Lamski Portrait

Thoughts on 'Design, Art and Life'. as such, . . 3rd Yr BA Design high jinxes at @lam.ski.404 . Work in Progress at Aslam Muses

[danismm]

The metropolis of tomorrow. By Hugh Ferriss, 1929.

[lamski]

W.I.P Miro Board #1:.

A great chance to view each other's work and check in with the rich and diverse themes, experiments and outcomes in development!

Link: https://miro.com/welcomeonboard/AX4TAv0Y3L0OytVLTYUQu3rv8RQQzIAP2TdD1r1J6C6whlQP7PbHDoWNJXlrrh6r

[lamski]

.:Fleet Street 📜 (Image by Aslam Hussain - BY-NC-SA)

Like many areas of London, Fleet Street is steeped with history and constantly changing.

It seems ironic that today, the spiritual home of journalism has only one editorial office and that is for a publication of the comic Beano (famous for Dennis the Menace).

The world’s first newspaper was started at the bottom of Ludgate Hill in 1702 (now a Leon restaurant on Ludgate Circus). A single sheet with two columns, it claimed to provide the facts, letting the reader make up their own mind.

By the 20th century this street barely a mile in length produced most of the reading public’s newspaper consumption. At one period the news was printed below as it was produced above, for example the former Daily Express building the striking Art Deco building on the north side of Fleet Street.

- former Daily Express building, Image by Aslam Hussain (BY-NC-SA)

Now the industry has fully embraced the digital publication and moved away from ‘The Street’ to print their editions in Docklands.

See documentary film ‘Banging Out!’ > http://www.digital-works.co.uk/bangingout/    

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However, my reason for writing this blog/ article is to share that an area of Fleet Street is about to get redeveloped soon. The proposals would see a flagship eighteen courtroom facility and a new state-of-the-art headquarters for the City of London Police, along with a commercial development that will help fund the scheme.

Further reading here > https://salisburysquaredevelopment.co.uk/

- Primrose Hill - EC4, Image by Aslam Hussain (BY-NC-SA)

- Redeveloped proposals site, Screenshot from the website.

The result would be a legal complex roughly halfway between the Royal Courts of Justice and the Old Bailey. It will also be good news for journalists while they wait outside the courthouse for a newsworthy story there’s a historical pub opposite the site – Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (rebuilt in 1666 after the Great Fire of London).

- Location of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, Screenshot from the Google Map.

- Royal Courts of Justice, Image by Aslam Hussain (BY-NC-SA)

[lamski]

Personal Archiving:.

A NEW ARCHIVIST HAS BEEN APPOINTED. BUT HAS ANYONE ACTUALLY APPOINTED HIM? 

IS HE NOT RATHER ACTING ON HIS OWN INSTRUCTIONS?… 

HE WILL NOT CONCERN HIMSELF WITH WHAT PREVIOUS ARCHIVISTS HAVE TREATED IN A THOUSAND DIFFERENT WAYS: PROPOSITIONS AND PHRASES. 

HE WILL IGNORE BOTH THE VERTICAL HIERARCHY OF PROPOSITIONS WHICH ARE STACKED ON TOP OF ONE ANOTHER, AND THE HORIZONTAL RELATIONSHIP ESTABLISHED BETWEEN PHRASES IN WHICH EACH SEEMS TO RESPOND TO ANOTHER.

– NEW ARCHIVIST, GILLES DELEUZE

Most of us comb through a lifelong collection of personal items, papers and photos either when we have no other job - typically in retirement or when we have to deal with the belongings of a deceased loved one. Often the job seems daunting and overwhelming that our natural response is to get discouraged and say, “I don’t know where to begin” or “It’s too much; I’ll do it some other time” or worse, “I’ll just get rid of it all.”

If you want to start and complete project. You just have to, not over think it, start simply, separate items broadly at first and, in the end, accept your final sorting decisions as “good enough.”

To quote Albert Einstein: ‘If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you probably don’t understand it yourself.’

Don’t dwell on individual photos or letters yet. Think about the entire collection as a mass of related things. “You’ll feel overwhelmed if you think, ‘I have a hundred plus things to sort out.” or “You can paralyse yourself by over scrutinising.”

Be prepared that your collection will take up space and time as you sift through it, so plan what you are going to do and where you are going to do it.

Nothing is perfect - after sorting the collection into groups. You’ll have some intellectual control over it that you didn’t have before.If you want you can go even deeper into sorting stuff out, like by date or by topic or by location or by whom etc...

Next stage is to digitise them and personally, the best method is by scanning the items. 

