Meander

A collection of works in progress, writing, goings on and occasionally influences.

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RCA Critical Historical Studies lecture poster w/ James Sanderson

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WIP identity 2016 w/James Sanderson

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Work in Progress workings

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DeepDrumpf

Twitter bot creates tweets using neural network analysis on public transcripts of Donald Trump:

Dubbed @DeepDrumpf, after John Oliver’s recent segment about Trump’s ancestral name, the bot creates Tweets one letter at a time. For example, if the bot randomly begins its Tweet with the letter “M,” it is somewhat likely to be followed by an “A,” and then a “K,” and so on until the bot types out Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” It then starts over for the next sentence and repeats the process until it reaches the 140-character limit.

The Tweetbot’s creator, CSAIL postdoc Bradley Hayes, used techniques from “deep-learning,” a field of artificial intelligence that uses systems called “neural networks” to teach computers to to find patterns on their own. Hayes was inspired by an existing training model that can simulate Shakespeare, as well as a recent report that analyzed the presidential candidates’ linguistic patterns to find that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level.

“Trump’s language tends to be more simplistic, so I figured that, as a modeling problem, he would be the most manageable candidate to study,” says Hayes.

More Here

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The early stages of web 2.0 gave the impression a “public” was emerging. Young, libertarian, educated, white, males were building an online democracy. The expansion of internet access, coupled with the centralization of discourse, enabled marginalized others to form collective voices. Social justice emerged as not only the most interesting, most urgent public discourse, but effectively the only public discourse left. Only collective voices could compete in what was now a landscape dominated by global media.

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Piece by Leandro Stafford

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Part of the Registration School workshop with edgar-walker

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The time has come my dear friends, followers, and fellow design proletariat. I will no longer be posting or reblogging to this Tumblr any longer. I will leave it up as an archive to rummage through dying trends but as much as I may believe in the benevolent act of sharing, I cannot ignore that the wholesale cheap selling off of your creative industry, our creative industry, is getting worse and worse. We’re taking lower pay. We’re giving our labor-time away. For almost nothing. The bottom dollar. Barely surviving. Which is a shame because I have seen how overpaid creative directors keen on the image aggregator world lurk these feeds; scrolling, right-click-saving images that typically younger, underpaid (or not paid at all) interns then assemble into dazzling pitch decks for brands to pick and choose their next flavor combination. Many of these “directors” have convinced people that their mood board is a substitute for vision, for an idea; the mirror reflecting back a little manga dystopia mixed with a dash of swiss typography mixed with motorcycle gangs from the 1970s Los Angeles. Alakazam! Hit the runways. Fast cash.

I’ve had whole conversations that feel more like footnotes than any discussion of any particular person or work of art nor their philosophical background or context. Did you see? Yeah. And did you see? Yeah. Well, did you go to? Yeah. Cool. Yeah, everyone’s cool. Nobody’s boring. Cool is cheap. Duh. Everyone’s a king or queen of their own curated life now. Therefore, it’s only natural that everyone’s ascension to the throne should soon follow with the irrelevance of the individual “tastemaker” founders of image blogs. Kanye West might not know it yet, but any Tumblr kid that’s going to be the next-gen pop icon already has more knowledge of what he/she wants to look like, act like, sound like than any seasoned brand strategist with a talent for tasteful arrangement.

When I went to the L.A. Art Book Fair a couple weeks ago I was struck by how precisely aggregated everything from the book jackets to the people browsing them were. I couldn’t identify very much amongst them because few if any stood out. Not necessarily one grey mass but the idea of many grey pulpy masses moving around each other. It was like watching an elaborate ritualistic opening ceremony. Cult of the book. Fetish of the image. Pastel Goth acquiesces to the Health Goth at zine table 58-D. Etc.

I am paraphrasing a bit. It’s Ryan Nelson’s DDDDoomed book again. Images need to be given the respect they individually deserve; which is not to become part of an assembled spectacle slop in the visual trough of the Internet’s transient pigpen. We’ve become such ravenous image consumers. Addicts, really. Barely halting long enough to understand an image as we whiz down down down the feed for our fix. What else in this world moves through information at such a dizzying pace without pause, without reflection? Search engines? Viruses? The NSA?

One’s justification for continuing to consume like this is, to no surprise, also an addicts’. Like any other addict, history is irrelevant. On to the next one. Pull down to refresh. 5 unread posts. 16 unread posts. 25 unread posts. The jaded addict will tell you everything’s already been done. Nothing’s original. The image pulled from oblivion is forgotten at exactly the point of reblog. Not once have I ever looked back at my posts from 3 years ago let alone 3 months ago for “inspiration.” What was I building? For whom? The addict’s memory. All this time I had convinced myself I was sharing knowledge.

Lastly, because we are all also producers of the image of ourselves (an image instantly loaded with surplus value) equipped with basic editing tools and camera in hand, we accept an uncritical view of the produced image. We are dangerously close to believing everything we see. It’s not some conspiratorial paranoia to think that such a lack of critical awareness has grave implications for humans as the Age of Information slips into the Age of Simulation. I can no longer aid such ignorance at such a crucial point of transition.

Thank you for following and godspeed!

- Travis

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Research shots from Margate/Turner Contemporary.

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Finished inscription. Et In Arcadia Ego.

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Collaboration with James Sanderson on the logotype for fashion student Anna Alexander. Shown on inside of shoe.

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Early days version of a typeface inspired by the lettering from a first edition copy of Lenin in Zurich. Fairly obvious working name of 'Solzhenitsyn'.

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A very early sketch of an airy Roman using stone inscriptions as a key influence. This is the basic character set. More unusual comic/script based characters are to be added as alternatives/discretionary ligatures. 

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The strange contrasts of Margate. 

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Rough placements for the Design Without brief. Repositioning parts of the building using projection to contrast context.

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A rather grainy photo from a talk by the creator of Comic Sans, Vincent Connare. An interesting talk.