Capsized by the velocity of change in a world of words and pictures, the meaning of the term “experimentation” has sunk at last, lost like a treasure chest of useless jewels. Experience, on the other hand, has gained value. “Experiences are replacing goods and services because they stimulate our creative faculties and enhance our creative capacities. This active, experiential lifestyle is spreading and becoming more prevalent in society as the structures and institutes of the Creative Economy spreads.”*
read the rest of this article
20 comments
Within the context of postmodern theoretical writing, (phonetic) writing is a limiting medium. From Plato to Saussure and onwards to a bevy of structuralist and post-structuralist writers, words are acknowledged to have only an insecure relationship to the objects or concepts they seek to represent. For Jacques Derrida, the Western philosophical tradition has prioritised the spoken word over the written; a conditioning cultural factor he identifies as logocentricism. In the presence of a speaker we hear not only the author but the authority of a statement: written and, even more so, printed texts are denied this authority. However many claims are made in support of handwriting as an authentic representation of an individual, not least the authority invested in an autographic signature, writing, it has been claimed, does not possess the same degree of conviction as the spoken word. The printed word is, therefore, seen to be at yet one further remove from the authority of the speaker.
read the rest of this article
13 comments
It would be easy to argue that graphic designers drag Graphic Design (as a loose ‘discipline’) down into continual disrepute. So eager to cynically appropriate the empty posturing of the ‘avant garde’, of ‘contemporary art’, or worse still the language of ‘now’ for the grim compromised reality of commercial ends. Daily they, or rather ‘we’, re-evaluate and redefine our own ‘ethical’ codes, capricious and mercenary to the last.
read the rest of this article
17 comments