JOHNSPACE

2011

2012-01-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

Oh, hi. Didn't see you there. Or maybe I didn't recognise you; I haven't blogged here in over a month. I know, it's bad, I'm bad, I'm sorry. I'm dying to make an excuse like 'I didn't have time' or 'life's been crazy recently', and though both are true, I wonder why I'm even apologising to a blog that's meant to be about me. If I had some responsibility to blog here, I would, regularly, but I don't. If I don't feel in the mood for blogging, or this blog is an outdated version of me, then I won't blog. Simple as.

Anyway, somehow I'm blogging. I figured, since I can't find anything deep and artistic to blog about (and I don't think it would be right, either), I'd just cover a few of the things that have happened in 2011 for me. As forementioned, December was a crazy month for me, both time-wise and sanity-wise. I am certainly not the same person I was in January 2011, and I am also not the same person I was at the start of December. But hey, I'm a teenager, I'd better just get used to change. It just seems to be happening so fast, is all.

Last year I made 36 posts, which may seem meagre compared to the 330+ of 2010, but I've started to doubt whether this blog is appropriate for me, and whether it really does represent me, any more. Some of the posts have been excellent, and I'm still proud of them: the design articles from the start of the year (The Finnish Line), the odd maths rant (Fingering the Third Dimension) and those two posts on Kafka. Aside from the article-like posts, I've documented my own productivity throughout the year - and I like those write-up posts too, such as the Suspension walkthrough and the Culture War posts.

I'd like to sum up 2011 completely in photos, but I recently broke my external harddrive. No biggie, you might say, it's just a backup, right? Wrong. It's got all my photos on it, plus everything I made before March last year. Shit. So I'll have to scrounge photos from the internet and, mostly, write things. Enjoy.

JOHN'S HIGHLIGHTS OF 2011

(IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER APART FROM MAYBE CHRONOLOGICALLY BUT I DOUBT HE'LL STICK TO IT)

Untitled, as most of my photos became in 2011

Black and White photography happened. Though I don't really like it when I look back, the start of 2011 was a big time for me in photography. I went through my 'gritty urban black and whites' phase. And did it in analogue, developing my own film. Which was fun. These days I'm not too happy at those old black and whites of mine, but I guess it had to happen sometime.

Pyramid Calendar, Xmas present-cum-graphic design project

I finished my portfolio. In early 2011, to prepare for work experience applications (yeah whatever happened to that?), I hurriedly compiled my first complete portfolio. This meant finishing and refining several of my favourite graphic design ideas, most of them recent. These included the Pyramid Calendar (above), my bookmark called Sidemark, my JIS. Medicine redesign (now with crappy Gotham lookalike!), and my WD16 furniture series. I'm proud of that, too. These designs mark a specific time in the evolution of my style and creativity, and I'm still proud of them now. Well, kinda. Nothing's perfect. Apart from, maybe, Helvetica *sheds a tear of typographic passion*

Untitled, because nothing's more artistic than the back of this guy's head

Ladies and Gentlemen, photos now have people in them. Otherwise known as portraits. The middle of 2011 was my portrait phase. Mainly done from my GCSE project 'One', about the individual and isolation in suburbia (here take this sick bag, you'll need it), I started to take portraits, and fashion shots, and generally photos with people in 'em. My photography moved on a lot in 2011, and the best place to read about that is my angsty photography post, which I think I was right to document. Portraits were the second stage in 2011's photography - though I do still attend the odd photoshoot. I recently did a shoot at the Barbican estate, north London, which was great. Maybe I've moved on, but I still enjoy a good fashion shoot. Especially when there's brutalist architecture and Amelia Oakley involved.

The Henne Beach House, which I won't say anything funny about because I still like it.

Lego architecture's fond farewell. The Henne Beach House was my final Lego architectural model, and my best. I'm still proud of it now, though it may be a bit rough around the edges, and I've realised Lego isn't the most accurate or realistic modeling medium. 2011 has also documented a change in my attitude in architecture, mainly in the post I just linked to, but also from my discovery of the modernist classics (the Villa Savoye, for instance), and how I came to 'like' postmodernism later in the year after reading a book about it. Ach, no, I take that back. I don't like it. But I understand it a lot more. And yes, it was appropriate for the time, and yes, modernism was stagnating into glass blocks ignorant of context or site or humanity. Fine. But I still don't like postmodernism.

The front cover

The JOHN Collection III One of the definite highlights of my year was the release of the longest project I've ever undertaken: the third JOHN Collection catalogue, nearly one and a half years in the making. It had had its possible release dates - and many of them - but, in May, it was finally finished. 18 pages with over 100 new pieces, and a huge hit on Flickr. The catalogue became my defining moment in the FOL community, even getting me a Lego employee's business card at STEAM in October. Am I still proud of it? Yes, as a Lego project, but as proper furniture it's pretty rubbish. But hey, it was brilliant to finish it after all that time.

The leaflet, kinda 90s-styled but eh, I dunno

That Lego point-and-click game I made. Also known as Suspension, and there are no pangs of regret that accompany this Lego project. I love it, still, and I wish I still had the inspiration to finish it. You see, a lot of people were expecting an early release date because they thought the whole game was set inside. It isn't; there are three parts to it, and they're all complex and varied and two of them are outside. One's in a city. Even the second demo scene I was going to release didn't happen - I needed to make a forest for that one. Once again I had been too ambitious, and ruined my chances of even starting on the full project. Regardless, the demo stands for itself, go play it. Again.

Culture War, because lens flare makes everything better

Culture War, another flash of inspiration, took hold of my creativity and my life and thrashed them around for two weeks in the summer until I had finished the film. And I loved it. I still get nostalgic thinking about the nights we spent filming, even the nights before that I spent designing the titles. I used to make so many films, it's a real shame I don't any more. Culture War was a reminder to me of how much I still love it, and how film is still a passion of mine. Ah, Culture War. We had some good times together. And now I'm getting all sentimental and nostalgic about you. Perhaps it's because you were the height of my summer, perhaps it was all my friends working together for something of mine and enjoying it, perhaps it's the particularly sad Death Cab song playing on my iTunes at the moment. Sigh. Anyway, read the post or watch the film. Just remind yourself.

Kids fingering my catalogues at STEAM. Feel free to add your own innuendo.

Exhibitions were also a part of 2011 for me. I first attended the Brickish exhibition at the NSC in Leicester, then STEAM in Swindon. NSC was fun, and we had a good parts draft, but STEAM 2011 was one of the best days of my life. Maybe it was the business cards and interest I got after showing my JC3 catalogues (above), maybe it was making my own way to Swindon and back, maybe it was messing around with Harry, Jake, Tom, Luke and Wimbe. It was just great fun and I only wish I could get out of this damn Dark Age (ie. time of not building), but I can't. I'm worried that I won't build any more. I've made so many friends through Flickr, gone to exhibitions like STEAM, and spent an awful lot of money on bricks, it would be a tragedy for me to end my FOLdom here. Who knows what 2012 will bring, but I can't promise anything.

...and that's pretty much 2011 for me. Obviously there were lots of other events and things I haven't mentioned, mainly social things, other design projects, and too much Minecraft. Oh, and not to forget the school art trip to Florence. I am definitely a different person after that. Maybe I'll get around to writing about it one day. It was eventful, to say the least.

I'd also like to use this post (because who knows when the next one's coming) to list a few things I'd like to achieve in 2012:

Make another film. I enjoyed Culture War, and though I'm not too happy with it now, I am dying to make another film. I've got another idea, I just need to propose it to someone who may be able to make it happen, then it may get made before Spring's over (we need the darkness). If that doesn't work out, then maybe another idea will.
Start a magazine. I've had an idea to make an indie 'zine for months now - since the MUME concept in May, in fact. I'm about to get it started now that I've got the details sorted out of the developed concept, abbreviated FYM. Check out my Tumblr if you want to see some of the early designs for it. Suffice to say it will be a photography- and art-based 'zine, and hopefully as cheap as possible.
Do something with that radio station idea. I don't think I've ever mentioned NURADIO/the radio station idea on this blog. It was going to happen, then the people who were going to help me with it pulled out, so it died. Maybe I'll resurrect it. I still like the idea.
Continue with that 'modern art' thing. Recently, as part of my AS art project, I've been experimenting with performance art and other modern art concepts. I'd really like to pursue this and see what comes of it.
Enjoy it. I'm in sixth form now, and though the last few weeks of term were the busiest I've had in ages, they were also the most fun. For god's sake, John, have fun in 2012. Somehow, my creativity will have to comply.

Well, that's all I have to say (and I think I've said enough). Happy new year to you all, and I'll see you whenever I choose to blog again.

~John

Speak like an architect

2011-11-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

Recently, as part of my unending cycle of interests, I've been drawn back to architecture. Partly because of my trip to Denmark, partly the book 'Architecture after Modernism' I'm reading (gripping, I assure you), and partly It's Nice That opening my eyes to Alexander Road Estate. As a result, I've been attempting a proper architecture project, a concrete social housing block with some wacky angles - a real departure from my Lego models of old. And the key to the change, and to the more mature architecture I'm starting to create, is in visual language. Here, I'll explain.

Above are sections of the floor plan for this housing block, which is only two storeys high, but still packed with apartments and annoyingly acute angles that are going to produce some cramped living spaces. The 'block' is, ironically, in the shape of a large scalene triangle. One corner is opened up to the roof in a large double-cavity opening split by a concrete chunk of a pillar. On one side of this opening, an industrial metal staircase clings to the wall. Inside the building is a triangular courtyard surrounded by walkways on both floors with two trees in it (grey circles, top picture), from which all apartments are accessible. There is another staircase (still metal, just like the ones you'd find in factories or on ships) occupying a cutout in the concrete wall.

It's hard to describe, and the actual slanty-here-but-more-slanty-there-but-not-there shape is even harder to describe, so you'll have to wait until I can figure out the goddamn trig to make a rough model of it (card this time, no more inaccurate Lego). For now I want to return to my previous architectural attempts, mainly the Ishøj House (my first, over a year ago):

The Ishøj House, looking back, was the only uniquely piece of architecture I made, as it pioneered using concrete and glass in my own creativity. From then on, my projects were variations on a theme, and each of them less buildable than the last. Why? Because the combination of materials, and the naïve concept of 'planes of concrete' were unrealisable in the real world, no matter how nice they looked in Lego. Ever since the Henne House I've wanted to make another building model, but I couldn't - I just couldn't make it realistic enough. It was like I was designing a toy, regardless of context, testing, and consequences. I also didn't know how to construct a house, so how could I just start with a shape, a shell? Without knowing anything about the materials, how they could hold together, how a normal building is made. Surely there is some system? Of floorboards, electricals, bricks, that creates a house - a system on which all buildings, from the wackiness of Gehry to the Victorian house I live in, is built with? Also, what means a building should be made of brick? Or have certain shaped windows? Is that a predefined style of the architect, or appropriate to the site, and if the latter, why?

These questions hung in my head for months, unanswered apart from one part of me continually saying 'I can't know, that's what they teach you in the degree', but 'Architecture after Modernism' has made me realise that isn't quite true. Because what I've been searching for, what my previous buildings struggled with, is a visual language. A typology of architecture. A building is not one big piece, it is specific repeated pieces - roofs, floors, windows, walls, corners - that are interpreted in the typology of the building - and the architect speaks in a language of parts and elements from which he can not only form a new, appropriate shape for the building, but it also provides a starting-point. That's what I was missing: I was getting too caught up in the language of concrete planes and glass walls of my previous attempts that I had convinced myself that was the only way to design a building.

But of course, that isn't. There are hundreds of typologies, of styles, of languages to speak when you are designing a building. You can even combine languages, adapt languages, or create new languages with new ways of thinking about elements. Of course, some architecture defies all this and uses no typology, no normal architectural elements. One example I can think of at the moment is the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum by Frank Lloyd Wright:

The Guggenheim defies normal visual language by creating a sculpture of a building, an interaction of shapes and forms into which the building fits. Of course, some elements are recognisable - a glass pane to the left and a covered entrance, but these are few and far between in this abstract and unique project. Aside from the basics, the Guggenheim shows signs of modernist architecture, in its cuboid volume at the back, and the whitewashed walls of the main form. The shape is not so much wacky as geometrically playful. The circular section is not wildly shaped, but instead takes on a slight frustum shape, and other elements - including the cuboid volume - are considered in relation to balance and good layout. The building, despite being unusual, is at its heart very modernist and rational, though not without its quirks.

Frank Lloyd Wright used the modernist typology in part with the Guggenheim museum, but it is largely devoid of an identifiable language. When a language is used in architecture, the architect can still experiment and explore - but there is an irony in the way he can pervert its words. Let's take another example, the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London, designed by Robert Venturi & co:

We're taking a big leap from the landmark Guggenheim to a small extension on the National Gallery in London, both in terms of ambition, context and time period: the Guggenheim Museum was built in the 50s (which places it distinctly before postmodernism, before you start that argument) and the Sainsbury Wing was built in 1991, coming in right at the end of what's been recently defined as the postmodernist age. Unofficially, I believe postmodernism continued through the 90s in the form of free, globalised design thought as afforded by the internet and technological advances. The cultural and stylistic multiplicity found in early-to-mid 90s design ultimately supports postmodernist theory of historicism, or rather referentiality (only in the 90s it was more cultural than historical).

Back to the Sainsbury Wing; let's notice the typology of this small extension. It's designed using the visual language of the old gallery building of the 1800s. You can see the classical elements in the design: columns with elaborate capitals (column caps) and similarly styled windows - windows in the language of the original 1800s building. So far, we can see that Venturi has created an extension that perfectly fits the old gallery - or not. On closer inspection we see he is playing with the typology - note the blind windows, predesigned like that, as opposed to normal windows filled in for some reason later on. The window to the far left even has its bottom frame missing. This experiment of the language, regardless of perfect effects, shows that Venturi is not interested in direct historical architecture; rather he's giving us an impression of the typology of the architecture. Note to the right the columns overlap and merge, yet the form is clearly made out of individual columns forming a cumulative shape, as if you copy-and-pasted them on top of each other on the plans and then just made the damn thing. In a way, this distances Venturi's work from the typology as it shows he can overlook formalities in the old visual language, such as column spacing and functional windows.

It's ironic that the only functional part of the façade - the entrance at the bottom - is simply cut into the wall, with a glass wall behind that. The extension has a resulting odd sculptural quality to it, like it knows what it's trying to say, what it's trying to be, but the language has to be adapted in a foreign way for the shape the architect needs to create. A few blind windows are thrown in for the historicism, but they are merely a reference. Even with all these perversions of 1800s architectural style, most passers-by would not notice the difference (other than the stone looking newer) - I can't comment on whether this is good or not, because I have no idea. Should postmodernist architects like Venturi design to show off their style, or to fit in, with their stylings only visible to critics and experts? I honestly can't say. But I can say that I believe the Sainsbury Wing to be an excellent example of late postmodernist architecture at its best; regardless of my own taste.

Of course, Venturi is also responsible for less rational postmodernist projects such as the Vanna Venturi House (above), devoid of any respect to architectural language, and so postmodern it makes me feel ill, but I'll save that rant for another day, or better yet my own head.

So maybe I haven't yet found a realistic visual language - unless I go find a modernist building or such and examine all its parts, then use them to form a design of my own. Ultimately, a project can't be fully realistic and use the visual language properly unless it's a legitimate piece of architecture, that considers ventilation, light, engineering, environment and intended use as specified by the client. And yes, I can't learn that properly unless I do a degree. But, for now, I feel I've progressed a little in my understanding of how architecture works and how a building comes to be. At this stage, I can't ask for any more.

~ John

Mutual friends

2011-11-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

Warning: very long arty post, mainly for my coursework, ignore

Recently I've been investigating into what the public calls 'modern art', and what everyone apart from the people who made it (and few others) love to hate. I'm one of those few others; I can't get enough of it. Sure, some of it may be stupidly over-the-top, such as Tracey Emin's three rows of bricks and a piece I saw at Reykjavik Art Museum that was simply a square of soil. Then I get fed up with it, because the artists - knowingly or not - are just taking the piss. With modern art, it's not about the effort put into the construction, it's about the idea. Make it contemporary, make it ultra-simple, but it should still lend the viewer a starting-point to understanding what it means (and no, it can't just say 'here I am, make of me what you like'). The artist has a responsibility not only to create the message, but to deliver it. The viewer must not be left in the dark as to what a piece means, or is, by the artist thinking they should be 'mysterious', or rather, pretentious. Artists shouldn't be selfish gits that go around creating high-brow shit no one else understands. If no-one gets a bit of art, then the artist is a bad one. He's failed in delivering what he's trying to say. Ergo, the art is bad.

This is something I've learnt first-hand. My favourite photography set, Resort (above), which I obsessed over so much while making it in Cyprus and afterwards, is evidence that art cannot be too self-contained, as then it fails to reach out to the viewer. Anyone I've shown Resort to doesn't understand it, and at first I thought - selfishly - that it was because they either would never understand it, or because it requires a lot of time looking over it and reading the description to 'get it'. But I was wrong; the art simply wasn't accessible. No matter how long they stared at it, or who I showed it to, Resort would just be a bunch of photos of cubes with a bullshitty write-up that didn't mean anything. Could this problem be solved by a better write-up? No, not really, because the pretentious, 'leaving it to the imagination' attitude of the write-up was reflected in the photos themselves. They were unclear - despite a title saying 'broken shape', the photo didn't really show a very broken shape. Therefore the art was imperfect (as my work always is), and faulted, and bad art. So, I move on and learn from my mistakes.

Harmen de Hoop - 2 Goats

Anywho, my most recent arty findings have been the street artist Harmen de Hoop, whose work I love more than my unborn kids. Its irony and 'fuck you'-ness to everyday society and urbanity is beautiful. I'd love to do something in his style for my A-level, but it requires a lot of work, and it's illegal, so I decided to try something in the style of Erwin Wurm instead.

Erwin Wurm, One Minute Scultpures

Erwim Wurm is the high priest of living, temporary sculptures. His set One Minute Sculptures was made at a meeting he had at a gallery about a possible exhibition. He took none of his work with him, and instead created sculptures using the people in the meeting and the objects in the room. It's a fantastic study of immediacy and the everyday, though some of the results are, admittedly, dull. You win some, you lose some. That's part of the fun in such quick, simple sculptures.

Last week, not part of my A-level assignment but just out of my own curiosity and inspiration, I tried a similar thing. Here's the idea (and just go with me on it): I took six people from my art class, three boys and three girls. I compiled data on how many mutual friends (ie. friends in common) they had on Facebook with each other. I then put them together in a space and attached strings between all of them. The length of the string between a pair was inversely proportional to the number of mutual friends they had. Thus, those with more mutual friends - and in close social circles (according to Facebook) - were forced to be closer to each other by the short string between them. Everyone had strings connected to everyone else, just like they have a relationship with everyone else, of some sort or another. I then left the six people, strung to each other, and told them to untangle themselves. Whether this could be done or not was not the point; they just had to get themselves into the most comfortable position that suited them all.

The results were, for me in my little weird way, fascinating. I took some photos of the - er - event, which don't do it justice, but they're good enough for me to analyse what was really going on, and what the problems with it were.

The first issue that needs examination concerning the 'mutual friends experiment' is that of what it actually is, medium-wise. Is it a performance? Not really, as there was no intended audience other than myself and my own interests, and I only took photos to analyse afterwards, not to display in some gallery or show off on the internet. I will discuss the role of photography in this project later, but for now I want to define exactly what I composed: not a performance, it was more of a controlled, choreographed occurance, an event, a happening; that explored this social network we find ourselves tied up in. This, of course, throws up issues with whether it's art at all, or simply some sort of small social experiment. Unlike Wurm's One Minute Scultpures, the project cannot be shown in one photo: it was not still, rather it was dynamic, a mutation, an evolution of relationships and positions in a localised area (it's important to note the localisation here mentioned; the experiment was very small and controlled). Thus, it is not art that can be quantified into a medium for distribution and showing to viewers in a gallery - does that make it bad art, according to the rule mentioned above? No, I don't think so - though it may be faulted in its own ways, which we will discuss later, it should not automatically be considered bad art. At the time of its occurance, it was effective in showing the relationships and how they change in the five minutes or so the experiment lasted for, so it is at least decent art. And, to avoid further discussion, I will call this art because I believed it to be art - and believed myself to be the artist - when making it. (of course this raises issues about whether something can be art when it is defined as art, and whether this is makes it proper art, but I will leave those for another discussion)

The results are fascinating, because the participants reacted to their relationships as they would do normally, true to their personalities, those which had got them the number of mutual friends in the first place. I realised confidence is key to this sort of social integration, or at least having the confidence to add a person on Facebook, and thus those in the 'middle' of the group (as soon created by the shortness of the strings between them) were more confident and were joking and messing around in the centre of the network. Their strings were pulled more often and they were able to deal with this: their positions in the experiment and their own personalities were the same, as of course they are both of the same person, and this showed in the experiment.

Similarly, those who had fewer mutual friends with the others - though not necessarily less confident - were able to have some free movement and some distance from the core of the network, afforded by their longer strings. This meant they weren't as involved in the main happenings of the rest, and it was at that point that I realised the incredible duality between the experiment and the real social network, Facebook-centred or otherwise.

Despite these insights that the experiment/artwork/occurance provided, there were three important problems that I need to identify here:

Firstly, the actual setup of the artwork does not lend itself to being useful in anything other than this write-up. The background was distracting and the photos themselves were low-quality and useless to show the entire experiment. Perhaps a video, or a larger set of photos, would better show the entirey of the project. Also, setting up the experiment again in a whitewashed, gallery-like room would show it to be more artistic (as I am adamant to define it as art), and what is actually going on would be clearer. Clarity is key to such a complex idea as this one - and if you think the idea itself is not particularly complex, then at least realise it can be difficult to see what is actually going on.

Secondly, there are problems with this technique of 'joining' people, with the strings that represent the relationships. Many of the measurements were very similar - people tended to have 130-ish mutual friends with each other, and as a result a lot of the strings were similar in length. This is, of course, accurate to the data collected but whether it shows the true relationship is unclear (more on that later). Additionally, the final lengths of the strings were skewed or wrong due to my compensating for the ends of the string to go round the participants' wrists. 25cm on either end was added to the calculated measurement to create a length to wrap around the pair's wrists. However, the 25cm measurement was a rough estimate when wrapped once round my wrist, and each of the six people wrapped the string round their wrists in different ways, thus ruining my attempted standardisation and skewing the results. Though they may not have been altered too much, I still feel like my job as controller of the artwork was not successfully carried out.

Thirdly and lastly, there remains the large problem of the numbers themselves, and the problems with judging relationships on the number of mutual friends on Facebook. Different people add different amounts of people on Facebook, as aforementioned - and though this may be representative of their character, there is still a lot to be said about people who could have a lot of friends but don't use Facebook much, so have few. Who you actually meet and who you actually are friends with is, of course, vastly different from who's in your Facebook friends list and as a result the string relationships were inaccurate. It also failed to take into account the actual closeness of the relationships, and instead concentrated on those who were in the same social circles and groups. For example, Ellie and Grace - very good friends since they met at the start of term - ironically had the fewest friends in common, and the longest string between them was not an accurate portrayal of their real friendship. I hope to amend this in further artworks.

The final thing to discuss in relation to this artwork/social experiment, which still lacks a name until further exploration of its themes, is the role of photography in its medium. As you may know, I've been struggling to find photography that reaches a higher level beyond just observational, shoot-what's-there photography. In this project, photography is not the central medium, and it's simply something I used to record the events and placements of people for my own dissection after the artwork occurred; it's not actually doing anything other than recording, and even then it's not intended for public viewing. Of course, this raises issues with how the artwork could be 'shown off' at all, but most importantly it shows how I'm using photography to record, and to observe - exactly the thing I've been trying to avoid! Despite its observational nature, photography is of course not the primary medium of this project and thus it should not be seen as an observational work. Still, it marks another step in the progression of what I believe photography to be for in art.

And there you have it; that's what I've been up to recently, explained in fine detail. I'm going to continue this relationships/'dynamic sculpture' experiment by changing the controlling factor of the length of the strings, and then maybe using other elements to physically represent the relationships. We'll see what the future brings.

~John

Denmark, again

2011-10-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

Evening all! Last night I returned home from my favourite country in the world - Denmark! (wow didn't see that coming.) Cynicism aside, it was brilliant to be back there, even for just a week, and to help explain what my trip consisted of, I've taken a photo of the books and leaflets I collected while there. I'll take you through them quickly:

1. This little, covered up magazine was free at the Fritz Hansen place in Illums Bolighus, so I thought I would pinch one to obsess over in England. Fritz Hansen is a Danish furniture distributor that owns a lot of Jacobsen pieces, and Illums Bolighus is a massive furniture store. Basically, heaven (for me). Dozens of Danish designs and design classics for you to sit in and marvel at the price tags. It's a brilliant shop, if you're into that sort of thing. They also have Vitra, Muuto and Iittala sections. For most people those are just words but for me they mean one thing: awesome design. And mainly Scandinavian too, so I'm not complaining.

2. Next up is another free handout, this time an info leaflet from Arken Museum. Yeah, remember Arken? I visisted it last time I was in Denmark, and returned this year to see what was new. The main exhibition was some Warhol thing, but Warhol annoys me with his imperfections and useless pop culture references, so I gave that about two minutes then left it in search of something a bit more challenging. And I found it - in Olafur Eliasson's experiential piece 'The Blind Passenger' which took up the length of the museum's main hall. Here it is:

Yeah, it's a big box. But it's what's inside the box that counts (book by its cover and all that) - after a scary warning sign on the door, you enter the installation and it's full of fine smoke and atmospheric lights. With low visibility and your hands struggling to find the walls, you walk through the box. You walk through several colours of light, experiencing the artwork and the atmosphere, then emerge out the other end of the box, quite changed. It's a fantastic piece of art and, though it doesn't have anything to say beyond commenting on our senses and experiences, it was worth several visits. Arken is a top-class modern art gallery (ignoring Warhol), it's just a shame they don't change what's on show very often.

3. One of the major finds of my trip to Copenhagen turned out to be something English - the creative review magazine It's Nice That is the publication version of the It's Nice That blog. I've been reading the blog now for over a year, and it's an excellent way to find fresh photography, art and graphic design talent and is brilliantly curated. The magazine - which I spied on the shelf of an Urban Outfitters shop in Stroget (ironic how I find myself buying a magazine I could buy in England in a shop I could buy from in England) - is a bound version of the blog with a few interviews and articles thrown in. It's a great mag, but I think I'll stick to reading the blog because it's quite pricey. I got it on discount, but I wouldn't buy it for its usual ~£10 price. Sorry guys.

4. & 5. As part of my visit, We went to the Danish Design School to talk to an admissions representative to see if I could get in. The result of the meeting was thus: it's gonna be damn hard to get in to the college, but here's some booklets anyway. I'd need to be fluent and pass some Studieproven test, etc etc, so it's not looking good in that respect, but these booklets are great and very contemporary. The work of DDS students inside is equally good, of course.

