Category: Design

June 23, 2010

Kult: A Visual Archive of Our Time

The magazine market with its quick turnaround and fierce competition has always been a fertile ground for creativity. This is a latest incarnation (ok, I’m a little late in discovering this) of a magazine: Kult’s ArtCade Machine — 3D Magazine. It merges a magazine with a 80’s arcade machine!

KULT

Kult, is a free printed quarterly magazine by a local creative agency of the same name that uses visual culture to explore issues of our society today. The ArtCade was created for its launch issue last year that explored the theme of “Trust”.

In its second issue, Kult looked at the “Artificial” and also created an interactive online version of its magazine. Unfortunately, it is offline currently. The magazine edited by Brendan Graham and art directed by Steve Lawler recently published its third issue, which features some 29 illustrations by artists from all around the world that looks at the health epidemic AIDS. Compared to the first two issues, which came in forms that explored new boundaries in magazine publishing, this is a little bit more regular, but still an interesting read.

KULT

Kult isn’t the first local magazine that devotes itself to use visual culture to explore issues. In fact, its art director Steve worked on the last issue of a now defunct local magazine FL.ag that runs on the same concept. Interestingly, the issue of FL.ag that Steve worked on also looked at AIDS and its cover image is the same one done by Austin Cowdall found inside this issue of Kult.

FL.ag

June 19, 2010

A lookback at THE LASALLE SHOW ’10

This was my first year attending graduate showcases of graphic design students. My first visit was to NAFA’s Be A Good Creative, which was disappointing. It didn’t help that my designer friend had warned me beforehand that local graduation shows were a waste of time. So, I didn’t expect too much when I visited THE LASALLE SHOW ’10 for the graduates of LASALLE College of the Arts. And, I’m glad I did. To be fair, LASALLE seems to have a much wider pool of graphic design students judging by the number of exhibits. Their Design Communication certificates, which you can specialise in Advertising Communication, Graphic Communication and Image & Communication, begin from diploma level and go up to a Master of Arts in Design.

The show left me with the impression that LASALLE graphic design graduates were educated with an approach to graphic design that was more conceptual than mere ‘styling’. Their Diploma level students worked on real-world problems, such as designing way-finding systems for People’s Park Complex and Toa Payoh bus interchange, and advertising concepts for National Museum Singapore and Yellow Pages. Their graduates’ work brought that to another level by tackling the issues of graphic design’s application in the real world.

A project that literally stood out (left) was Richard Phua’s White Ink, a series of visuals that shows the negative spaces that one usually doesn’t “see”, but is all around us. One thing he did was to print a book of newspaper pages on transparencies. This eliminated the white space and made you realise how difficult reading is without white space! Unfortunately, Richard’s website hardly says anything (actually, nothing).

Stella Clarissa’s Dyslexia: I See Words Differently (right) introduces graphic design to investigate a community’s specific problem — reading. Even as graphic designers constantly argue about legibility issues, we often forget that the argument is based on the vision of a normal person. Her work inserts this community’s concern to nudge graphic design towards a more inclusive form of communication.

The Papercy Project (left), by Benjamin Koh, brings alive the medium of paper in a series of posters that are just beautiful and interactive. As part of this project, he created an astronomy calendar and posters that celebrate a origami typeface and the year of biodiversity. In an era where it’s so easy to do design digitally, it’s great to still see graphic designers showing the beauty of what a pair of hands can do.

While the graduates works showed the possibilities of graphic design, LASALLE’s Masters students used it as an intellectual tool to understand our culture. Aditi Bhari’s Impressions of a City: Singapore created a visually exciting book of what shapes this country. He’s managed to appropriate images of our everyday visual culture and matched them with observations from some of Singapore’s best intellectual minds. I’ll love to get hold of the book!

Finally, Sanchita Jain’s Decoding Culture combines graphic design with intervention in public spaces as a kind of experiment to pin down India’s culture. She created a series of public signs that are beautiful, hilarious and sometimes puzzling (as viewed from a different culture) and put them up in India to see how people react. This was all cut into a short film. She actually created similar signs for Singapore, but unfortunately she did not have time to conduct a similar experiment here. Although, I wonder if she might get into trouble if she carried out such a Situationist act here.

And that’s my take on THE LASALLE SHOW ’10. In a way, it’s restored my belief that students’ work can be exciting and great. Plus, it was only a year ago when I was a student, so I can totally understand how comments, both good and bad, can shape the journey ahead!

June 14, 2010

In Singapore, Emptiness is Full of Meaning

An empty piece of land is not something that will catch our eye as we go about our daily lives, but for photographer Darren Soh, it sparked his on-going project that documents the building of Marina Bay Sands. Presenting at the inaugural PLATFORM, Darren showed a full-house crowd at Sinema his “progress pictures” of the integrated resort since construction began some four years ago. The photographer, who has made several photo collections of the Singapore landscape, said this island is one big construction site and that makes emptiness in Singapore’s landscape significant and something worth documenting.

Indeed, living in a country where everything is so transient, Singapore’s landscape has been extensively photographed. However, most works on it that I’ve seen focuses on the death of landscapes and its decay. It’s become a knee-jerk reaction for photographers living here — just look at the number of photographers who have been flocking down to Tanjong Pagar Railway Station now that it’s future is in limbo. Darren’s project responds to this Singapore condition from a different time frame — its beginning and birth. More importantly, his project freezes the never-ending construction work that we are seemingly surrounded with and allows us to reflect, and even marvel, the building of Singapore.

Coincidentally, I recently had the privilege of helping do some background research for an architectural project that looks at the conditions of emptiness in Singapore. The findings of architect Thomas Kong’s project will be presented in ‘Zero’: Alternative Scenarios for Architecture in a Post-Bubble Era on 16 June in Rotterdam.

As a number, zero is neither negative nor positive but we often assign a degree of negativity despite its neutral meaning. A vacated site similarly lies in a liminal state with potentiality. However, architects have been taught that the only thing they could present to society is a building, to fill the void again. But what can they learn from the way in which individuals and groups appropriate empty sites in towns and cities? And in broader perspective, what can zero offer as we live through the Great Recession, when the myth of continuous economic growth is shattered, the assumption of ready capital for development can no longer be guaranteed and architecture students are taught only one mode of survival as a professional?