The Eames’ Network: Norman McLaren
Posted: April 26, 2011 Filed under: jessica's notes, The Eames Network Leave a commentChairy Tale, Norman McLaren (1957)
Norman McLaren was an “artist turned filmmaker” and , according to Pat Kirkham in her book Charles & Ray Eames: Designers of the 20th Century, published by MIT Press, he was “fascinated by animation, by giving visual form to ‘thoughts’, by the relationship of sound to visual form, by the play of light & shade, and by the use of the traveling zoom and multiple optics”.
In the 1950’s John Entenza (editor of Arts & Architecture magazine) would host ‘Salon’s which brought together filmmakers, dancers, architects, painters & others associated with the artistic fringes of LA at that time, including the Eames’. So Charles & Ray would have encountered a great deal of the avant-garde filmmaking that was happening post-war in California.
I’m sure the punning of the rather difficult & fractious relationship between the chair & the man in the above short was not lost on the Eames’ sense of ‘serious’ fun. Pat Kirkham cites McLaren as a possible influence on the Eames – suggesting that perhaps Chairy Tale had an influence on the dancing chair sequence in their film Kaileidoscope Jazz Chair (1960).
Norman McLaren would have known & admired the Eames’ work, and they would have moved in similar circles during the 50’s and 60’s, the Eames’ weaving themselves broadly across a range of disciplines & artistic ‘societies’ in a kind of pseudo-Renaissance fashion. Both the Eames’ an McLaren traveled India & this experience would have influenced their works.
Eamon O’Kane’s Eames House/Playroom Hybrid
Posted: April 20, 2011 Filed under: architecture, Art, Eames, jessica's notes Leave a comment
Since 2009 irish artist Eamon O’Kane has been making installation work that explores the continuous learning approaches of Charles (and Ray?) Eames. O’Kane makes the connection between the Eames’ work and the Froebel method of schooling which both Charles Eames & Frank Lloyd Wright experienced as children. The work above is the current installation of this body of work by O’Kane, and will be on exhibition from April 30th at The Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design, as part of a group exhibition BROODWORK. At the bottom left of the image you can see the giant house of cards – the original ‘House of Cards’ was designed by the Eames’ in the year leading up to A Communications Primer, circa 1952. It was around this time that the Eames were heavily involved in ‘ART X’, or ‘Sample Lesson’ which took place at the University of California in 1952. The Eames’ were very engaged with teaching & learning, and this inevitably led to their engagement with Communication theory of the day.
(It’s interesting to note that O’Kane’s original exhibition in Limerick (images & description below) was sponsored by The Eames Foundation… I’ll have to try harder to get in touch with them!)
‘The Eames Studio Limerick’ uses as a starting point the fact that Charles Eames’s grandfather Henry Eames embarked from County Limerick for America in the mid 1700s. The installation involves constructing a scale model of a hybrid of the Eames Studio and House using a wooden structure covered in paper. The structure is split into two spaces, an archive/viewing space and a workshop/studio. In keeping with Charles and Ray Eames’ ideologies and approach, the model of the Eames house/studio is a resource archive about the development of architecture and design from the 20th century to the present day.
The space is a reflective space for research discussion and contemplation. There is a comprehensive display on the work of the Eames’s including screening of their films. Other architecture and design is also displayed both outlining the legacy of their practice and how architecture has developed since.
The workshop/studio performs a different function; it is used as a working studio where workshops are conducted for all ages. Charles Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright (who was a great inspiration for Eames) both were educated using the Froebel method of teaching, which involved blocks in primary and essential shapes as early teaching tools. The space is an extremely accessible workspace for children where many toys, shapes and drawing tools are available for them to play with.
http://www.eamonokane.com/eames_limerick/index.html
A Tale well Told… Communicating a history of architecture
Posted: April 11, 2011 Filed under: architecture Leave a commentFinal year students out in the UCD School of Architecture have put together a nifty stop motion animation outlining four of the Great Architectural Exhibitions from the late 50’s and early 60’s – and guess who’s included in the mix… well, “Glimpses of the USA” by Charles & Ray Eames of course:
Ai Wei Wei: Art, Communication and the Internet
Posted: April 5, 2011 Filed under: Art, Telecommunication Leave a commentA TED talk on Ai Wei Wei’s work and his take on the importance of the Internet:
Ai Wei Wei is currently exhibiting major work as part of the Unilever Series at Tate Modern. I went to see it recently, and the most interesting aspect of the work is the process of it’s coming to be through the labour of people from the city of Jingdezhen in China. This work echos the inventiveness of the Chinese people across the centuries, alluding to their innovation and technological heritage, from the discovery of gun powder/fireworks, to the printing press, to paper, etc.
