8/23/2008

NEW ORDER- Metadesign at the service of fashion industrie



That fashion industrie likes to hire some of the biggest talents in design is something that doesn't surprise anyone. The latest Bread and Butter add for 2008 summer Barcelona event is one of these meta-graphic-designs that works as an encapsulated code for experts. Pure exercise of pattern recognition. Layers and layers of meanings overlapping. It is also frustrating to see how even some of the new-wave codes are expose and work for the sake of consumption. "New Order: profile your business" makes explicit reference to the way how the legacy of NO and JD are used today. I've not seen Anton Corbijn's "Control" film yet. Something I should do. What it seems to be more annoying in the case of the add is the opportunistic choice of NO as an emblem or codeword for a whole "sign of the new times" with the gracefully design that it brings. It is know the way Peter Saville had to recycle the work of the avan-gardes in its early Factory days, NO first album being a good "homage" to italian Futurist artist Fortunato Depero (Italy, 1892-1960). There is in the current case a way of echoing this "looking back" to avant-garde aesthetics to link NO to a specific and meaningful graphic that might work hand by hand with the band concept. A Russian font and some Malevich-like read and black diagonals makes clear the references. It is also interesting to see the pencil marks (not visible in this image due its small size) showing the process of the making of both text and lines, since text itself is treated as a form. Or maybe it is just a fictionalisation of the handmade? Any case, as much as Joy Division has become without doubt a group of cult to the generation born in early eighties, just after Ian Curtis suicide, New Order seems to maintain a more distant, codified aesthetics that serves for a highly meta-design practice in our meta-referential societies.

8/19/2008

Preparing to write


Critics in the balcony. Here I'm with Bilal Khbeiz and Tirdad Zolghadr. The other two instructors of the workshop "Preparing to write". Contemporary Image Collective. Cairo. 15-23 June 2008.
The workshop revolved about the distinction between criticism and criticallity and about the before, during and after of the task of writing. Ah! the book on the table is "The fuction of criticism" by Terry Eagleton, a key-reading during or after the workshop.