6. Last time I was in the Danish Design Centre, I picked up my design bible - a book about Jacobsen. Second time around, I bought a book about Panton. Might as well bulk out my bookshelves, at the moment they're looking a little too empty of decent design books and a little too full of Wallpaper magazines. This book seems to be a lot more about Panton's design philosophies rather than his life and complete works, but I don't mind, I'm not such an avid fan of his work as I am Jacobsen's.

7. I also returned to Det Kongelige Bibliotek - the royal library - and its extension, the Black Diamond (yeah, remember?) to sample some coffee and some photography. I hit gold with the library's current exhibition, a collection of urban sets by Gregory Crewdson, the centerpiece: Beneath the Roses, a set about the loneliness and dischord of suburban American life:

The photography has a similar perspective to the stories of Raymond Carver (who I've recently studied and appreciated in my English class), and the paintings of Edward Hopper (ie. Nighthawks, which I love), so it's no wonder this exhibition was music to my ears (in a photography way). The set Beneath the Roses, especially, drew out the bland anonymity of 70s American suburbia... remind you of anything? A certain album I have obsessed over? Yeah, though the set is not totally similar to The Suburbs, they have common ground. Just another coincidence about this exhibition. Yeah, I loved it.

8. The final thing in this photo (yeah, scroll back up to see it) is a bit of a strange one. And a boring one to most of you. Because, recently, I've become drawn to postmodernism, the design, art and architectural style of the 70s, 80s and early 90s, the time when designers etc. put a middle finger up to dull modernism and tried something different. Normally, I'd hate postmodernism, but I'm beginning to appreciate its justifications and reasons (mainly the emergence of the inefficient, thoughtless boilerplate modernism in the 70s) - though I still don't like the work itself. This book should help with my understanding of postmodernism, or at least that was my thinking.

And that's it! That was Denmark! Oh yeah, one final thing: when I was there, I turned a corner and bumped into one of my favourite buildings, Jacobsen's Danmarks Nationalbank. I always thought it was placed somewhere out in the Danish countryside, or in a Copenhagen suburb, but it turns out it was right in the city centre. It's got an acute angle on this corner, which stops it being as boring as it might be with a right angle, which was good to see. Jacobsen, you jammy dodger.

~John

Learning to drive

2011-10-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

Good evening to you all. I'm in a good mood because, well, it's my birthday! I'd be cynical and rant on about how we get so excited about birthdays but they're just some stupid biological event (and not even that), and a step closer to death or something else Kafkaesque, but I don't want to spoil the mood so I'll leave you to read last year's post about that.

OK, onto this year. Being 17 means, mainly, that I can drive - and drive I will! Lessons, then the test, then the provisional license, then I'll be able to go wherever I like, once the extortionate insurance is sorted out. And, on that thought, I'm reminded of an analogy used in Arcade Fire's 'In the Backseat'. Sure, I'm getting way too obsessed with this band, but hear me out: the song uses the analogy of sitting in the backseat of a car to not have responsibility and control over your life. Learning to drive is you preparing yourself for being in charge of your own life, having your own problems, etc. In the song, Régine sings 'I don't have to drive / I don't have to speak / I can watch the countryside'; and this is exactly how it is. Kids, even teenagers, are led through their young lives by their parents, the 'driver', and simply need to enjoy the ride. This motif is repeated in 'The Suburbs', with 'in the suburbs I / I learned to drive' - adolescence is the period in your life when you start to take responsibility and control over yourself.

Anyway, back on topic, that's how I feel. That these new abilities like learning to drive are opening my life up into what it will eventually be, and I can't wait. Sure, there's all that fiddling around with money that I've yet to worry about properly, but other than that, adult life sounds brilliant. Plus, I'd be out of this goddamn school and doing what I love. Exactly what that will be, I haven't yet decided. Design is looking awfully good right now, since I discovered postmodernism (tasteless but very interesting).

In all honesty, I've done very little in the way of creative stuff since I started sixth form in September. That's one and half months, and I've barely touched my Lego, that second Suspension scene looking as far off as ever, let alone another bit of architecture. Design sketches have become few and far between, as, I'm sure you've noticed, have blog posts; but change is change. Simply put, I have a lot more in my life and something has to temporarily shift to make room. Not that I haven't been productive at all; I created a whole lot of school club posters a few weeks ago, and last weekend mocked up a website design, and I've signed up to do graphic design and set design for many school productions and events that seem too far off into the future to satisfy my excitement.

That's really all I have by means of an excuse, either for few blog posts or the lack of Suspension additions. Half term's next week but even that won't give me much time to make a start on the second scene, as I'm off to Denmark for four days to sample universities and open sandwiches and such. I've been learning Danish at St Catherine's Church in London, so it will also give me a chance to try out my Daneglish.

Before I go, here's a picture I drew of how this evening went down, mainly as a thank-you to people on Facebook for 'remembering' my birthday:

Yeah, I know it's crap, that's part of the humour of it. I think. Basically, don't take it seriously. I don't.

~ John

Flatlands, 2011

2011-10-11T12:34:00.000-07:00

Long time no see, avid JOHNSPACE readers (ha ha, I'm making jokes already). A lot has happened since I last blogged and annoyingly you've caught me on another bad evening. Oh fun. Anywho, I figured I'd break my blogging silence and show you some photos of Iceland I got back from the developer after a few months of the negatives presumably sitting on their desk, and they eventually thought "gee, I guess we'd better develop and scan this for our only film customer". Nonetheless it's back in my grubby hands and I've got a short post of photographs to show you of my travels.

Firstly, let's get the title sorted with. I've called this short photoset 'Flatlands', which may seem odd if you know what Iceland is: a country full of mountains, glaciers and volcanoes. And yeah, it is odd. But I wanted to aim for something that didn't just state the obvious; something to use over 'land of hot and cold' or something cliché like that. So how to be different? Well, why not give it a misnomer that has some sort of meaning and things should be more interesting - hence 'Flatlands'. Yeah, it's a crappy reason for a title, but I like to think of it as 'social flatlands' or 'flatlands of civilisation', because socially Iceland is a barren rock. It does have a culture, of course, and enough nightclubs in Reykjavik to keep the country's population of 300,000 busy on a friday night - but in terms of the sprawl and the interconnected civilisation I know well, Iceland is lacking. Nearly half of its population lives in the capital, Reykjavik, or its suburbs. Other than that, it's hard for towns to really get their size up due to a barren, almost outback-like landscape and a small population that isn't too bothered in growing. It's this sort of whimsical happiness, combined with a historical cultural pessimism, that makes Iceland such a strange place. But I'm not complaining; with exports like Sigur Rós, Björk and clothing brand Vík Prjónsdottír, it's hard not to like the Icelanders.*

Anyway, on to my photos from my trip there. We stayed in a hotel in Reykjavik but I won't show you any pictures of the capital other than this one - because, to be honest, it was crappy; or at least the area we were in. A Hotel Björk, ironically. Reykjavik, though practical and the centre of all Icelandic civilisation, is essentially a bunch of houses, some nice shops and restaurants, and some offices. There's not much more to it, though we did visit Reykjavik Art Museum, which was... interesting. Modern art; I'll say no more.

The real Iceland, the bit you have to see if you're going there, the bit I loved, was the geography. There are countless national parks full of geysers, glaciers and volcanoes, but if you're stationed in the capital the best thing to do is travel along Route 1 and into Þingvellur National Park. Route 1, an unending and well-kept road that extends out of Reykjavik across the south of the country, was expectedly dull. But hey, there's always Icelandic radio to cheer you up on a long car journey (insert sarcasm here). Route 1 took us through the 'towns' of Hveragerði, Selfoss, Hella and Hvolsvöllur. I say 'towns' because, though marked on the map as major settlements, they were barely villages. Selfoss was the largest of the four and even that wasn't much; enough to have a Bónus supermarket and a few cheap cafés. But it gets worse; don't expect to find anything in the coastal town of Stokkseyri other than a closed-down ghost museum. Huh.

Þingvellur offered a lot of interesting sights, but if you travel out a bit more you can get to Geysir - the original geyser. Old Faithful's got nuthin on Geyir, unless you're measuring size or power, in which case Old Faithful trumps the Icelandic offering. Even still, Geysir is where we get the word 'geyser' from.

Also out somewhere east of Þingvellur are a few huge waterfalls: Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss (above). I'm usually not swayed by the spectacle of huge amounts of water dropping into some pool naturally, but Skógafoss got my attention. It's just so... pretty. Awesome in the original sense of the word. Huge, natural, wet.

Anyway, waterfall obsessions aside, I took a few other photos of the small farmhouses and barns scattered around Route 1 - one small clump of houses (no, it wasn't a village, not even by Icelandic standards) had a tiny white chapel. On the door was the key in an envelope, with a sign saying 'lock the door on your way out'. It was these details I loved the most.

Well, this post was shit. I was trying so hard to steer it away from being a journal entry that I ended up leaving out all the interesting 'where my curiosity took me' stuff. Ah well, at least I got the photos up on the blog. I can't guarantee when I'll post again, let's hope it's this month.

kthxbai,
~ John

* ps. yeah, I love the language. Can you tell?

Max, Moritz and cubes under the sun

2011-09-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

Today, after yet more weeks without posting, I bring you a four-in-one post. Sixth Form started with a bang, and things have been manic recently but I wanted to slip this post in before September ends. Tomorrow I'm off to Swindon, and to the STEAM exhibition for the third year running, to show off some JOHN Collection catalogues (below) and have a good time. That is, if we exclude the two-hour train journey each way.

Below you can see the four pieces of print design in question:

And to shed a little light on what I've been up to recently (other than going to school, listening to too much Vampire Weekend and wishing I had more time to sleep), I'm going to show you round these four items of print design, if you care to join me.

The JOHN Collection 3 Everyone knows the JOHN Collection, right? And most of them know my third catalogue, released in June this year. The second catalogue and a preview of the third were well received at STEAM last year, so I thought to show off this completed one, I'd get them professionally printed from Lulu.com. Though the interior pages are matte (which subtly annoys me), the rest of the printing is perfect and the cover is so shiny I almost don't want to leave it for all the little kids to finger. At least I'll please Pete Reid, who complained about my string binding last year. Here's a sample from the pages inside:

Yeah, awesome, right? Now they're arranged into page spreads you can appreciate the bars at the top and bottom that line up, and it looks much more professional. So, if you're heading to STEAM tomorrow, come check these out and introduce yourself.

Max und Moritz Book Cover This small orange book, also printed by Lulu but perfect-bound instead of stapled (and how lovely the spine looks, too), was a small piece of design I did for my ever-patient friend Peter. The book is a full translation of a lengthy German children's poem, accompanied by some German children's songs and enough prefaces (or Vorworts) to keep you entertained for hours. Wit aside, I was originally obsessed with this professionally printed realisation of my design - I just love having it there to hold in your hand - but the real genius of this book is its contents. The German Jamboree club at my school (coloquialised 'gerjam') has put an awful lot of work into this book and it's brilliant, I doubt any other school has produced something so concise and so ambitious. It's going on sale at the school's open day tomorrow and I hope it sells well; it's definitely worth it.

A snapshot of the inside of the book - I had originally wanted to do the inside page design too, but Peter has done it perfectly himself and I'm happy I ended up not doing it. The illustrations here are from the original poem, and I adapted one for the front cover design. The book is over 100 pages long.

Maths Extension Classes advertising This week I've been hard at work in the evenings. No, not doing homework - but I fitted that in, miraculously - but completing a whole set of posters for various school maths clubs and societies in preparation for Open Day tomorrow. My favourite of the designs is that for the Year 13 Mathematics Extension Classes. The name's a mouthful, and I can't say the classes sound like much fun, but I struck upon a cube idea for the poster:

And decided to apply the muted colours to a real-life cube (a little bit of 'Resort' slipping in there). The advertising cube, though totally useless, is very pretty and I made one to sit on my shelf. The colours are really faded in comparison to the poster above, so the grey is white and the red more like a baby pink, but it's understated and bold, and I like it. I used Futura bold on the poster and cube, and in a way I feel like I've betrayed the font's hipsterness by using it for a maths poster, but at least it will turn some heads.

'Resort' booklet Finally, I can show this to the world (or rather, the dozen people who read this blog). After a brief fuck-up from my developers Bonusprint, and several weeks elapsing, I got the second roll of 'Resort' photos back and put them all into a booklet that no one other than myself understands. I'm going to send it off to some blogs or galleries in hope that someone else will understand what I'm trying to say, but first the booklet needs to be reprinted; this one is a mess.

Check this post for all the info about 'Resort', but I'll quote the arty-farty summary that I put in the front of the booklet:

'Resort' is a 7-piece photographic project. It explores the point at which man and his environment meet, and where man's urges to repress and perfect abuses the very elements he creates with.

Or, in layman's terms, the photoset is about people stressing and forcing and breaking natural elements when they try to make stuff (eg. a holiday resort). The cubes and other shapes represent these 'perfect' forms that people force the natural elements into. The irony of this project being completed in a holiday resort - other than that people are striving for a perfect environment for relaxation while the elements are stressed - the natural elements are the focus of the place! The resort is about enjoying the geography and landscape of the area, yet restricts it by being built there! Oh the delicious irony!

There is a brief blurb about me in the back. Because I have to have some credit, guys!

Anyway, there's my two cents. Or rather, four. I hope this pleases you and keeps you happy until I next have a chance to blog. October is soon arriving, and looks set to be a busy month (if September was anything to go by) - including my birthday and a half term when I'm off to Denmark to sample universities. Hoorah.

Have a good October y'all,
~ John

Starting a Culture War

2011-09-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

To follow up on yesterday's post, which I'd had written for weeks but couldn't publish because the video was being a bitch, I wanted to show you some of the behind-the-scenes stuff about Culture War. I was originally going to take you through the shooting of the film, but aside from that being very boring I thought I would be ruining the final product by explaining how I had to cut corners here and what scenes I missed how there, so I'm going to stay away from the particulars.

Firstly, I'd like to draw your attention to the titles:

I've talked about the titles before, but I thought I should include another mention of them here because - after I had the inspiration from the song - they were the first thing I made for this film. Sitting around waiting for people to reply to my pleas for their help to act in the film, I was so hyped about the project that I made hand-drawn titles, based off the typography of the album's cover art. They were drawn on the thickest card I could find (to prevent it bleeding through) with a Letraset Promarker - an unusually undigital approach for me. I quite enjoyed hand-drawing them, though, and I think they look right. Here's one of the many sheets I scanned in for the titles:

As you can see, the composition of the titles themselves was handled in Photoshop; I simply drew the words and characters on the paper then manipulated them digitally. When the hand-drawn titles weren't going my way (that goddamn S was a nightmare), I also experimented with different digital typefaces (below). The only one that I would have possibly used is the first, Akzidenz Grotesk condensed. The hand-drawn characters were partially based off that, too.

I got maybe a little to excited about this project, and could barely sleep one night, I was so inspired. It was just one of those ideas that I wanted to get done as soon as possible - and had the means to do so. Like Suspension. But Suspension took a week, and due to logistical problems, the need for ten actors and reshoots, Culture War took two weeks. Still a very short timespan. It makes me wonder what I could make with longer holidays - one thing's for sure, I'd be able to go back for more reshoots. There are some parts of Culture War that annoy me a little because I see where I directed wrong. But hey, I said I wouldn't talk about that, so let's move on. Here's a ticklist I made while still incensed with the idea in the first few days:

That was back when I was using my friend Ant as the main character - in fact, I shot the bit at the start on the bus with him first, then he got a haircut and went on holiday right when I needed to shoot the rest of the film, so I reshot the start with Matt, and he was just as good - probably better - in the part. Note also that I originally wanted 20 actors, and got 10. In a way I think fewer is better (or easier to direct), but I'll never know for sure.

Above are some of the pages of planning I did for the film. The first page was my first start at storyboarding - still with Ant as the main character, you can see - but after a while I gave up on storyboarding and instead planned out what would happen in each of the mini scenes (second page). The red stuff is my reminder of what to film in the reshoot - bits to film again, bits to add in, bits to do because the battery of my camera died before we could complete the fight scene on the first night. I stuck quite close to that list, helpfully.

And there you have it; a look at what I did for this film. I hope you all enjoyed it - here's the link again - and have a nice September, I'll try to blog when I can but school starts tomorrow, so, bleugh.

~John

'Culture War'

2011-09-03T13:41:00.000-07:00

School starts soon, so what better way to end the summer than with a film I made weeks ago, Culture War. You have no idea how hyped I've been about it, ever since I had the idea, and it's brilliant to finally get it online after so many failed attempts, and being as pleased with it as I am at the moment. Sure, it's not perfect - there were other bits I'd have liked to film, and some which I couldn't include - but the final outcome is best it could be with the amount of shooting I did. It's crazy to think the entire project - from conception to final edit - took me two weeks (it was the exporting and uploading that delayed its public release). This was one of those inspirations that I had to act on, and fast. Like Suspension.

So here's the video:

I understand the video doesn't explain some things, and that was half the point. I wasn't aiming to create something simple and boring like a commercial music video, rather something that explained less and left open the possibility for more.

It's set to the Arcade Fire song 'Culture War' from 'The Suburbs (Deluxe Version)', and I really wanted to use themes and concepts from both the song and its enclosing album, but the main problem with Culture War is that its name and many of its lyrics are centered on American culture and politics - 'culture war' is a term used to refer to the political friction between the north and south of America, the liberal and traditional values, or so Wikipedia tells me. The song also mentions 'the southern strategy', yet another lyric I can't include due to my location in England.

So I was forced to ignore some of the more political of the song's themes and concentrate on others, specifically the repeated 'We'll be soldiers for you, mommy and dad / in your culture war' lyrics. I focused on this theme of the sad corruption of kids, made to fight maybe not directly for their parents, but for the values and beliefs that their parents had forced upon them. It's a sense of world-weariness ('now the future's looking at me / like a vision from the past') and propaganda that would be better placed in 'Neon Bible' than 'The Suburbs' if it were not for that sound so distinctive of the latter album.

I feel I must say something here regarding the fight at the end of the video, the climax. It may seem unimaginative and immature to interpret 'Culture War' as being a physical, literal fight - obviously Arcade Fire intended for the 'war' to be metaphorical. However, considering that the song - like all the others on the album - is told from the perspective of an adult, and I only have teens to work with, I wanted to focus on the youths in question. And the best way, I thought, to show the corruption of these modern kids was to show them physically fighting each other. The film is intended to be enjoyable to watch, but I still wanted the fight to make for uneasy viewing. The discord between the violent, immediate imagery and the more wistful and saddened sound of the song were intentional.

Don't think I like making violent films - I don't. I'm no Tarantino, nor am I one of those teen filmmakers bent on making homages to Shaun of the Dead. I really didn't like the idea of such violence in my film, but I think - looking at the film as a whole - it is both justified and necessary. Having taken the lyrics literally, I now see why Spike Jonze made the 'Suburban War' mentioned in the album a literal war for his film Scenes from the Suburbs. Sometimes the most obvious imagery is the most effective.

'The Suburbs' has been a constant source of creative inspiration for me ever since its release, and I feel I owe it a lot - not only for being a work of art in itself, but for also opening my eyes to music as I'd never understood before. I've always wanted to make something Suburbs-related, and I think that with Culture War I've made my peace with the album. I've finally given something back.

~John

A holiday well spent

2011-08-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

After the seemingly unending blah in the last post, I thought I should show you some of my typographic work with a little less backstory. The plane journey and my first few days in Cyprus were spent doing some hand-drawn typographic work. I started on the plane with a few diagonal letters in a didone font (high contrast, a class created by Didot and Bodoni), a result of boredom and being left alone with a Telegraph Magazine for too long in the flight. Doubtless to say I got a few funny looks, but the results were some of the best hand-drawn characters I've made. Serif fonts are much easier than sans-serifs to draw out because the serifs help to balance the letters out and the high contrast between thin and thick strokes is easy to represent with a single pen line as the former.

The first pages, which have no good characters other than a flimsy M and W. I was totally ignorant of the actual form of the N, but we'll see that recitfied later. Also note the wrong emphases on the V and U. Early days.

The next page, and I ventured into unlikely territory for me - lowercase. After a few tries at the holy grail of calligraphy - the g - I realised I was doing it the wrong way round and had a decent try. The j and y also came out nicely, with the strokes smoothly drawn. The older form of the j with the flat tail looks much better than the one with the ball terminal, to me.

The third page, with some successful Ws and an alright f - the ball terminal just needs to be more tucked in under the ascender. Everything else is poor.

After a little more experimentation, here are some of the 'final' results that I put in my Moleskine:

Some of the basic letters - unfortunately I achieved a better W in the first drawings, but ah well.

Some lowercase letters, using the diagonal top strokes on the bodies of the n, k and i which I was pleased with. The curve on the n is kinda awkward, though.

After some more drawings of Ns and squinting at the Telegraph Magazine (which uses a didone font in its titles) I realised that the bottom-right corner of the letter was a point, not seriffed as previously thought. That realised, I created a decent N and an M to go with it.

So those were my typographic doodles last week. I also did some drawings of cubes and shapes in isometric, which didn't turn out too well:

But which happily led to the geometric shapes in 'Resort', which turned out very well (or should do when the film is developed). Here's one of many pages of planning I did for the project; this one mainly covers the shapes I made for the photoset and the nets involved. For the record, the three-quarter sphere drawn at the bottom didn't work, but was a fun idea.

And that's all I have to show you for now. Have a great end-of-summer and I'll blog again soon!

~John

The expected observer

2011-08-21T12:34:00.000-07:00

Good evening, readers. First I must apologise for the lack of posts this month - as I do almost constantly on this blog - but at least this time there's a reason: it's August! I was in Cyprus last week, trying desperately to get an internet connection at the oddly existent Costa's in the resort, but I didn't prevail (not that I had anything to blog about, anyway). I arrived home in the early hours of this morning and I think it's now time for a quick post to prove I'm not dead. To you, of course - I need no convincing on that matter, thankyouverymuch.

When I got home this morning, the huge pile of mail that had somehow built up in the course of a week was perused, and in its depths was a roll of developed film back from the mysterious people at Bonusprint (whose developing service is no longer on their website so I'm now sending my films out into the blue). This roll contained shots from a evening photoshoot I did with my friend Olly in London way back at the start of the summer, and also a few photos from another London shoot with my friend Olivia. The latter is a long story - it was going to be a Flickr meetup but by the time we got there it had been cancelled, so we decided to do a shoot anyway. So far the results have been great, but I'll leave those photos for another post.

So today, here are some photos from the first London shoot...

I began the shoot with Olly just before it got dark, and with absolutely no plans or ideas. It's an exciting feeling, let me tell you, to not know where you're going with your photography and yet go out for a shoot and just take whatever comes to you. There's no assurance it's going to work, but I was really relying on my creativity to find something new and take me that one step further. Yes, that post is still very relevant, sorry to bring it up again. Olly kept asking me what I wanted to take photos of, where I wanted to go, what I was looking for... and I knew none of the answers to those questions. I just told him I'd go wherever he was heading and hopefully my new idea of photography would form in the course of the evening.

Sadly, it didn't, but I made a start...

Everywhere I went, my as-ever indecpherable curiosity was piqued by the abundance of scaffolding and building works being done in London. Soon enough, an idea started to form about showing London hiding behind all the scaffolding; or perhaps tourists coming to London to see the landmarks and the buildings but they find both are obscured by scaffolding. I called it 'So much for London'. Here are three photos I took when I decided to give that idea a try:

And they're alright. Yeah. The idea's alright, too. It's got something more than aesthetic photography, but even at the time I knew it was not enough. I knew I was trying, but not succeding in pushing the boundaries I so wanted to push. It was more of what I'd deem a GCSE art concept; something that someone's put work into, but it's no professional artwork. Yet, luckily for this idea, the photos aren't purely aesthetic pieces with a meaning sellotaped on for the A* - the idea is the core of the photo, not an accessory.

Later that evening I had the idea of calling the project 'London Behind Bars' and instantly regretted it. Witty the title may be, but it's also unbearably clichéd. That should give you some idea of my attitude to my photography that evening.

Finally, here's a nice neat photo of some 70s architecture. Nothing special, and certainly not art, but a sign there is still a part of my mind which likes a nice bit of composition.

So where is this post leading? Am I still without a clue, lost for a description of the art medium I work with so much? Still searching?

Well, during my week in Cyprus, when I should have been sitting around by the pool and doing sod all, I found myself on the penultimate day bent double over a table, hurriedly making cubes and triangular prisms out of paper. If you don't already know I'm insane, let this be your moment of realisation, because I decided to forget the pool, the beaches, and the rest of the holiday in favour of making some art. Some photography art.

The idea was to bring some attention to the repression of natural materials and nature itself in the construction of the resort I was staying in. Though it may sound conservationalist, don't be fooled into thinking I was making it for the sake of the poor plants (sob sob). The project was borne of an unusual interest (or, for me, just an interest) in geometric shapes, specifically cubes, earlier in the week; combined with my usual dislike of the resort I was staying in. The photoset, called 'Resort', is less about the plants being the rightful owners of the land &c &c, but more about man's unstobbale need to inflict straight edges on the world. Cubes and other such basic shapes are found nowhere in nature, and are a purely human idea - restricted to the perfection achievable only in the human mind.

I'll leave the rest of the details of 'Resort' to when the photos are developed, but I do want to show you something important regarding what photography is to me. I was writing up the many ideas and meanings of 'Resort' that were fighting in my head for most of the week (no matter how school-ish write-ups are, this one was infinitely helpful to the final photos), and was suddenly struck with an understanding of what 'Resort' was, photography-wise:

The medium [of photography in 'Resort'] is beyond simple photography and in fact the project is more modern art than conventional photography, sensing that with so many years of good photography consisting of stretching the truth visually, photography has become an expected observer and in fact it is the raw contents of the photo that need to be the focus, not the manipulation of the medium itself.

And then it all made sense. Photography, for now at least, makes sense to me. I realised the London shoot was unsuccessful because stepping up to the next stage meant abandoning purely observational photography - there had to be some form of setup to achieve the meaning and effectiveness of the art. The other realisation was that of the 'expected observer', which, on understanding it, calmed my problems. The attitudes are threefold:

Photography has become commonplace. People don't look at a photo and think about the technicalities of its medium; it is now totally normal to have such an accurate image of reality, as opposed to the paintings beforehand.
Therefore we must strive to no longer focus on the medium and format of photography itself - that is a given, just as the brushstrokes and canvas of a painting are a given. The contents of the photo must be its core, rather than the manipulation of the medium (ie. Photoshop).
The benefit of photography as a medium over paintings nowadays is that they are expected to be true and to show real things how they really are (if you wish to create something visually abstract then you can do it in a painting or other format). Thus, we can mould the emotions of the viewer by this preconviction that the photo will portray real occurrences. One interpretation of this is in favour of observational work, focusing on what really exists rather than the manipulation of photos of what exists. The other interpretation is what 'Resort' is - using photography to capture real-life 'sculptures' and occurrences that have been set up to mean something artistically. The user will therefore be more inclined to see the artwork as realistic and true (which may throw up a useful contrast with the surreality of the 'sculpture' itself). Photography's part in such a project is merely to capture it for the sake of the end viewer.

