make them public.

p.172 - Ideology in its third meaning is not a static set of values and ways of seeing, but a practice.

Science helps to maintain the current power structure: the highly-educated not only become the dominant class; they come from it, too.

p. 173 - According to Marx, the ideology of the bourgeoise kept the workers, or proletariat, in the state of false consciousness. They were led to understand their social experience by a set of ideas that were not theirs, were opposed to them.

p. 174 - Althusser (1971): ideology is much more effective than Marx gave it credit for because it works fro, within rather than without - it is deeply inscribed in the ways of thinking and ways of living of all classes (e.g., wearing of high heels by women).

p. 176 -  Communication is a social process and therefore be ideological; interpellation is a key part of its ideological practice.

p. 176 - Gramsci: hegemony, ideology as struggle.  Dominant ideology constantly meets resistances it has to overcome in order to win people's consent to the social order that it is promoting.

p 177 - 'Common sense': the common sense that criminality is a function of a wicked individual rather than the unfairsociety is .. a part of bourgeois ideology

All ideological theories agree that ideology works to maintain class dominationm their differences lie in the ways in which this domination is exercised, the degree of its effectiveness, and the extent of hte resistances it meets.

p. 178 - Gramsci's theory makes social change appear possible, Marx's makes it inevitable, and Althusse's improbable.

p. 181 - 'Displacement': a term that ideological theorists have borrowed from Freudian dream theory: when a topic or anxiety is repressed, either psychologically or ideologically, the concern for it can only be expressed by being displaced on to a legitimate, socially acceptavle topic.

Ideological analysis terms: incorporation ('0don't worry be hippie' - making alternaitve culture a part of mainstream ideology) and commodification (you need commodities produced by current ideology to overcome the troubles).

p. 182 - Capitalism is the system.. that produced commodities, so making commodities seem natural is at the heart of much ideological practice.

Women's bodies and their lives are constructed as a set of problems for which there are commodities to provide solutions.

p. 183 - Barthes' myth of femininity and family work: turning history and society into nature.

Girls 'naturally' become women who 'naturally' become housewives - ruling out the question what sort of women do they become and whose interests are served by this.

Women's magazines: by recognizing herself as the addressee, she is helping to win the consent of herself and other like her to a system that only middle-class men can benefit from in the long run.

p. 184 - Ideological analysis... focuses on the coherence of texts, whether they are telling the coherent story of white, patriarchal capitalism. The theory of hegemony, no the contrary, looks at the weaknesses in texts and argues that some traces of resistance will necessarily remain.

The 'no-make up' look is a strategy to incorporate the resistance of many young women to the ideological practice of painting their faces.

Wearing jeans: 1) symbol of hard work/hard leisure; 2) Symbol of American West - freedom, naturalness, ruggedness, informality, self-sufficiency, tradition; 3) Americanness and social consensus (they are US contribution to the international fashion scene).

Eugene Atget: photos of Paris

Here, by a remarkable regression, we have come back to the level of expression of the Egyptians
. . . Pictorial language has not yet matured because our eyes have not yet adjusted to it.
There is as yet insufficient respect for, insufficient cult of, what it expresses. - Abel
Gance

What art has been granted a dream more poetical and more real at the same time! Approached
in this fashion the film might represent an incomparable means of expression. Only the most
high-minded persons, in the most perfect and mysterious moments of their lives, should be
allowed to enter its ambience. - Severin-Mars

Sources:
Text: W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Images:
http://quintessentialruminations.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/atget2.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-_SwKfl4Jngo/UJ6hmjV55NI/AAAAAAAACVY/_zTMbwFfOMg/s1600/eugene+atget-2.jpeg
http://www.alleyconnoisseur.com/wp-content/gallery/atget/la_cour_du_dragon_paris_vie1913.jpg

A letter to Contently about infographics and prices

 Hi,

Again, thank you for sending this over!

Strictly speaking, there are seven parameters from which a quote for infographics is constructed:

1. What is the usage?  (Unpromoted blog post of a smaller client is priced differently from the publication on the front page of a major media portal).

2. Area of Use or Territory (I'm still looking to understand how this applies to web distribution)

3. Duration of License (digital licenses are offered on a 1,3,5 years and on Perpetuity. I think it was mentioned before that most work done on Contently is done as a work-for-hire, but in cases where it's not, it's best to build quotes based on the length of time the work is seen on client's website).

4. Client’s Profile (life dictates that it works both ways: big companies have bigger budgets, and especially advertising (!). On the other hand, elite clients who are a prestige to work with, often pay little because there are too many high profile designers willing to work for them, even pro bono).