About the exhibition
Sunflower Seeds is made up of millions of small works, each apparently identical, but actually unique. However realistic they may seem, these life-sized sunflower seed husks are in fact intricately hand-crafted in porcelain.
Each seed has been individually sculpted and painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops in the Chinese city of Jingdezhen. Far from being industrially produced, they are the effort of hundreds of skilled hands. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the 100 million seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape.
Porcelain is almost synonymous with China and, to make this work, Ai Weiwei has manipulated traditional methods of crafting what has historically been one of China’s most prized exports. Sunflower Seeds invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today. (From the Tate Website)
The work also raises questions, due to the detention of Ai Wei Wei by the Chinese Government, as to the human ability to cope with more open systems and technologies of communication, such as that heralded by the Internet. Ai Wei Wei’s work taps into the concerns of those who see the rise of the Internet, the rise of a global free market, the spread of international labour, and raises these as issues that are deeply connected and problematic. Ai Wei Wei’s work challenges us to consider our understanding of Labour, and of Work itself.
Claude E. Shannon… the poet
Posted: March 31, 2011 Filed under: Claude E. Shannon, jessica's notes Leave a comment
A Rubric on Rubik Cubics (1)
Claude E. Shannon Strange imports come from Hungary:
Count Dracula, and ZsaZsa G.,
Now Erno Rubik’s Magic Cube
For PhD or country rube.
This fiendish clever engineer
Entrapped the music of the sphere.
It’s sphere on sphere in all 3D—
A kinematic symphony!
Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!
One thousand bucks a day.
That’s Rubik’s cubic pay.
He drives a Chevrolet. (2)
Forty-three quintillion plus (3)
Problems Rubik posed for us.
Numbers of this awesome kind
Boggle even Sagan’s mind. (4)
Out with sex and violence,
In with calm intelligence.
Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange“—no!
Rubik’s Magic Cube—Jawohl!
Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!
Cu-bies in disarray?
First twist them that-a-way,
Then turn them this-a-way.
Respect your cube and keep it clean.
Lube your cube with Vaseline.
Beware the dreaded cubist’s thumb,
The callused hand and fingers numb. (5)
No borrower nor lender be.
Rude folks might switch two tabs on thee,
The most unkindest switch of all,
Into insolubility. (6)
In-sol-u-bility.
The cruelest place to be. (7)
However you persist
Solutions don’t exist.
Cubemeisters follow Rubik’s camp—
There’s Bühler, Guy and Berlekamp;
John Conway leads a Cambridge pack
(And solves the cube behind his back!). (8)
All hail Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw,
A mayor with fast cubic draw.
Now Dave Singmaster wrote THE BOOK. (9)
One more we must not overlook—
Singmaster’s office-mate!
Programming potentate!
Alg’rithmic heavyweight!
Morwen B. Thistlethwaite!
Rubik’s groupies know their groups:
(That’s math, not rock, you nincompoops.)
Their squares and slices, tri-twist loops,
Plus mono-swaps and supergroups.
Now supergroups have smaller groups
Upon their backs to bite ’em,
And smaller groups have smaller still,
Almost ad infinitum.
How many moves to solve?
How many sides revolve?
Fifty two for Thistlethwaite.
Even God needs ten and eight. (10)
The issue’s joined in steely grip:
Man’s mind against computer chip.
With theorems wrought by Conway’s eight
‘Gainst programs writ by Thistlethwait.
Can multibillion-neuron brains
Beat multimegabit machines?
The thrust of this theistic schism—
To ferret out God’s algorism!
