Graphic Design, Feminism, and Me – Part 1

As I’ve become more familiar with the graphic design and typography “world,” and begun to identify more of my favorite artists  and type designers (Robert Slimbach, Matthew Carter, David Carson…) I’ve started to wonder why I don’t have more female role models.

The other day I happened upon this fantastic video (I highly recommend it) of a panel discussion on the art of the book, with Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd, and Dave Eggers, moderated by Michael Beirut. I’m very familiar with all of their work, and all four of them are some of my top heroes – my idols! The coolest, savviest, most interesting designers I know! And seeing all of them together in the same room talking about book design, it was a real treat. Until the very end during a Q & A, when there was a question about why there were so few female “superstar” graphic designers – “is there a glass ceiling in graphic design?” Milton Glaser’s response:

He said that the reason there are so few female rock star graphic designers is that “women get pregnant, have children, go home and take care of their children. And those essential years that men are building their careers and becoming visible are basically denied to women who choose to be at home.” He continued: “Unless something very dramatic happens to the nature of the human experience then it’s never going to change.” About day care and nannies, he said, “None of them are good solutions.”

The crowd was silent except for a hiss or two and then Eggers piped up that he and his wife both work from home and share child care responsibilities — but added that maybe New York was different (although we don’t think Eggers really believes this). Then it was clear to everyone in the room that it was time to move on.

In Helvetica (the greatest movie ever) why are only two of the two dozen interviews with women?

Shira asked me once when the first time I was really conscious of my gender was. There are probably some times in my youth that I can’t clearly recall (other kids questioning whether I could play Huck Finn because I was a girl), I think the first time was in a class my freshman year of high school. After completing a month’s worth of assignments for an Intro to Technology class in one day, my parents and teachers realized something should be done. So I was transferred into Visual Communication, where I was the only freshman and the only girl.  I thrived on the material, but I felt really uncomfortable and out of place in that environment.

I’ve take a number of computer and technology oriented classes in both high school and college, and I’ve always been in the minority.  I think it always made me subconsciously want to work harder, to prove that I could be as good or better than the boys.

Graphic Design, Feminism, and Me – Part 2: what I’ve learned from doing design and animation on the documentary film Heretics: Stories from a Feminist Art Collective for the past two years… coming soon.

-Molly

(p.s.  if you read this, you should comment!  the more you comment on our blog, the happier we will be, and the more often we will update.  it’s nice to know when your writing is read.)

 

why tube advertisement space should be like public bathroom stalls

this project by the space hijackers has a wonderful yes-men feel about it, with their tongue-in-cheek impersonation of Transport For London (TFL) and what they should be doing. amazing!

advertisements on public transport have always grated on me – corporate sponsorship fees may be subsidizing my train fare, but it’s not like there are many alternatives for getting around. (how is public transport funded, anyhow? isn’t iit also partially federal money? tabitha would know!)

anyhow, it’s nice  to see groups of people out there engaging with their surroundings. i’ve had many conversations where people say that they like both graffitti and advertisements as long as they’re of a certain ‘quality.’  i like even scribbled tags, proof that some kid had the guts to claim a bit of visual, physical sapce as her own, to leave her mark (of however little artistic merit), whereas advertisements, however clever or beautiful, always leave me with a vague gross feeling of being manipulated.

a lot of banksy’s writings are about how graffitti and other ‘illegal’ use of public space is illegal only because it is not being paid for, as advertising is. if public space is public, why can it be bought? 

subways aren’t a public space, obviously – you have to pay to get in – but the advertising is so intrusive and so built into the atmosphere that it’s nearly impossible not to look at it. i especially hate the long rows of repetitive posters up the sides of the escalators here in london. there’s something about their proximity and the motion as you pass them that makes it nearly impossible not to look at them – trying frustrates me nearly every time.

as suggested by people the space hijackers spoke to, it would be nice to replace the advertisements with art or poems, but even just blank space would be welcome. better yet, what if commuters could trade being passive receptors of massages on public transport for becoming active creators of content, marking walls, drawing pictures, and having drawn-out, scrawled conversations with each other?

other good stuff i found on their website:                                                             urban letterboxing                                                                                                        the starbucks game

the laboratory of insurectionary imagination

 

are cities sustainable?

Walking home this evening, I was attacking this question from just one angle, that of ‘transport.’ My thoughts went something like this:

What if, for a day, personal vehicles were outlawed in a major city? Buses, lorries/trucks, ambulances, vans, cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders, rollerbladers, unicyclists, and carpools would be allowed, but personal automobiles would have to stay home. People would flood public transport, leave for work an hour early just to get there, see each other’s faces as they passed…

Could be possible to narrow that list further? There are certain people, young children, elderly, disabled, etc. that wouldn’t be able to travel under their own power. You would still need buses, etc. with priority for those passengers so that they’d be able to get around. Getting rid of lorries is impossible: how else would we get necessary goods, food, medical supplies, etc? Cities, by condensing the distance needed to go to get resources, should mean less travel in general. But all those convenient resources still need to travel from their originating point to the city, which is perhaps more energy output in all. So staying local should be the solution, except that then if you can’t get everything you need locally, you still have to travel – or the goods do.