And with that, everything made sense to me. I was - and still am - satisfied with photography once again. How long this satisfaction will last, I don't know, but for now those uncertainties are silenced. Stay tuned for more posts, including one showing my short film 'Culture War' and another, eventually, showing 'Resort'.

~John

Three snippets of graphic design

2011-08-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

Hello, it's August. I'm ill, but up to this point productive so I thought I should use my plenteous time to make a blog post. My current musical obsession (other than the ever-present Arcade Fire) is Fleet Foxes' second album 'Helplessness Blues', so for the very few who give a shit, I'll inform you that it's playing while I write this post. Below are three little bits of graphic design that I've made in the past few weeks, and their justification and backgrounds.

1. LØRSKEAIR BOARDING PASS After a few weeks of no progress on Suspension - not even further developments on the first beta-only scene - I returned to the graphic design of its location, the citystate of Lørske, and designed a national airline. LørskeAir is based on a simple blue, grey and white colour scheme with a strong emphasis on symbols and simplistic graphics (you know me) because 'who says flying has to be a hassle?'. Above is the back of the boarding pass (airplane ticket), with three little pictures of how to use said ticket. The first shows an Oyster card-esque scan-for-entry idea, which is a progression on current plane tickets (because Suspension is set in the future), the second warns you to keep your ticket close at hand, and the third is your usual luggage pass thing.

Obviously you can see that my holiday is coming up, fast, so my attention turned to airport and airline design, and I really love the systems of it. I remember a designer said in an interview in the film Helvetica said his dream was to design the signage for an airport, and I really understand why. The film also showed me David Carson's frustratingly messy and unorganised design, but my anti-postmodernism rant is best saved for another post.

As for LørskeAir's placement in the game, I haven't decided on it yet. Obviously it would have a constant presence, with posters (see below) on walls and people with boarding passes in their houses/wallets, which you can find. I'm also thinking along the lines of a mysterious flight that went missing, and clues pointing to its whereabouts and details, but that's yet another subplot that I shouldn't indulge in. Still, it would be good to get the branding in there somewhere, considering there's no possibility of the player coming across Lørske City Airport (because, just, no).

2. LØRSKEAIR POSTER Here is a poster for the previously mentioned LørskeAir, continuing the branding of the airline and also incorporating the logo I designed - the circular thing in the bottom-left. You can't see it much here but I quite like it. It's intended to show an arrow going through a circle, like a plane's route taking off, but the two elements also look like the letter Ø in the word 'Lørske', so a double-hit of relevance.

For those of you who give even a fraction of a shit about typography, the typeface used in Johnston ITC, which many Londoners may recognise as being the branding face of Transport for London (TfL), so used on trains, tubes and buses around the capital. It has those distinctive diamond-shaped dots on the i and j, and diamond-shaped full stop and comma. I'd usually leave it alone as being too recognisable, but I recently saw it used in Coca Cola's UK Olympic Flame campaign and thought I'd give it a go. And I like it, actually. It has a little more purpose to it than Gill Sans, plus lacks its awful extra-bold weight.

3. CULTURE WAR TITLES I've been working mainly on my latest film, Culture War, this past week. It's coming together and I only need to shoot for another evening then I can get on with editing it. It's a music video to Arcade Fire's song of the same name, so for the titles I wanted to honour the album in my own way. The above picture shows hand-drawn typography by yours truly, similar to the style of 'The Suburbs' album cover, but not identical. I wanted to give the titles my own twist, make them a nod to the album's design but also keep them independent from it. The final titles will not be at an angle as you see above - for me that's a little too close to the original.

Stay tuned for that film sometime in the next week - I'll film the final few bits in a few days' time (need a break after I overworked myself on it yesterday), then take a couple of days to edit, then I'll reveal it to you. I'm quite excited about it, as long as the footage is decent.

Until then,

~John

Evidently, too much spare time

2011-07-30T07:03:00.000-07:00

aka. The Minecraft post, happy now?
aka. July was looking a little bare on this blog and I didn't want to leave it at my Arcade Fire rant*

Though it may seem like I do a lot (oh I make myself laugh sometimes) - or at least this blog gives that idea - I don't. In fact, the percentage of time I spend making stuff like Suspension or working on this new film that you're all gonna love is rather small. But, when I'm not trying to create something new and unique, or creating something unoriginal and generic, I'm on Minecraft.

For those of you who do not yet have Minecraft in your lives (it will come to all of us, with time), Minecraft is the newest fad in indie gaming. Created by Markus 'Notch' Persson and his team of supernormal Swedish codemonkeys at Mojang, Minecraft takes the normal sandbox game one step further, and creates a whole world of cubes - trees made from cubes, dirt cubes, stone cubes, wood cubes, and even animals and monsters made from cubes. Your task? To do whatever you like in this huge world, 'crafting' items and making whatever you want. At night the monsters come and attempt to destroy all that you've achieved in the daytime. It's a genius cycle.

I discovered Minecraft many months ago, bought it, got playing, got my sister playing, she bought it, got my other sister playing, she also bought it, set up a server for us, realised my friends played it, bought server space and then - well - then it was now. I'll admit, I'm obsessed. Minecraft is clever because, as a sandbox game, it means so much to so many people, and can be played in so many ways. My friends, who'd otherwise be slaughtering Nazi zombies (which is still an outdated horror stereotype, no matter how popular) on Call of Dull Gameplay, can enjoy killing the many monsters (zombies (not of the Nazi type), skeletons, and the dreaded creepers) and making fortresses. My sisters, on the other hand, can make their cottages and little ponds and have a nice U-rated time, provided they keep away from the monsters.

But the reason I love the game so much is its flexibility. I can make almost anything I want, and what I usually want to make is towns. Cities. Little hamlets. Houses. Civilisation, interconnected and planned and realistic. There's just something about designing a town that I enjoy - it takes design one step further from architecture and two steps further from furniture design. Screw designing a living space, why not design a living space for the living spaces? A place where both people and design interact, constantly, but there's more people than in a single house.

And that's my justification for Johnsborg:

Johnsborg is my hub - it was the first and largest town I built. It started with the ugly castle on the hill (I didn't know how to make stone at the time, derp) and the buildings and roads spilled into the valley below. I'm trying to make it a natural and cohesive town, and trying to make use of all the land I have rather than building huge houses really far away. I like the idea of a town (though I prefer to think of Johnsborg as a city in relation to the smaller settlements I've made) being centred on one feature, be it a geographical feature such as a lake or hill, or a man-made feature such as a castle. A settlement needs sometime to sprawl out from, otherwise it's just a cluster of small houses surrounding nothing in particular.

I began Johnsborg in February and have been building upon it since, but I'm slowly running out of inner-city space, especially since the land next to the castle itself is bloody annoying to work with since it's so steep. I will occasionally change the landscape but I don't like it looking fake, so that land will be left as-is for now.

Of course, if I spent all my time on Johnsborg city centre I might go a little mad (or more mad than I currently am). I love town-making for its systems and consistencies, such as using the same roads (two-wide of stone half-blocks) and including similar features in every town on the road map. Above you can see the single Johnsborg suburb, set into a small clearing to one side of the town itself. On the left you can see a bus stop - there are no buses in Minecraft nor will there be in the conceivable future, but placing a bus stop in each settlement on my road network gives it all a sense of interconnectivity and realism. The identical houses and dullness of this suburb were half my desire to make a 'kit house' that could be copied indefinitely, and half a result of listening to 'The Suburbs' too many times.

Also in Johnsborg - but a bit closer to the castle itself this time - is the district of Newtown (top picture, above), my attempt at creating a tall, claustrophobic, dislikable area with an underground market inspired by a trip to Camden (haters gonna hate). The bottom picture shows a small square (or plaza, or plads) at night, located to the back of the castle, called Johnsø Square, which features an angle statue identical to the one on the far-off island of Johnsø - a gift to the city and a reminder of other settlements.

But anyway, let's move on to other shit I built.

All roads and towns are properly signposted out of my obsessive need to organise.

Follow the coast and you'll go past Johnsworth Farm, then keep going and you'll reach a stretch of coastline I like to call the Gravel Coast (I like naming things, get over it) because, funnily enough, it's made of gravel. Here I spent a little while making a little village: Lørske. Though sharing a name with the citystate in which Suspension is set, it's hardly large. In fact, it's not large. At all. It has a town hall and a shop and a few houses. My intentions with Lørske were to make a realistic village - there is a house for the owner of the shop and a house for the owner of the café, then a town hall for those two to converse in. There's also a little wooden archway into the town which I like, it's like a little English village. Only virtual, and tiny, and blocky. And clearly not English. OK, let's move on.

Far away from Johnsborg is Abjab Lake, an unfinished project of mine. Abjab is a 'Johnsborg dependency' - imagine Johnsborg is the centre of an empire of little settlements. I spent a lot of time making an underground rail link between Johnsborg and Abjab, which gives it that 'long rail trip to a far-off land for holiday' feel. You spend so long underground travelling that when you walk up the steps of the station and out into the open your eyes meet the beautiful waters of Abjab Lake. Shame there's nothing to do there.

I'd go on but I fear I'd lose your interest even more than I already have. Plus, I got lost trying to find Johnsø to screenshot it, so that will have to wait. Suffice to say, Minecraft satisfies a part of me that longs to design houses, roads and public spaces, then experience them on their scale. I'd build houses out of Lego, but I'd most likely run out of bricks and I could never shrink down to live in them. Minecraft, though its blocks may prevent elaborate architecture and the lack of chairs and tables (fuck you, Notch) prevent decent interiors, produces great results.

If you don't already own Minecraft, you're missing out on something great, so I strongly recommend it. If you do own Minecraft, well done. If you already own Minecraft and go on my server, get back on and stop wasting my money, I'm not paying for it so you can ignore it you bastards.

Maybe I'll look back at this post in a year's time and hang my head in shame at how I spent so much time playing this game, but for now it's just another chance for me to make stuff. Plus I don't have to go anywhere and can enjoy a warm cup of tea and (occasionally) a hobnob whilst playing. Mmmm.

~John

*Ironically, I now love both new songs and am making a video to 'Culture War'. I'm a hypocrite. I'm not a hypocrite.

Why 16 songs is enough

2011-07-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

Hey all. Just a short post today about Arcade Fire, because I finally got around to listening to the three new songs they ungainly wedged on the end of their masterpiece album 'The Suburbs' this year, along with that awesome film Scenes from the Suburbs. These three tracks are two entirely new pieces, 'Speaking in Tongues' and 'Culture War', and an extended version of the existing Suburbs track 'Wasted Hours'.

First, I'd just like to say that I love the album. Of course I do. I've said that before and I'll say it again. I'm not slagging off the album at all, I just simply think two extra songs - especially placed so stupidly at the end of the album - ruins it a little, and I encourage anyone who wants to appreciate 'The Suburbs' fully to buy the original.

Here's why - the album starts with the song 'The Suburbs', a wonderful lilting song that begins the album so perfectly. And, after all is said, the final (16th) song of the album, 'The suburbs (continued)' drifts back in with that melody we remember from the start to tie everything together into a neat indie rock bundle. Lovely. Or not - the two additions to the album ('Wasted hours (extended)' simply replaces 'Wasted hours') are simply added on to the end, thus obliterating the calming and fading out effects of 'The suburbs (continued)', thus ruining any sort of beginning-middle-end the album had. Now it's beginning-middle-end-extras. I'm OK with new songs, even new songs that are tied in with the album, but why not just release a 'Culture War/Speaking in Tongues' single that is designed as an extra release to 'The Suburbs' album, without putting the songs in the album itself? Yeah, I know why, because putting 'deluxe version' on the end of the title will sell a whole bunch of copies all over again. Bloody consumerism.

Nice album cover, though.

'Culture War' is perhaps the best of the two new tracks, haunting like many other songs from the album. It also has some excellent powerful lyrics, such as 'We'll be soldiers for your mommy and dad / in your culture war' and one of my favourite lines, 'Now the future's staring at me / like a vision from the past / and I know these crumbs they sold me / they're never gonna last.' No doubt 'Culture War' holds the lyrical impact of the two.

'Speaking in Tongues' has its own charm, starting almost like an ABBA song mixed with Arcade Fire, but soon speeds into the usual AF sound when Win comes in with his lyrics. It doesn't sound that similar to other songs on the album, though, tempting me to think that it was made afterwards, and so is the next evolution of Arcade Fire's musical style. Its melody is a little too regular for the more abstract sounds of 'The Suburbs', though underneath Win and Régine's vocals there is a familiar guitar sound pulled from 'Suburban War'. For me, 'Speaking in Tongues' is the weaker of the two. Plus, it's not that meaningful anyway. And you should know I love 'The Suburbs' for its meaning.

Where that meaning is at its purest is in 'Wasted Hours', what many dismissed as a dull song. Sure, it's slow, and sure, it lacks the energy of some of the more catchy tracks on the record, but its lyrics are brilliant and central to the album itself. Especially, later on in the song, the line 'But now we see / we're still kids in buses longing to be free'. You may not see it, but the meaning of that goes above and beyond everything the album says. The album is remembering a childhood long gone, and the trials and tribulations of it, and how the person is 'moving past the feeling'; forgetting their past and what it was like and what they felt. The line in 'Wasted Hours' says that they're still in the same state as they were when they were a kid - they thought growing up would provide freedom and happiness but in fact they're still stuck in the same old system, still on the buses relying on other people to get by. Fantastic line.

Anywho, the update of 'Wasted Hours', tactfully named 'Wasted Hours (Extended)' brings some variation to the otherwise 'dull' song (I didn't think it was that bad, actually). It's almost identical to the original at the start, but the end brings a faster pace and more layers for a memorable piece of music (though reusing the guitar melody in 'Sprawl I', it seems). That's the gem of this deluxe album for me, bringing a good piece of music to some good lyrics.

So the deluxe version of 'The Suburbs' does have its advantages, but I'm still not sold on the placement of the two extra songs in the track listing. I like albums to be an experience, not a collection of equal, unrelated songs. And I though 'The Suburbs' was the perfect example of a coherent, beautiful and powerful album. It still is; just don't buy the deluxe version.

~John

Jallery: June

2011-06-29T12:19:00.000-07:00

So much for London.

I'm back with another Jallery! Now I'm on holiday I have 10 weeks to waste doing something 'productive' as no one replied to my work experience emails. But hey, life goes on, and it gives me more time to achieve personal projects such as MUME - which I've had a huge idea for - and Suspension. But until such massive projects as those are finished, I've still been busy doing various little things...

Client work Believe it or not, I've been doing a bit of client work recently. Two pieces - firstly, this A5 flier for the Abbeyfield fête. Abbeyfield is a charity, so I didn't get paid for doing this, but it's still a great feeling to see my design used and being sent out. The flier was only distributed to about 100 households but I feel so proud of my design, pinned to noticeboards in houses all around the area. Or chucked straight in the bin. Regardless, my design's done its job. And the client wasn't that picky, either, so it was enjoyable work!
I've also been doing some video editing for my school - finished it on monday - which isn't quite 'client work' but still requires considerable effort.

Suspension Achievements I've been working on it slowly, and though I haven't built anything yet I've been working towards a full idea of the game, adding in little challenges and puzzles and sections and whatnots. I've also been creating an achievements system - because I will include little extra rooms and puzzles, but because they require more time and effort to create than in a normal point-and-click game, I need a way to encourage players to discover and appreciate them. That's where achievements come in. There are different types: liner achievements are achievements that everyone will 'complete' when they play the game normally. It is only when they explore or try something different that they will complete non-liner achievements. For example, here you can see 'No Mackerel Go' (a play on 'No cars go', a song by Arcade Fire - what else?), which is when you can pick up a mackerel in Act 2 and don't use it for what it's meant for and keep it in your inventory until the start of Act 3, when all your items are confiscated by border guards (to clear them out for the many different ones you'll get in Act 3). Others you get for completing non-essential puzzles, such as the 'café' logo there which is for the achievement 'Paradisa Lost'. I'll leave you to imagine what that could entail.

Overall there will be about 200 achievements, liner and non-linear. I love the idea of being able to come back to the game and trying to complete all the achievements, it means players won't just leave the game after they've completed it. And it means my little extras aren't put in for no one to find, haha. Also, my uncle suggested making it an iPhone/iPod Touch app, which is a damn good idea, anyone up for that? And it would be free, of course.

WD Sans This isn't particularly new, but I've had a renewed interest in it recently because I've been teaching my Gran the ways of typography (and preaching the word of Helvetica). It's an old font of mine that I hurriedly finalised for my portfolio, badly named 'WD sans' but I prefer to call it by 'unnamed humanist sans serif' because it's of no standard to name it after my initials. I don't know where I'm going with it - it's simply evolving as I create the letters the best I can. I'm adapting the glyphs you can see in my portfolio project to be properly designed with fixing colour and optical problems. And damn, it's difficult. Getting the curve on the D is near impossible - I'm still not happy with the version you see above. It's just something I come back to every now and then and have a go at improving.

More photography I recently got back my 20th roll of film from the developer's, and it's alright. It was from the last shoot I did for my GCSE project 'One', with the brilliant models Zoë and Suyin. The photos from it will show up on John Too slowly, so be sure to check them out and fave them and gimme some damn attention. I'm pleased with some of them but even those select shots aren't up to the standard I was searching for at the end of this blog post - the shoot was before I wrote that. Yet I'm still looking...

JOHN Collection rejects Finally, a photo from my main Flickr account showing some of the furniture that didn't make it into the final pages of the JOHN Collection catalogue this year - either because I didn't like the final design, or they were too similar to other designs, or (in the case of the table in the bottom-left) they were just too annoying to photograph. Find more info on the notes of the photo.

Two posts in two days... lucky you (sarcasm). I might start blogging on... what's it called again? Oh yeah, a regular basis. Woah.

~John

I'm moving past the feeling again

2011-06-28T10:35:00.000-07:00

Recently I've wanted to make a short film, specifically a music video. Not a music video with the singers belting it out on a stage with half-naked women left, right and centre - but a video that tells a story that is true to the song, or one that fits the song. Something like the video CANADA made for Battles' 'Ice Cream', but with more of a plotline and less innuendo. Then I struck upon the idea of making a video for one of the songs from Arcade Fire's third album 'The Suburbs'.

I wanted something dark, wistful and tastefully sepia - something to represent 'The Suburbs' in film... but that's a tricky task with songs so deep and specific as those in 'The Suburbs'. The obvious choice would be 'We used to wait', but there's already a music video for that. Other songs are too restrictive in their lyrics, such as 'City with no children' which is told from an adult's perspective (the whole album is, really) or 'Rococo'. Either the songs are too specific for videos, or I just can't think of a fitting video - for example, what would you do for 'Sprawl II'?

Luckily, I need not wonder such things any more because along with the release of the deluxe version of 'The Suburbs', Arcade Fire have made a film with director Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things are) called Scenes from the Suburbs. For a few days, the film is available to watch on MUBI, and I've watched it several times today and yesterday - I just can't get it out of my head. The film is written by Spike Jonze and two members of Arcade Fire, Win and Will Butler. It was shot in Austin, Texas, where the Butler brothers grew up (and what the album is presumably based on), and all the actors are schoolchildren from thereabouts.

At first I thought the film was going to be an indulgent affair, with Arcade Fire songs playing non-stop in the background. I was also put off by the short music video for 'The suburbs' song from the album that someone put together with clips from the film - this was all modern kids with modern toys and modern bikes, not what 'The Suburbs' is about at all. All lanky and long-haired and dirty-talking americanised youngster set to ruin any sort of sensitivity the music has.

But from the very start of the movie, it was different to my expectations. We fade into a long shot of the kids staring through a fence, only the wind for sound, then slowly and wistfully, the album's first track 'The suburbs' lilts in and I'm filled with the sense of nostalgia for a childhood I haven't completed yet, but one Arcade Fire know so well. Then we're thrown into the opening narrative - the main character talking about how he only remembers bits of his past, a parallel of course to the lyrics 'some times I can't believe it / I'm moving past the feeling again' at the start of the album.

Though the album was what the film was based on, it isn't that prominent. Which is a good thing - I didn't want the film to be rolling around in the music, rather the music fades in and out for different parts of the film. There are also slowed down tracks, instrumental versions, which are haunting and beautiful, so right for the film. We get to hear some tracks normally, such as 'Modern man' and 'Month of May' (which I'd usually hate but am warming to), and at other times we hear whispers, melodies, sounds of the songs, such as 'The suburbs' and 'Suburban war'. They really add to the feel of the film, but they aren't integral.

Win Butler and Régine Chassagne have a cameo, © Scenes from the Suburbs

What are integral to the film are the themes it covers, very similar to those of the album. Other than the start and end narratives of selected memories relating to 'The suburbs' and 'The suburbs (continued)' from the album, and various lyrical aspects (such as 'I can remember when you cut your hair / I never saw you again' from 'Suburban War'), there is not other direct parallel. The film, like the album, is a series of related scenes, sharply edited and covering various different themes of growing up and teenage life, like memories coming back to you from a previous life. Some are important, some not, but they all work to show you the dynamics of the three main characters.

Another link to the album is the 'suburban war'. In the film, the towns in the suburbs are fighting like countries would, with border patrols and armed guards rounding up residents. It's probably the only fault of the film for me, the scenes with soldiers and people being shot seem boyish and immature, silly and having no place next to the gravity of the main storyline and teens' acting. I always thought the song 'Suburban war' was about kids picking sides based on their interests, and how when your young a slight difference in hobbies or favourite bands can create a war-like rift between friends ('the music divides us into tribes / you choose your side, I'll choose my side'). Clearly Spike Jonze doesn't think so, and he's taken the 'war' literally in the film. In a way, the soldiers are like adults, the oppressive overlords that adults and parents seem like when you're young. They are the only adults in the film - other than a fleeting glance of Kyle's mother, and Winter's brother, who is in no way a trustworthy, world-wise adult. It's a very interesting twist but one that degrades the movie in my mind.

Scenes from the Suburbs will be off MUBI before long, but don't fret - it's coming out with 'The Suburbs' deluxe version along with two new songs to make the album even longer than it already is (that would be 18 songs!). To be honest, I wouldn't have bought the deluxe version before watching the film - and if I do buy it for the film, I still don't like adding two more songs on. The album's perfect as it is, guys! Why pile in more songs when you've already got me mistaking songs for one another with 16 songs?

Ah well. Extras will be extras. 'Scenes from the suburbs' is well worth a watch if you're a fan of the album, or Spike Jonze, or hopefully both. It's enticing yet wistful and sensitive - much like the album. So, though I'd have done some things differently, a script written by the people who wrote the album cannot better my interpretation of it. An excellent piece of short filmmaking.

~John

Suspension: get your floor panels out

2011-06-16T05:16:00.000-07:00

Two weeks after my last post, I'm back! And with something to show you! At first I thought 'I've got to blog, I may as well do a Wossup post', but I managed to finish this Suspension project quicker than expected and I have it here to show you.

In the words of You, Me and Everyone we Know (who sadly split up recently boo hoo): 'things are really weird right now'. I'm in a period of sort of strange between-exams-study-leave uneasiness. And I feel like crap. But I got this done.

Game making has been something I've been quite interested in over the years - though I don't have much to show for it other than a shitty game called 'The moving box' in which - you guessed it - you move a box round the screen. Circles come past and if one hits you you're pushed aside and you lose points. Or you're meant to, I could never get the points to work.

Anywho, the long and short of it is that I have a history of making little games and I used to be pretty competent at Flash, using it for the Brickspace header (remember that kerfuffle?), a mobile phone screensaver and various other things. I recently had an idea for a game based on an old Lego webstory I wrote the start of. There would be three parts and you'd click your way through and pick up items and use them, like a proper immersive puzzle game, but in Lego. Because I can't draw and don't want to bother with 3D software.

It was a mammoth idea - especially since the third part was going to be a city exploration stage, much like Half-Life 2. It was simply a pipe dream until last thursday (yes, exactly a week ago) I decided to give it a go - but only make a demo. For my demo I'd take the opening sequence of the game, where you wake up in a windowless cell, and scale it down a bit. Make it simple, so there are only two items you need. Click, click, click, click, done. Just to test the format. And now, a week later, it's done - Suspension: Demo. And I'm quite proud of it.

As you can see above, a fair amount of work went into it. I'm off on study leave and only had an exam on Friday so I had a lot of time to make it. I planned out the area with its viewpoints and what they link to (as you can see on the paper) first, then built and photographed the cell and extra pics at the weekend. Since then I've been hard at work coding and compiling and not compressing. Bloody Flash thinks I want 7kB/s mono audio for Bowie... I told it otherwise. Though it does mean the game takes a little while to load.

OK, to properly explain to you my inspiration and thoughts and intentions with this game, I'll take you through it. Please try it for yourself if you don't want me to spoil it.

Extras
You're meant to click on 'Play game' first, but after you finish the demo be sure to come back to the menu and have a gander at the 'extras' page. It's got a bunch of photos and graphics from the game for you to see clearer, including the 80s-styled fitness video advert on the TV (for which I created all the graphics, based on the 80s Miami Vice logo, took photos of the Patsy Upanova minifig and took photos of a video case to Photoshop the minifig onto). There are also unedited versions of the photos from the earthquakes leaflet. I've been busy.

Intro movie
Start the game and you'll be greeted with the sound of waves crashing onto a beach, and for a second a snapshot of a previous life, a memory - then the mechanical sounds and hums of the cell take over and your first view of your surroundings fades in. All the sounds were edited by yours truly, taken from the iLife sound library and the site SoundSnap. The first view you get of the cell is as is you're on the floor, so you can see the ceiling. This gives the player the full view of their surroundings - the ceiling isn't visible in other shots so this introductory view shows them the boundaries of their confinement. Which you'll need to know if you're going to escape.

Leaflet
Then the player is allowed to look around the cell freely. The main area has a bed, a chair, a TV in a corner and a little piece of paper folded and next to a plain wall. Click on this and you'll open up the leaflet to hold in your hand. You can click further to look at the middle pages and back page. The idea with this leaflet was to give some sort of backstory to the game, thus giving it mystery. What is this place I'm in? What does this leaflet mean? Was there an earthquake? Will this be important later in the game? etc.
I designed the leaflet to be 90s-styled - I wanted to keep with the 80s feel of the TV screen but I just couldn't find enough inspiration to accurately create an 80s leaflet - bear in mind I never lived in the 80s! So I decided to draw on one decade I can vaguely remember, the 90s. And what I can't remember I can piece together by watching reruns of Friends on E4.