CODA:
He (hooked on
Cubing)
With great
Enthusiasm:
Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Ay!
Men’s schemes gang aft agley.
Let’s cube our life away!
She: Long pause
(having been
here before):
—————OY VAY!
The above poem was published by John Horgan in Scientific American this week, and was written by the founder of Information Theory, Claude E. Shannon. It turns out the man declared himself a better poet than a scientist in a letter addressed to the editor of Scientific American, dated December 1st 1981. Check out the article here.
Marshall McLuhan
Posted: March 29, 2011 Filed under: Digital Learning, jessica's notes, Telecommunication Leave a comment
On Communication via the Internet: “Instead of going out and buying a book… They send you the package as a personal service….”, he says.
Revealing Wifi…
Posted: March 4, 2011 Filed under: Telecommunication Leave a commentA Beautiful project by Timo Arnall. Along side heading up an international design research project that investigates the applications of computing technologies in products and services, He is undertaking a PhD entitled ‘Making Visible’ and is based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. You can check out more of his research & work at www.elasticspace.com.
It’s not just a resource, is it?
Posted: February 22, 2011 Filed under: jessica's notes, Networks, Telecommunication Leave a commentBefore it seemed the Internet was a networked source of Information, on anything & everything, from the believable and trustworthy, to the highly dubious. It’s becoming increasingly obvious though that the Internet is fast evolving into an unprecedented form of mass communication, not alone as a holding space for information.
An image of the Internet by one of CTVR's researchers, developed in a Workshop called 'Imagining the Internet'
I came upon a podcast on the IEEE Spectrum website where Steven Cherrie discusses with James Cowie of Renesy’s (A network management company based in the UK) the very recent ‘switching off’ of Egypt’s Internet… towards the end of the interview James Cowie gives this interpretation of what Internet Engineers hope for the Internet:
We hope that the Internet will be beyond politics, in the sense that it is just a communications medium. It’s really almost like keeping electricity on or keeping clean water flowing to people. It’s an infrastructure component that everybody should have, almost as basic access for living.
Inspired by Eames’… and Hugh Campbell!
Posted: February 18, 2011 Filed under: jessica's notes, Workshops 1 Comment
Some images from last nights screening of A Communications Primer, and talk by Hugh Campbell, at the Science Gallery. All photographs were taken by Darragh O’Rian. (Thanks Darragh!) We’ll be working on compiling ideas for the practical learning workshops we mentioned last night. Again, if anyone would like to get involved or to learn more about this outreach project by CTVR, please don’t hesitate to get in touch – post comments & the like, and you can find us at www.ctvr.ie.
Emergent Networks…
Posted: February 17, 2011 Filed under: jessica's notes, Networks Leave a commentIn the course of researching & planning the event at the Science Gallery, to take place this evening at 6pm by the way, I’ve managed to choreograph an accidental network of sorts. Encountering some authentic Eames Chairs at a friends house one evening, I thought how appropriate it would be to have some Eames Chairs & 1950’s style furniture to dress the stage on the night of our talk & screening. This led me to approach a local shop on Cow’s Lane, Retrospect, a place I’ve long dipped in and out of in true window shopper fashion. I had a conversation with the proprietor there about our Eames inspired project and she was immediately enthusiastic to lend us some chairs for the evening. Through our conversation, which became about more than chairs as is the way, it emerged that her son, Darragh, was having difficulty sourcing a work place for his Transistion Year work experience. The long & short of it is, not only do we have appropriate furniture for the evening, we also have a careful & educated assistant who knows a thing or two about 20th century furniture!
Added to this, through an innate willingness to include & engage others with the ‘magic’ of electronic engineering, the CTVR researchers in the Lab have introduced Darragh to the wonderful world of smart phone app’s. And so, in the space of two days, Darragh has set up a blog, begun writing about his experience of Telecommunications, and has programmed two smart phone Apps:
Darragh's Whackamole Smart Phone App
I suppose the moral of the story is you never know where a conversation is going to lead, or who it will bring together, and more to the point, you never know what kind of inspiration you’ll get from sitting in an Eames chair of an evening…
Let’s hope this will hold true tonight!
Communicating Communication 