So certain vehicles are necessary evils of cities, in that case. But at least we could strip it down a certain amount, by encouraging cycling and people-powered methods of transport…

London is thinking about instituting a biker’s license, similar to a driver’s license, if the upward trend in cycle commuting continues. This is supposed to be a response to the concurrent upward trend in cyclist deaths and injuries. Yet there don’t seem to be any major plans to change the roads so that there are more separated bike lanes, signed bike paths, etc, to keep bikes away from the lorries, roundabouts, large intersections, and other hazards. This seems to be just another way to make the bikers responsible for their own victimization. I recently read an article which anecdotally found that car drivers percieved helmeted bikers as less fragile than unhelmeted bikers and therefore were less cautious driving around them, resulting in MORE accidents with HELMETED cyclists – which were still the cyclist’s fault, for wearing the helmet.

All in all, though, London seems to me the most green-conscious city I’ve been to (right now). There are recycling collection points in every neighborhood, many boroughs are expanding their initiatives to include compost of garden waste and kitchen scraps. There bins for paper and plastic bottle recycling next to trash bins on some corners and public-transport ads advocating cycling and walking. Half the flyers and free newspapers I read boast ‘printed on recycled paper,’ and local councils have freecycle-esque webpages for posting used stuff swaps. Re-use and recycling is high profile at the moment, but on a governmental and social scale, not just in the news. Heartening!

-Tara

 

Palin Pains

The other day I watched the SNL parody of the Couric/Palin interview, and I thought it was pretty funny. Tina Fey is brilliant as Palin. But I found out after watching the actual Couric/Palin interview that SNL took a lot of material pretty much VERBATIM. It was already so ridiculous that they hardly had to make anything up to exaggerate it. The thought of Sarah Palin being vice president (or, in all likelihood, president) basically terrifies me. I think I might start actively campaigning for Obama less so to promote him, but rather to urgently campaign AGAINST McCain and Palin.

Here is the SNL version…

And clips from the actual interview: foreign policy, McCain and regulations, and the bailout proposal.

I think this article sums it up pretty well:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters.

!!!

-Molly

 

TEOTWAWKI

So, the whole Large-Hadron-Collider doomsday scenario whereby Scientists in an Underground Laboratory are creating Miniscule Collisions that will create Miniscule Black Holes eating away at the Core of the Earth resulting in the Eventual Preemptive End of Civilization got me hyperlinking through Wikipedia (once again) discovering an anti-apocalypse group I didn’t know about. (Mol, I bet you knew about it. I bet you’ve read all Wikipedia has to say on the subject…)

They’re called the Global Scenario Group, and they did all their prophesizing in 1995. That’s right, 1995, pre-Inconvenient Truth, pre-reusable grocery bags initiatives, pre-widespread Nalgene vogue. They came up with three possibilities for the future: 1) Barbarization, i.e. collapse of civilization, 2) Conventional Worlds, i.e. we manage to cover our butts as we go, putting out forest fires with tsunamis, 3) The Great Transition, i.e. everybody becomes an environmentalist, locavore, and (most importantly) a humanist.

Unsurprisingly, it’s The Great Transition that they’re trying to push, and within that scenario there are two more, straight from Wikipedia:

“Eco-Communalism: Localism and civil society help bring about the environmental transition. The Great Transitions scholars do not view this path as being incredibly plausible.

New Sustainability Paradigm: Population stabilization, lower consumerism, and greener values create a more humane world. Civilization has a smaller ecological footprint and its members live healthier, more equitable lives.”

Their literature sounds academic at first, but ends up being much more like my first-year end of term papers: good topic, good ideas, some research, well written, but frustratingly inexact generalizations and conclusions that aren’t actually going to help anybody. (And only now do I realise that the LHC sounds familiar because two years ago I read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.)

It’s still a nice juxtaposition to other Wikipedia articles which calmly remind me that the Earth’s eventual end is inevitable in astronomical terms (the Sun is scheduled to become a Red Dwarf and swell in size, consuming our planet, in about 5.5 billion years).

Being in London, a city which collects compost along with plastics, paper, and metal to be recycled and has a congestion charge in effect to discourage traffic gives me some hope: I still feel like maybe governments can enact large-scale changes that people can join in with. The analogy, I suppose is war, where sacrifice is encouraged with nationalism as the motive. Why can’t humanism be the motive for equal ’sacrifices,’ for allocating resources, energy, time and thought toward finding and implementing solutions that may literally ensure the future?

