from ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963)
design
February 12, 2016 at 05:34PM
Doodling on my sick day with Hunterwasser, Shiele and Tiger Tateishi. It’s 17:30 and it’s still light. That’s progress.
Notebook: Myrtle.
Against Design
“I recognize the value of building an established discipline, and of crafting a shared set of principles that define game design as a profession. But, I also think that in our efforts to define and legitimize our practice as a professional discipline we sometimes forget the history we inherit, the legacy of games made by communities of players, games made by amateurs, by dilettantes, by mathematicians, mothers, scientists, gym teachers, shepherds, inventors, philosophers, eccentrics and cranks.
And in honor of this tradition I would like to suggest other verbs for us to describe where games come from, alternatives to the overconfident precision of the word “design”. Words like invent, discover, compose, write, find, grow, perform, build, support, identify, copy, re-assemble, excavate and preserve.”
When I was 16 I couldn’t find a poster of this so I drew it myself as large as I could
“O’Bannon introduced Scott to the artwork of H. R. Giger; both of them felt that his painting Necronom IV was the type of representation they wanted for the film’s antagonist and began asking the studio to hire him as a designer. 20th Century Fox initially believed Giger’s work was too ghastly for audiences, but the Brandywine team were persistent and eventually won out. According to Gordon Carroll: “The first second that Ridley saw Giger’s work, he knew that the biggest single design problem, maybe the biggest problem in the film, had been solved.” Scott flew to Zürich to meet Giger and recruited him to work on all aspects of the Alien and its environment including the surface of the planetoid, the derelict spacecraft, and all four forms of the Alien from the egg to the adult”
“The Paradise Destroyed by the Straight Line,”- Friedensreich Hundertwasser on Stamps and Lines
“The stamp is an important object. Although very small in format, it carries a message. Stamps are a measure of the culture of a country. This tiny, rectangular piece of paper links the hearts of the sender and receiver. It is a bridge between peoples and nations. The stamp knows no borders. It reaches us even in prisons, asylums, and hospitals, and wherever we may be on earth. Stamps should be ambassadors of art and life and not simply soulless proofs of postage paid. The stamp must experience its destiny. The stamp must once again fulfil its purpose, which means it must serve on letters. A true stamp must feel the tongue of the sender moistening its gum. A stamp must be stuck on a letter. A stamp must experience the dark depths of the post box. A stamp must suffer franking. A stamp must sense the hand of the postman handing the letter to the addressee….The stamp is the only work of art that everyone can own, young and old, rich and poor, healthy and sick, educated and ignorant, free or robbed of freedom…“
— Hundertwasser, February 14, 1990
“In 1953 I realized that the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind. But the straight line has become an absolute tyranny. The straight line is something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is a line which does not exist in nature. And that the line is the rotten foundation of our doomed civilization. Even if there are certain places where it is recognized that this line is rapidly leading to perdition, its course continues to be plotted. The straight line is godless and immoral.
The straight line is the only uncreative line, the only line which does not suit man as the image of God. The straight line is the forbidden fruit. The straight line is the curse of our civilization. Any design undertaken with the straight line will be stillborn.
Today we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist knowhow and yet, at the same time, we find ourselves confronted with emptiness. An aesthetic void, desert of uniformity, criminal sterility, loss of creative power. Even creativity is prefabricated. We have become impotent. We are no longer able to create. That is our real illiteracy.”
Mistick Krewe of Comus 1873 ‘Missing Links’ Parade Costume Designs For Mardis Gras
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
Recorded this film off the telly on ye olde VHS when I was a child, and it was one of the films, (along with the Terror of Mechagodzilla)that I watched over and over again. Bela plays Ygor, who’s neck was broken in the Noose at the end of “Bride”. I remember the sound it made when he tapped it, to let you know it was actually broken and he was actually still alive.
Images courtesy of Obscure Hollow.
See more great stills from this film here.
Stamp Design Number Five
I’m going quiet now. I’m recklessly going to focus my attention on making a short film thing.
Stamp Design Number Four
Smaller version of this.
Paul Greer 