This little experiment was about creating places for music performance down town. It’s pretty simple but the idea is that it gives people a platform to express themselves in a public landscape dominated by commercial messages.
Akzidenz, baby! is going in the NZ Best awards! I’m really interested to see what the judges make of it - it’s a strange piece, but probably my favourite project from design school. We took some better photos at work (thanks Ying), have a look.
Ok here we go! I’ve decided that i really need to be writing more. It’s all very well to have the ideas going around in my head but need to get them down on the page in order to understand what i’m actually doing. Coz i’m confused at the moment, i’m damn scared - and i’ve never been more excited about a semester.
Changes to the direction
First up, where I left off last semester leaves a lot to be desired. My research, and in particular reading this article have re-shaped my thinking about the role of a cultural object. My inital idea was to create an enduring cultural object. What Steven Heller suggests is that music-related objects are both throw-away and enduring. He shows that gig posters became objects of desire, archived and celebrated for their rarity and moment-ness. So the covetous nature of fan-dom elevates the mundane, what begins as perfunctory information design becomes something much more.
Because of the temporality of the physical object, it’s a great idea to save it in cyberspace for eternity, see GigPosters.com. My realisation is that the cultural record takes care of itself - the things people deem worth remembering are collected and displayed and available online all the time for everyone to consume, on-demand.
Therefore, I think I need to look at music stories as making /staging a series of memorable events that can be documented and transmitted - prompting conversation and connection, rather than locking things up in a tome or book or atlas. Maybe it’s about using real spaces as the sites for action that generate the elements which become the memory - photos, tshirts, communal activity, sweat or ringing ears….
CD sleeve design exploring the performance of the packaging object.
well i’ve been exploring the history of Kiwi Music for my major project at uni which has generated some interesting work, here’s a few bits and pieces.
My Akzidenz Grotestk specimen is being submitted to the ISTD 09 in London. This is the first time i’ve entered anything in a competition since highschool (eek, thats a while ago now), will be cool to see how it goes. Anyway, we’re re-roofing at the moment so i should really go and be useful…
A friend from uni, the talented Mr Jesse Cogswell, pulled me in to do a photoshoot for a cd sleeve for a summer school project based on Camp A Low Hum.