If you’ve got digital files, organise and back them up - best to have 2/3 copies in two different places. (i.e. one on an external drive and a copy uploaded to an online drive) 

Personal collections can be a way to tell a story about your life or the life of a loved one. Old items give you a sense of the people who owned them, even if there’s not much to the photos, letters or the cards. It shows you what they valued. What they did, what they ate, what holidays they celebrated. They provide a voice and by grouping them together you release a kind of narrative.

Not everyone values this stuff but if you archive it, it will be there for somebody in a later generation. There may be one person who really cares about their family history and will be glad to have it.

[lamski]

Handwritten Stories in a Digital Age 📬

Long before smartphones, tablet computers, email and social media, people would send all sorts of postcards to their family, friends and loved ones. 

The subjects of these postcards included everything under the sun, from locally- or amateur-made photographic scenes or portraits. All the way up to mass-produced colour lithographs or halftone postcards of major tourist destinations around the world. 

Today, however, individuals can create and instantly share real-time travel photos (and the dreaded selfie) over social media, making the physical postcard somewhat anachronistic.

However, postcards hasn’t lost its appeal. In fact, collecting postcards has never been more popular, as vintage postcards offer a fascinating window into the past—both public and private. 

Postcards from the family archive can also provide a vital link to the lives of our relatives, going back generation after generation.

[lamski]

Methods and Processes 🎨

One of the modules (BA Design @Goldsmiths) I took (early) last year was Risograph Printing - Popular among the zine and self publishing community due to low production costs, Riso prints come with a simple colourfulness that makes them seem easy to make. 

Appearances can be deceptive, though, as Risograph printing is not an easy technique to learn, let alone master. To create the perfect print requires finding the balance between your design and the way it will turn out best in print.

Digital prints look so dull next to Riso prints with its bold and intense colours. Often limiting your colour palette to two or three colours fits perfectly to this technique for printing and learning what images work well.

[lamski]

BAD Doodles @Goldsmiths.

BAD = BA Design and these doodles are on the studio desks used by us throughout the years - they are Fun, thought-provoking and attention-grabbing. Where one can put most random, crude, ridiculous blurbs of absolutely nothing.

(>”)> https://vimeo.com/55947482

[lamski]

[O]ur notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” … [W]e are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

Joan Didion (On Keeping A Notebook)

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Written long ago, the 1960s I think, the essay is still relevant today. In fact, you could make an argument that in the world of blogging and twitter, this is more relevant than ever.

[lamski]

Making Notes ✎

There’s plethora of note-taking apps makes idea capture fingertip-convenient. I’ve used Evernote for work purposes and keep most of my idea files in Google Docs. But that said, my first medium for idea capture is still pen and paper!

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”

— Joan Didion

Everything is an idea for something, something that touches the imagination, a fact that seems relevant or maybe just a statement I find interesting — either because it resonates or because I don’t understand. All of it is fodder for continued work or thinking on the topics.

[oo111111]

Excerpts from Yuk Hui’s “Writing and Cosmotechnics” (2020)

[lamski]

[Digital] Objects.

[kenotype]

[lamski]

NoteBooks.

[lamski]

"The question we face is thus whether social memory is entering a phase of technological exteriorisation, where global processes of automatisation and synchronisation have accelerated to the point of pre-empting the imaginative dynamics of living memory - ie. the environmental adaptations that take place through rhythmisation and invention. .... However, an overly totalising critique of the synchronisation and homogenisation of rhythms may be dismissed. Not only has this not yet taken place, given that a large part of the world’s population is not even connected to the digital networks; more significantly, absolute synchronisation is not even possible since it equals death."

- Yuk Hui, ‘On the Synthesis of Social Memories’. 

Ref: http://digitalmilieu.net/about-yh/

[crossconnectmag]

Painting by David Mensing (b.1963, Iowa)

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[lamski]

Stay Occupied! . . Work on Context Report. . . Read read, read, lots of reading! . . Meditation, things to calm your body. . . Work out, walk around the neighbourhood (safely). . . Draw, paint, collage, play games, sleep in or learn a new subject (film, astrology, bio, etc). . . Bake or cook something. . . Take breaks from social media. . . & finally, binge-watch movies and shows... (if you can)

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[itscolossal]

‘Sistine Chapel of the Ancients’: Tens of Thousands of Ice-Age Paintings Discovered in a Remote Area of the Amazon

[lamski]

⬅ Read ⬆ Read ⬇ Print ㊞

I'm mostly a fiction reader, especially around historical and fantasy fiction. Terry Pratchett and Bernard Cornwell are probably my favourite authors of these genres, but I'm open to other types. (I've read majority of Ian Rankin’s novels)

Currently, I'm reading the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov 🚀

P.S. I encourage everyone to support https://readtheprintedword.org/ 

[lamski]

Self Portrait.

[unflattering]