simples

Committee of the Regions’ Plenary Session, European Parliament Hemicycle © Katja Ilner

Creativity, innovation, regions, clusters, mobility, funding, education, risk, opportunity, competitiveness, sustainability, networks, integration, culture, fertile grounds, Europe, America. This simultaneously-translated, multilingual bureaucratic litany, this Powerpoint-generated “tag cloud” of policy buzzwords shaped my two-day visit to Brussels last month. But I did manage to find creative, innovative life beyond the “eurospeak” of the European Union and its institutions.

Read the rest of this entry »

I made this 30x30cm image in 1998, as part of a visual concepts alphabet exercise on my 2nd year in university. The word for S was "simples".

a few more images of one of my favourite school assignments ever after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have to say there is something special about this place.
Merry Christmas.

Countering the one-way street of mechanical and structural determinism, [Raymond Loewy] declared that ‘there is as much [to be gained] working backward from optical form to mechanics’; offering Betty Grable as an example, he observed that, although her ‘liver and kidneys are no doubt adorable’ I would rather have her with skin than without’”.

C. Edson Armi, quoting Raymond Loewy in “Car Design Theory, Commercial Arts After the Second World War”, The Art of American Car Design

“There are times when we are perhaps visited by a mild nostalgia for the harmless and leisured times before the advent of advertising. yet if we considered how the world would look without advertising, we should certainly have to admit that it would lose much of its form and color. that we should no longer see the faces turned towards the bright displays, nor the eyes that sparkle in the light of illuminated advertisements. The walls would be monotonous, the streets emptier and duller; there might be unemployment, there might be even misery. And above all we should not see our own progress, for advertisement is nothing if not a manifestation of progress.”

Carlo Dinelli, “Advertising Art in Italy”, Graphis, #33, 1950