E

Very Nice. I love your poster series!

Re: Presentation
It may help to try to write captions for the main numbered sections (e.g., Pretend Architecture, Pretend History), for the purposes of guiding the audience and choosing appropriate imagery. I would love to
see the presentation more clearly articulate what ‘Pretend’ is to you and show its value as a tactic or method of representation.

I have added some commentary, mostly links or relevant content,
to your presentation and pasted it into this e-mail. All of my comments
are within dashed lines - - - - - -.

F

Eric Adolfsen Thesis Presentation : Draft 0.2

Reality or Make Pretend? In the world we all live in, it’s sometimes hard to draw that line in the sand between the two.

1.

Take Walt Disney’s World. Mickey Mouse and his friends. Imaginary right? Sure. If you ignore the history behind Mickey. But as some of you know, Mickey–like the lesser known Flip the frog and many others–is an evolution of the american minstrel act. Walt Disney was at the frontier of a brand new world but he still brought fragments of the world around him to develop his new brand.

Many companies do this everyday. Building a story around their product, creating an aura for something that is in reality lifeless. But mythologizing is done to live things too, like Jaques Cousteau in his red cap and yellow submarine. Or baseball players, who might look ordinary out of their costumes.

In fact a lot of re-presenting of the world takes place when we develop something for the kids. Maybe it’s a result of our desire to protect children from, while still preparing them for, the world. But we never return back to the basics entirely. Kid tools and books often connect utopia with reality. This can also be said of publications such as The Whole Earth Catalogue, or Willy Flekhouse-designed Twen Magazine.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Pretend Architecture

Archigram may be a good reference here as well.
Projects such as the Walking City may complement the
Whole Earth Catalogue. During your presentation,
you are building the value of ‘Pretend’ in the audience’s eyes.

Archigram (Walking City)
—-> http://www.archigram.net/projects_pages/walking_city.html

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Both were reinventing the world, creating everyday things that seem uncommon. But like their common counterparts, they were designed for everyday people–like us.

Well, Governments play this game too, imbuing our daily lives and transactions with the color of something familiar yet alien.

2.

In science fiction we often find worlds like our own but different.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Pretend language

The Ewokese that the Ewoks speak in Return of the Jedi
is sampled ‘Earth languages’ such as Tagalog, Hindi,
Tibetan, and Swedish. Pretend (or alien) as an appropriation of ‘foreign.’
—> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewok (see Language)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Aliens look like humans or animals. It’s often like looking at a fun-house mirror (eg, Windsor McKay). In near-future science fiction (Blade Runner), we’re able to peer into a world that’s only slightly ahead of our time–a convention that allows for critical commentary about contemporary issues without seeming too political: there’s still a mirroring going on, but it’s dressed in a strange costume so as not call attention to itself.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Pretend Curse

It is interesting to note the Blade Runner Curse that is humorously mentioned
in reference to all of the companies whose logos are prominently featured
in the film — market leaders at the time of the film but the majority went bankrupt.
(Atari, Pan AM, Cuisinart, etc.). Pretend is real.

Pretend Airlines

The Pan Am Space Clipper (Orion III) from 2001: A Space Odyssey
What companies and brands follow us into pretend worlds? and why?

–> http://www.fantastic-plastic.com/PAN%20AM%20SPACE%20CLIPPER%20PAGE.htm

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In many contemporary Japanese video games, tv shows and films, a signifier (lets say, an Italian American plumber, to offer one example) is dislodged from its ‘original’ (or previous) context and placed in a world that recombines with other dislocated elements (say, turtles and mushrooms) to construct a new (super mario) world. Howl’s Moving Castle jumps across centuries and continents.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Pretend Hero

It is interesting to note that Mario’s origin is in Donkey Kong,
where Donkey Kong captures Mario’s girlfriend Pauline. Mario is
thus embedded in our collective consciousness as the
archetypal working-class hero.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

And maybe Mario’s world is even more bizarre, but there’s something that we want to connect with. What about these characters do we identify with? Is it the way they represent the underdog, the working class hero, filtered through strange lenses and cultures. Mario arrived in the US from Japan (like the Super Sentai, aka Power Rangers) and became one of the worlds most iconic (and profitable) figures. We play their video game, or draw a piece of fan art, or even “cosplay” (kosupure in japanese, contraction of costume + play) a manga character. We pretend we are the character who, in way, is an abstraction of our selves.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Pretend World: Avatars and the Virtual Space (the Metaverse)

Second Life may be a good reference here. A virtual space
where people assume avatars that can buy and sell virtual
goods and services using real currency. Pretend is profitable.

—> http://secondlife.com/

Leo Burnett just opened a virtual agency in Second Life,
hoping to capitalize on having visibility to virtual clients
and build brands in a virtual environment. Pretend as the future.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

3.