Chair and panel
Next, move round to the side of the room with the bed and click on the chair. You'll be brought to a close-up of it. Simply click on it and lo, it's knocked over. What good has that done other than make a satisfying clunk? (I also found sound effects to put in) Well, look at the foot of the chair and you'll see a loose floor panel. One click and you've picked it up! A tasteful Akzidenz Grotesk box appears to tell you just that! Now you have your first item, so the game is evolving. Curiosity helps the player learn that the item can be 'equipped' by clicking on its icon, and you can even see it in your cute minifig hand on the right.

That took me a bloody long time to code.

Shower door
So, after a bit of experimenting and exploring you should come across the sub-room of the cell - with a glass door to a shower and also a little toilet. The toilet doesn't do much (slash anything), but the shower door makes a sound when you click it! And a dialogue box pops up! It's jammed! Oh my! What could we use to open it? How about that floor panel we found? Equip it and click the shower door again and with a nice smashing sound (thanks coding!) the door breaks. In the corner of the shower we find another item, a hammer! Now you have two items and can swap between them freely. Or fairly freely, as sometimes both can be selected at the same time. I was going to rewrite that section of code but I gave up because hopefully players will be clever enough to realise they have to use their newly acquired item, the hammer.

The wall
And use it they must! What can we smash down with our hammer? Well, after a little bit more exploring of your cell, you should realise that the wall with uneven tiles - opposite where you started in the game - is important in some way. If not, hopefully you'll come across it by just clicking everything while you have the hammer equipped. So click and the wall will break a little, click again and it'll break more. There's something through there... what could it be? Click once more and you go through.

Ending
Yeah, I told you it was a short game. It's only a demo! So you've clicked through to this weird dark antechamber, and there's a skeleton there (yet more mystery!). The radio he is holding crackles into life and starts playing a David Bowie song. This song (Life on Mars) was one of the main inspirations for making the demo - in the full game it would be much more appropriate and a more joyous way to end - both the song and the credits seem ill fitting to a demo but I'm just trying to give you the feel of the full game. And besides, I love me some credits.
The doors open dramatically, light floods in and obscures the macabre skeleton and his radio, and then the credits roll. I give thanks to Lego and Flash (ha yeah right), say once again that the game is a demo then plug this blog.

Play the demo here.

And that's it! Seems like a short demo but I put a lot of work into it. There are something like 30 viewpoints, 3 full audio tracks (including ambience), 4 sound effects, various animations and more coding that you think. I have no idea how I'm going to make the whole thing - the file would be huge and the coding huger(er). I have no idea if I'm going to make the whole thing. Let's see what feedback this demo gets first.

Apart from that, life's been dull. Oh yeah; I've been planning to make two movies, do something about MUME, finish Cronas 13, take more photos to sort out this dilemma, write something important and (sometime) enjoy summer.

~John

Like fingering the third dimension

2011-06-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

Good. I've got your attention with some double entendre. Now read this damn post.

For today's glorious, confusing, slightly maths-themed post I have some further discussion on dimensions and how to understand them, specifically how it's possible for them to interact with each other (I suggest you start with this post). We'll go through things slowly so you can understand them (and making the diagrams has helped myself understand them), and soon enough I'll be able to show you what it would look like if a fourth-dimensional person stuck their finger into our 3D world.

You're looking a little plane
Before we think about fingering a 3D world (cough) we're going to see what it would be like if you stuck your appendage into a 2D world (cough). And yes, potential innuendo will be a core part of this post.

So here's our first diagram. Ignoring your cries of 'what's a 2D plane? How can it exist?' we'll just assume that it does. A 2D plane is a 2D space, it's not necessarily finite like the square you see here, but it does exist in a three-dimensional space, which is why we can make it interact with 3D objects. So we have our 2D 'world', K, and we have a regular tube, a cylinder, named L. Following that handy arrow, we're going to take L and stick it through the plane K. Think of a 2D plane as a piece of paper, but it's more of a space than an object. That's why we can stick things through it - it's super handy.

So we now move L along the arrow axis, perpendicular to the 2D plane (remember it has two dimensions - up/down and left/right - x and y), and thus it will intersect it.

There we go, it's intersecting it. The blue circle is the shape of L that is intersecting the 2D plane - because a cylinder is effectively a circular prism, if we record the shape of L on the plane we can see that it is a cross-section of the shape. Imagine it as a slice of the 3D object, like a cucumber.

So we can conclude that if you stuck your cylindrical finger through a 2D world, those inside the 2D world (ignore the details) would see it as a roughly circular shape, and - because it's a cross section - they would see all the insides of your finger, such as your bone in the middle. It's quite a handy X-ray technique, apart from the whole '2D world's can't exist' thang, which isn't wholly true.

Frustum in
Now we're going to try the 3D-into-2D interaction with a shape that does not have a consistent cross-section. Because the tube is a circular prism, no matter how far into the 2D plane you stick it, its 'image' on the plane will always be the same, circular. If you move it around in the x- and y- direction, you'll only move that image around the plane (ie. up/down and left/right).

Now we're going to taper our cylinder L slightly, so one circular face is smaller than the other. We have what's known mathematically as a frustum - a cone with its top sliced off and fed to rapid deer. N.B. the deer bit might not be in all textbooks.

Here it is, out little frustum, endearingly named J. It's going in the same direction and into the same plane as L was, only it's a frustum. The face nearest plane K is smaller than the opposite face.

Now we've moved forwards a little and boy, are things getting crazy! Frustum J has moved parrallel to the arrow and has moved to intersect plane K, but close to the small circular face. We'll call this stage a.

Keep that frustum moving, son, and now we come to stage b. J is further into the plane and thus is intersecting it at a point where its cross-section (still a circle) is larger than it was at stage a.

Compare the two stages (a is before b, remember) and we can see that the circular cross section gets larger the further the frustum is into the 2D plane. That means if you were in that 2D world and someone stuck a frustum in like above, you'd see it as a circle getting bigger. Stick the frustum in with the larger face first and the 2D people would see it as a diminishing circle. Clever, eh?

Cube your enthusiasm
Now we're gonna get serious. Because it's time to stick your hyperobject in a 3D world and perhaps jiggle it about a bit (cough).

Let's explain. Instead of a 2D world, or 'plane', we're going to use a 3D world - which is really just a 3D space. I don't like saying 'world' because it makes it sound like it's a finite space with tiny trees and tinier dogs, like a little cube of '3D stuff' whereas it's actually just a space. That plane in the previous section could have gone on forever, objects J and L are seperate from the plane in the third dimension (outwards), regardless of how large the plane is in the x- and y- directions.

So, as I displayed the 2D space as a square in a greater 3D space (notice it was in perspective), and I'm going to show the 3D space as a cube in a greater 4D space that we can't really show. Into the 3D space M we're going to poke a four-dimensional hyperobject, N. N is the 4D equivalent of a cylinder - a hypercylinder, I suppose.

Remember I showed the 'image' of the 3D object on the 2D plane in blue? Well now I'm showing the 'image' of 4D object N on 3D space M in blue. Just as the 2D plane showed its image as a cross section in the same amount of dimensions as itself (a circle is a 2D shape), we'd assume the 3D world would show its image in three dimensions. And since our hyperobject is a cylinder of sorts, the image would be a circle + one dimension. AKA a sphere!

From this we can discern that the cross-section of a hypercylinder is a sphere, which makes sense because the 3D cylinder has a 2D cross section, therefore an nth dimensional object has a (n-1)th dimensional cross-section when intersected with an (n-1)nth dimensional space.

The second diagram above shows what would happen if that hyperobject, N, had a varying cross-section. Just like the frustum having a small circle front face and a large circle back face, N could be a 'hyperfrustum' and thus have a small sphere front cell (4D cell ~ 3D face ~ 2D side ~ 1D point) and a large sphere back cell. That means if a 4D frustum is poked into a 3D world, you'd see it as an enlarging sphere.

And that's what if would be like if a four-dimensional person stuck their four-dimensional finger into a three-dimensional space. You would also be able to see the inside of their finger - though whether they'd have fingers or whether they'd exist at all is a totally different matter.

But there's more: Slice me some, Joe
Wait up. Before we leave this post I have two further things to show you re: dimensions intersecting. Let's go back to our original 2D plane and the 3D cylinder that's intersecting it. Remember I took the cylinder away and showed you, in blue, the 'image' it made on the 2D plane? Well here's a similar diagram, but there's three:

I've showed the 'image' on the 2D plane when the cylinder intersects it at different points. Stage a is when the cylinder's very edge is touching the 2D plane and, as before, a circle image (a slice, a cross section) is created on it. Move the cylinder through the plane and we get to stage b, then to stage c. The images are the same, but remember something vital: they are simply 2D images so only have 2 dimensions, x and y. To the person in the 2D world, they are not linked! They are separate shapes! The only thing linking them together to the 2D observer is the fact that they are in the same 2D place, and after each other in time. Mathematically, their only linking factor is that they are linked in the third dimension.

Now we shift it up a dimension and go back to our 4D hyperobject sliding through a 3D space. It creates a 3D 'image' (or projection) in the 3D space, a sphere. At points a, b and c the hyperobject is intersecting the 3D space at different points along its length, but because it is a 4D 'prism', these slices are the same - always the same size of sphere. These spheres have values in the x, y and z directions but apart from that are not linked, as the circles were before. That means that us, 3D observers, cannot see the axis along which they become part of the same object.

So, potentially, objects we see in everyday life could be projections of the same four-dimensional object intersecting our 3D world, and could actually be linked together in higher dimensions. For all we know, the entire Earth or galaxy could be projections of one 4D object, and thus we are all linked.

And finally, before we go, remember we can also show different dimensions in graph format, keeping with the Cartesian standard that I nattered on about in the last post. A cylinder is shown above - in the x and y axes it's simply a circle, but then add in another graph comparing the y axis to a third, the z (3D) axis and we can see that it is more than simply a 2D object. It's a 3D object!

Similarly, the above diagram shows a hypercylinder. In our three dimensions, it's simply a sphere - but show its fourth value, the w axis (4thD) and we can see it has 'depth' in that dimension also, making it a four-dimensional object. N.B. if the line was flat in the second graph, then it would have no 4D depth - it may have a place on the axes (w=2) but it does not have any 'length' along it.

And there you have it, folks. Now if anyone asks you what it would be like if a 4D being fingered a three-dimensional space, you can tell them! Or just direct them to this blog! Or if they don't ask, direct them to this blog anyway! Then go get dinner with them, because people like that need dinner.*

Look at it this way: at least you now know the effects of sticking your frustum into mysterious spaces. (That one's for all of you who were only interested in this post for its innuendo)

~John

*Also, people need love, people need loving, people need the trst of a frail old man. Just sayin'.

The JOHN Collection: Summer 2011

2011-05-31T07:34:00.000-07:00

Seventeen months after the last catalogue, the JOHN Collection's third installment is ready, and boy am I glad to get it done! With 106 new pieces (and others that didn't make it into the final layouts), 18 pages and 563 photos taken for it, it's a beast of a project and now it's a finished beast. I'm slowly uploading it to Flickr, but you lucky JOHNSPACE readers can see it in its entirety on Issuu:

On a more serious note, I must say I am sick to death of this damn catalogue. I originally planned for it to be finished in Summer 2010, then at Christmas (exactly a year after the last one), but I was too ambitious with the scenes I wanted to do and pictures I wanted to take for it, so I gave up on it, and its myriad scenes and photos just sat on my harddrive for five months. I knew I wanted to finish it at some point - I knew I needed to finish it, considering how much work I'd put into it - but I'd lost interest.

Luckily for you guys, a few weeks ago I was reading through my layouts for the pages (I'll upload them to Flickr at some point) and I was inspired to just finish the damn thing. I originally thought 'let's just finish it with what I have', but some things were really necessary and I shot three more scenes (front cover and kitchen, waiting, commercial furniture) and another bunch of photos against a white background (the fifth shoot of that kind), then set to work creating the pages in Illustrator.

A few weeks later - and several Illustrator crashes later - the catalogue is finished. The page layout has been fully redesigned since JC2, with a tasty new colour - aqua - for the majority of the graphics. There are 18 pages including the front and back covers, each one with a unique layout and - I hope - checked for errors. Though the sand-red stool does appear twice, I am aware thankyouverymuch.

Now I'll 'briefly' go through each of the pages in case you're interested in the scenes or the names of the pieces of furniture. Feel free to skim-read, I know not everything will be of interest to you.

Page 1: Contents
Not much to say for this page - only that it was the last page I designed. There's a small note from me at the top (yes, my name is really John Danishsurname), which is basically a summary of the above paragraphs, but without the 'sick to death of this catalogue' bit, I thought that would put off readers, heheh. There's also a massive aqua box and - I think - the only black text in the catalogue. Oh such interesting trivia!

Page 2: Home divider
This is the same set as on the Home Office page, which is next. So I'll explain it there.

Page 3: Home Office
The set you see here was the second one I did (the first being Office), and it's surprisingly traditional for me. I was quite proud of it so I posted it empty on Flickr at the time. There's a lovely large four-pane window, a large 'Sumo' desk that I never took a picture of on a white background (dammit) and two JB Task Chairs, which I love. They were inspired by the AJ Task Chairs that Arne Jacobsen designed for St Catherine's College, Cambridge - though they bear little resemblance. The other chair is just there to be a side chair - and one of many pieces that includes the 3-long bars, I love 'em.

Page 4: Bedroom
I don't really like making beds so that's why there are only three here, and two of them are boring (guess which two, and you won't be far off). I always thought I'd make more beds at some point but that dream was one of many that got cast aside in recent weeks, the 'fuck it, let's just get it finished' stage. Also notice several of the pieces on this page come from my LEGO architecture - specifically the Rødovre house. Not all the furniture I designed for Ishøj, Rødovre and Henne are in the catalogue, as I only think of them being functional in the building and not good on their own, but a couple of the best are in there. None from Kongsholmparken, but that's because it was a public building. And the furniture was shit. Too much brown.

Page 5: Modular Kitchen
The modular kitchen was, as many things were in this catalogue, something I liked the idea of but didn't have enough inspiration to do. So the modules you see here are pretty basic, and most of them come from my architecture (all of my residential houses have used this modular system, in different colours). Still, I am very proud of the set you see above the modules - it's part of the set used on the front cover, and was the final one I built. 'Build something small, John,' I said beforehand, 'get it done'. I did get it done, but I got it done well, and the 'glass' panels are something I've wanted to include in my architecture for a while now. They offer a really interesting divide through the room, splitting the higher dining area from the lower kitchen and utility area while letting through light and keeping the rooms together, in an interaction kind of way. The change of height increases the importance of this divider, and stops the glass from being purely aesthetic.

Page 6: Kitchen
Not much to say here, only that I was pretty annoyed when I came to put together this page and found I only had one dining table, the 'Grande'. I decided to throw in the dining tables from the Rødovre and Henne houses, which offer some much-needed varation. So it wasn't all bad. Other recent additions include the 'Dara' chair, which is called Dara for no real reason. I was going to say it's named after a friend of mine called Dara who is bottom-heavy like the chair, but that's a lie. It's just a shameless merge of the JB Task Chair and the Pinchair. Also on that page is the Jalkow stool, named after the awesome guy Jalkow who included it in his Jalkow collection - I named this and two tables after him because he's always so supportive of my furniture stuff. Thanks, mate.

Page 7: Living Room
A couple of great pieces in here, notably the 'centrepiece' pic at the top of the page including the Shell chair (hmmm Jacobsen) and the Jalkow table Sr. I really like both of them and I think they go well together. The Jalkow table and its junior buddy are merely named so after their similarity to the Jalkow stool, sadly they're not his own work. Speaking of chairs' namesakes, the 'Verner' chair is, of course, a homage to Verner Panton and his 'Amoeba' chair. Notice also the 'Lighting options' box which is there to fill up the empty space. It's a shame the Helix lamp (blue one) is revealed before the Lighting page, but ah well.

Page 8: Bathroom Planning
Bathroom planning = I couldn't get inspiration to make enough pieces for the bathroom department. However, it did result in a really nice set, and my first experiments with the LEGO Power Functions lights. There are four of them in the set - two either side of the sink, one in the ceiling of the shower cubicle and one above the door.

Page 9: Garage
The garage set was massive, a real beast to photograph, especially because I wanted to keep both the garage door (left) and raised part (right) in the frame. The raised part contains a door (Gambort-style), two Mono recliners, a JC2 table in white that we'll have to keep hush-hush, a glass table unit and - below it, hidden in shadow, a Trio unit. It's packed, it's dark, it's got light-up hanging lamps (thanks fibre optics!) and it's all light grey if you can ever see a photo of it in the light. Sure, no garage is as big or as complex, but I really wanted to show the luxurious side of the garage, for your 'man den' - a place to watch football on TV and drink beer and get away from it all. Apart from modernist furniture, of course! There's no escape from that! Ahahahahaha!

Page 10: Office & Other Divider
This page isn't uploaded to Flickr because, sadly, it isn't interesting enough. It is, however, a set that I spent considerable time on. Details you can't see here include a silhouetted skyline beyond the windows, a staircase coming down from a hole in the ceiling, and a dark turquoise wall. It's amazing how much work I put into these fully lit scenes and yet how little of the details you see in the final picture. I'd say it isn't worth it, but perhaps it is to get that perfect shot.

Page 11: Office
The set you see here was the first one I built, way back in April last year. It's not the greatest - it's square and the furniture is kinda strewn around the room, not connected to walls or anything logical, but it does the job. It also has an awesome ceiling, made to look like the modular lights and ceiling panels of many offices and schools, but - as aforementioned - sometimes the best bits just have to be left out.

Page 12: Office cont'd
More office on this page because it is the largest department of the catalogue. You may recognise the Clippon tables from this post last year, and now they're arranged all fancy and with other colour combos! Also on this page is the Charles table, my homage to the design and chair legs of Charles and Ray Eames back in the 50s. The Professional Table also has something of Eames in it, it's quite similar to the Charles but not as neat.

Page 13: Lighting and decoration
This page should probably appear a little later in the catalogue - after Outdoors, certainly - but here it is anyway. Including floor lamps in various styles, including the one with the drawstring from the Ishøj House (remember that?) and some strange 'Leanpost' thing that fell together and I thought looked nice. The bottom photo shows the five assorted desk lamps posed stylishly on the Professional Table from the Office department - this 'several pieces together' idea was something I wanted to implement across the catalogue, but I ran out of time and ability to give a shit so most of the pieces are in their own individual photographs.

Page 14: Waiting
For some reason I accumulated many of these Waiting pieces, and quite quickly too (the last ones, the circle bench, was made last October) - it's just a style of furniture that I enjoyed creating. My favourite is the Jeames seating, another homage to Charles and Ray Eames, this time their public seating (as explained in this post). The set, quite a small one, was put together last week because I was originally going to have my modular public seating pieces at the top of the page, but I ran out of effort to photograph it. One day I'll show it to you all. One day.

Page 15: Outdoors
The penultimate page is for the various outdoor pieces I've created over the past 17 months. Originally I hoped to create an outdoors scene, with a large tree lit up by fairy lights and people enjoying an evening summer barbeque on the decking, but I ran out of time to make it and as a result this page is very... spacious. Note the Hope and Glory camping seat, which comes from Hope and Glory Towers. I wanted to chuck it in there, it's an outdoors piece. Also on this page are other pieces from previous MOCs: the Ishøj BBQ, and the lounger and two-sprout box from the Rødovre Townhouse.

Page 16: Commerical Furniture
We finish the catalogue with a relatively boring page, one that would have been spruced up with a large scene of a cargo ship's mess hall but - you guessed it - I ran out of time to make it. As a result we have a little scene that is meant to be part of a cargo ship, hence the Maersk furniture. It has a functional staircase and a strange light grid thing in the wall - a concept that I've wanted to put in a MOC for a while now, it's probably more appropriate for a spaceship (it was inspired by the light wall by Sam's bed in Moon), but here it is on a high-tech Maersk ship. A very old LEGO plate, if you're interested.

And that's it, folks! 106 pieces, 18 pages, 8 fully-lit scenes, 17 months of work and one catalogue. The JOHN Collection 3. Wow.

As a final note, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who's appreciated past JOHN Collections and this one too. Without praise, I am nothing. If anyone's crazily thinking about a JOHN Collection 4, you can crazily unthink that - for now, this is it in terms of LEGO furniture catalogues. I'll still make furniture, but for my architecture only. JC3 is my final 'tada!' of furniture, I foresee. I hope you all appreciate it, because it's taken a lot of work to get it finished how it is. Enjoy.

~John

Jallery: May

2011-05-25T12:33:00.000-07:00

Look ma, culture!

Now don't go saying I spelt 'gallery' wrong - this is a gallery, John-style. Alongside my infrequent 'Wossup' posts I've decided to make a monthly 'Jallery' post showcasing some of the stuff I've been making, rather than whole plain paragraphs of the stuff I've been doing. We all know which is more interesting (FYI, this one), and this is easier to skim-read. Because it's about time I started to take note of what you all do on here, haha.

Daltown Minecraft Server Blog My Minecraft server, or at least one that I frequent (more than most people on it, pssht) is called Daltown, and I recently designed a blog for its members to use to find info about mods, people, places and the recent goings-on in that virtual world. Recently, the server's been a little empty because apparently we all have exams to be doing. Well fuck you guys, I posted about my newly discovered album 'Into the Murky Water' for no reason. Other than it's an awesome album.

I was really struggling with the new Blogger whilst making this blog, so I'm glad it came out as well as it did. Simple, updatable, and bold. Also, Helvetica, if you've got it on your system. I was pretty happy when I finished it one sunday a few weeks ago, it's gathered a few bugs since then but I can't be bothered at the moment. Considering no one goes on the server, I can assume that even fewer check the blog so I'll leave it.

Akzidenz 2 You guys will never see this post, I never got around to writing the words to go with this second Akzidenz Grotesk article. I bet you're sad. I bet you're really bummed about it. Haha yeah right, one post was enough methinks, and in a way I explored the font enough myself in just making the diagrams (about 5) like this one, no words needed. Besides, I'd just say 'modernist' and 'utilitarian' too much. I need some new adjectives.

Henne Original Plans Recognise this? Ya, it's a graphic version of something similar to my recent Lego architecture excursion, the Henne Beach House (80 faves - suck it, haters). The Lego model only has one cube form in it, but I always wanted to include two (as in my original sketch). This isometric drawing of the house shows what I was trying to create, but maybe less pod-like. IE. move the bottom of the flat sections down to meet the ground as in the Lego model. Also, I'd make the shape of the back part like it was in the Lego model (symmetrical), and remove that pointless second flat plane coming out the side of the cube there. I drew this up before I made the Lego model, so it is really a preliminary idea, not a 'this is what I would have done' picture.

MUME Magazine I feel kinda odd showing this so early in its... development? Life? I don't even know where I'm going with it, where I want to go with, or what I'll do with it. All I know is this: I need to make a magazine. Not a glossy mag with articles and reviews, but something else. Something different. And I think it's going to be called MUME (let me know if that means anything odd, as far as I know it's only the name of a Runescape site). I'm just experimenting at the moment, including this cover. I kinda like it. I like DIN. It's nice and neat and useful for work in grids.

JOHN Collection: Summer 2011 Wow, isn't this a turn up for the books? JCiii? More stuff about it? A new picture? Yes indeedy folks, it's nearly finished. I don't want to say too much about it because then it may never be finished, I'll keep procrastinating, but I shot a few scenes (such as this one) earlier this week and am planning to do the Kitchen one this weekend, then stick the new photos in the layout, then touch it all up a little, then it will be done. Finished by the end of this week, posted up on Flickr sometime soon. I'm quite excited, actually. By the way, you shouldn't be seeing this really, but it's a teaser for you faithful JOHNSPACE readers. Not that anyone's going to leak it or anything.

There. Five pictures. Five descriptions. Five insights into what I've been up to. I'm quite pleased I blogged, and pleased I talked about these things (especially MUME). Next up: JCiii. Hopefully.

~John

Love at first type

2011-05-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

It's often said that Helvetica, that typeface we all know and (mostly) love, that defined mid-century modernism in typography and has been used profusely ever since its release in 1957, was inspired directly by one earlier font, Akzidenz Grotesk, a round and characteristic sans-serif designed by Günter Gehard Lange of the H. Berthold type foundry. Recently I downloaded several weights of Akzidenz Grotesk (a name not too dissimilar to Helvetica's original title of 'Die Neue Haas Grotesk' - yet more similarities), and it's really got me thinking about where Akzidenz fits into the range of sans-serifs we use today, despite being so old. According to typographic standards, it's a grotesque sans (and Helvetica is a neo-grotesque), but there's a lot more to Akzidenz than that.

It's not used commercially as much as, say, Helvetica or Univers, but it still appears here and there. For example, the American Red Cross use it in their graphic identity, and I also noticed it absent-mindedly in my garden, on the packaging of Homebase compost:

Looks nice, doesn't it? It doesn't have those horizontal terminals, those rational restraints of Helvetica, let alone the squarish forms of Univers. It's a little freer and a little more natural, though not humanist. In fact, it's damn near my concept of a 'modern sans serif' that I mentioned a few posts back. It's got the right capital R-form and has a petite look, but maybe doesn't quite compare to the contemporary stylings of Gotham. Even still, to see this font used is incredible in 2011. Why? Because it was designed in 1898. That's like designing a modern department store and using pre-Thonet wooden furniture. It's amazing how type, in contrast to furniture, can last for so long - because it's not a physical thing. So long as you can keep hold of the dimensions in one form or another, that typeface can be preserved. Another thing the continued use of Akzidenz tells us is that when your teacher tells you 'sans serifs are modern', they're talking out of their rear end, or some other unpleasant orifice. If their definition of 'modern' is 'in the past century', then they're still wrong. Akzidenz goes incredibly far back.

Using Akzidenz in a modern media, a website, where its boldness is used to give a modernist edge. Photos © people off Google Images, website design © yours truly.

The interesting thing about Akzidenz Grotesk is how modern-looking it is. It has that modernist touch a lot more than Univers (many would disagree but this is my opinion), yet predates both Univers and Helvetica by almost fifty years. Sans-serifs began as industrial designs, such as DIN, created to standardise type, especially in Germany (DIN is in fact named after the German standards institute who commissioned it). DIN was constantly reinvented and redesigned throughout the early 20th century, even during WWII, as a rational and functional alternative to black letter script that could be found across the country. This was a late part of Germany's industrialisation, its move from the Germany of the 19th century to a new, forward-thinking country of technology and standardisation.

Though also being German, I think Akzidenz holds a lot of different values to DIN. They were developed for different purposes, almost opposite purposes. DIN was created to replace serif and script types in practical uses (such as engineering diagrams and railway signage), building letterforms from repeating geometric shapes (rational angles, perfect circles, arcs, etc) in search of the appropriate typographic system. Akzidenz, however, has more character and lacks those restrictions. It's more experimental and the letters differ more from each other than the almost dull regularity of DIN or the visibly squarish forms of Univers. And why? Because it was such an early sans serif. It's practically a serif font, but with the serifs chopped off and personalisations added. Wikipedia dutifully informs me it was based off Walbaum and - get this - Didot. No wonder I like it so much. Any sans-serif taking inspiration from the trendsetting face Didot gets my vote, and if that same font inspired Helvetica, it's surely love at first type.

