June 2010
Typologies at Tate Modern
Tate Modern is advertising its Exposed photography exhibition, but if you don’t want to pay, there are still some gems to be found by going up to level five.
In room eight of the State of Flux collection, a selection of images from Bruce Davidson’s Subway series, taken in New York in 1980, are on display. Usually he works in black and white, but these are in colour.
They’re also stunning collection generally, and I could easily fill a post just with selections I found online. If you’re in London and can get there before the room changes (which is, unfortunately, a bit unpredictable), you should.
Also on the fifth floor is a collection of rooms entitled Photographic Typologies. To some extent, Davidson’s series could have fitted here, but instead you get an entire room of August Sander’s work, which is well worth examining. (I missed an exhibition of his work in Paris last year, so this was a nice chance to see a subset of it for free.)
Meanwhile, another room - perhaps inevitably - has two of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s composite photographs of industrial works.
All in all, the two together are well worth a look. If you’re in London, just pop in; if you have to visit, start with these, take a restorative cup of tea, then see Exposed. It’s worth it.
“The point of Helvetica is that it is neutral. It is extremely legible. It is not subject to cultural bias, regional variation, and the vicissitudes of fashion and corporate identity. It is designed, painstakingly designed, to create standardised signage. Standardisation might not be exactly sexy but it is extremely useful if you want to avoid the world being a confusing racket. “Uncompromising”, damn right it is. It is also international, part of the global language of airports, flight, travel - exactly the kind of spirit that this cloth-eared rebranding exercise apparently wants to tap into.”
—Will Wiles, in Air Rage, on Gatwick’s rebranding. He’s right: this is awful. The whole piece is worth a read.
“Ironically, it was I, and not my German roommates, who suffered from that famous German syndrome: Mauer-im-Kopf, or “wall in the head.” I knew the path the Berlin Wall had traced only two blocks from our Kreuzberg apartment; my roommates did not. They took their out-of-town guests to the natural history museum; I took my bewildered visitors to barren patches of park where the concrete Mauer used to stand. I got the distinct sense during my year in Berlin that the preoccupation with history’s physical imprint on the city was an Auslander phenomenon.”
—Amelia Atlas in n+1’s Berlin Trilogy, a worth-reading review of three books set in (and, more or less, about) the city. I’m definitely keen to read Book of Clouds, and I wish I could read enough German to make sense of Treffen sich zwei.
“As an analytical framework, economics can come unstuck when dealing with the net. Because while economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources, the online world is distinguished by abundance. Similarly, ecology (the study of natural systems) specialises in abundance, and it can be useful to look at what’s happening in the media through the eyes of an ecologist.”
—John Naughton in Everything you need to know about the internet, which is deservedly getting linked to everywhere.
“In short, there’s just too many fundamental issues with the Windows interface to just “tweak”. It’s not a matter of size, weight, power or portability of the device that matters - the core underpinnings of a WIMP-based interface is just incompatible with touch usability. Everything is going to need to be re-written from ground up - OS and apps alike.”
—
Russell Beattie: The end of WIMP and the rise of Touch
You could argue this is stating the obvious, but this is still a worthwhile article, since the obvious is often easy to miss.
“Publishers now have absolutely no control over how their content is displayed in a browser.”
—
Jim Lynch, in Safari Reader: Apple’s Weapon of Mass Destruction (via, via)
This chap can’t have been around when Load Images was a browser setting. Or have read the CSS spec, and the assumption that users would be able to apply styles.
Of course, given he’s forced his rant over three pages (each of which are incredibly short and smothered with ads), and because I haven’t installed Safari 5 yet, I’ve only read the first third of his article, so perhaps he covers all of that. Somehow, though, I doubt it. And I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of page views to find out.
“For Scott Dadich, the award-winning designer who has overseen Wired US for the past three years, HTML has been a central problem. Dadich argues that the magazine industry’s “design experiment” with the clunky coding language “never really succeeded in the way that we had hoped”. But now there are tablets — which represent an opportunity “to retain control of the quality of the product in a way that we weren’t able to with HTML”.”
—Peter Kirwan quoting Scott Dadich, in Tablets of the new covenant, an article from Wired UK a couple of months ago (via).
“What we’re hearing here at the Guardian though is that Apple itself helped to kill off the “unlimited” tag, because it doesn’t like it being used with services that call it “unlimited*” and then explain further down the page in tiny print that that actually * means “subject to ‘fair usage’”.”
—Charles Arthur in the Guardian: Why file-sharing has killed ‘unlimited’ mobile data contracts.
“So when looking for somewhere using the iPhone I had two choices; use an augmented reality app such as Layer, or using something like Yelp. … Holding your phone like some kind of sci-fi binoculars and moving around the landscape makes you look like a dick. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice thing to demo, and people always go “ooh that’s cool”, but generally, you look like a complete and utter dick. Instead, I used Yelp.”
—Augmented Reality: is it a Bit Rubbish? (via iamdanw)