Done ranting. For now. Sorry for the length.

Happy thought to leave you with: Guerilla Gardening.

-Tara

 

The internet needs to know: What are you doing RIGHT now?

Okay, SO Tara and I have been horrible at blogging the last few weeks, but we’ve both been rather busy moving. To be fair, I moved only from North Amherst to Hadley, about five miles away, and Tara moved from New York to London… Here is a picture of us hugging goodbye a few weeks ago. And, here are some random scattered thoughts and article excerpts about social interaction the internet and such things.

I read an interesting article a few days ago about digital intimacy, and it had a few new media terms I liked: microblogging (posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing, like Twitter) and ambient awareness.

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.”

But: “If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.” It’s a long article, but I recommend reading all of it, very fascinating stuff.

I also just read an article in Hampshire’s student newspaper, the Climax, about so-called “Facebook celebrities” in the incoming class – those kids who, before school even starts, go and and friend every single person they can find. So when you meet someone you’ve friended on Facebook in person for the first time, do you pretend you don’t already know where they’re from, their favorite music, relationship status, and employment history? Is it taboo to ask about an interesting picture you saw of them on a vacation?

Facebook was the new thing when I first started college, and our generation is still navigating the social do’s and don’ts of how online information is used in real life interaction. But do you suppose, in a few years, there will be a more universal, unwritten social code about how we interface with such things? OR, maybe at some point ALL of our socializing will just be digital? This virtual reality cocoon is amazing technology, but it kind of freaks me out.

We joke casually nowadays about googling or stalking someone online, but in the age of social networking, digital intimacy, ambient information, and blogging, where is the line drawn between curiosity, obsession, and straightforward stalking?

-Molly

 

Photoshop Follies

Now that “photoshopping” has become a commonly used term in pop culture vocabulary, even most non-digital artists can spot and laugh at a bad Photoshop job these days. But when the government is behind such an image, it becomes even more amusing and disturbing.

Evidently the Iranian government needs to hire some better photoshoppers… or better yet, STOP FIRING MISSILES. This image was printed on the front page of the LA Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and many others before someone noticed there was a missile too many, and an identical cloud of smoke.

Oh, and did you think that the satellite photos on Google maps were surely sacred? Apparently not, as evidenced by this secret alien landing site in Holland.

It seems like everyone is manipulating reality these days, from shady foreign governments, to bitter relatives removing undesired family members from vacation photos.

Manipulating photographs has been going on long before the advent of Photoshop, but the degree to which people are digitally altered today is unsettling. Sure, as a photoshop artist, it’s very easy for me to change the color of your shirt, remove a few zits, smooth out those wrinkles, trim a few pounds… but should I? Where to draw the line between a few touch ups and a completely fabricated makeover? I would hope that most women understand the degree to which celebrities and supermodels are digitally beautified these days, but I know that’s not the case.

I guess the bottom line is: don’t trust any image you see, and either launch the proper amount of nuclear weapons or just don’t bother launching any at all.

For more about Photoshop topics, see:

the Dove “Evolution” ad, and it’s many parodies

Photoshop Disasters - blog about poorly done and often amusing photoshop jobs

You Suck at Photoshop - very entertaining serialized fictional video blog, masquerading as actually useful Photoshop tutorials

-Molly

 

Convoluted Comments on Connectivity & Computers

I’ve been thinking about the dichotomy of connectivity, communication, and new media. How “web 2.0″, social networking, cell phones, email, etc are making communication across time and space exponentially faster and easier. And yet, we are often so plugged in that we sometimes don’t take time to interact in real ways with real people around us. I am not arrogantly scolding society, I am often guilty of this too. But I am always trying to think of creative ways to start conversations between strangers, like my 11 Shirts project. Also, this was part of the instigation for my friend Tara to start the Society for the Creative REalization of a Weirder You. This is from our manifesto:

Worried about personal connections in a society of increasing isolation, SCReWY aims to be the antithesis of apathy — to challenge the public to actively engage in changing and exploring reality.

SCReWY manifests interactive interventions by using internet video and new media technologies to connect cyberspace with real space. Orchestrating flash mobs, Happenings, community art, and collaborative performances, SCReWY aims to proactively instigate community expression

There are a million other sub-topics I could take on here: crowdsourcing, social bookmarking, activism on the internet, performance art and the web, and of course… facebook. I have probably done too much critical thinking about facebook for my own good. But these will probably all come up in future blog posts. For a start, see my two videos about Friendship on the internet, and Minifeed: a Story about Facebook.

-

In other news, my SCReWY-cofounder, friend, and long time collaborator Tara will be joining me on this blog! She’s also taking next year off of Hampshire, and she’ll be in London for most of the year, playing with her new baby niece and doing circus things. Hooray for Tara!

-Molly