But I'm not saying Akzidenz is perfect. It certainly isn't, and like Helvetica certain glyphs show its age and its inspiration quite obviously. Akzidenz's numbers are the real giveaway - the archaic serif remnant hanging from the top bar of the 7, the nearly-closed calligraphic counters in the 2 and 5 and (elsewhere in the font) the flared terminals. It's these kinds of unique features that Univers eradicated, prompting many to call it a 'true modern typeface'. Me? I think it's a true functionalist typeface, it has that DIN look to it, unlike Helvetica which has enough style for me to consider it modern [-ist]. Univers reminds me too much of Eurostile, an unusable font for anything other than futuristic titling.

Ignoring DIN (that'll have to wait for another post), I like to think of the three grotesque sans-serif heavyweights of the 20th century (sans Gill Sans, which I think of as humanist) as representative of furniture design styles. They may not coincide chronologically with the furniture, but they hold a similar design intention and style.

Univers is certainly something Bauhaus, it has that German functionalist edge to it. But to me it's imperfect, and it has a futuristic side too. It can only be really appreciated if you see its squarish forms as representative of that utilitarian ideal of the future, like DIN but a little sharper. And for that reason, it's Marcel Breuer's bentmetal 'Wassily' Chair.

As for Akzidenz Grotesk, for me it holds a little too much character for a Bauhaus piece. It's a 'modern' redesigning of an older design - Didot and Walbaum. And what classic chair design of the early 20th century was based off older designs? Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 'Barcelona' chair, designed for the German Pavilion at the world expo in - you got it - Barcelona. Mies van der Rohe wanted to design something that reflected the ancient stylings of the city and that's where that distinctive leg shape came from. It also has that edge of luxury, of not just being a purely functional piece - and I think Akzidenz has that too.

It's near impossible to pin down Helvetica into a piece of furniture - it means so much to so many. It's totally flexible, as fifty years of use in graphic design has shown us, but when I imagine Helvetica I imagine classic Swiss modernism, those glorious exciting posters of the 40s that made such an impact on the world of graphic design. So who better to show Swiss mid-century design than Le Corbusier? He may not always be my favourite designer (I can't get the hideous image of his chaise longue in cow hide out of my head), but I think his LC2 chair is appropriate for Helvetica. It wears it functionalism in plain sight - that bentmetal tubing framework - but it still manages to look classy and contemporary, without showing too much subjective character. And that, to me, is Helvetica.

I have a bunch more stuff to talk about re: Akzidenz Grotesk, with a load of analysis diagrams, but they'll have to wait for another post because this is enough for now. Two posts on one font? We haven't had something like that since Helvetica itself!

Though you may have skim-read the post and those scarily obsessive typographic bits, I feel a real need to show Akzidenz Grotesk to everyone and let them know where Helvetica came from. Akzidenz played a big part in modernism, and still is affecting graphic design today, way back from 1898. What a font.

~John

Where now, photography?

2011-05-04T13:24:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, before I start today's complicated post I feel I must make a stand against something. Blogger, ever the great blog hosts, are having a massive update (that can be accessed through Blogger in Draft) which, though the GUI is spiffy, is ultimately disappointing. You either choose one of their templates and be able to edit layout and 'add CSS', or you start right from scratch in HTML and don't have access to the layout page. Basically, it's a shit deal and it's left me - who usually takes a Blogger template then edits it in HTML - with a problem. Making and updating the designs of my blogs is now near-impossible - I doubt I'd be able to edit JOHNSPACE's design without transferring the HTML in a messy process. And I don't like messy, not at all. So thanks a lot, Blogger. I managed to squeeze out this blog for my Minecraft server on Sunday, but only using the old version of Blogger currently available at blogger.com. Fuck knows what I'll do with JOHNSPACE, maybe I'll have to move it.

Anyway, onto photography. I'm not showing you through every photo I took this time. My art project - hell, my whole art GCSE - was finished today in five hours of printing and binding mayhem, and I'm left drained in more ways than one. Physically and mentally drained from such a rush, such an experience, but also drained of creativity.

Here's the sitch. My creative style changes dramatically from month to month, I'm fully aware of that, I'm just exploring and finding what suits me best. Also, my creative interests change from month to month. First it was movies, then typography, design, architecture, photography and now I'm heading into a more artistic direction. It seems through this whole process - which I can only really trace back a year - photography has been the constant, the easy-to-do creative outlet that shows my progression in style. it also shows my progression in how I think about my photography.

Basically I started off with this:

This was taken when I was in Paris in summer 2009. It's a nice angle, sure, and I edited it beyond recognition, but there's nothing more to it. Most people would not care about there being nothing else to it, but for me photography is art. And what is art? Simply, a medium for expressing human emotions in non-human ways. And what emotion is shown above? None. I wasn't too bothered about this but it was only when I discovered film that I realised how powerful photographic mood is:

Suddenly, photography had a deeper purpose. It had tools - I had the ability to control aperture, shutter speed, developing, the type of film I used. That and composition, the rule of thirds, contrasting elements. Lighting. Photography became all about going somewhere, finding that all-important mood, that atmosphere, and accurately representing it in a photo. I was still a believer that photography was for capturing a moment, and the skill was in finding the perfect angle and the perfect representation of the mood I felt in the place. I couldn't - and still can't - take a decent photo in a moodless place. Sunny days are the worst - who wants blue skies? What do they emote?

My next art project saw me taking on the massive task of portraiture. I wrote in the previous project ('Urban Life', all gritty architectural B&Ws) that I didn't like taking portraits because 'people are hard to work with (and no, that's not just because I can't work with people)'. So, after seeing many great portraits (well, less portraits, more photos with people in them) from talented people on Flickr, I decided to prove myself wrong and try a portraiture project - 'One'. And it was amazing. Truly amazing. Urban architecture can only emote so much: more or less, 'gritty and downtrodden'. That's it.

But add a person into your photo and you have flexibility. You have a face - emotive mouth, those all-important eyes. How the person stands. Where they stand. If they interact with the background. What they're wearing. The possibilities are so much greater and there is more chance to get to that 'emotional photo' I am always striving for. So above is one of my first experimentations with portraits, and it's a nice shot, sure. Nice composition and DoF yada yada yada. But I learnt later on that composition means nothing. Well, something, for sure, but if you're doing photography as art it's near-meaningless unless you choose it specifically. Art is not just about taking a pretty picture. The picture must mean a lot more. And I discovered after several photoshoots that, interesting subject-surroundings interactions aside, I was taking fashion shots. Over. And over. And over. And none of them held any artistic weight.

In the eleventh hour of my 'One' portraiture project I commissioned my good friend Tom for a night photoshoot near where we live. He was reluctant, always had his mouth open in photos, and spent a lot of time informing me of how much he didn't like being in photos, but something changed. Something clicked. And it wasn't just the lonely urbane backdrop to the photoshoot. For, that evening, I realised an important thing. I don't want to take fashion shots. They look nice, sure, and I'm all for helping my friends' Lookbook pages, but there's still not enough weight. But hold on - I take away the pretty girls, take away the fancy clothes, the bokeh and the pouting. Now the photo isn't about the fashion. It's stripped of models - this guy doesn't even want to be in the photos. And now we can concentrate on something other than composition. Now we can focus on that emotional weight. Now we're taking artistic photography.

And that's where I'm left at the moment. That's where I am in the progression of my photography. I've moved slowly into taking deeper and more meaningful photos:
- The 'nice composition' aspect is important but it's only a surface thing, and is not emotive.
- Using people gives me a lot more flexility and emotion to deal with, but still I can't get to the raw emotion
- Stripping the photo of fancy clothes and fancy people means we're left with the emotion.

But I had a lot of time to look over my photos today, sticking them onto boards and what-not. I looked and looked. Because - and you're going to facepalm now - there's something missing. 'There's always something missing' you may comment. Sure, maybe there is. But I really felt like I'd reached a point of photographic enlightenment, a conclusion, and now I find it's still not enough. It's not emotive enough. I don't mean the subject should give passionate poses and intense looks - that's not what I mean by emotive. I mean that the artwork (for that is what I want it to be, eventually) should convey a strong and meaningful emotion - the basics would be 'sadness' or 'loneliness' (as above), and the ideals 'the interaction between man and his environment' or 'inner conflict in the external world'. Arty farty it may be but, once again, my photography is too lightweight.

So, sigh. A pat on the back for finishing that GCSE, but also a look to the future. I find myself once again at a photographic impasse, more prominent now that I have reached deeper in the technique of photography as art. The title of this post says 'where now'? - I honestly can't answer that question, I have no idea. Let's hope I keep trying and keep photographing and keep searching for that ideal, whatever it may turn out to be.

~John

WD16 Furniture

2011-04-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

OK, here's a short regurgitated post about my recent line of WD16 furniture models that you can all find on my portfolio. I really want to maintain this blog as a place to show off the new stuff I've made and I feel bad having left out the first proper furniture project of mine, having blogged so much about the design classics of the 20th century. So, without further ado, I present the WD16 range:

The range consists of three pieces - a chair, a table and a small bin from an earlier, discontinued series of model furniture (WD15). All the pieces are modeled in card at no specific scale.

WD15 Bin this small, triangular bin is from an eariler furniture series, WD15. The bin, which would be made out of bent metal sheet, changes the user's conception of a simple metal bin yet still keeps it as a solid, understandable and functional whole shape.

WD16 Table this two-by-one seater, splayed-leg table is intended to be aesthetically lightweight yet be functionally strong, having a very light impact on the ground and in a room, yet being able to take a large weight. The tapering, outwards-pointing legs give the WD15 table a bold, reliable yet not uniform aesthetic. Intended to be made out of a pine tabletop with bentwood legs or bent metal legs, the WD15 table would also being mostly unpainted with a white-painted tabletop.

WD16 Chair this is the centrepiece of the WD16 range, a chair made from one single piece of bent metal. Inspired by the bentwood chair 'Mosquito' by Michael Bihain, I discovered the simplicity and wholeness of a single-piece chair.

The Panton chair showed us that a chair can be made from one piece of plastic, but personally I prefer the feel of a fully metal one-piece chair is better. Your average chair is a mass of unnecessary interactions - between materials, part, fittings, glues - but all this can be removed and the only interaction needed and wanted can be focused on: that between the user and chair. I love the concept of a chair as a whole, something you could throw around or pick up and not fear for the glue joint to come unstuck or for screws to fall out. It's complete of itself and can be therefore considered as one simple, self-sufficient shape amidst a complicated world of overinteraction and overcomplicated design.

Whilst designing the chair, I felt I couldn't create such a space as exists under the seat without having some interaction - it will be cut from sheet metal after all, not cut out of a metal block. So I took the concept one step further and had the chair's fundamental structure interact with itself, hooking round the base of the backrest creating stability without a permanent joint and also create a handle to carry the chair by. To prevent attention being directed immediately at this one interaction, I designed the front three faces as solid shapes and the back two as frame shapes to show the front three as one consistent, bold shape flowing from the floor, through to the seat and to the backrest. This links otherwise distractingly unconnected shapes, diverting attention from the joint.

There, I just wanted to get those photos and descriptions up on the internet somewhere - I had to cut them down somewhat for my portfolio and the stuff about the Panton and Mosquito chairs is integral to the project.

~John

Suddenly, Keanu

2011-04-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

aka. Keanu Reeves and how I learned to love Futura
aka. The round-up post, April
aka. I've been... er... revising

Greetings, ladies and gentlefolk. It's been a busy coupla weeks in my life so I apologise for not keeping up the perfect four-posts-a-month thing this month. I have my exams next month so maybe it's acceptable, but it probably isn't because they're next month and I haven't been revising that much. I told myself I'd balance revision and creativity this easter holiday but that thankfully resulted in me being overly creative in defiance of revision. Hence, I've been working on a proper typeface, did a photoshoot in London, got depressed and thought up the most disturbing sci-fi movie I know, and now I'm scriptwriting and feeling very good about it. Still, I have so much to catch up on here!

Now then, onto the meat of the post (expect no funny meat suitcase here, I've done that joke): Futura. Remember that font? No? Well, I guess not, we're not all typophiles. Futura is a typographic institution, that set the standard for geometric sans-serifs along with Avant-Garde Gothic back in the 1970s. You probably have it on your computer, it's thin and has sharp corners. It's great - maybe a little to pointy for my liking, lacking that control and standardisation that Helvetica has, but it's always good for the odd poster. I use it for the branding of my school's Film Club:

Here I combined Futura, the sharp and postmodern sans-serif, with Didot, another classic typeface that co-created its own typographic class, the Didone serif. It's high-contrast, Italian, and downright classy. Futura and Didot get on quite well actually, and though the poster could've been more restrained layour-wise, I enjoyed experimenting with two colours and two typefaces interacting. I never realised how wonderful Didot italicised lowercase looked. Mmmm.

Anywho, moving on. I was browsing Behance one day and came across this brilliant project for a fictional film festival, showing only Wes Anderson films. The design was consistent, witty, appropriate and well restrained. I always like to think the key to really good design is not finding the right features and gimmicks for your project, but actively restraining yourself from going so over the top. I know centuries of Italian and Spanish designers would protest, but functionalism didn't emerge in the 1920s for everyone to ignore it and get on with the same old shit we'd been doing beforehand. It's had an impact on us, specifically on me. A wise man once said 'moderation in all things, including moderation' and he couldn't have been more right. If I could find him, and he happens to still be alive, I'd give him a hi-five. If he's more in the mood, a hug, but I'm perfectly willing to just hi-five him. Moderation in all things, including congratulatory gestures.

Moving quickly on, you may notice a familiar face in that Behance project. A familiar typeface. Futura, but bold. Extra bold. The version I have is called 'Futura Standard Bold' but I can't always trust what I download off FontYükle. It's a bold weight of Futura, and it's gorgeous. It's overused, especially as you see in the Wes Anderson project - all-caps, small size, on a big photo. Perhaps coloured text on a black-and-white photo. Horizontal lines and bold, statement graphics, everything centred. Psychedelic hipster colours, patterned triangles, fashion shots. All this with Futura bold.

But what's so good about it? What about emboldening Futura takes it from a sharp sans-serif to an incredibly hip typeface? Well, I can't know for sure - because I don't know who used it for that sort of thing first - but those pointy acute-angle corners get lost in the bulk of Futura bold, yet it still keeps its formal shapes. It's a geometric sans-serif, so that means perpendiculars, almost-circular Os, and classical dimensions. Use all those in a font whose line weights are increased to the point of creating an almost chibi typeface with a masculine edge to it - and what perfect edges they are - and you have a font that is spot-on for the sort of indie culture that attracts youths to music festivals and Topman stores these days.

So I downloaded the bold weight off FontYükle (dankeschön!) and set to use it for something. Then I realised it was perfect for a small project of mine I've had in mind for a few weeks. Because, if there's one actor who constantly annoys me, it's Keanu Reeves. Appropriate he may be for The Matrix but in anything else, especially rom-coms, I can't bear him. So why not make a Keanu Reeves kit? This tastefully pink card pocket includes a little model of Keanu's torso on which you can put different Keanu heads. You can pick from a wide range of Keanu expressions - happy, sad, grumpy, joyous, pondering existential dilemmas, plus the token trollface!

Voila: tasteful pink, Futura bold and Keanu Reeves. Yay, hoorah and hell no! The kit comes in a little pocket (left) and includes the Keanu figure, a sheet about 'Keanu merch' and eight faces - seven identical Keanu faces and a trollface. I wish I could physically show this to you all, it makes no sense on the internet and you can't properly get the joke (the fact that all the faces are the same). Still, it has graphic design merit. Futura bold was surprisingly easy to master, it just needed some centering, horizontal lines and balanced layout and it looks positively hipster!

Close-up of this little 'Keanu merch!' sheet included in the kit

Why I love printing double-sided

That's all I've got for you folks. Some Keanu, some typographic discussion, and an apology for not blogging more. I'd like to say expect more from me in the next few weeks, but considering I said that about the easter holidays and here I am only posting on the last day of them, you can no longer trust me.

So, see you... erm... whenever possible. JOHNSPACE is not dead! Long live JOHNSPACE!

~John

ps. I'm also busy playing Portal 2, which - and I don't often say this, especially about a game - is incredible. The scale, the ambition, the graphics, the story, the world it creates... Valve have not only outdone themselves but, in one move, bettered the entire games industry. Play it, for it'll set the standard for many years of games to come.

Wossup #2

2011-04-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

I return to these blogging depths with a new Wossup. I have a bunch of post ideas and Easter holiday coming up so we'll just have to not predict anything and hope some of them see the light of day. Until then:

READING 'Franz Kafka: Short Stories' or some book like that. As I've said before, it has all his short stories, both novellas like The Metamorphosis and little snippets of prose like A Dream. It's a great read, though I try not to peruse it so often because reading Kafka in the afternoon means I'm bound to feel like shit all evening. And I always have this niggling feeling of uselessness and pointlessness in the human race. Reading Kafka makes me realise the Human Condition too much. Too much? This is our situation, I shouldn't scoff at something which makes me more aware of it! Pfft, life goes on. Too much, it does - too much for us to say 'oi stop' for a second and realise we're missing the bigger picture and that we'll never be around to see it all. Might as well be ignorant and not even know we're missing it. It's worse when you're aware. Jeez.

WATCHING Several good films. Notably Shattered Glass, a brilliant small project film about the downfall of a lying journalist and general madman Steven Glass, made in the 00s and set in the 90s. The main performance by Hayden Christensen (Star Wars, Jumper) was brilliant, such a great attention-whore character who - on reading Glass' Wikipedia page - is surprisingly true-to-life. Plus, it has one of my fave actors, Peter Saarsgard, in it as the editor of New Republic magazine. Dammit, I love everything Saarsgard does, and this film - small budget and small subject matter though it may be - shows his talents to the full. He's so understated, great performances all round.
I also had the - pleasure? Experience? Eventful evening? - of watching I Heart Huckabees, a film that aims high but doesn't take itself seriously enough to really make an impact. The plot is based around an environmentalist who goes to an existential detective agency to see whether his chance meetings with a tall Nigerian man mean anything in the bigger picture (yes, Kafka is referred to in this film), but ends up going on a journey about the connectedness (or non-connectedness) of life along with Mark Wahlberg and Dustin Hoffman. It has some seriously deep elements, lots of explanations about life and what things mean, but these wonderful insights are interspersed with comedy bits and indie sequences, making you wonder whether the writers actually know what existential dilemmas they're writing about or whether they're just making a comedy indie film. True themes or not, the comedic elements and off-the-wall directing nullifies the 'meaningful' bits like the blanket and the rubber ball, producing viewers at the end of the film feeling deeply unsatisfied and confused over whether they'd just learnt a lot of meaningful stuff or whether the film was just having a laugh with them. It's a real shame, I was hoping for something like Synecdoche, New York but more accessible and indie and with Mark Wahlberg. And Jude Law. Sadly it didn't meet expectations, little though they were.

LISTENING TO 'Vices and Virtues' by Panic! At the Disco. Like all great bands, I didn't like them at first - dismissing them as a 'meh version of You, Me and Everyone We Know', and accrediting all those boring 'trendy' songs I hear at parties to them - I'm warming to them. There's something quite enjoyable about the album, there's a lot of great tunage to listen to there. Maybe the songs lack the punch and pure American rockness of YMAEWK, but this latest album of theirs is concise and worth a listen.

ADMIRING Some of the best indie photography I've seen in a long while (woah, two indie things in one Wossup post? Hipster John is proud), from Tamara Lichtenstein. Not only is she a great photographer and follows the style of many of my Flickr faves, but she does a lot of professional shoots, including a lot for Converse's 2011 range. Regardless of whether I like Converse or not, she's a great photographer and her Flickr 'stream definitely deserves a gander from anyone interested in photography. Professional stuff and uniquely personal pieces, portraits, observations. Great photos all round. I wish I could embed her photos in this post but she's disabled downloading of them, grr.

DRAWING up ideas for a conlang a friend and I am making. It's a big, big project, and will take some time, but I'm very interested in it and hopefully it will go somewhere. Eff Why Eye, a conlang is a constructed language, a new language that people create that doesn't evolve naturally like English or French. There are hundreds that people have created, but the best take time and dedication. It's not just saying 'house' is 'zoowap', it's deeper than that. Firstly, you must create the phonetics of the language, choosing from the myriad of consonants and vowels that human languages contain, picking some from English and some unusual ones from European languages that we can pronounce or hope to pronounce. The sounds have great names, like uvular fricative and bilabial plosive.
Then there's the issue of vocabulary and grammar. Which sounds occur most often? Which consonant-vowel pairs? How are words formed? How many tenses are there? How many cases? What's 'the' and 'a'? Shall we even include words for 'the' and 'a'? There are loads more questions. Then, my favourite part of making this conlang, the writing system must be created. Sure, some conlangs can be written using Latin or Cyrillic script, but we wanted to go for something adventurous and so I spend some time each evening doodling scripts and letterforms for our conlang. The genius about started afresh is that you can include phonetic parts in the letters themselves - for example, differentiate between voiced and voiceless consonants by a common diacritic that can be recognised by the reader. Then we have the actual forms of the script, the adaptions that can be made for handwriting or formal and modern typefaces. Ooh, it's just a fancier and more creative type of typography, with a chunk of phonetics at the start. Excitiddling.

WEARING nothing new, annoyingly. Hoping to go to Topman for some new yet boringly highstreet someone-else-is-probably-wearing-it clothes tomorrow but we'll see what we get out the other side of that.

PROMOTING my portfolio! Yay! It's finally finished, not totally done but it's ready for some of you select viewers to have a looksie at it and appreciate it or give me feedback. The About page needs to be rewritten, but apart from that it's quite complete and there's a lot of stuff on there I haven't shown on this blog, including my WD16 furniture set:

An experiment with forms in metal sheet, modelled in card and featuring a triangular bin from WD15. Also in my portfolio are my portraits from three posts earlier, JIS. medicine packaging, the sidemark (remember that?), Snowfall and my architecture MOCs. Go check it out.

PHOTOGRAPHING a bunch of irregular portrait stuff for my art GCSE. It's hard to keep track of but a few days ago I took a substantial photoshoot of my ever-so-willing friend in an empty car park at night. I also brought a bright LED lamp to illuminate him like those indie photos of crazy parties, and even if the non-lit photos come out all underexposed, the lot ones will hopefully come out well. I also whacked my head on the camera when some policemen walked by. Awkward moment. Other than that, expect those photos very soon! Or at least as soon as Bogusprint - oops, sorry, Bonusprint get them back to me.

Laters, guys. I've got some badass Minecrafting to do on this free evening.
~John

Impenetrable Depths

2011-03-29T13:05:00.000-07:00

Sadly I must subject you poor JOHNSPACE readers to another Kafka post, because there's a huge part of Kafka's psyche I totally ignored in the last article.

There are, ultimately, two meanings to any piece of Kafka's writing - one is about society and the dilemma of the modern man, as I explained before, and the other one is about death. Kafka, being the paranoid and intensely self-aware, was not only wary of his place in society but his place in life and the role of his life in the world around him. For him, life was not simply an endless journey, but a clear beginning-middle-end with which to spend your time wisely - if at all possible.

A few years ago I was looking up quotes for a blog post and I absent-mindedly came across a quote of Kafka's, before I had read The Metamorphosis, which was this: "The point of life is that it ends". And it's amazing that Kafka, who we often disregard as being overly pessimistic or just downright depressing, here makes his most starkly meaningful statement. The point of life is that it ends. Life leads up to death; is defined by death. Ever since seeing that quote, I've had an interest in how death should sit in life and what its purpose or meaning is, if any. Kafka was obsessed with that thought, much more than my vague interest which never failed to pop up every month or so of my 365 project last year. Because it's so intriguing, that everything we do in life is ultimately irrelevant in the face of the greatest barrier known to man: death. No man, however clever, however inventive, however healthy, can overcome death. It's a ticking body clock that starts at birth and winds down to death, and for most of our lives we ignore it. Most people simply don't think about it, out of pure ignorance of lack of deep thought. It's complicated and worrying and should therefore not be thought about.

But Kafka was plagued with death. So much so that he was overcome with paranoia, intense sensitivity and anxiety that made the later years of his life almost unbearable for him. It's no wonder his worries weakened his health and he caught TB and died at the young age of 41 in 1925, luckily before all the pain and strife he would have experienced if he had lived through World War 2. Nowadays people live for twice that age, imagine what new wonders we would have to interpret had Franz Kafka lived for twice as long. It would surely be brilliant for him to turn out something better than The Metamorphosis or The Trial, but in a way Kafka's early death is an important part of his character. In a way, a man who thought so deeply about death and respected it so honourably has no better destiny than to accept it early in his life. It's sooner or later.

On a side note, it's interesting to read that Kafka was decided on his role in life rather than being helplessly aimless. He writes in his diary in June 1913: "The tremendous world I have in my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is clear to me." How peculiar of Kafka to be so determined of something so life-defining, but that can be explored in further posts (most likely in my head).

But, back on the topic of death, one brilliant short story of Kafka's stands out to me as being a complete, perfectly formed, clear analogy to what Kafka perceived death to be. The story is called A Dream, and explains the dream of Josef K. (an obvious pseudonym for Kafka, and obviously so), probably a dream that Kafka had himself or based on a dream he had and augmented to be more meaningful. Either way, I really love A Dream, and have read it three times now (more than I have The Metamorphosis, which to be honest takes so dedication to read).

The story goes like this: Josef K. is dreaming, and is walking along when he almost immediately comes to a cemetery. The paths are long and winding but he finds himself attracted to a grave in the distance, which "exerted fascination over him" and he "felt he could not reach it fast enough". If that's not a clear analogy for life and how Kafka sees life as a winding journey to a finite location, I don't know what is. For Kafka, he couldn't reach death fast enough - he was so amazed by the concept that it seemed almost like a state of judgement for him, judgement for the complicated life he led with complicated interactions and complicated people. Death is a singularity, a grave, an ending.

But an ironic thing for Kafka is that "his view [of the grave] was obscured by banners which veered and flapped against each other with great force; one could not see the standard-bearers but there seemed to be a very joyous celebration going on." It is only Franc Kafka who could describe the pursuits and distractions of life as banners flapping in front of his view of death. Perhaps these banners are other people, distracting him from that one definite occurrence, his death, which he can often see at the end of his life? It's brilliant how much you can interpret Kafka's stories.

