why so long ?!

Well i haven’t posted up any thing for ages mostly because my work has consumed most of my time im in my final year of uni now and hopefully ill be geting round to putting up some stuff from that soooooon the more eagle eyed of you may have noticed the blog has changed from the frenz design blog to the golem design blog after alot of research and soul searching i felt it was a more accurate pseudonym for me . any way this post was just to let y’all know I am still alive .

Lators DXX

{DONT LOOK AWAY}

the journal/rationale

Journal

 

Our project for this semester was to create a magazine based around the concept of “surviving the 21st century”. Sounds simple enough. However nailing down a solid idea was quite tough. Although I am fairly  happy with my final result I feel I made my life harder than necessary with my subject matter.

 

Initially I wanted to do a totally clean book about recycling and the environment the usual sort of information you’d get in a magazine but I thought this was too bland. I wanted to make a punky arts and crafts underground graphics , arts and culture magazine where many topics are looked at and discussed from fashion to social issues to music to art.

 

After looking at many magazines I decided a mixture of some of my favourites would be perfect

So I took influences from Vice, juxta pos , idN (international designers network) ,Computer Arts and Grafik to help me to think of how I would structure my magazine , I liked the informal journalism style of Vice  ,the Arts and crafts style of International Designers network , I like the size of Computer arts and I really enjoy the general style and finish of grafik 

 

The treatment for my article was based around that in my magazine there was a “what if” column where they speculate current affairs and issues and with global warming and pollution being a prevalent issue my article was based around an extreme idea of what could happen and how it would effect people in the way of how bad could the 21st Century get?

 

The back-story behind my article was that because of the irresponsible and over use of fossil fuels the earth’s atmosphere has slowly become more and more poisonous and weather patterns became more severe causing huge population shifts around the world. However before this in the early 2000’s after the success of the “EDEN PROJECT” many of the more developed countries star ted building “EDEN SITES” around important cities that were crucial to their economies. The “EDEN SITES” were built in much the same way as the Eden project Biospheres except on a much larger scale that incorporated housing and workplaces they were perfect self contained atmosphere controlled cities & when Agriculture became impossible many biospheres were developed strictly for agricultural purposes. However the “EDEN SITES” can only sustain a small portion of the population so when the selection process of who could live and work and live inside the “EDEN SITES” people had to be left out. How would this effect human morale?. What extremes would humanity have to endure to persist on planet earth would humanity as we know it even be able to stand these sorts of radical change . Taking ideas from the old Russian revolutions when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and you had a distinct divide between the haves and the have nots and taking from this I really wanted to get a Russian constructivist feel to key parts of the work.  

 

I am happy with the overall design of the magazine especially the contents layout , I just wish I had taken more time to write the articles up and to make better dummies and just planned my time better however I am confident in saying that going to get my work printed at an external printers really lightened the burden of worrying about printing . I feel if I had just kept my idea simpler I would have achieved a much better realised outcome but I am happy none the less with the actual designs of my work .

Constuctivism & Art in the revolution

As much as involving itself in designs for industry, the Constructivists worked on public festivals and street designs for the post-October revolution Bolshevik government. Perhaps the most famous of these was in Vitebsk, where Malevich’s UNOVIS Group painted propaganda plaques and buildings (the best known being El Lissitzky’s poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919)). Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s declaration ‘the streets our brushes, the squares our palettes’, artists and designers participated in public life throughout the Civil War. A striking instance was the proposed festival for the Comintern congress in 1921 by Alexander Vesnin and Liubov Popova, which resembled the constructions of the OBMOKhU exhibition as well as their work for the theatre. There was a great deal of overlap in this period between Constructivism and Proletkult, the ideas of which concerning the need to create an entirely new culture struck a chord with the Constructivists. In addition some Constructivists were heavily involved in the ‘ROSTA Windows’, a Bolshevik public information campaign of around 1920. Some of the most famous of these were by the poet-painter Vladimir Mayakovsky and Vladimir Lebedev.

As a part of the early Soviet youth movement, the constructivists took an artistic outlook aimed to encompass cognitive, material activity, and the whole of spirituality of mankind. The artists tried to create works that would take the viewer out of the traditional setting and make them an active viewer of the artwork. In this it had similarities with the Russian Formalists’ theory of ‘making strange’, and accordingly their leading theorist Viktor Shklovsky worked closely with the Constructivists, as did other formalists like Osip Brik. These theories were tested in the theatre, particularly in the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had set up what he called ‘October in the theatre’. Meyerhold developed a ‘biomechanical’ acting style, which was influenced both by the circus and by the ’scientific management’ theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Meanwhile the stage sets by the likes of Vesnin, Popova and Stepanova tested out Constructivist spatial ideas in a public form. A more populist version of this was developed by Alexander Tairov, with stage sets by Aleksandra Ekster and the Stenberg Brothers. These ideas would go on to influence German directors like Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, as well as the early Soviet cinema.

Private military companies

BENI-TAL “security”

Following the recent Blackwater incidents P.M.C’s have become more known to the civilian populous but what few of the them don’t know is that there are well over a hundred organizations operating outside of the law . . . scary right .