Preliminary Class Business

• (Monday) Class 12: Interactive Discussion on "New Media" and "New Media Art"
• Four-page paper due in lecture in Class 12
  • Sample topics
• Reading Exam 1 in Class 13, Feb. 6th
  • Short-answer questions
  • Multiple-choice questions
  • Identification questions
• Students with problems installing Riven on their computers

Overview of Hypertext and Hypertext Literature

"Hypertext" was one of the first deployments of "new media" principles (digitization, modularity, variability).

• Practical Hypertext: from "Gopher" (U. Minnesota) to "WWW" (Tim Berners-Lee; NCSA and Mosaic browser)
  
  
• Conceptual & Artistic Exploration of Hypertext: (e.g., George Landow, p. 100 [in Trend]:

Critical Issues of Hypertext (as exemplified in Edward Falco's "Self-Portrait as Child with Father")

"Self-Portrait as Child with Father" is a work that tries to show that "new media" is not either more clear or more obscure, but clear and obscure in different ways that can be exploited to map out what is important to people.

The obscurity in Falco's work demonstrates some of the standard, much-discussed "problematics" of hypertext literature):

Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (1996)

Lialina's influence on new-media/hypertext art (the open-source, copyleft cult of Lialina)

Lialina's original frameset version of Boyfriend:

• A "hypermedia" version of hypertext (images, graphic design and typography, framesets, and animation/sound in later "covers" of the work by others)
  
  
• Equivalent "problematics" of navigation, closure, narrative, point of view, sentence form, interactivity.
  
  
• Lialina's specific deployment of the principles of new media underlying these problematics:
  
  
  • Digital Modularity = constriction of human relationships
    
    
  • Linking = the opposite of expansiveness, freedom, and connection: exhaustion, imprisonment, disconnection

New Media Art:
The Case of New Graphic Design
("Graphic Design" = Graphics + Typography + Layout)

Example of contemporary, mainstream graphic design (from advertising):

Chanel ad from Wired 7.09, Sept. 1999 (9 x 10.75")

Where the Allure of Mainstream Graphic Design Came From (A Short History)

Avant-Garde Typographic Experimentation (see Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word) F.T. Marinetti, from Zang Tumb Tuuum (Milan, 1914) F.T. Marinetti, Bataille à neuf étages: Mont Altissimo (Rome, 1916) I. Zdanevich, Soirée du Coeur à Barbe (Paris, 1923) T. Tzara, Bulletin (Zurich, 1918) Main Features: Assymmetrical layout Use of diagonals in layout Designed use of white space Emphasis on contrasting elements Goals: Intended to shock the bourgeois (and its concept of art as "high culture"); mimetic of the WW I-era sense of culture

The Professionalization/Mainstreaming of Avant-Garde Graphic Design Principles (see Jan Tschichold, The New Typography, 1928; excerpts): Assymmetrical layout Use of diagonals in layout Designed use of white space Emphasis on contrasting elements Variation in type size but standardization of type font: rejection of serif fonts and the adoption of sans serif serif font:    sans serif font:   gG yY               gG yY The "grid system" (Bauhaus school, Desau | grid system as explained by Paul Rand El Lissitzky, Two pages (poem titles) from Mayakovsky, Diya golossa (1922-23) (reproduced in Tschichold) Piet Zwart, from advertising leaflet (original in Dutch) (reproduced in Tschichold) Jan Tschichold, display poster for publisher, 1924 (l.), and cover for "elementaire typographie, 1925 (r.) Willi Baumeister, invitation card (example of "reading order" reproduced in Tschichold) Jan Tschichold, examples of bad and good layout from The New Typography Jan Tschichold, brochure for The New Typography Goals: Informational "clarity" (quote 1 | 2) (a version of the Modernist credo of "form follows function" The naturalization of the look-and-feel of avant-garde design (cf., Manovitch on the "anti-montage" tendencies of contemporary "compositing") Corporate style: Swiss Style, International Style (migration of European designers after WW II; the Container Corporation of America)

Thus was born the "look and feel" of contemporary corporate graphic design: a "designed" form of immediacy:

Chanel ad from Wired 7.09, Sept. 1999 (9 x 10.75")

New Media Graphic Design (Anti-Design)

• The graphic design of David Carson, 1980s-1990s (Transworld Skateboarding, Beach Culture, Ray Gun) (examples, course password required)
  
  
• The graphic design of April Greiman (examples, course password required)
  
  
• Early Wired Magazine (examples, course password required)
  
  
• Current "fresh styles" of Web design (categories and examples from Curt Cloninger, Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground)
  • Riku@Suellen.org: example
  • Titler
  • Hyperprism
  • Entropy8: example (hallucinations)

Goals:

• Unclarity
  
  
• Denaturalization of the look-and-feel of avant-garde design (aggressive montage vs. compositing)
  
  
  • assymmetry to the nth degree
  • "grids" used ironically (example)
  • hybrid, "bleeding," or "distressed" fonts and images (as opposed to sans serif) (example)
    
    
• Exposure of the underlying principles of digital new media:
  • digitization (e.g., Greiman's "jaggie" fonts)
  • modularity (retro photo-montage)
    
    
• Reflection of "postmodern" or "postindustrial" age

[To next class notes]

References

• Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994)
• Edward Falco, "Typing with Edward Falco" (interview with Falco) (Blue Penny Quarterly, 1996)
• Philip B. Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, 2d ed. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983)
• Paul Rand, A Designer's Art (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985)
• Darrell Sano, Designing Large-Scale Web Sites: A Visual Design Methodology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996)