I will jump to the end of the story, for though it is short it is also full of possible analogies that I have neither the time nor the patience to go through and analyse now. Suffice to say; Josef K. meets a artist at the graveside and the painter is writing the dead person's name on the grave. But before he can inscribe the name, he cannot go on. An awkward silence ensues between the two in which K. feels "deeply embarrassed and yet unable to explain himself". Finally, K. starts to cry with the horrific misunderstanding between him and the artist, so the artist reluctantly starts to write the name on the grave - "J" he starts, and finally Josef K. realises and digs away the thin layer of soil above the grave and sinks into the hole below. He wafts down the infinite hole, and "while he was already being received into impenetrable depths, his head still straining upwards on his neck, his own name raced across the stone above him in great flourishes". There really is so much to extract from this, I'll leave most of the interpretation to you but I'll leave you with this: Kafka in fact does not fear death like most people do, he in fact feels he is not complete and honourable if he has not died. Society expects him to die and it prevents pain on his and its part for him to succumb to death. And Kafka explains death as "being wafted onto [one's] back by a gentle current", into "impenetrable depths". Despite all the turmoil and anxiety in Kafka's life, it seems death is a final time to relax, to look up and see your life fading away from you, knowing your chores and your tasks and your purposes are gone and completed, your life finished and your name written on your gravestone. No more needs to be done, no more needs to be said, to be written. Kafka sees death as the ultimate ending, freeing him of all the responsibilities of the modern man - and of any man - that make life for him so unbearable.

tl;dr - Kafka loves death and thinks life is a chore. Also, he has brilliant dreams.

~John

Kafkaesque

2011-03-22T14:12:00.000-07:00

Today I will attempt to talk about a man who has eluded and confused the world ever since his death. And eluded and confused his friends before his death. If you didn't understand Inception, don't bother reading his work. If you didn't understand Synecdoche, New York, have a go but you'll be fruitless. This man's name is Franz Kafka, and he was an Austrian writer and general pessimist. When asked 'is the glass half full or half empty?', he'd answer 'what's the point in a glass anyway? Every sip takes us closer to death'. He was that kind of guy.

Kafka's work is mysterious, highly symbolic and pretty much define the term 'more than meets the eye'. I often read his shorter stories - only a page or two long, but so much can possibly be taken from them that they may as well be a whole novel. Even greater than the meanings of single stories, it seems to me that Kafka's work is all related fundamentally to his mentality and the struggles he found in his life related to fitting in to society and being a modern man. Forever he is creating social stereotypes, picking out every unnecessary detail of a chance encounter with a stranger, wondering who is thinking what, who is thinking what about him, and what others' opinions of things are. He is a man constantly plagued by the existence of so many others, so many others he doesn't know, around him in such a bustling society as 1910s Prague. And yet this predicament of the modern man has changed little since then! I sometimes find myself thing Kafkaesque thoughts, the world being full of foreign souls, that can never be understood and are therefore a menace.

One story of Kafka's that shows this the most is The Bridge. In it, Kafka tells a story of a bridge spanning a small river in first person. The bridge has its feet on one side and its hands holding the other side of the river and is strong and proud of itself. It is not on any map as of yet but is happy enough waiting for its use by some unknown user. Then, the bridge encounters a man, a hiker, who tentatively taps the bridge with his stick then jumps right into the middle of it, causing the bridge to be shocked and attempted to "turn around to see him" - which in fact causes the bridge to break and fall onto the jagged rocks which had beforehand seemed so safe from when the bridge was firm.

God knows how many interpretations that story could present, but I'm going to continue the line of investigation into Kafka's fear of the modern society. The bridge is like a person, strong of itself and not fearful of another person's interference into what people would nowadays call their 'private bubble', or their personal lives. The bridge's entire purpose is that of interaction with a person, it's what it lies in wait for for so many years. It's not labelled on any map - not known, but out there to be discovered. However, when it encounters what we can assume is its first user, or first user in many years, it is immediately hurt and is affected by the appearance of someone so close to itself. Suddenly, not expecting someone to actually come along and use it, it turns in horror and is destroyed as a result of the one thing it exists for. Perhaps this is how Kafka saw himself - a man, an island, happy to be on its own but forever waiting for someone to come and interact with it, maybe romantically. The moment someone does, that hope is turned into fear and the person wants nothing to do with other people; in fact their life is ruined by having those foreign elements in it. Conclusion: your life is fine unless you interact with anyone other than yourself.

Such morals are found everywhere in Kafka's stories. For example, The Confidence Trickster, a study of a particular character you would not want to be deceived by, and The Sudden Walk - in which the protagonist suddenly walks out of his cosy home to encounter the cold, faceless streets and is distracted from himself as a result. It's a recurring theme, and also key to Kafka's masterpiece and - I believe - his best work, The Metamorphosis.

The Metamorphosis is the most accessible of Kafka's stories because it is so unusually formally structured and begins with such a simple and understandable idea - that you wake up from sleeping in your bed to find yourself transformed into something horrific. Right at the start we have the concept of deceit from something you trusted - your simple humble bed, your home, your family, your shelter. And, due to no fault of your own, you become something that sets you out from society in the worst way possible - being a giant insect. Suddenly your family is turned against you, the entire city is against you because you are different. A totally respectable man - Gregor Samsa, I believe - is a public humiliation and object of hatred the moment he wakes up. Social embarrassment is another theme Kafka loves experimenting with. Then, poor Mr. Samsa, confined in his room and listening to his distraught family discussing him outside the door (specifically, how he should get to work on time), also struggling to come to terms with his many new limbs, finds a friend of sorts in the cleaner sent to clean out his room. She and him are brought together by being two social outsiders. Then, naturally, Samsa is hit by an apple and dies a slow and painful death, still inside his bedroom.

Suffice to say, Franz Kafka was a very pessimistic guy but also a very clever guy. On the back of my Kafka short story book it says 'Kafka's predicament is that of the modern man', and I think if we're going to take anything from this post, it's got to be that. Kafka experienced social life as an outsider, fearful of anything that wasn't him and fearful of the community itself. It's not a bad thing most of his stories are about him; he's not conceited - rather, afraid of having any sort of self-confidence taken from him by the dangerous free radicals that are other people. Because he knows that, someday, one of those free radicals will get too close and he'll come crashing down - and that peaceful stream he felt so safe from beforehand turns out to be his greatest foe.

And in every one of Kafka's stories, whether society-related or not, based on characters from dozens of cultures and settings, we see a little more of the frightened, sensitive man behind the pessimism. It's like Kafka's mind is a plateau and each story offers a hole punched through to reveal the true personality beneath. The Metamorphosis offers a large, very accessible hole, so if you're going to attempt to understand Kafka I recommend you read that. Or even if you don't care for the man himself, I recommend you read The Metamorphosis. There is a lot to be interpreted from such a short read, and since it's a bit more to-the-point than FK's other work, it's a damn good start on a whole range of Kafkaesque wonders.

~John

Portraits

2011-03-20T13:31:00.000-07:00

Well hey guys, it's been ages. Many apologies. Today I bring you something a little more mainstream (Argh! I burns my hispter eyes!) in the form of a bunch of photos from my recent photo-taking sessions. After that bunch of black-and-white photos, I've returned to the usual, more flexible format of colour film. And, even better, I've found a developer who won't fuck up every roll I give them - Bonusprint - who may take a while to send your films back to you but it's cheaper than Jessops and the results are perfect. Thanks, Bonusprint people!

Before we get onto two colour rolls of pure awesomeness, I have one final black and white to show you. I don't think I showed you the others, but never mind - you can find them all on my photostream a page or so back. This photo is the second in a long-running photography project of mine, Skylines. It's basically just Intersections, but in the sky. The idea is that grounded and flying objects interact with each other and with the frame, creating unique and unusual compositions with telegraph wires, planes and birds. The first photo was simple some pylons and a moody cloudy sky, and now I've started interacting the pylons with planes:

It may seem empty and basic, but it's a simple composition and that's what I wanted to achieve. The two lines (pylon wires) give the idea of a runway, something extending out and creating thrust to the top-left of the frame. The plane accentuates this and gives it purpose and a vague meaning (runway? The aim of the plane? Something along those lines). That's the general idea. I hope to extend and continue the series in further rolls, but all in good time! It's a long-scale project.

Next up is the first of my portraits. For my current GCSE art project (which sadly fuels most of my photography nowadays), I have decided to take a break from grungy urban architecture and Skylines. I'm moving into a much more emotive artform, the portrait. Unlike blocks of flats, people give off distinct, passionate and sometimes disturbingly clear emotions in their expressions and poses, and we can use photography to enhance that. I read somewhere that in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy uses the descriptions of the background, setting and other people as a sort of mirror for Tess' emotions. What she feels and what she thinks echoes in the world around her, for she is the centre of the whole novel and everything eventually leads back to her. This is an idea I really want to explore in my photography over the course of this gosh-darned art project - reflecting emotions of the subject in the background so that the emotion is both clear and deeply set into the photo.

But, before I get into that, I need to get used to taking portraits. The only portraits I've taken of any note were a bunch of cast photographs for my youth theatre group's production of Alice in Wonderland back in the Summer, a bunch of digital photos against a shitty backdrop with shitty lighting and me not doing much work to make it look less shitty. I'm not including those in my portfolio; they're behind me now and portraits with film is a whole new start.

Thus behold, my friend Rob. In our school hall. In front of a projector. With the focus a bit off and a bit wobbly. Imperfect but perfectly so. Or something like that. I like the imperfection of it, despite my perfectionist ways. Sure, the motion blur doesn't help, but the softness of the photo and warmness of its colours seems to make this a good pic for me. Not a proper portrait - none of these are - but more a photo-of-a-person portrait.

Also on my second roll is this photo of Tim, a guy in my art class, sitting in my art classroom and generally looking moody and very cool. I reiterate what I said earlier; these photos don't necessarily show the personalities of the person in them. They're just emotions, not the genuine people. Because though Tim may have one heck of a badass fringe, he's a really nice guy and is rarely moody. And Rob doesn't always have a rainbow on his hair.

In the half term I did my first photoshoot, with my photography friend Olly, my not-so-photography-but-she's-actually-very-good-at-it friend Zoë, and her friend Maria. Yes, it was freezing cold, and it rained half the time, and my jeans got muddy (ooh sissy me). But I got some goddamn good shots out of it, if I don't say so myself. Here are the four best ones that I put on my Flickr:

Zoë, the first location thingy we did.

Maria, Zoë, bokeh.

Same angle, better pose, better light. Mmmm, glowy.

Maria by a tree

I'm only two rolls into this project (will probably be six by the end), but it's already had a dramatic effect on my photography. I see photo opportunities that I would beforehand have loved, but in the absence of someone to pose for me in front of it, it seems lifeless and emotionless. Sure, there are still good personless photos, but photos such as a nice shot of the blossom on a tree on my road don't entice me like they used to. Have I moved up? No, probably not, I've just moved away. Into a different field of photography. And I really love it. All I need is more people to pose for me, but there seems to be no shortage of that, whether it's people who want to model like Zoë or Maria or people who get told to stand, whether they like it or not, in my photos, like Rob and Tim. Thanks to you all.

And, before we go, here's a non-portrait, a shot of Zoë's awesomely retro suitcase:

Mmmmm, short DoF. How I love you. I'm just perfecting my portfolio right now, kids, so expect more posts about my creative projects very soon - including furniture! Proper furniture! Oh the exictement!

~John

ps. It's been so long. I hope you didn't all judge me on that dimensions post; I had to indulge.

pps. Dammit, I'm reading Kafka again. I'm formulating a Kafka post in my mind, I'll try and get that done for you guys.

Cartesian what now?

2011-03-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

OK guys, for today's post (jeez I need to post more often, jeez), I have a little bit of maths for you to comprehend. OK, it's not that maths-y, it's the sort of thing that I would have put up on Dimensionality back when it was alive. Let it be known before I start my multi-dimensional ramblings that this is something that I worked out a few weeks ago, but it has actually been worked out differently and 'properly' by mathematicians decades ago. Sure, maybe I'm wrong in some places because I'm not au fait with the proper notation and I'm not going into tesseracts and shit like that, here's the theory. And just the theory.

Before we begin, I need to inform you we'll be talking a lot about dimensions. You know, those planes of existence in which we live. The four dimensions we can perceive with our human eyes are 0, 1, 2, and 3. Below you can see these represented graphically. You see we can graphically show a 0-dimensional object, a point. Then we can extend that point into a new dimension, the first dimension, created a line from point A to point B. We can extend that line and thus points A and B again, creating a square, and a third point, C. That's the second dimension; like this screen. We can then pull points A, B and C out of their two dimensions and into a third, creating a cube. This offers us point D. Like the other points, D can be represented in any of the lower dimensions, but it's only when we open those dimensions up that we see the true placement of D. For example, squash that cube back down into a 2D shape and it goes right on top of one of the other points, so in a 2D plane we see it as being the same as that other point. It's only in a higher dimension that we realise just how far away certain points are.

Similarly, you could be right next to someone else in the first 3 dimensions, but maybe in the fourth or fifth dimensions, you're aeons away. It's a scary thought.

Some display schtuff: 1D coordinates (x-variables) are brown, 2D coordinates (y-variables) are blue, and 3D coordinates (z-variables) are yellow.

OK. Let's get started.

Science is based on comparing different variables, right? For every variable, one value in that variable corresponds to a different value in a different variable. This was the starting point for me. We compare two variables together and we can display them in a table; much like the times table you know so well from primary school. That grid with numbers on one side (1 to 10, say) and numbers on another side (1 to 10 again), and then meeting to create different numbers in the table space. This is a 2D variable comparison space.

But remember that those variables, such as in that times table (though they're not scientific variables) are discrete - as in, they only have certain values, such as 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. We can link our tables to what is known as Cartesian space. Cartesian space is the xy plane in which we deal with most graphs. And the only difference between a two-way table and Cartesian space is that in the xy plane, the variables (x and y) are continuous, whereas in a table, the variables are discrete. In a table, the values are simply '1,2,3' but in xy space the variables could use values '1,2,3' or go deeper and use '0.00001, 0.00002', etc. There are an infinite number of values in Cartesian space.

You can see the comparison here, and it's also clear to see that variables are compared to each other in both systems as being a simple 2D shape - extending that 1D line outwards to form two sides of a square.

Now, if you were doing proper science, you'd perhaps want to compare three variables. And just as comparing two variables requires a 2D table space, comparing three requires a 3D space. You extend that grid of values out into a third dimension, creating a grid cube of sorts. Imagine you had ten values in Variable A, ten values in Variable B and ten values in Variable C. Plotting A against B will give you a table of 100 values, and plotting those two against C will multiply that number by the number of values in Variable C, ie. 100x10 = 1,000.

Knowing this simple maths, we can easily plot our first three variables - A, B and C - against a fourth, D. If D also has 10 values, then clearly we have 1,000x10 = 10,000 values in our grid space. We can't represent it graphically in a 2D space like we can a 3D table, but it's still possibly to work out - as we just did - how many values would be in it according to how many values our fourth variable has.

Similarly, we can plot the first four variables against a fifth, E. If E has ten values, then we know that the resulting 5D grid space has 10,000x10 = 100,000 resulting values. The five variables intersect at 100,000 points, and it's simple to find out what those are. Say A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4 and E=5. Therefore the resulting value is 1x2x3x4x5 = 120, and the highest possible value is when all five equal 10, so 10x10x10x10x10 = 100,000. See? Not so complicated stuff after all.

Plotting a 3D ABC table against a 2D DE table

So now let's return to Cartesian space. Descartes, who was the dude who created Cartesian space, originally accommodated it for three variables. In our previous example, we had Variables A, B and C creating a 3D table space. In Cartesian space, we have x, y and z. xy is the 2D space you see to your left, plotting x against y. Just like in the table, we can then plot that 2D space against a third variable, z. This gives us a 3D space to work in, where people can place and manipulate cubes, spheres and other things. However, the genius of it is that we can also place one- and two-dimensional shapes in 3D space, such as lines and squares. The only difference is that instead of a point being defined by (x,y), its coordinates include a third variable: (x,y,z).

Side note: It's ironic to think that we have an infinite number of values in the xy space, then when we plot them against a third, infinite variable (z), we are left with ∞x∞ values. Which turns out just to be infinity again.

But, just as 1D and 2D objects can be displayed in a 3D space, that same 3D space, full of complex 3D objects, can be displayed accurately in 2D spaces. The only problem is, 2D spaces only plot two variables against each other. We need three. So we plot x against y on one 2D graph, then y against z on another 2D graph, therefore showing the value and location of all the points in all three dimensions. This solution needs two graphs as opposed to one, and it's much harder to understand the location and size of shapes, but it could mean the difference between thinking two points as the same and realising that they are incredibly far away in the z plane.

You can see there I'm using the point (2,2,2) as an example. Luckily for us, the xy coordinate (2,2) has a z coordinate of 2. That's not too hard to comprehend. Take a point at 2 on a 1D plane, extend it into a 2D plane by 2, then extend it out again into another, 3D plane, creating a (2,2,2) coordinate.

But what if we want to show a line in this 3D space? I'm not going to try showing it in the xyz space in a 2D format as above, because it's hard to tell where the points are, so I'll use two 2D graphs to show one 3D graph. Here we can see a line that runs from (2,2) to (3,3). Quite a basic line, right? Well, we may misinterpret it! If we then show that line in another graph, plotting y against z, then we see that it runs from (2,2,2) to (3,3,17). It's longer than we thought. NB. we could also have plotted x against z, the line runs from one point to another in that plane too. It's just a different way of showing where the point lies. However, for future developments (it gets complicated later on), we will follow a rule to plot the last variable against the next one, ie. in xyz, plot xy and yz, not xz. You'll see why later.

So that's alright to understand. Coolio. But, when we were dealing with tables way back at the start of the post, we extended our 3D table space by presenting another variable, D, and plotting A, B and C against D. ie., the space was called ABCD. It turns out that you could do this pretty easily in Cartesian space too, though I don't think Cartesian space was designed to deal with a fourth variable. Our fourth variable is the value of a point, or line, or whatever, in a fourth dimension. 'Fourth dimension!?' you say, 'that's crazy talk! How can we ever interpret or understand that?'. Well my little non-believer, we can. We can't display a 3D graph on a 2D screen (such as the one you are reading from), because each point would correspond to an infinite number of points if that 3D graph were real. That's why I said it was bad form to keep using that '3D' graph to show xyz spaces. So I used two 2D graphs to = a 3D graph instead.

And we can do just the same with a 4D graph. Only, because we now have four variables, we have to show three variables on one graph and two variables on another. We use a common variable that appears on both graphs to link them together. So, let's take a look at this:

This is a 2D (just about) representation of a 4D space. The first graph is easy; it's a simple 3D graph (yes, in a 2D format, but just ignore that for now). We're plotting x against y (as per usual) against z. That gives us a three-dimensional space. But what if that point, (2,2,2), had another value? A value in a fourth dimension? Well, just as we took the y from xy and plotted it against the new variable, z, we're gonna take the z from xyz and plot it against our new fourth variable, w. (Wikipedia uses w, BTW, it's no personal thing). So we plot a second, 2D, graph of zw. And from that we can see that the point (2,2,2) has a value of w=2. Therefore its xyzw coordinate is (2,2,2,2). It's quite simple, really.

And, just as before, we can use multiple graphs of the same multidimensional space to show the true values of lines. Just as before, I'm going to switch back to only using 2D graphs when I'm representing lines in higher dimensions, because otherwise it's really hard to display it properly. So, I've used three 2D graphs here. We need to show an xyzw space, so we plot xy (you'll be sick of that by now), yz (remember that?) and zw. Once again, we see that the first few dimensions are very deceptive. In the xy plane, we see the points on the line are (2,2) and (3,3). In the xyz plane very little changes as we see their coordinates are (2,2,2) and (3,3,3). However, extend that line into a fourth plane, a fourth dimension, and we see that the points are (2,2,2,2) and (3,3,3,20). That second point is in fact further away than we thought.

But does that make the line longer ? We can still measure it in cm, it's still a 1D shape, but in a 4D plane. Perhaps. There's a bit too much mindfuckery there for me.

So now we reach the final throes of this horrendously long post. But before we go, I have one final thing to show you. We've seen how easy it is too understand and graphically represent 4D space, whether they exist physically or not. So, using our advanced understanding of simple 2D and 3D graphs, we can therefore represent even higher dimensions. Be prepared to be confused.

So now we're plotting five variables against each other. Remember we need to display all five, but repeat one to link the two graphs together. That means we need a series of graphs to display six variables. Therefore, we need two 3D graphs. One one graph, we plot our usual 3D space of xyz. On the second graph, we continue z from the first to link the two. We plot z against w (the fourth dimension) against our newbie, ŵ. The first graph tells us the point is at (2,2,2), and the second graph tells us it's at (x,y,2,2,2). Combine the xyz and zwŵ spaces together and we can produce a (x,y,z,w,ŵ) coordinate of (2,2,2,2,2). It's surprisingly simple to do!

I won't go on, because from now on it's all boring and samey. Need to display an eighth-dimensional point? Sure thing! Eight dimensions means (theoretically, just choosing symbols now) (x,y,z,w,ŵ,ŵ',ŵ'',ŵ'''). That means plotting graphs xyz, zwŵ, ŵŵ'ŵ'', and ŵ''ŵ'''. And that's all there is to it, for an infinite number of dimensions, forever and ever. Of course, this is all purely mathematical, and hypothetical, so that means that there may not be a 58th dimension, however many shapes you can represent in it. Different theories give us different values as to how many dimensions actually exist (ignoring time, which isn't representable in Cartesian form, haha); some say 16, some say 20. If you ask me, the nature of the universe seems infer that there would be an infinite number of dimensions, partially because we can work with an infinite number of dimensions graphically (as shown above). I also think that something so key to the being of the universe shouldn't be so finite, so human-defines as simply 16. To me, it seems crazy to put a cap on the number of planes in which matter - and antimatter and presumably dark matter - exists and is perceived.

But that's a rant for another day.

~John

Helvetica's last words

2011-02-27T06:55:00.000-08:00

Ladies and gentleman, today I have to tell you something very sad. For, it seems to me, a good friend has passed away. That friend is Helvetica, my all-time favourite font and the most used (commercially) typeface of all time, ever. Made in the 50s by the Haas type foundry, and used in branding from M&S to T-Mobile and dozens of others, Helvetica is an important part of our everyday life, though most people don't know it. It's always there to tell you to buy more M&S food or that there's a new offer from T-Mobile. It warns you to keep out or beware of electricity pylons. It directs you on streetsigns. It's everywhere, it's trustworthy, it's stable and it's reliable. It's Helvetica.

But it's time that we moved on, typographically speaking. I'm talking of a sans-serif revolution, forefronted by the greatest type designers currently working, Hoefler and Frere-Jones. These two released one of their best fonts, by name of Gotham, a few years ago and I believe this is forefronting a typographical revolution. I'll still use Helvetica, as will everyone else - for now anyway - but I want to make you aware of this imminent and large-scale change that I think is happening. Well, it is happening, but I think it will grow to be bigger than it is.

So here's a little clipping of Gotham, credits to H&FJ. I'd buy it, but sadly it's way too expensive for any typography fan and exclusive to the budgets of magazines and design agencies.

Gotham, inspired by the 'American vernacular', is sharp, strong and modern yet with a clear US-40s vibe to it that will allow it to sit in a less modern setting. It's not universal like Helvetica is, not bland like Univers is, not too abstract like Avant-Garde or Future, and more stylish than Gill Sans. I like to think of it as the Eames of sans-serifs. And it's had a large impact. I can't tell you that it's being used in more and more places now, because I don't know how to define it from other similar fonts, but that type of sans-serif is becoming more and more common.

Let's take a look at the logo of one of the leading menswear designers, Tom Ford. Yeah, the guy who presented an award at the BAFTAs and held a womenswear show but only invited one photographer and no bloggers. That guy. Well, here's his current logo. Now look at his older logo:

Notice any difference? Yeah, the font is different. The older logo has our best friend Helvetica - noticeable by the classic R-form (more on that later), and the current logo is what I hereby christen as a 'modern sans serif'. Maybe even Gotham, though I believe the M-form is different. 'Modern sans serif?' you ask, 'aren't all sans-serifs modern?'. Ah, my dear fellow, that is where you are wrong. This is what I'm trying to say with this post: sans-serifs have been around for nearly a century now, so we can't perceive all of them as being 'modern'. At some point we need to separate the sans-serifs of the past with a new wave of sans-serifs that are in use by the most fashionable designers and brands (ie. Tom Ford, also Michael Kors and various other fashion brands), and I call them 'modern' sans-serifs.

These fonts are most recognisable by that simple yet bold R-form, a letterform which I find myself more and more attracted to every time I see it in use. It's so modern, that's all I can call it. Modern, bold, and strong. Strong is a big thing to identify about it and the rest of 'modern' sans-serif typefaces, that's what they're beginning to hold over classical sans-serifs, and why I have to say that Helvetica is looking increasingly weak and old-fashioned. Look, let me explain with a brief history of the R-form...

So here is the R-form (bear in mind I'm talking constantly about the capital/majuscule R-form) in various Helvetica weights - bold, regular, light and ultra-light. It's not a badly designed font - of course not, it's one of the greatest ever made - but it does have it flaws, that I have only discovered after using it so much. And one of those flaws is the signiature R-form. Alright in the bold weight, a maybe even in regular, but when we get to ultra-light that letterform is looking weak and not at all elegant. In an italicised weight, it looks even worse as the leg of the R sticks out, still vertical as in the regular weights but now looking diagonal to the back stem. It can't be helped with that sort of leg on the R, but it still doesn't look very good. It's no wonder M&S occasionally use a similar ultralight sans-serif for their branding, one with a modern R-form, and swap between the two. Risky, but necessary if you want your branding free of that increasingly dated R-form.

Here we can see Helvetica at the end of the evolution of type: starting with Hoefler Text (made by Jonathan Hoefler from H&FJ), standing for a classical serif font, then with Didot for that art deco Didone period in the 20s and 30s, then to Clarendon for the league of slab serifs in the late 20th century. Sure, Helvetica is a bit out of place in a serif font line-up, but it shows its roots. Classical serif fonts have that straight R leg that we recognise in Gotham, kinda, but since then they moved onto a more intricate, curled form, evident in both Didones and slab-serifs. That form then moved straight into the sans-serif movement in the 40s and 50s, because both Univers and Helvetica have a reduced form of the curled leg, and that's only one of many old-fashioned stylings that can be found in Helvetica. It may look modern in most circumstances, but in actual fact it shows its age quite a lot!

Now let's look at Helvetica, specifically its R-form, as part of the sans-serif evolution. Sans-serifs as we know them today are divided into three main types: humanist, geometric and grotesque. The humanist font shown here is the British classic Gill Sans - used for BBC News graphics and designed by Eric Gill. I once when to a Gill Sans-themed Pizza Express, but that's another matter. Gill Sans' R-form has a very wide leg, one of its most recognisable features, so this is more related to that swash leg we see in Hoefler Text in the previous graphic. Our geometric sans-serifs are Futura and Avant-Garde, and in these fonts the designers have explored using straight legs to balance the rounded form of the small bowl (loop) at the top of the R. This form can start to look a bit like the handwritten R-form, as if the letter was drawn with one single stroke, but even this can be manipulated, as in the distinctive unattached leg in Avant-Garde.