5. Client's Budget (connected to previous one).

6. Deadline (urgent jobs cost more than the normal priority ones. Also, different clients see urgency very differently, so it's worth considering something fixed, like number of days per amount of work?).

7. Expenses (travel and accommodation obviously do not apply to online freelance work, but there might be some - in your examples, there are costs for photography, where it is used).

Apart from that, are of course the very reasonable considerations that you listed - complexity of data, number of visuals to be created/number of entries, how prepared the data is (how much additional research is needed).

I agree that for most cases the quotes you list in the pdf are quite realistic, but it is hard to assess them because we don't know much about their production. Illustration on page 4 is easy to do visually and probably wouldn't require much research, but we don't know what were the deadlines and how much the photographer charged for his picture. Besides, usage rights for this image by now should be sky high, because it is so well-known! Authors who came up with such a brilliant idea should have quoted a lot, despite of visual simplicity.

- The categorization is another potential threat, because not all timelines are the same, and the prices for them vary greatly - the same goes for maps, comparisons, and other genres - some of them take weeks to do, others are very easy.

- The other important point with regards to the pricing is that the boundary between the writer, the producer and the designer in the infographics are very vague. The writer creates the text, and does research for that, but the production of the visual story is a completely different thing. Text for the infographic has to be cut down to a few dozen words (that's editor's work, which is often done by designers), and there has to be an approved wireframe in place before any design work starts. Producers often do the wireframes, but in those cases where they only manage and research, the fees for design work has to compensate for creation of wireframes. Often designers have to do research, too.

Hope this helps - wanted to thank you again for working on this! Very much appreciated your efforts!

Best regards,
Zhenia

Ideas: experiments

13-jan : Iconography+crumpled paper tracing - at which point the sign is not working anymore?

- drawing with light: how can shadow from a 3d part of drawing be a part of the drawing, too? 

- drawing breaking out to space: a mix of drawing and 3d objects of line- like quality: thread, paper cuts, matchsticks.

- Rorschach tests, ink drawing by bending the paper.

11 jan: Folding the paper: a sequence of drawings made througholding the paper 1,23 times, etc. What the algorithm for such folding could be?

9 Jan :   Family tree: connecting standing matchsticks with thread, add names of relatives to matchsticks.

8 Jan: resistance of form. Fold the letters, tie the paper on which the letters are printed with thread and test how these forms resist the tention. (This te had been completed. Outcome: there is also a tension when you physically hold a resulting object, a strive to open and see the letter fully, without the bend. Feeling of psychological discomfort). 

Anthony Huberman: I (not love) Information

- A total absence of information about a given subject usually solicits no curiosity: without an awareness of its existence, we can't possibly care about it;

- When we come to realise the existence of something we never knew was there before, our curiosity is sparked: What is it? How does it work? What should we call it? Why is it there? But we remain in the early stages of our ability to recognise and read it;

- We attempt to accumulate information and, while additional research provides many answers, it also reveals additional questions, fuelling more curiosity still;

- At a certain point – at the top of the bell curve – we come to a place where effective discussion and debate is possible, but much still remains speculation. It is a moment of intense scrutiny and educated hypothesising when questions, answers, contradictions, controversy, desire, violence, disappointment and determination make up a complex system;

- Little by little, though, speculation gives way to consensus. The power structures that make up the socio-political fabric begin enforcing their choices. The many questions gather around common answers, and information becomes more and more organised, making the transition into 'the understood';

- Sinking into 'the understood', our given subject provokes less and less curiosity;

- Eventually, we have a dictionary definition.

This progression is also a loop: thanks to scientific, artistic or intellectual pioneers – from Copernicus to Duchamp – common assumptions about the world are second-guessed, challenged, and 'the understood' once again becomes 'no longer understood', prompting the cycle to begin anew.

Source: http://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.16/i.not.love.information

JOHN CAGE: 10 RULES FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

Rule 1: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.
Rule 2: General duties as a student - pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
Rule 3: General duties as a teacher - pull everything out of your students.
Rule 4: Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined - this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
Rule 7: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.
Rule 8: Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
Rule 9: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It is lighter than you think.
Rule 10: “We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X qualities.” (John Cage)

Helpful Hints:
Always Be Around.
Come or go to everything.
Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at movies carefully and often.
Save everything - it may come in handy later.

Ideas before Urbino

Have found my notes from before the Urbino Summer School last summer. Contains some ideas that I never actually realised!

A view from our hotel in Falconara Maritima - the morning before the School began.

Ideas before Urbino

15-Jul Taking a walk for a line - if I could only use one line to describe Urbino, what could that line be?

13-Jul Modernism and postmodernism exist together and influence one another. There's no changing of fashion.

