color101: March 2011

wall street scandals / waxy.org

Dave Mueller

Edward Tufte

Unknown

David McCandleless

Aleksandra Mir, Naming Tokyo, 2003

Aleksandra Mir, writing about her project Naming Tokyo:

The idea is based on the fact that Westerners often complain that Tokyo has no street names and that you can’t find your way around without a guide who innately knows the logic of his own city. I always thought that was such a superb form of local resistance—no key! So I felt it would be interesting to start naming the streets of Tokyo with names from Western culture and society, to help us around. I am sure the people of Tokyo will like it too!

Needless to say, Tokyo is large and I will need thousands and thousands of names, even for the central area. I have started by asking my friends for help by providing me with a short list of names on any coherent theme, which I will apply to the streets. In return and as thanks, they will have a neighborhood named after themselves.

The names will be grouped around any poignant literary or political moment of the West, or any of the most banal elements of our society, which then will be reflected back into the physical neighborhoods of Tokyo. I have asked people to follow their fancy and stick close to their heart. Names in any Western language will do, but I will leave out any reference to street, rue, calle, etc., keeping only the name as such.

After the first installment of the work—the map at the Palais de Tokyo in the summer of 2003—we will continue to try to actually put these names into common usage. This can happen by a variety of means—by producing further guidebook publications, referring to popular tourist spots with the new street names, infiltrating advertising and community planning, and possibly and hopefully even starting to put up street signs on location. It may take forever, but it starts with a blank map and the very first nominations. I can’t wait.

Naming Tokyo

June 5 - September 14, 2003. Palais de Tokyo, Paris, as part of the exhibition GNS: Global Navigation System. Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.

Deb Sokolow

Stephanie Posavic

Stephanie Posavic and David McCandless

(okay this one doesn't utilize color, but it's great)
Ad Reinhardt

Nathan Carter

Julie Mehretu

Mark Lombardi

Tom Friedman

A. Boetti

Jules De Balincourt

Moscow subway Map

MIT / Climate Interactive
http://www.climateinteractive.org/simulations/mits-greenhouse-gas-simulator

Bill Rankin, Les Deux Axes

Otto Neurath, Home and Factory Weaving in England

Otto Neurath, from International Picture Language, 1936

Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information, cover

from Edward Tufte

Straight-line distance between European cities with populations of 100,000 or more, Denise Pumain, 2000

PROJECT 8: Use color as a major element in cartography, charting, or indexing to map any sort of geography (including psycho geography or piece of knowledge, to clarify and/or denote a set of complex information. Your diagram or chart should have an investigative aspect.

This is a two week project (15 hours outside of class expected). Any media. Project due MONDAY, APRIL 20.

*note: we are still departing from our customary schedule, ending on a Wednesday.*

The next project period after this one will be our final project. This will be a two and a half week self-intitiated color-oriented project. So please begin to consider what you'd like to do

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If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where the decline of the Empire sees this map become frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts — the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an Imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing) — then this fable has come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation of models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory — PRECESSION OF SIMULACRA — it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.

Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra"

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Yale professor Edward Tufte takes dull data and turns it into magical and meaningful pictures. Forget those clunky bars and pizza slices you were taught in school, Tufte produces such inventive and even decorative graphs it's enough to have you weeping over your squared paper. And each one helps us understand the world a bit better, or alerts us to the crimes that can be committed when the people with the numbers seek to confuse the have-nots.

Tufte exposes the hidden dangers of misrepresented numbers: how graphs can kill. In his book Visual Explanations he shows how inept graphing of data about the space shuttle paved the way for the Challenger disaster. Throw out the engineer's pretty slides and substitute Tufte's simple curve, and mental warning lights flash. It's not rocket science, after all.

-Paul May, "Why I Love...Edward Tufte", The Guardian, 11/8/04

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/p>

On Otto Neurath (from C. R. Shalizi, U. Mich)

Austrian sociologist, political economist and anti-philosopher; possibly the most unorthodox Marxist ever. Having developed some theories about a moneyless ``economy in kind'' before the war, he was assigned by the Austrian government to work in what was, effectively, the planning ministry during the Great War. This led to his working for the governments of Bavaria and Saxony towards socializing their economies after the war, a project he attacked with great enthusiasm, continuing through two coups that brought to power two different ``Soviet Republics''. (He had cleverly arranged to be hired as a civil servant...) Eventually the central German government restored order and arrested him as a collaborator in high treason, but they had to let him go when it became evident that he didn't care about anything except his work, and had barely noticed the changes in government. (The intervention of Max Weber and various Austrian officials helped.) When he got back to Vienna, we became involved in a project which evolved into the Social and Economic Museum, which tried to convey complicated social and economic relations to the largely uneducated Viennese public. (The didn't call it Red Vienna for nothing.) This led to some very interesting work on graphic design, visual education and the visual display of quantitative information, indeed, a whole Vienna Method for such displays, also called ISOTYPE.

5min. excerpt from Shade Compositions 2009 from RASHAAD NEWSOME on Vimeo.

...Newsome also records the more pedestrian street theater of urban female body language in an ongoing piece called Shade Compositions, which he has performed internationally. For this piece he choreographs women performers who act out body language typical of urban environments.

"My interest lies in cultural signifiers," says Newsome. "I'm fascinated by ghetto body language used by black and Latino women and how it is integrated into popular culture all around the world and how that transcends class levels. When does it become a part of contemporary global culture and when does it lose that lower-class stigma?"

Newsome casts women from the streets of cities like Paris, New York, and Atlanta and films them in screen tests acting out these gestures before he includes them in a group performance. In live stagings the performers stand together, with a few initiating the first moves and corresponding verbal sounds and then more following, each standing in place and repeating their move. Some snap their fingers and jerk their heads, and others thrust their hips out and call out expressions like "Girrrrrrl!" Newsome records all these sounds with a Nintendo Wii gaming machine that he hacked into, using the wand controller as a bespoke conductors' baton. He takes these live sounds, along with some that he prerecorded, and loops them back during the performance until they overlap, recycle, and crescendo in a rich remix.

"For Shade Compositions certain women would be hesitant to get into character or perform the gestures," Newsome says. "It proved that this body language has a stigma. They’re kind of embarrassed that they do it."

Everywhere he travels he picks up on and records regional gestures, like the mutations of American hip-hop body language he found in Paris's North African baneuil neighborhoods. In this way Newsome acts as an anthropologist, scouting and observing the way urban women interact in globally connected but sometimes marginalized societies. And he has even slyly incorporated men into Shade Compositions. (from The Advocate)