However, compared to these other forms of sans-serif, grotesques like Helvetica and its counterpart Univers are staring to look aged and unbalanced. Their forms are too classic and show too many signs of traditional letterforms and the remains of serifs (such as on the tail of the lowercase A in Helvetica regular), even though Helvetica is a massive improvement on the older Univers, which keeps almost exclusively to classical proportions (ie. width of R is half width of O). I have also included the only example of a 'modern' sans-serif I own; some display font called 'Hit the Road Regular' which is the closest I can come to Gotham without spending a load of money on H&FJ's typeface. You can see it's smaller - that's only unique to Hit the Road, it's got a load of problems with it (especially kerning), but even without it is very bold and intense when compared to the etherial Avant-Garde or towering Helvetica R-forms.

I'm not saying that Helvetica's typographic reign is over. It certainly isn't. I want to make you aware that Helvetica won't last forever, and that - as with everything - it has its flaws. So it's about time we thought about where we're going to move on to, typographically. And I say we move onto 'modern' sans-serifs, that's what I find myself being dragged to. Rest assured, Helvetica will last another 10 years at least, but today we see Univers slipping by the sidelines (HSBC's branding is the only important current use I can remember) and Helvetica is walking the same road as Univers; they're in the same boat. So sure, let's enjoy Helvetica for now, but let's keep our typographic senses trained on the future. Mid-century modernism won't last forever.

~John

Forever Alone?

2011-02-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

Ah, it's Valentine's Day. That holiday invented by the greeting card conglomerates to get us all to send meaningless cards to one another and celebrate how awesome our lives our and how awesome our partners are, though we all secretly know they're not all that good and the divorce papers are somewhere in the third drawer of my desk, must get around to signing them and letting her know at some point. "Our marriage is on the rocks" is a commonly used term, especially in Denmark (with the highest divorce rate in Europe), though there's some stupid story in the Bible that tells us rocks are better to build on than sand. Though I'll admit I've never heard someone say "our marriage is on the sand", though I think there are several 80s romance films that would say otherwise.

So how did I spend today? Trapped under a pile of Valentine's Day cards, scrawled over by a myriad of John-hungry girls professing their love for me? Nah, I got one parcel today, and that was from Harry - and no letter, may I add, I wrote you one! Jeez, the things I do for you Harry m'boy. Anywho, no. No cards. No love professions. No John-hungry girls. No fanatics crowding outside my house. To be honest, I didn't expect them. But it would have been a fun morning nonetheless. So I spent my Valentine's Day afternoon with one person in a room, with much intimate contact.

My dentist.

He wears awesome glasses, though.

And I'll conclude this fantastic Valentine's Day with a full hour of heavy Minecrafting. Boy, I love my life. Before I end this already poor post (just to archive this particular February the 14th, may be some sort of tradition after last year), I present you with this handy Venn diagram:

And this:

Well I hope you guys all had a better Valentine's Day than me (and my dentist). Arrivaderci, or - as the Danes would say - "Darling, get the divorce papers!"

~John

ps. No, not intimate in that way you sick bastards. You're lucky I didn't say 'spent the afternoon with another person, one of us with a bodily appendage in the other's mouth', I'm not that dirty. Oh shi-

pps. I made a microscale town hall. Just to prove that my Flickr account isn't dead.

Wossup #1

2011-02-09T12:24:00.000-08:00

A possible new format for some regular posts, covering most of what I've been up to recently.

READING Wallpaper* Magazine, latest issue. It's all about fashion this time - yeah, I mean all about fashion, even the architectural articles are about fashion architecture, or some such thing. It's a bit too much for me in some places, but the majority of it is very, very interesting and as useless as the included fold-out poster of next season's myriad of colours is (my sister says, quite rightly, 'so isn't that just all the colours, then?'), it's fun to look at and admire. Great Newspaper section, too. Not my fave issue of the ever-changing mag, but certainly one to refer back to in the future.

WATCHING Glee, sadly. I began watching the second season a few weeks ago high on anticipation of the continuation of one of the greatest comedy/musical TV programmes to grace our screens in years. Now, four weeks later, I am left feeling very disappointed and even a bit angry at the programmemakers for such a poor seriesquel. Sure, the songs are as good as ever, but the writers couldn't be bothered to make them fit into the plot any more. They were songs for the sake of songs, for the sake of having 'Billionaire' in there. Plus, everyone's character has changed such that it seems like some moronic writer has taken a look back on season 1 and accentuated the personalities to the unrealistic extremes. Gone are the cleverly written one-theme-episodes, gone is the satire on High School Musical and self-satire, and we're left with a regular drama with a script so dry it's approaching the level of other boring US soaps. Sure, I enjoyed the Rocky Horror Show episode on monday (It's just a jump to the left...), but my standards and expectations are now considerably lower than before. Shame, really.

LISTENING TO 'Price Tag' by Jessie J, who has exploded onto the music scene like a pinless grenade of great music, and thank goodness for that - she had so much to live up to. Though her first single 'Do it like a dude' is totally not her (originally written for Rihanna, doncha know), 'Price Tag' is something I heard in acoustic on Later Live with Jools Holland months ago and have been looking forward to the release of ever since. And with BoB thrown into the equation for a bit of rap relief at the end? Great, great song. And it went straight to number 1, as well. Just as I predicted.

ADMIRING Arne Jacobsen's architecture, as always. I reread the book I bought at the Dansk Design Centre about him today; he never fails to inspire me. His hanging plants and brilliantly restrained yet elegant architectural features give projects like the Royal Hotel, Copenhagen and Danmarks Nationalbank that Jacobsen trademark. A trademark that is forever amazing me, goddamit Arne! Why you so good?

Rødovre town hall, by Jacobsen - naturally

DRAWING furniture, for once. Curiously, a flash of inspiration in that great inspiration vessel, the bath (gotta love Aristotle) caused me to go on a creative streak and design a chair, a table, a dresser and a system of lights. I've made a model of the chair, but I'm awaiting more card so I can create the others to the same scale. Chuck 'em in a card interior (quite a small scale, by the way - not full-size!) and snap a photo, and maybe you'll get to see them. For the moment, I'm brainstorming most of the pieces in my Moleskine and designing the others to be printed out pronto. Exciting stuff, if I ever finish it.

WEARING new glasses, yay. This time I wanted to go for something a bit more hip, more trendy, but not too trendy - dudes, I'm not a mindless trend follower. Well, OK, I usually am. But if I had my way and a lot more drive to buy clothes, I wouldn't be. Anywho, new glasses. Still wearing into them, nasty headgrabbing things. Ouch.

PROMOTING a new project on my Behance Network profile, a packaging design study for third-world medicine distribution by Japanese Industrial Standards. Using their 2005 logo (on the Unicode character set, don't sue me bro), a fun smiling face graphic and a neat modern sans-serif font, I've created a whole new brand and product range:

See all the photos and details here.

PHOTOGRAPHING not much at the moment. My photography GCSE assessment has put me off photography for a while, and my recent furniture-designing and architecture passion flares have distracted me even more. I'm also frustrated, taking photos of everyday moments, when I keep telling myself in my coursework that photography is art, and pre-conceived photosets examining artistic themes are the only way to separate my work from that of the common camera-wielder. It's really been bothering me, but I shouldn't force myself into photography when I'm not truly inspired at this moment in time. My creativity is a precarious balance between furniture design, graphic design, architecture, photography and - occasionally - writing. I should just go with the flow and do whatever I'm inspired about, but with another art GCSE photography project looming over my head it's getting awful difficult to put photography to the side - even when I don't have any inspiration.

Maybe I'll make more like this sometime soon, every month or so. I'd do it every week but my interests don't change that quickly. Feel free to use this template, too, if you like.

~John

Six style questions

2011-02-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

Recently I've been plagued by these several key, unanswerable questions about style and fashion and how our preferred aesthetic styles (in both fashion and design) change over time, and between individuals. So here's a list of those questions, unanswered, to be discussed at a later point. Alternatively, if you have any thoughts, comment below.

Does anything ever go out of style, or are the more unfashionable styles just seen as pushing the boundaries?
By predicting next season's styles, colours and fashion, are we in fact setting those styles? Does that count as the natural progression of fashion in society?
Can one person only design in one style, or can a change occur? If so, is that new style strictly theirs, since they're not 'born with it'?
Can one person only pull of one style, or can they pull of many? Is there one specific style that is 'perfect' for them, appropriate for their personality as well as looks? Perhaps the 'perfect' style doesn't fit their personality.
Similarly, do styles only work for certain people? Can we define or appreciate styles if they only work with a tiny percentage of the population?
In terms of fashion, a style is set as an outfit. But can you set a style in an outfit with simply one item? Or do you have to give two items to set the relationship between their styles, creating a new style (or if they're the same style, confirm that that style is the style for the outfit)? Can any combination of two items act to create an outfit style that would work with other, similar items? Or will some pairs of items just never 'go' together?

Just a couple of my thoughts these past days. More posts coming soon, guys, I realise that I am in fact wasting a lot of my creativity by not putting it into a regular post every day, maybe I'll try an every-week posting project sometime soon. Sometime soon...

~John

Spatial problem-solving

2011-01-31T11:59:00.000-08:00

Recently I took a book out from my library, 'Twentieth Century Furniture' (which happened to be previously owned by my art teacher), so you've no doubt it's inspired me a great deal. Thus, I've decided to dedicate a post to early international modernism, a variant of the modernist style from before 1940.

Pre-war modernism began with two main schools of thought: De Stijl, a loose-knit group of Dutch designers and artists (including Mondrian and Rietveld), and Bauhaus, a school in Germany occupied by some of the greats of modernism, including Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius. Together, these two styles of design brought about the early modernist revolution, turning their Dutch and German middle fingers up to the commoner styles of art deco and early modernism such as Wright and Mackintosh.

Everyone knows Bauhaus as the function-before-form lot, but in fact their counterparts at De Stijl had a very different way of doing things. Rietveld, one of the key designers of the group, wanted to focus on 'solving spatial problems' - in other worlds, creating 3D objects that satisfy the eye to the greatest degree, finding perfect formations and perfect shapes in perfect places. For De Stijl, this was all about manipulating lines and geometric shapes (nearly always rectangles) to create common forms, and compositions that were both stable and aesthetically pleasing.

From the book, Rietveld gave this quote: "A practical realisation [of the De Stijl design ethic] was not always feasible. Function for me was a thing by itself which I never overlooked, it is true, but it did not come into play until the construction and spatial exercises in De Stijl had been completed". This, for me, is incredibly interesting - here we have one of the founding fathers of modernism actively ignoring functionalism until the last moment in the design process! What for? To follow a set of rules that De Stijl was based on. I'm by no means criticising this process - I like it, but I feel that function has to come into play a little earlier than it did with, say, the 'Zig-Zag' chair by Rietveld:

If we take the De Stijl standards to simply apply to art and sculpture, then we can let Rietveld off for this one - he was not purposefully creating a functional element, merely satisfy spatial problems with a seat and a backrest. Fair enough; but the more purist designers would argue that all design must include some sort of functionality and ergonomics. Mondrian was more than welcome to go nuts with the right angles in his artwork, but if Rietveld's creating De Stijl furniture and actively including it in interiors (such as the Schröder House in Utrecht), he should have considered function a bit more, in my opinion. It may be just about acceptable for his Red and Blue chair:

In the Red and Blue chair, it is important to note that, until Mondrian set the primary colour palette of De Stijl with his abstract paintings, Rietveld had designed the chair to be unpainted, so it would probably blend in more with an interor. It is only with its bold colour scheme that the Red and Blue chair individualised itself as something other than a functional piece of furniture, much as all Rietveld's designs' bold forms and colours set them apart from objects that would otherwise be used a lot. Perhaps it is important that the objects show themselves as being artistic and sculptural, to prevent any misunderstanding of them being ergonomic objects. Even still, the only Rietveld-accurate Red and Blue chairs (Cassina sell a replica version) exist in MoMA, the Vitra Archives and the now-museum Schröder House, so we can no longer interact with the chair. That way we don't have to worry about the functionality, but at some point in the past, someone had to, and that's one of Rietveld's flaws.

This lack of care for functionality may be a result of De Stijl's historical setting - it's still in the earlier 20th Century, so perhaps the form-before-function motif is related to the styles of Victorian and pre-Victorian era design, which had been so dominant in previous centuries. Back then, everything was form before function: people treated furniture as a chance to express grandeur and elegance in their houses, which were similarly styled - that's why function always took a back seat. The theory I'm presenting is that De Stijl, only in the 1920s don't forget, still held this ethic of elaborate form before considering function - function simply didn't figure into the designer's mind until they'd made the aesthetics look as good as possible so they show the owner's wealth and grandiose style.

Later on, Rietveld commented of the Red and Blue chair that it "was made to the end of showing that a thing of beauty, a spatial object, could be made of nothing but straight, machined materials". Putting his continued use of the ever-artistic term 'spatial object' (as if he's sculpting in a 3D plane, much as we do nowadays in CAD and CGI) aside, this shows you that his chair was, perhaps, just a chance to create a Victorian-era chair (complete with elaborations and form-before-function) with the modern straight lines and forms. It's a transitional design state, an important style to be studied, but it's still pre-Bauhaus and we must acknowledge that.

But, otherwise, function must take a bigger role. Elsewhere, Rietveld openly compared himself and his style to Bauhaus: "The Bauhaus approach was very different in that it attempted to develop form on the basis of a clear definition of function." - though Bauhaus designs' starting points were the bare functions; backrest, seats, tabletops, etc - Rietveld's designs were more fluid in their function, and must have depended on what shape the final solution to the 'spatial problem' happened to be. As evidenced by the aforementioned Zig-Zag chair, which has been used primarily as a dining chair but could really be any sort of chair. "Having a strong sense of relativity," Rietveld continues, "I did not think that function as a point of departure was a sound approach. Function was an accidental, casual need that would change with the time and indeed always changes in the course of time." This is a drastically different way of thinking from the down-to-Earth Germans at Bauhaus, a little further east. In fact, most of the Bauhaus designers would have scorned Rietveld for such a non-functionalist view, it's crazy to think he sits alongside them in 'Bauhaus designers' websites - if this post proves anything, it's that Rietveld and De Stijl and clearly not part of Bauhaus, merely a precursor to the Germans.

Suffice to say, I think we should classify De Stijl as pre-modernism, or early transitional modernism. 'Transitional' is an important word to use in relation to those Dutch designers and artists, because not only did they blend traditional and modernist ways of designing, but they blended art and design, creating boxy sculptures we can live in or sit on. Not only were chairs to be adorned with artistic details, but they were now stripped of details and treated as 'spatial objects', sculptures solving 'spatial problems' and finding perfect forms, then throwing in function as a 'casual need'. Though I don't necessarily see this process as creating the best design, I still love the Red and Blue chair and Rietveld's designs are certainly not to be forgotten. Not all modernism was functionalist.

~John

Yet another reason why my cats hate me

2011-01-27T12:06:00.000-08:00

Recently, I've been up to no good doing meagre psychology experiments on my family. Nothing important, nothing recordable, just a little bit of fun that I found weirdly interesting. Oh - and to your inevitable questions - no, it's not something I do often, yes, it's not the usual thing to do, and perhaps, only if you ask me first.

Experiment 1: Which way?

It's no formal experiment, I warn in advance. It consists of this: there's a doorframe between my kitchen and little utility room thing in my house, and my cats often run through it to escape the claws of my cat-hugging, -kissing, -dressing up and generally -tormenting sisters. Remember those moments when you're unnecessarily picked up, swooshed around like a centrifuge, then have a Tesco bag wrapped ungainly around your waist? No? Well, my cats do. All too well.

So, with humans there are those moments when you're walking past someone, then they get out of the way, then you get out of the way to the same side, and then you do the same on the other side, then there's that awkward feeling (which Luke informs me must be accompanied by some sort of tortoise) that usual results in romance in films but in normal life leads you to become embarrassed. Embarrassed because you're being a dick in the street or wherever, and because the person faffing around with you in such follies is not Cameron Diaz and the faffing around will not end in a light-hearted relationship, with true love and Ashton Kutcher somewhere in between.

My plan was to do this on my cats, in that doorway I was telling you about a few paragraphs back. And it's fun to see how they interact and react with that: my thick cat took ten side-switches before he realised this wasn't getting anywhere and that he'd probably be better off somewhere else. Ten switches! Ten! I told you he was thick, didn't I? Funny little bugger, though.

The other cat of mine was not so easy to trick. He's clever. Or rather, clever in relation to the thick one. Which isn't saying much - just that he possesses more than three independent brain cells. As a result of being so vastly clever and being some kind of feline genius, he sees fit to treat us all like shit and act like a total jerk. If he were a human, he'd be one of those guys who's grumpy, but not funnily so like Jack Dee or (occasionally) yours truly, grumpy like that old guy on the bus who kept shooting you condemnatory stares and who no one likes. The person who constantly revisits the thought "I hate my life because all the people in it are idiots" for that much-needed ego boost every lonely Friday night. That's my cat. He shoots you this cat-stare (different from human stares, might I add) that is the epitome of hatred and disgust. Like us humans are below him. Anywho, he took three side-switches before he backtracked a bit and sat down to wait for me to move.

See the big difference between thick and clever cats? It's amazing how even cats have the brains for such problem-solving. They think in much the same way as us, working out where they need to go, how they're going to get there, and moving to a different place to solve the problem of me being in the way. And it's not just that; their brains don't just allow them to keep changing sides forever - they have the intelligence to see that a problem will keep persisting, so find another way round. It's amazing how similar yet more simplified the minds of cats are. Incredibly simplified in the case of the thick one.

Experiment 2: Got milk?

Taking the whole 'experimenting with my family' schpiel to a whole new level, here's my second experiment. Not with my cats, but with my family - that's right, people. Can I just get two things clear here, before I explain:

1. This experiment has no meaning or psycho-analysis explanation
2. This experiment was basically just an effort to see if I could get my family confused over something.

So it's not amazing. Here's what I did: in my family we use semi-skimmed and non-skimmed milk cartons from the God of retail that is Tesco. Or, as we call it, 'the green milk' and 'the blue milk' - judging by the caps, for we don't read/look at the labels. Simple, huh? Yeah, but what if I swap round those instantly recognisable coloured milk bottletops? Well, firstly, I've changed a vital part of breakfast routine! But did anyone notice? Not consciously, it seemed. My sister did once remark that 'the blue milk tastes different', so I guess I've succeeded in some way. Also, I tricked myself directly after swapping the caps for a second time, haha. Try it sometime, it's a quick but interesting experiment, even if it doesn't give many results, let alone analysable ones. Because there's nothing like a good psychological experiment when you're among family. Or, in other words,

JOHN USED PESKY SON--
IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!

~John

It's all Dutch to me.

2011-01-24T11:26:00.000-08:00

I built. Hahahahahahahaha, I can't believe I can actually say that. For two reasons: a) I haven't built in ages, been feeling really shit about it, and b) I built this post-apoc diorama a few weeks ago, so maybe I didn't build. Maybe I just photographed. Either way, I feel like I'm getting back into my swing, into my building mood. Plus I have a kickass post coming atcha sometime soon about Janteloven, complete with moody Lego scene to compliment/exaggerate the words. Or maybe just to make skim-reading it a lot more enjoyable.

OK, before we get started, here's a couple of links so you can quit asking me the Flickr page or whatevs:
Flickr set link
Brickshelf Gallery

This particular MOC is a big mixture of a bunch of smaller project, which is why it can seem a bit messy, and there's the issue of whether it should be post-apoc at all, or whether I should just put away my little plastic guns and be peaceful for once. The first thing I built was the car:

The original intentions were to make a true-to-life representation of the Soccer-Mom-mobile, the AMC Eagle (see below). It's full of curves, bulky bits, sitting high on its tyres, and features whopping great fenders. So I decided to start from the most recognisable part of the car: the radiator grille. I made that fine - sure, the grille tiles fall out, but they look great, right - and it was all downhill from there. Steeply downhill. I made what I thought was a decent version of the AMC Eagle, then realised it didn't have any wheels (that's what all that bother at the end of my 365 project was about), so I cut into the back and chucked some wheels on a small axle there, then tore out the sides and put some front wheels in. The result? This heap o' junk. Not recognisable as an AMC Eagle any more. Which is why I didn't title it so in the Flickr pic - I felt it was an insult to AMC and to the LUGnuts challenge to pass this off as something it looks nothing like. I still like it. Not as an AMC Eagle, but I like it. It's chunky, it's rickety, and it's a tasteful shade of brown, some sort of family car. For 80s, small-family soccer moms. That kind of thing.

My inspiration pic for the car.

I didn't get the Eagle done by the end of the month, so I decided I'd include it in a dio and just say 'screw you' to the LUGnuts challenge, I diverged from that aeons ago. Next up for my big and [inevitably] ambitious project was a tug boat.

Back when I was on a school trip in Portsmouth, before the summer holidays last year, we came across a little quay, and in it were a bunch of blue-hulled tug boats, with tyres round the edge. I loved them, for some reason. I really did - they were so dirty, so functional, so perfect for post-apoc. For a few months I held the romantic notion I'd eventually make one (I snapped a few source shots when I was there), put it next to a stained wood warehouse and make it a little travelling drug dealer's hideout, featuring sausage guy. But then, when I came up with the idea for a post-apoc canal lock, I told those ideas to go do something nasty to themselves and decided to make the tug for that instead.

My main source pic for the tug

So, after some finickety angled plates, I created the hull, chucked some wooden panelling on top to form a petite deck, and set about fucking up the white cockpit frame. Yeah, it's a total mess. And not even totally white, which sucks harder. "put them vertically," said my subconscious at several key times during the tug's build, "it'll be much easier and not so sucky looking." But did I listen? Nuh-uh, I made an angled thing to look more realistic. And it sucks. But anywho, enough about that. Here's the final thing:

The hull is, admittedly, very bulky. But it's OK, because I never intended to show the entire boat until the photo-taking session itself, when I couldn't resist my shutter-happy finger. It's 'submerged' below the water. Fair enough.

So I had my boat, bulky and rough. And I had my car, looking nothing like an AMC Eagle. But who cares, it's Post-Apoc - it's meant to be messy, and since it's fictional, I could've included a flying Velociraptor and it would've fitted in some strange, surrealist way. On that thought, I realise I really should have done that. Dang. Ah well, next time.

Just like the boat and the car, the canal lock itself needed a source picture. I have no idea when and where and how the idea for a canal lock came from, all I can show you is the source photo I used for most of the mechanisms and layout involved. The lockhouse building itself was something I spied once on an unsurprisingly boring episode of Location location location, with Phil and Katie getting on swell. Also, she seems to be constantly pregnant throughout most series of the show - anyone else noticed this? Probably not, because the kind of interesting, cynical and world-weary people who notice details like that don't watch boring-ass shows like Location location location. But, one day, I did. And I saw this white wooden-panelled lockhouse somewhere in Essex or Sussex or Worcester. One of those counties that isn't Kent or anything I vaguely recognise as being urban.

So here's my source photo, thanks to Wikipedia:

This photo shows a canal lock somewhere in the Netherlands, a place called Noordoostpolder - a name I later worked out to be a combo of 'noord', 'oost' and 'polder' - in other words, north-east polder. So that's the reason for the lengthy title of the creation. Sorted. Obviously I didn't include two lockhouses as in the photo, because I'm not a maniac, and - as much as I'd've liked to - I didn't include that dark green pipe construction on the grounds of sanity. I think I created a good enough reproduction of the canal lock:

Maybe it's a little blocky, a little chibi, but I'm proud of it. And my biggest MOC to date, too. Building it took place over two whole days, during which I listened to Kate Nash's album 'My best friend is you' almost exclusively. As a result I now know all the words to the foul-mouthed 'Mansion Song', and can sing along to a decent percentage of all the other songs. A great album, a great singer. That ginger fellow by the car is included, I believe, as some sort of subconscious nod of thanks to Kate Nash for the awesome music.

Well, there you have it folks. Winging its way down the blog tunnel to you soon will be a couple of posts, but you may have to hang around for the Janteloven one, that'll take some time. See y'all!

~John

The Finnish Line

2011-01-17T11:38:00.000-08:00

Well howdy hey guys, it's my first post after my 365 project. I finally got around to finding something to blog about, but you'll have to let me off for the wait because I've been super busy with school. Exams are a bitch, seriously. However, to brighten your monday evening and hopefully make good use of mine, I present to you, a post on Finnish design.

I always used to think Finnish design contained two key features: pale wooden planks, mostly uncut, and a sense of almost autistic simplicity in furniture design. Big bright white picnic tables and the Ball Chair by Aarnio. That was Finnish design to me. Eero Saarinen fitted in there somewhere, too, but I was never too sure about whether he was Finnish or American, and his collaborations with the Eameses seem too Eamesey to be Finnish. Then there was this other guy, Aalto. Or was there? He was just one of those Finnish designers who had a similar name to Aarnio (Ball Chair guy, keep remembering that), plus his Wikipedia page only shows a buttload of info and a very stern image of him on a stamp.

Which is why I was surprised when I saw some of his designs in a design book at school today and thought to myself "hey, that stuff's pretty nice". Then I looked at it again, and thought "hey, that stuff's wonderful. Check out the lines, the shapes, the simplicity..." and here's a post to satisfy my new love for Aalto (he's still nowhere near the badassery of Jacobsen, don't worry 'bout that).

SRS BZNS

So here he is, the cheerful fella. I can't find a picture of him when he was young, so I guess he was just permanently wrinkly throughout his life. And with a permanent look of mixed despair and disgust at everyone else's work on his face. If you're ever unnecessarily happy (not that it's natural for you to find that a bad thing), just stare at his face for a while and it'll drain you of all your joy. He's like some Finnish Dementor, or Demäääänttör as they'd call it.

Recognise these little dudes? Yup, they're the FROSTA stools that have been popping up in IKEA stores for years. I'm not sure whether IKEA have the rights to it or whether FROSTA is just a shameful copy of Aalto's stool, but whatevs. OK, it's simply. Minimalist, even. So simple you think maybe he was being frustratingly constrictive in his design. But that's the beauty of it; he's kept his design so simple that this stool becomes a universal design. It's a stool here, but I've seen it used elsewhere as a little side-table. It becomes part of the background, an unobtrusive addition to the room. It even comes in a version with a coloured top (seat or tabletop? You decide!) to give a little colour accent to what might otherwise be a bland Finnish interior design. Pale wood is the best!

