Tag Archives: art

Serious enough.

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I’ve wanted to wake up, sit down with coffee and make something wild. Then do it again and the next morning again. Working fast and free.

What fired this up, after yet another late night of tech immersion, was a visit to Javier Mariscal’s site. I’d been away too long. Estudio Mariscal is a designer’s vacation. Bursts of energy and freedom, the appearance of no rules, though there are many, and a loud laughing clapping joy of creation that I have come to miss, whilst sitting on the yachts of tech, wet salt in my face as we crash through deep sea.

I love technology. The brightly lit young players blow me away. The vast majority of the products I will never use, or will be brushed off like dust, and so what?  It’s the click of persistent code-checking, the strike of flame and a new product mix glows then flares. Fire.

All in all as a graphic designer I look at interfaces which grow spare and cold. Readability without personality. We are so engineered. Visual design at a shrink. Shy. Clean: The dreaded default word used by initiates. On occasion I want to throw some graffiti at perfect typography. I want to  remember we are a collective of monkeys enjoying bananas. It’s not that serious. Humans who laugh and cry, deliberate, celebrate, fornicate, kick ourselves and slap backs and hug one another and eat lunch quickly, getting honey mustard on our fingers. Sites can do that.

Instead we have the new dentist’s polished surgery . Competent, white-tiled and dull. Do not touch. I wouldn’t want to eat in a restaurant like that. And I bet the kitchen in back is a wee bit messier.

Back to Mariscal. The studio produces messy. Humor. Fun. A whole family is involved. Full of sunshine and patios, good food, weirdness and kid-style drawing, big banging colors that bleed over lines and creep where it shouldn’t.

Except it all works and he runs a fabulously successful studio out of Barcelona, making work for the whole world.

When you get Mariscal, you get life. It’s chaotic. Not much in Silicon Valley or Alley, is let out of the house before much of the cat litter is swept and the floor mopped. Iterative or not.

The most brilliant toys and tools on earth, changing lives and doing it so that it looks like lab work not spade work. It’s the latter. It will come to be enjoyed as such.

So here is belief in the steaming minds and laptops charging ahead with the greatest period of innovation in memory. Puff it out three times daily. Dollars and digits on fire.  And let’s start some disrespect for pixel perfect manners. Let’s have a code / art fight. Bring garden tools and bar room stools. Look at Mariscal. Can you see what we are missing?

“First surprise, then fascinate. Finally, convince.” This is our strategy.— Javier Mariscal

Art is Not About Communication

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‘Art is not about communication.  Art is not a way of conveying information. It’s a way of understanding information. That is, creating a work of art is a means we have of making sense of the world, focusing to make it clearer, not a way of communicating some understanding of the world that we already hold.’  — James Kochalka

 

 

Live in Mystery

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WE NOW KNOW ENOUGH to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art:
it teaches us how to live with mystery. Only the artist can explore the ineffable without offering us an answer, for sometimes there is no answer. John Keats called this romantic impulse ‘negative capability.’ He said that certain poets, like Shakespeare, had ‘the ability to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ Keats realized that just because something can’t be solved, or reduced into the laws of physics, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.

But before we can get a fourth culture, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call and not ignore science’s inspiring descriptions of reality. Every humanist should read Nature.

At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. That simple idea will be the starting premise of any fourth culture. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science, wrote, ‘It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach. There is no authority beyond the reach of criticism.” — Jonah Lehrer via Maria Popova

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