Merry Christmas

Santa and Basement Cat do not get on very well...

Re-inventing the "F" word

Guerrilla Girls celebrating 25 years!



25 years ago Guerrilla Girls started campaining for equal opportunity, the end of gender-based discrimination, equal access to education, freedom from sexual exploitation
and abuse, reproductive rights education, and human rights for women everywhere in their unique style.

There is still much to do considering these bleak United Nations statistics:

- Women comprise more than 50 percent of the world's population, but they own only one percent of the world's wealth

- Up to 100 million people are homeless throughout the world, the majority of them women and dependent children

- Of the estimated 1.3 billion people living in poverty around the world, 70 percent are women and girls. Women and girls are also the fastest increasing group of impoverished, a process called "the global feminization of poverty"

- Women are much less likely to have steady employment than men, and working women are lower paid, including those in industrial countries.:

Keep fighting girls!

Modern Tools

The tools of "survial" are changing! Swiss knifes now come with laser pointer and USB stick (very handy when downloading those Top Secret files).

I think you have Cats on your Internet

No blog would be complete without some cats, therefore I want to give some fuel to a running gag about the internet and share LOLcats with you.



So are Lol cats a sign of increasing creativity in society as Clay Shirky argues in his book "Cognitive Surplus" or should people better watch the Sopranos like Johan Lehrer of Wired magazine proposes?

I think the whole debate about consumption versus creation is beside the point. Especially Lehrer gets his creation and consumption completely mixed up. If you are writing about your TV consumption (like he did) it is actually creation. In any case, creativity does not spring out of a vacuum, it is always triggered by something that has been experienced or consumed before. If you write a Wikipedia article, you (hopefully) consumed a lot on the subject before. (Or maybe Lehrer gets his divine inspirations, if not from the Sopranos, directly from God?)

And the tools for creation have always been available, if people felt inclined they could have put captions to cat photos before the internet was available. So what has really changed with the Internet? It has given people an audience and the possibility to connect with like minded people. This turned out to be a huge motivator for creating things that only your internet community could possibly understand and like. Subcultures emerge that share special characters like ceiling cat and basement cat:

And insider chokes, running gags and even a special language:

In many ways, it is those thriving subcultures and idiosyncrasies that make the web exiting and not the streamlined sleek branded webpages. However, like almost anything this is a double edged sword and we can all think of some groups like neo-nazi organisations or paedophiles that we would prefer not to connect and thrive on the internet. But is the web in this respect really any worse then society as a whole?
If society is full of consumerism, banality, stereotypes, misogyny and violence then this is what we will encounter in the net as well. Of course the computer and the internet are special media and in the way they allow people to connect and be sender and receiver (or creator and consumer) at the same time, however this does not mean that the medium is the message. Like books, TV, film or radio before computer and internet can be used for good or evil, stupidity and enlightenment. If we have the feeling that the internet is currently a tool of collective stupidity, a time waster and attention destroyer then it should be all the more important to show how it could be put to a more beneficial use. The alternative would be to stay away form it altogether and that would be too bad, because then we would miss all those LOL cats ;)

Plotter drawings

I have always been fascinated by the delicacy of line drawings, both hand drawn or computer produced. Recently, I came across some beautiful line drawings that are done with a computer and a plotter printer. This is a plotter drawings by Roman Verostko a pioneer of algorithmic/software art.

A plotter is a printer where different pencils can be inserted to achieve very precise line drawings.

By inserting different colored pencils and repeating the print processes a multicolor line drawing results. Some artists have also been inserting brushes into the plotter to achieve totally different results. Or below and example of a plotter drawing on sand by Jean-Pierre Hebert using a steal ball as a drawing device that is guided by a magnet controlled by the computer/plotter. After some time the patterns in the sand vanish and the process starts again.

The algorithm that controls the output of the printer is usually programmed by the artists themselves. A programming language that has been particular popular in recent years to achieve this type of visual outputs is Processing.

However plotter drawings where used since the very early days of computer art in the 60s. Below an example of early computer art using the plotter as an output device by Charles Csuri called Sine Curve Man.

If you want to see more visit the Digital Art Museum

Stop Motion Animation

This is my first stop-motion animation. It is about a lonely and bored toy that finds joy, distraction and in the end even friendship through drawing and being creative.

Helvetica: The Film

I have to admit that I never payed much attention to the typefaces around me and the subtle differences between them before I saw the film "Helvetica". Type was just there to be read. However, since I saw the film, I started to intensely stare at all types of signs, asking myself: Is this Helvetica?
Below I gathered some examples, where I think I spotted Helvetica on my way from Germany to Dublin airport:



It is very interesting to see how widely it is used, probably because of the good legibility and the clarity of the characters. However, I have to agree with what Erik Spiekermann said in the film that Helvetica needs a lot of white space to really look good, as it is very "round in the middle". Considering this, I think that the typeface also dictates a certain style/design and just using Helvetica or a few similar fonts would be very restrictive to the creativity. On the other hand, if designers restrict themselves in this way and just use a few fonts it saves them from looking at hundreds of fonts to find "the right one", which can be very tedious.

Personally, I would not limit myself to Helvetica, but there is definitely a time and place for this typeface.