Category Archives: 5: Abstract

Meaning other than- yet about- material objects and or practical matters

Some Ends and Odds of SEO

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SEO Grand PrixITWEB’s new publication ByteSize, inaugural edition (March 2007) features a nice short and sweet introduction to SEO on page 98, geared like the rest of the publications smartly at the SME context. It closes with a url for a Forrester report based on interviews with 20 companies, including Avenue A | Razorfish.

(ByteSize is a pretty decent piece of work, love the cover which is one of the most successful uses of spot varnishing I’ve seen in a while. It features a goldfish leaping out of its bowl, lime green title-typography on a rich blue background. Excellent job, even with the typo in the article on IPV6 on page 146 :-))

One look at that Forester report will make most mere mortals mouth that mystical magic word involuntarily – ‘OUTSOURCE…’, Continue reading →

Awards are flawed. (Updated)

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Do they reflect quality or popularity, neither or both?

The truth about awards is that they, like all other forms of competition, are expressions of the dynamics of power, of the politics and principles of the environments they inhabit. They are often about a quick buck, profanely biased and resemble nothing more than the average microbial parasite. They usually reward those that need their glory the least.

That said I believe they have their place in our cultural and industrial constructs. They can facilitate a bit of magic that might otherwise be all but consumed by the hum-drum required to produce the stuff they celebrate. On occasion they can do amazing things for new-comers to any field, remarkably sometimes even for deserving newcomers.

But let’s not forget that they are dinosaurs. Continue reading →

Contempo about design, art and society

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Contempo arts culture design magazineContempo, (nice site styling, but all flash is a bit last century in internet years, especially for a purveyor of things contemporary) the new and refreshingly convergent publication presenting homegrown creative style and cultural sophistication is posing an open question around the relationship of art and design. Imposing a 200 word limit is me thinks a good thing. So my unedited initial response to the question goes:

Isn’t design and art simply sides of the same coin. Is there really any interesting or important Continue reading →

Media Design Technologist : Identity Assignment

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Consider ‘Media Design and Technologies’, in relation to contemporary art.
Question: What are the most pertinent new ideas in contemporary art?
(This is not a rhetorical question) Consider the keywords locus, network, software, generative, agency and avant-garde.
How should we know? Research!

How, if at all, does the ideas that emerge from the above impact on your Identity as a designer?
Discuss with reference to your online identity.
Assessment:
Continue reading →

Assorted cerebral skims

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Enola Gaia, Dr Randall Whitiker, Autopoiesis & Enaction + Information Warfare

What is art? (in What is Philosophy?)

Reading group on What is Philosophy?

re nonlinearity: “…Pierre Huyghe strikes a universal chord when he explains that he carves up the narratives in his video installations to escape overly efficient, and therefore limiting, storytelling. Fragmentation enables him to access what he calls the “exponential present,”… as an object to think with, “Broken Screen” is a stirring example of what I call visual intellectuality. The book ends with…”

It’s Art Magazine ‘Interview’

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The latest issue of IT’s Art Magazine, #0004 is available online free for view-only pdf and and $3.50 for the printable version. It includes interviews with and work by Eric Scala, Fred Bastide, Marc Simonneti, Ziv Qual, Isabelle Hubert Olivier, Philippe Batini and yours truly, André SC.
Availble in French and reasonable English.

So, in view of shameless self promotion herewith an excerpt from the editorial column as well as from the text of my interview. For all the fabulous images in it is more than worth the download.

…artists with different inspiration and various working methods, but these two concepts merge: a vision and an inventive mind continuously in search of new horizons. This research can give birth to more than new artwork but can also suggest a new way to describe the world and introduce us to it.

The most blatant example in this issue is certainly André SC’s proposition. This South African artist whom in one way follows the tracks drawn by Nathaniel Stern and in another, gives us his own vision of “Compressionism”. This art is in equilibrium somewhere between the real world and the virtual one using technology to simultaneously promote questions and offer answers to the audience…

Continue reading →

Quiddity: Exhibition Concept Proposal (Working Draft)

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Quiddity: being is not an exact thing

Quiddity2

For the first solo exhibition of pieces by André SC in November 2006, or there about.

Artists statement:

My intentions involve exploring relationships, between figments of recognition and interpretation, through abstraction and resemblance, both reductive and transcendent, in technological culture.

I translate this intention digitally into aesthetic artefacts/’pieces’ through:

  • Portraiture & Locationality: facial portraits and landscapes, young vs. mature, affluent vs. poor, urban vs. rural. studies using multiple perspective digital photo-composite techniques
  • Lessons in Obsolescence: instruments that evoke associations of past technological progress and the fragile nature of human expression, subjected to manual advance scanner manipulation techniques [?related to/influenced by Compressionism (Footnote 1) ]
  • Scapes: post-painterly-digital-abstractions (partially based on generative techniques and user-centred IT/interface design themes) partially transposed into physical/tactile form.

When programming stops being linear it becomes design.

When design stops being subservient it becomes art.

What is the digital equivalent of lovely? He wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-fingers that enclose, transform, transmit, decode, and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it? Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, passes undiminished through the new machines.
— Salman Rushdie

Sample works etc.