Next up is one of my faves from Aalto (the stool of his is a little too simple for me, I can't help but be reminded of those characterless mass-produced IKEA stools), a teacart (Fn: teewagen) coming atcha from early modernism 1936. 1936, think about that. That's incredibly early for such a simple of minimalism. The undecorated disc wheels and simple bend wood frame, combined with a pale wood and white colour scheme, make this the epitome of Aalto's style for me. I just love the void of indulgence, of flair and of unnecessary details here. It's not my ethic of 'aesthetic flexibility', Aalto wasn't thinking about users adapting and personalising the teacart to their own style, he was thinking about creating something that worked, but that wasn't distracting. Because it didn't need to be distracting for him, it was simply a teacart. What was the point in decoration, in indulgence? Why show the axle on the wheel when you could just paint over a big wooden disc and it'd still be practical?

Aalto once said, "we should work for simple, undecorated things, but things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street". See, he's not thinking about minimalism as a purpose for his design, but he wants design to fit in, to work with its surroundings and with its users, and the best way to do this is to keep it free of bold stylistic details that could sway a user's judgement. There's no chance for judgement here, unless you have an aversion to plain, neutral white faces and bentwood. I'm not sure what he means by "the little man in the street", maybe he just means that design should be suited to anyone and everyone, further solidifying my point about universal design and aesthetics, whilst the function itself is specific. It's such a shame teacarts are out of fashion at the moment, maybe one day in the future we can again enjoy using such wonderful design without feeling like you're hosting some sort of stuffy 1940s dinner party with the Hamiltons from No. 63.

Aalto was a trendsetter. And, very importantly, I'll never get him confused with Aarnio again - Aalto is so much more than Aarnio, Aalto is minimalism, functionalism, universal design available and attractive to all, reduction of stylistic details, and - still - pale wood. He's not just that grumpy guy on the Finnish stamp.

~John

Day 365, the final post of the project. And what an amazing project it has been. [31.12.10]

2010-12-31T13:43:00.000-08:00

Dag tre hundrede femogtres. Wow. That's it. That's the end of the entire project. It's finished, it's over, it's finito, it's that in every language. Three hundred and sixty five days of blogging in the evening about what I've been up to, what I've been creating, or my opinions on certain topics. And design, of course. I never expected it to pan out like this when I started, in fact I had little idea of what I'd talk about, blogging on a daily basis. I was not prepared for it at all, but as I've explained January suffered for that and it's been getting slowly better from then. Once I got into the flow, knowing what sort of content would be in the posts, I got into my style and it's been one consistent progression from there.

But let's not forget the posts which haven't been so good. The posts which, in all honesty, were shit. When I didn't have enough time, when I forgot to do a monthly letter, when I wasn't in a creative mood, when I was ill. Yesterday. Those times can't be forgotten, of course, and as much as I'd like to wipe them from the face of this blog, they remain testaments to how I blogged no matter what. I hate myself for those times when I could have blogged, but I just wasn't in the mood. There are so many, and so many excuses I've made for just that. But I guess you have to expect the highs and the lows in life, and I love how this 365 project has encapsulated that. I just wish I'd blogged better on the low days (though that post when I moaned on about things that pissed me off isn't bad). Good and bad, that's what makes this project realistic.

Gee, I'm getting so sentimental now. Gee whizz. OK, to sum up the year, here are ten of my highlights from this blog or just from my activities in the past year. In no particular order,

2010 on JOHNSPACE

I visited my homeland. I think its clear enough if you read at least five posts from this 365 project to tell that I'm obsessed with Denmark and Danish culture, and 2010 was the year my then-young obsession was fulfilled with a four-day trip to the king of all countries (metaphorically), Denmark. 2010 was the year I finally saw Copenhagen, walked its streets, enjoyed its culture, its design, its people, Tivoli, and so much more. I wish I could go back now... my parents are thinking of returning with my whole family at Easter next year, but I doubt it. I'll go back there one day. And stay.
Photography went analogue. 2010 was the year I took photography seriously, the year I realised how crap all my photos were in the past. Thanks to Flickr and the genius of photographers like Caiti Anne, my mind was opened to the possibilities of photography as an art form, and the joys of an imperfect photo - just how much better a grainy, out-of-focus analogue photo can be than a heavily Photoshopped digital photo. In many ways, my analogue photography goes against what I consider to be my design style: perfection, crisp lines, clear shapes and simplicity. But I still love it, and I think it deserves to be said that in 2010 I started using my Canon A-1 film camera, and took photography seriously.
Refining my style. I like to think of 2010 as the biggest, largest change and shift and refinement of my style of design, of MOCs, of photography, of writing, of being. My identity has changed beyond anything I can possible hope to pin down in one paragraph. When I look back on my posts at the start of the day I see myself as a totally different person. My style has changed for the simple reason that I've become aware of my style. I've become aware of myself, I've looked at myself objectively. And that has meant a lot of changes, because I've realised who I am and who I'd like to be and I'm trying to head towards the latter. And whilst I haven't quite arrived, I've certainly started my journey. 'Cause I'm a teenager and that's one of the points of teenagehood - though it's not something I actively started to do because it was a necessity. It just started happening and it's still going. Hopefully I won't have a Holden Caulfield experience as part of it...
Design became big. It's amazing to think that at the start of the year I had no interest in design whatsoever. Well, I was a little interested in my JOHN Collection furniture and I had a slight interest in proper furniture design, such as Panton and Gerrit Rietveld's Red and Blue chair. It was more of something which humoured me, but at the time that interest was based around the JOHN Collection. Since then, my interest has bloomed into an obsession. In less than 12 months... less than ten months even. Less than ten months to turn a slight interest based on Lego furniture into an obsession which has become my ambition in life. Tell my January self that I'd want to be a designer by the end of the year and he's be surprised. Design has taken over my life, it's become my life, and I'm so glad for 2010 to be the time this journey was undertaken.
I built better. I'm proud to say that 2010 was a year spent heavily engaged in the FOL (Fans of Lego) community on Flickr, I've made some great friends there, a couple of enemies, and a lot of great MOCs. Without being too self-indulgent, I must say I've enjoyed this year in the Lego community and I've made some MOCs than I'm still proud of a few months later, which is saying something. Notably the Ishøj House, the Kongsholmparken Café, Hope and Glory Towers (just about) and my Volvo Amazon. Not the Rødovre House, I look back on that in distaste now. It was also great to see everyone at STEAM back in October, I don't see you guys enough! Boo hoo!
I acted a lot. This isn't something you guys hear a lot about and you probably won't hear much more about it next year, but it's been a massive thing for me this year, culminating in several performances in a performance of Alice in Wonderland at my local theatre group in July. And it was the best fun I've ever had, I hope to do a lot more next year. It was amazing. But enough reminiscing.
I started managing my ideas. This process is still very much in its early stages, but I bought a Moleskine and I've started recording my ideas down onto paper, just sketches, so I can develop them properly like real designers do. I start with a concept sketch, develop details and keep doing so until I have something good. Whilst I haven't done the full process on anything yet, I've started getting down my ideas and now they won't fall out of my head again. You won't believe the amount of film and design ideas I've had that I've simply forgotten. I never knew quite how and where to get my ideas down, but my Moleskine is a start on this process.
I've got opinions. I really look back with pride on my philosophical posts, because I love formulating opinions and creating my own identity and finding out what I believe and what I think of stuff. Notably my posts on death, my Fate Graphs, and those couple of posts on religion that pretty much covered my full opinions. I wish I could blog about philsophy more, but then I get all angry and will normally revert to something about death or how small we are and how insignificant we are. It's sad.
'That's so John'. My writing style has also developed, and I'm very proud of some of the posts I created this year, which people say 'that's so John' too. It's just my style. Totally and utterly. Some examples of this are my Hallowe'en story, and those posts on the new iLife, which I looked back on recently - and I think "how did I actually say that? That is so totally crazy even I'm shocked!' (in the iLife post I captioned one of the pictures with "Note the 'happy' photos of the family on the front of the album, when in fact there's a lot of family issues, domestic violence and a possible divorce via dad-in-drag looming over the horizon." hahahah what!?). And this is what I want to write more in the new year.
I actually did it. Yeah, what I'm more proud of than anything else is that I actually finished this project. It's not totally complete, of course, but I don't give a fuck. I did it. I made it to the end with the vast majority of days posted on, I did it! I DID IT! And now I can finally stop!!

But of course this project would never have been possible without you. You guys, you awesome readers of this blog. Though you may be few in number and fewer in giving a damn, you still comment every now and then and you show your support. Harry, Matti, Tim, Zack and the occasional other person. Thanks guys, really really thank you.

Expect more posts here on JOHNSPACE in the new year, though hopefully fewer and with better content. Though not for a good week, I need a break from this blogging shizzle.

Happy new year, I wish you all a great 2011, and I'll see you after the jump. Thank you and, for the final time in this project, farvel.

~John

Day 364, on which John watches 'Aftenshowet' [30.12.10]

2010-12-30T13:02:00.000-08:00

Dag tre hundrede fireogtres. Wowzers, it's the penultimate day of the year! The penultimate day of this 365 project! The penultimate day of this regular torment that forces me to write three paragraphs of rubbish on this sit! The penultimate day of having to write a boring-ass introduction which totally ruins the flow and relevance and together-ness of the post. The penultimate day of italicising the Danish numbers I remember and write at the start of the intro. The penultimate day of this project. And I'm sad to see it go, but on the other hand I think it's about time it came to a nice neat finish. Hopefully tomorrow will see a big ol' post about big ol' things. We'll see. If I'm not in a good mood on the final day, it's screwed. Be happy!

Today I watched the half-hour episode of a Danish show on the channel DR1 called Aftenshowet - 'the evening show' - featuring one of my fave singers, the Kate Nash of Denmark that is Sys Bjerre. You can see the episode in its entirety here, and skip to the end to see Sys perform, but here is a brief summary of what the people are saying and what happens in this very special episode of Aftenshowet:

Hans: hej, my name is Hans and welcome to Aftenshowet. Blah blah blah.
Lady: hejsa, my name is some lady or something and here we have an old man.
Old man: yes.
Hans: we also have many other exciting things. It is christmas and it is snowing and I'm fucking freezing. Let's get a move on.

Hans: woops, watch your step there, lady. Careful of the baby.
Lady: Hans you idiot, shut up. We weren't meant to say anything.
Hans: Oh yes. Oh, bugger me. Soz luv.
Lady: That old man was in the new Klovn film. He acts a bit and says some words in the plot.
Hans: yes.

Hans: here is the singer Sys Bjerre. Sys, what are you doing?
Sys: I am getting my fingernails painted to look like pink leopards. I like this.
Androgenous fingernail painter: yes.
Hans: that is remarkably shallow of you. What songs are you performing for us today?
Sys: 'Blah blah blah' and 'blah blah blah'. I like them.
Hans: that's cool, man. I do like your nails. Woman, can I have mine done like that?
Sys: I am not doing anything for Christmas. I live a sad life.
Hans: yes.

Lady: here is a chef. He used to be on TV. Hi chef.
Chef: hello. Care to buy a puffy potato thing? I made them myself and they are only 10 kroner.
Lady: nah, I don't trust anything you make, you dirty Swede.
Chef: please, I am lacking of money and I need my puffy potatoes sold. They are tasty.
Lady: no. Do you know how much I earn a year?
Chef: fifty million?
Other man: thirty million?
Chef: nah, clearly fifty.
Lady: no, a hundred million. You guys underestimate, you idiots.

Hans: I have found these two young girls. Hi.
Girl one: please Hans, can we leave?
Hans: no because I have sellotaped a microphone to your heads and you're coming home with me.
Girl two: boo hoo
Hans: how are you spending Christmas?
Girl one: with my grandparents. It says that in the graphic at the bottom.
Hans: so it does. My mistake.

Lady: this is a girl. She is throwing a potato into a bucket of sawdust. Why are you doing this?
Girl: goo bee dada.
Lady: interesting. You keep doing that.
Girl: yes.

Lady: now I amn suddenly with this old man. His name is Mister Bjerre, but sadly is nor relation to Sys.
Old man: yes. I am an actor.
Lady: yes. Care for a puffy potato thing?
Old man: no, that manky TV chef made them.
Lady: apparently you are in the Klovn film.
Old man: yes.
Lady: here is a clip.
[boring-ass clip from Klovn]
Lady: I love how deliciously dull it is.
Old Man: that's exactly what I was going for.
Lady: clearly we are soulmates.

Hans: what a great show it has been tonight, Lady.
Lady: yes. I appreciated the old man and the snow particularly.
Hans: here is Sys Bjerre singing some song or other about something-or-other on a stage. Today she is wearing the latest in fashionable knobbly shoulder pads. Also notice some lady standing next to her who does nothing but hold her hand at the end.
Lady: I wish you'd hold my hand, Hans.
Hans: shut up and watch the music [storms off in hormonal rage]
Sys: [sings]

The End

Jeezus that was unfunny. Remind me to delete or rewrite this post at some point, because it's totally boring and about as funny as genocide. Of course, the show was very interesting and Sys Bjerre sang better than I thought she was going to, well done to all. Hans is not a perv and lady is not pregnant. It's a great show, thank you and goodnight.

~John

Day 363, on which Will Smith's dog dies [29.12.10]

2010-12-29T13:33:00.000-08:00

Dag tre hundrede treogtres. Productive day again today, I seem to be having a lot of them recently. I'm on a roll. At the moment I'm stuck trying to build an AMC Eagle (car) for the LUGNuts whateverth challenge. And it's a real nightmare. I've got a rough chassis, bonnet and roof combo sorted out and just about stable enough to be held by one hand without breaking into a total mess of crappy connections and bad brick maths. My current problem, apart from the inevitable 'it won't fit a fig', is that I can't fit any wheels in. Anywhere. Nowhere is there enough space, or the right space, or space in the right place to fit four wheels, let alone two. So I'm having a slight nightmare. But I won't resort to cutting a wheel in half and sticking it to the bottom of the car. NEVAR.

Fairytrail of New York

Imagine a world, just like ours, but deserted. No one left. The world is a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland, inhabited by weird diseased zombies and cars and nothing much else. In New York (WOAH never saw that coming), one man survives. Well, three main things survive. Will Smith. His dog. His six-pack. These are basically the main characters of I Am Legend, there are a couple of 'also-starred's such as Will Smith's gun, Will Smith's annoying-as-fuck daughter (yes his actual daughter. Yes, her. The one who plagues our radios with her awful song. Yes, the one you that makes you wish you had a pistol to point to your head in sorrow for your poor ears) and a bunch of zombies.

I wouldn't usually watch a zombie film. I normally hate the idea of zombies. They're up there with vampires and Frankenstein-style monsters. That kind of supernatural slash fantastical being that always shows up in the same type of film. Frankenstein-style monsters are usually in spooky gothic films that appear every five years or so, we all know what atrocities of filmmaking star vampires nowadays, and zombies are for all-out horror action films like 27 Days and they're also stars of many a mindless video game (sorry L4D fans). I originally thought I Am Legend was different, I thought it was a normal, realistic post-apocalyptic film, but not as boringly realistic as The Road, which is slit-your-wrists depressing. Then I saw a clip which featured the 'zombies' and I feared that I Am Legend was just another zombie film. It has a lot more style than your everyday freak flick, plus it has Will Smith in it, so it's badass and 27 Days isn't (just, no. No. No, Danny Boyle).

Now I finally got a chance to watch it, and badass it was not. Which, it turned out, was good. Will Smith didn't have any of his usual Samuel L. Jackson-esque lines. He wasn't a badass mo-fo. He never had it with those motherfuckin' zombies in that motherfuckin' city. He was surprisingly soft, acted very well and as a result much more interesting. Though we did have to see his six-pack a couple of times in the movie, he kept his usual boisterousness restrained. And why? Because he had no one to be boisterous to. That's the beauty of casting Will Smith in this movie; he's all on his own and that brings out some true acting skills. He can't be charming or a badass, 'cause he has no one to charm (apart from a few mannequins) and no one to be a badass to. And he's pretty amazing in I Am Legend, let me tell you that. The best performance I've seen from him yet. Yes, even better than The Pursuit of Happyness, which was an awful movie.

This superb performance (especially the 'What are you doing here!?' and dog death scenes) makes up for the fact he wangled the producers to give his daughter, Willow Smith, a small part in the film. Luckily she isn't in it for long (not long enough to whip her goddamn hair, thank goodness. I'd like to whip a bat into her face), so we're saved from that. OK, so you probably want a plot summary: Will Smith is a doctor who is living in the ruins of New York (duh) trying to find a cure for a disease which turns people into the boilerplate 'zombie', biting, pale and wanting to eat people or some such trait. You see, Emma Thompson (in a crazy one-scene role in this film) found a cure for cancer but it turned out to be a nasty virus and it's screwed up the world. These zombies come out at night (the light, it BUUUUUUUUURNS) and eat and stuff, but Will Smith keeps in the daytime, experimenting and shooting deer and basically having a nice-but-lonely time with his dog, Sam.

Will Smith doesn't even need a bed. All he needs is a bath and a dog for a good night's sleep. MEANINGS?!?!1/!?!1/1/11!?

I can't be bothered to do a full review here as I don't think I have it in me and I'll only slag off Willow Smith more (I WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTH I WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTH), so I'll sum it up here. I Am Legend is a top-rate film that isn't perfect, nor is it ground-breaking, but it's a solid, well-styled post-apocalyptic movie with a killer main performance by Will Smith (he made his daughter's name around his own (WILLow) so people find her when they google him). Sure, the CGI isn't as good as it could be, and some of the plot devices are not developed enough, but a lot of the plot devices are spot-on and the film kept me glued to my seat for two hours. It was well and truly gripping. And you can't tell me that a film which made me wish I couldn't blink to miss a scary bit isn't a good film. I strongly advise you to see it if you're into post-apoc or Will Smith or Will Smith's six-pack. It's a great example of all three.

~John

ps. I WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTHI WHIP MA HAIR BACK AN FORTH

Day 362, on which John gets hypam on his hands. It stings. [28.12.10]

2010-12-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

Dag tre hundrede toogtres. Wahahaha I feel so awesome today, and I got a load done. Mainly developing film, which we'll get onto later. But now, more bullcrap. 'Cause - wait for it - I revised today. Yeah, I know right? John, revising? At last? No, not at last. Don't be all 'gotta do it this holiday' on me, shut up and go away. I don't need to revise that much, but what I do need to revise, I need to revise a lot. And I got some graphics work done, some medicine packaging I made a few weeks ago and that needs some refining. Next step, print it out, then put it together, then photograph it and I have a top-class packaging design piece for my portfolio. Wahey.

So the big new of today is that I developed my first ever film! Nope, not sent it off to the flids at Jessops to put through their big automatic Film Fucker-Upper machine, I did it myself. And boy, was that one crazy experience. Firstly, you have to transfer the long strip of film with your precious photos on it into a bigger spool and chuck that in a special bucket. Sounds easy; just pop open the film canister with a can opener and painstakingly pull the film onto the spool. Nah. Now try that in the dark. When you have no idea where anything is, you can't see a goddamn thing and you have to get it right. Because, kids, film is light-sensitive until developed so doing it in the light would mean insta-crap. Total obliteration of all your photos, no way back.

Luckily once I struggled the film into the bucket and clicked it light-tight, everything was easy. Well, maybe not easy, but you can do it in the light, which is a relief. Now you have your film in a bucket - a special bucket, remember - you can put some chemicals in to develop the film and make the exposure (photo) you took 'stick', ie. be permanent. There are three boring stages to this - the developer, the stop, and the fixer. The developer goes in the bucket for ages, you thrash it round like a naughty child, then pour it out and put the stop in. This is only in there for 20 seconds in which it halts everything the developer did in its 9 minutes, which is ironic. Finally, you chuck the fixer in (which does some other thing I'm not sure of) for two minutes. The fixer is a total bitch, it's called hypam and it stings like hell when you get it on you. I just managed to tip over the bottle onto my hands, and now they feel like... uh... they feel stingy. There, that's an accurate description.

Clips of my roll on a lightbox. My dad's got all the kit, squee!

It's so nerve-wracking to make sure you don't show the film to light and to maintain the right temperatures and volumes of chemicals, but it's well worth it in the end. I liken it to a rollercoaster ride. Or at least how I experience rollercoasters. Basically, you're scared shitless before you do it, during it you're still scared shitless but you're happy that you started it (still a little apprehensive), and the moment it ends you're super-proud of yourself. OK, maybe I wasn't scared shitless with developing film, but I was certainly apprehensive. And the moment you unravel your film to see your photos, perfectly developed there in little frames on the reel, is amazing. The moment you realise you didn't screw it up, that light in the 'dark' room didn't get to the film, you didn't cross-contaminate the chemicals... priceless.

Here's the first photo I've uploaded of this roll. Not my best, I admit, but still pretty awesome. It's a bunch of broken table frames in my school grounds with the snow in the background. I'm not sure why they are there and why someone hasn't removed them already (they've been there for years), but they make for good photography. Yayayayayayayayayay.

More tomorrow folks,
~John

Day 361, on which John becomes a man. A REAL MAN. [27.12.10]

2010-12-27T12:58:00.000-08:00

Dag tre hundrede enogtres. Booyah readers, today I turned from a silly card-cutting kid into a REAL GODDAMN MAN. And why? Because I built an IKEA wardrobe, mofos. Hell to the yeah to the floor to the Sweden. OK, well maybe I didn't do it all on my own, and following instructions to put little screws in shitty corkboard pieces isn't exactly a man-building experience. Fair enough. But, 'cause I'm a guy and sometimes I can't stop myself, I enjoyed it and I feel really cool drilling stuff. And I don't usually pride myself in doing that, I don't give a damn how many muscles I have or if I have a cool car, to be honest. Those aren't my priorities in life. Sure, I'll get a car at some point to move stuff about, and sure, I'd like to have some sort of control over it, but it's not top-of-the-list for me. I won't be a 'man' if I get a big car with woofing speakers or whatever. If I have my way, I'd probably get an old eastern European car or Volvo if I can find one, haha. And as for muscles, I think it's safe to say I couldn't give less of a damn. And because I don't go around saying "yo, check out my muscles blah blah blah" leaking testosterone and punching strangers in the face as a greeting, it's OK. Or at least, that's how I like to justify it. I'm fine with my IKEA wardrobe, anywho.

I've started reading through the posts back in January. And oh boy, was I an idiot or what? I think I could've puked over just how much I whined on about snow and whether it was going to snow and what the goddamn MET Office said. I'm trying to keep a record of not puking and I haven't puked for a year or so (which is essential information for you, I'm sure), thus you'll have to believe me when I say I would have puked. January's full of snow references and extremely short paragraphs.

To be honest, I was just experimenting with the format. Not knowingly - it was a totally new thing for me, I'd never blogged properly and regularly before and it took a lot of getting used to. January was the testing ground of this project, it seems, the sandbox. When I found out how the posts were going to take their format, what was going to be in them, and how I was going to write them. My writing voice has evolved a lot over the past year, turning from what I thought was a strong 'improv-writing' style into something that I now consider to be more refined and more me. It's not brilliant, of course not, but I'm still young and I love that it's not totally refined yet. I'm still experimenting, in the sandbox of my life, so to speak. I mentioned this before; this way that kids and teenagers explore their styles and their personalities to pin them down for adulthood. Much like dæmons in the His Dark Materials trilogy, I think they are intended to be a metaphor for this.

It's something which has dominated my thoughts recently, this eventuality of my myriad of interests and styles compressing themselves down to one style and one main interest which I'll keep for the rest of my life. It's a scary thought, but also quite exciting - I can't wait to see what I end up doing, what my designs end up looking like, and if they're successful or not, and what I'm known for. I'm stuck in this stupid position right back here at 16, with everything ahead of me. And, as much as I'd love to time-travel 20 years into the future to meet myself, I don't want it to happen, this compression. Haha, I'm such a stereotype, just like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye who doesn't want to grow up. Sure, I want to grow up, but there are strings attached. Perfectly natural behaviour, I'm just a boring hypocrite. Move on.

January was just the start. I hate most of it, but that's natural. I have developed a lot throughout the year - and I had to start somewhere. Let's just be happy I started at all!

~~~Holden~~ John

Day 360, on which John stumbles back into normality [26.12.10]

2010-12-26T13:20:00.000-08:00

Dag tre hundrede og tres. OK, let's try Day 360 again, since I got it wrong last time. Dang nabbit, I can't believe I got that wrong. Ah well. Ah, Boxing Day, the unappreciated younger brother of Christmas Day and Christmas Eve. A great day, when you can just sit in front of the TV and watch all the best bits that you recorded from the day before. Sadly, with younger sisters that means watching crap like Shrek 3, but I grinned and gritted my teeth through it and even indulged in watching yesterday's Strictly Come Dancing. Which I love to insult, but I secretly like for some reason - a reason I haven't pinned down yet. And, as if that weren't enough, there's a backlog of ER episodes to watch. An old TV series, sure, but one that hasn't lost its appeal in the year or so since it ended. Great stuff.

Suffice to say, I didn't do much today. But hey, what's wrong with that? It's Boxing Day, that's just the way people spend it.

OK, since I haven't been on my computer at all today and I have nothing new to show you, I took a photo of some of the stuff I got for Christmas and I may just blab on about it for another two paragraphs. That way, I may talk some interesting stuff (may) and I'll get this post done. One of these days I need to start looking back through this year's posts and collecting quotes and making funny posts summarising recurring topics. But now, back to shameless self indulgence.

From left to right, them bottom, or some such order:

Fifty Chairs that Changed the World book; a nice succint book detailing the best chairs of the past century and a couple from after 2000. And none made of crappy eco-friendly materials, or simply for the purpose of being sustainable. Sadly there's only one Jacobsen (the Series 7 chair), but I will admit that Jacobsen's chairs weren't all world-changing. The Panton chair's there, of course, even on the front cover. And several Eames pieces, a crazily large number of Aarnio chairs (I really need to look into him), Saarinen and some others too. A very good book, if a little too short on description.
Danish to English Dictionary; one of my best presents this year, I believe. You have no idea how hard it is to find a decent Danish dictionary - most of them are just phrasebooks, and a lot of the rest are not large enough or aren't in-depth enough. Luckily this one comes with explanation of verbs and adjectives and stuff like that, which will be very helpful. You can't see from this angle but it is in fact a very hefty tome. And has the words Dansk Ordbøger scrawled across the front. Just sayin'.
Lego sets; blah blah blah you guys don't want to hear about them, just the usual. I feel like I should have got one big set, like the Grand Emporium, but when I count my newly acquired money I may buy something big in the sales. May.
Film; this was totally unexpected! Three rolls of black and white 35mm film from my grandparents, one of the most useful small presents I've got. They usually buy me something big then include a little Lego set but I much prefer getting film than yet another City police motorcycle. Woot.
District 9 DVD; I've always wanted this. Now I can have a copy of the awesomeness all to myself.
Danish culture books; insta-expert!
Another Moleskine; I haven't finished my last one yet but it's always good to have the next one ready to move into.

And there we go, that's my Christmas loot/haul/whatever. Everyone else was uploading theirs to Flickr and, whilst I don't usually do the whole my-real-life thing, mine's on Flickr too now. Enjoy.

~John

ps. remind me at some point to buy myself a T-shirt reading 'Jacobsen is my homeboy'. Thanks.