FUNNY FEELING

I've created a new site to host my thesis ideas and experiments. This blog will be discontinued as of today. New link below:

Typocraft

"Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically." -Sol LeWitt

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Proposal 1:
Experiment with different ways of lifting type off the two-dimensional plane. As mentioned in J Abbot Miller's book "Dimensional Typography", historical precedents exists in how we are to perceive 3D typography.

EXTRUSION, ROTATION, TUBING, SHADOWING, SEWING, MODULAR CONSTRUCTION, and BLOATING

With the exception of extrusion, these precedents have rarely ever been made into physical objects.

Proposal 2:
3D typography doesn't really convey any message if it is only limited to letterforms. Writing becomes a way for adding meaning to 3D type. Is it a word, sentence or poem? How does the reading of the type affected by the 3D plane? Three-dimensional space has three axis: x,y and z. Readings can change depending on how the viewer sees the planes. Three-dimensional space also has gravity, light and shadow. And lastly, three dimensional space is dictated by the space around it.

Proposal 3:
The heritage of language is rich with meaning. In Western languages, the Greek and Latin roots of words are often overlooked. How can the richness of the word origins be evoked through art? Similarly, in Asian languages, the pictorial element of characters have been abstracted for faster reading. However, is there a way to expose the construction of the word to today's readers? And why?

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WEEKS 1-8:
Ongoing experimentation with the formal aspects of 3D type. Also begin to look at writing and research language structure. Record and document process via Flickr and Blogger.com.

WEEKS 8-14:
Begin to write and develop a system of documenting and organizing findings.


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Possible Thesis Advisors:
Geoff Kaplan, Lisa Krohn, Leah Hoffmitz, Martin Venezky, Jason Pilarski and Peter Cho (UCLA Media Arts)

Technology gives us the ability to be available and on check from anywhere. If you stay online for long enough, iChat can be a good monitor for viewing how friends in your network live their lives. From my iChat menu, I can gather the information about their status: sleeping patterns, when they have lunch, how they represent themselves in their icons and (with iTunes) what music they listen to.

From July to August, I began to list the things I ate from breakfast to dinner. And what I found out is I really like Asian food and coffee and I skip breakfast. Here's the complete list:

bagel and cafe con leche
tacos and guinness
medium coffee and a not so ripe banana
small coffee with light cream and a banana
vegetable curry and sapporo
ong choy with preserved tofu and iced tea
beet salad and coffee
penne alla vodka
UCC BLACK無糖
barley tea and orbit gum
caesar salad and chicken wings
hank huang's brown rice and chicken cutlet
veg. omelet and another coffee
jap chae, hijiki and small coffee
sukiyaki and beer
large black coffee
scoop of tuna, green salad and large coffee
pad see mao and sapporo
large americano and muffin
beer, beer, and fries
two pints of newcastle and fries
chicken, grits, greens and MGD
green tea boba and leftover fish dumplings
soon doobu chigae and hot barley tea
salmon onigiri and coffee
8" turkey sub and 21 oz drink
tuna salad and medium coffee
leftovers
croissant and coffee with 1/2 & 1/2
lots of dumplings
falafel sandwich from father nature
some type of shredded chicken over rice
fruit salad(cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple and watermelon)
pho tai from golden deli
beet salad and goat cheese, more coffee
salmon focaccia sandwich & green bean slushie for dessert
penne arrabiata witha turkey meatballsa
coffee and two day old crab cake
chicken quesadilla & two margaritas-aye arriba!
coffee
rice soup with pickles, fried egg and salmon flakes
coffee and sesame crackers
malaysian chicken rice and chrysantheum tea
6" turkey sandwich from Subway
oodles of noodles
I ♥ pho and chia gio and taiwan beer
duk bokki
eggs moliere and bloody mary
noodle soup and pickled cabbage
감사합니다! I ♥ 두부찌개
cafe con leche
black coffee and a glazed crueller
beef noodle soup and black coffee/ 2 sugars
coffee and croissant

I've had a great opportunity to create the identity for an amazing architectural firm in Los Angeles. The firm is called Escher GuneWardena and they are completely subscribed to the Modernist way of architecture. White boxes on hillsides of LA. Talking with them about architecture, website and identity work has led to many interesting perspectives of design. They believe that everything should be tied to a function and have a strong, driving concept behind it. Below are a few points in website design:

1) No scrollbars, textfields or hardware of any kind should be visible. On a site visit to an apartment they were designing, I noticed that the walls were seamless, no door handles or molding. It was sheer white plane that wrapped around the room. Even the door hinges were concealed within the door.