13-Jul

Vignelli: three aspects of design - Semantic, Syntactic and Pragmatic
Design is one - it is not many different ones
White, in typography, is what space is in Architecture.
Light is the master of form and texture

10-Jul Combining both the architectural and the painterly, the space itself was meant to act as material and to become the support medium of the installation

10-Jul Urbino: a research into the experience of built space and of building materials in their sensory aspects.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(architecture)

07-Jul Intro: I draw and I go graphic design, and I use both those disciplines as methods for analysis. Now, there are many things that can be analysed visually, and here I've collected some of them.

06-Jul semiotics as a method focuses our attention on to the task of tracing the meanings of things back through the systems and codes through which they have meaning and make meaning. (Slater, 1995, p. 240)

05-Jul Teaching of Kandinsky - analytical drawing: Schematic drawing, Compositional diagram, Characterisation of objects, constructive analysis, geometrical connections and linear analysis

05-Jul Best drawings are done when I look into my feelings and analyse them in my drawing try to find the marks and method express my emotion. Graphic design can also be applied analytically to explore emotion/subject matter.

05-Jul
Design for analysis, including analysis of:
   * Information (data vis)
   * Structure (books, etc.)
   * Form
   * Content

30-Jun Ideas for Drawing techniques:
   * drawing made by folding, tearing, cutting (maybe paper different colours)
   * drawing+projection
   * thaumatrope
   * The project researches the interplay of perception and memory in ordinary experience of reality and adopts drawing as a language of visualisation outlining the structures and grammar of the phenomenon ( Maria Teresa Ortoleva)

29-Jun The early stages of a science must be dominated by empirical work, that is, the accumulation and classification of data. Only as a discipline matures can an adequate body of theory be developed. - Walliman, N., 2001. P.83

29-Jun Georges Braque: Seek for common in dissimilar.

29-Jun Drawing = motor factor+Visual organization (Flashlight drawings by Picasso)

29-Jun Make a map drawing of all my movements around Urbino during two weeks. Make a GPS drawing by moving around town.

29-Jun Drawing as analytical tool - plan/map, unmotivated looking, drawings based on drawings, or drawings as analysis of drawings or other types of data collection.

28-Jun Urbino - make icons/ symbols based on street sketching. Also, make a black square - as a sign that graphic art has gone into a circle and started repeating itself from 100 years ago.

Urbino - collect all icons, mix icons and drawings

Also try to make nonrepresentational street sketching - eg making a different kind of notation on the paper. Scratch, put charcoal on found icons and make prints. 

Also black square means that this 100 years have ended - and now it's time for different graphic art, although deeply rooted in that era. Non conceptual? Simply mine?..

Think as when doing computer graphics, but express it with means of drawing

Sample problem definition: How does drawing help us learn? 

Make referential drawings: cognitive aspect of images won't change if the constituent elements are to be rearranged. Eg gather all vertical etc - add a level of abstraction. Also make Infographic drawings, eg draw the data conveyed in the drawing, how much light, space is there, etc.May be do a plan/map of some kind.Make several drawing with different amount of abstraction - from very subtle to extremely wild.

Drawing facilitates analysis.

Do a series from one stencil - white square, with white spray paint (so that it was a bit visible that part of area is covered). And a black square. And then when they are displayed together you'll have a nice after image from black square, to make white lighter than the paper on white square.

27-Jun That's why we call a drawing a 'study'. Drawing studies seeing in the same way as music studies hearing, architecture studies our perception of space, perfumery studies how we smell and fashion studies our sense of touch (as we touch our clothes all the time and touch our surroundings through the clothes).

Learning aspect of drawing/images is very much underestimated in contemporary culture and could contribute immensely to learning if thoroughly researched and fully employed. (Including digital means.)

Drawing as experience: when we read, we learn from someone else's experience, but when we look at the image, we learn from our own. This is why learning from images is easier and more direct.

26-Jun We always learn from images. When we read, our brain constructs a mental image of a subject described, and then learns from it. The same with numbers, brain has to combine numbers in one coherent image before it can analyse them. When the image is readymade, brain can learn directly, without having to transform words or numbers mentally.

Emotions/essences described when reading -> expression in images.

Drawing and Cognition - learning through drawing, learning through creating images

19-Jun It is from first words in a book, when you start to read it, you understand what this book is going to be about.

End of Form - a story in drawings

Homer's ink

У Гомера иссякли чернила, Когда он сочинял про Ахилла. И сказал он тогда, Вовсе то не беда: Ведь я слеп – ну зачем мне чернила!

А. Дубровский, 2011

Homer ran out of ink when he was writing about Achilles. But he said: "This is no trouble - as I'm a blind man anyway!"(makeshift translation of A. Dubrovski's poem).