2) Entrance to a space. Why should a site visitor be presented with any information when they first enter a site? Shouldn't there be a "foyer"? Wouldn't that be more eloquent? The partners both agreed that the site should have a soft landing page before the visitor sees the content. Maybe this could be a new trend of "slow" sites? In their building designs, the door always opens to a foyer and slowly leads the visitor to the main living space, never directly.

3) The size of the space reveals the function. We did something similar in our Blux web site which was a brilliant design decision. Content dictates the size of the button text. The partners loved the idea of allowing information to control the design. Similarly, architectural plans shows that there's a reason why bathrooms and closets are smaller than living rooms.

4) Content sorting. What if architecture could be sorted by color, elevation and size? Rem Koolhaus's monogram S,M,L,XL is organized by the size of the building. I suggested that Escher GuneWardena may have a chance at being whimiscal by sorting their projects by elevation to the LA landscape.

I learned a new word today and that is "autodidact". It means someone who is self-taught. I found it incredibly inspiring that Bruno Munari was entirely a self-taught artist. Lisa Nugent introduced his work to us in first term and my interest quickly grew into a fascination of his work and his philosophy. In hindsight, our Superstudio could be indirectly influenced by his playfulness and his process of making things. Munari was involved with children's book and teaching children about art. The monsters, wood boxes, and wooden mobiles suddenly become more meaningful in my own reasoning. As an inventor of "useless machines" (a phrase he coined himself), Munari would have been pleased.

"Da cosa nasce cosa" (one thing leads to another).--Bruno Munari

(images from Zbigvision.com and Midnight Eye)

In "Tango", the use of small space creates more opportunities for interaction than larger spaces. The technique of using the imaginary space off-screen is inversed so that no single person is significant in the shot. It is the interaction between them bump up against each other that creates the drama. No narrative is necessary in the piece because the viewer creates their own version of what is occurring in the interactions. Each character interacts with the room by performs an action. The manner they enter the frame and exit. The "dance" they perform around each other. Each of these interactions build a drama that would usually happen in a much larger space or with less characters.

Similarly, Yasujiro Ozu also plays off the offscreen space and utilizing interactions in a small space. In his "tatami" shots, the camera never moves while characters move in and out of the shot. They can also be moving along on different planes of the shot. The father reading the newspaper sitting in the foreground while the mother is in the background preparing dinner.

With interaction design, you can choose the timing and positioning of the characters. Good interaction design also uses the techniques of the stage. While the user is the director, actors shouldn't be on the stage unless they’re called upon. For example, navigation shouldn't appear unless the user is ready to move away from the page.

In both examples, the stage is important and players move in and out of the stage. But what happens offscreen could be just as interesting. How can that be shown? What if you can remove characters off the stage? Would that change the narrative? What if it's not a small tenement room but a tatami room? Does that change the context?

The 1000 year old egg is a delicacy for the Chinese. The eggs are preserved by "covering them with a mixture of clay, lime, salt, tea, and straw" and then burying them into the ground until the chemicals turn the inside of the eggs to black (from the Global Gourmet). When cracked open, you start to see that it looks like a rare stone and the discoloration in each egg is really unique in each egg. The preserving chemicals create rings of color in the yolk and sprout-like patterns in the egg white.

Every culture has their unique dishes and the dish that brings back childhood memories is the 1000 year old egg. The memory I have is being eleven and trying to explain it to my friend who is convinced that my family eats rotten eggs. Besides the embarrassing part, I formed the idea that the 1000 year old egg is like the Chinese heritage that is steeped in mysticism and tradition of a 5000 year old culture. In the essay by Andrea Codrington called "Contours and Colonies", she writes about the work of de Geuzen which addresses Dutch colonization in Indonesia. Their work uses a dress of a Dutch woman as a platform to raise issues of tolerance, dominance and assimiliation on a social level. In my response, I've chosen to use an egg to convey the idea of culture conditioning on a more personal level. My traditional parents and my environment create a mix of American and Chinese values that makes me reflect about my cultural make-up.