Our ease in character/self-identification is hardly surprising when we look at the first books we read growing up. Cartoons and comics are by definition simple drawings that caricature at the same time as they help introduce young readers to the real world. Richard Scarry teaches us about cars by showing us imaginary ones driven by human-like animals. Chris Ware also redecorates the world, including its signage, in a recombination of the everyday and the nostalgic that is still surprising and new–a modern spin on Windsor McKay. Finding that new thing is very much the challenge, as when Mckay drew ‘imagination,’ where he equates new forms of pretending with the progress of mankind.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Neverending Story. Pretend as necessity for survival.
Evil is personified as the Nothing, an absence of imagination.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

4.

Some graphic designers have taken on this challenge by passing the briefs given to them through their own signature hand (eg, Tadanori Yokoo). Edward Fella has chewed up the painted signs he’s shot on his polaroid and spit them back out soaked in his signature saliva. With his typeface Babyfat, Milton Glaser runs gothic letters through an imaginary beveling machine rendering a new and unexpected form. And once that form was popular enough to appear in supermarket posters, he caricatured himself, running this poster for a Simon and Garfunkel concert through the Glaser machine.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Barbara Kruger (another applied/fine artist)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Perhaps it’s not strange then that these designers—all three of whom have work on display at the MoMA—are sometimes referred to as artists. They grew up alongside pop art, which elevated the applied arts while also supplying fine art to the masses.

5.

There are plenty of other artists who make pretend in their own esoteric ways (Marcel Dzama, Aya Takano, Rita Ackermann, Paper Rad, Nara Yoshitomo, Matthew Barney). But if you’re familiar with these artists, you’ll agree that there’s a lot of abstracted reality echoing in their work.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Federico Fellini may be a good reference (8 1/2). Pretend as autobiography.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

There’s also a way in which, like a lot of the work I’ve been pointing to, images of childhood bear shadows of more sinister realities. Yes, making pretend is about our “make beliefs,” but it’s also about our “beliefs”–our awareness of what is real and, often, terrifying.

6.

I’d like to make one caveat about art and its relation to the real before wrapping up tonight’s talk. Fake Louis Vuitton handbags and wallets, sold on the street: Do they have the currency of the the real? It’s a test in a way for these wallets, just as it is for art I’ve shown you tonight. The relationship between the pretend and its reflection. But that’s not all.

You see, I want to make clear that with the exception of this wallet, I have been sidestepping a discussion about forgery, fakeness, or trickery. I don’t want to have a conversation about whether this baboon centaur exists (We all know it doesn’t) or whether the men of Apollo 11 in fact walked on the moon.

With Make Pretend there’s a third element. It’s the hand, the artist, the inventor, the performer, the provocateur. It’s the maker of pretend. That person is an active participant, a critical voice in the back and forth of real and fiction.

JS Boggs draws a detailed cartoon of a dollar bill and then uses that bill to purchase something. Tom Sachs remakes a big mac extra value meal but gives it Prada skin. When these two artists borrow elements from the real world, we are able to track what value is lost, what remains, and what is added. Pierre Huygue, Momus, or Paul McCarthy also borrow characters from the world (a Manga character named Anna Lee or Walt Disney’s Pinocchio) and recombine them with other unexpected elements also abstracted from reality (copyright laws or violence, albeit with ketchup instead of blood).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Life Is Beautiful (1997) with Roberto Benigi.
A father shields his son from the horrors of the concentration camp,
using ‘Pretend’ as his tactic.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Through their acts of abstraction and recombining they make something that helps us challenge systems and ideas in the real world. The artist stands on the line between the borrowed element and the artwork. It is a triangular relationship, with value passed between each of them. And moreover every time that act takes place, there is a metaphorical zooming back in space, echoing and re-imagining the act that came before.

Epilogue

I once met an American Indian in Grants, New Mexico. His name, which I’ve never forgotten him pronouncing (dool-ZAA-AAH), means Walk on Edge. They’re words to live by, he told me. And the more I hear that expression come up, the more I understand its message. On the frontiers of art and experience, you must walk the line between fantasy and reality, terror and delight, youth and adulthood, designer and artist, what’s been before you and what’s yet to pass. And you call it whatever you want. I like to call it Make Pretend.

Eric Adolfsen Thesis Presentation : Draft 0.2

Reality or Make Pretend? In the world we all live in, it’s sometimes hard to draw that line in the sand between the two.

1.

Take Walt Disney’s World. Mickey Mouse and his friends. Imaginary right? Sure. If you ignore the history behind Mickey. But as some of you know, Mickey–like the lesser known Flip the frog and many others–is an evolution of the american minstrel act. Walt Disney was at the frontier of a brand new world but he still brought fragments of the world around him to develop his new brand.

Many companies do this everyday. Building a story around their product, creating an aura for something that is in reality lifeless. But mythologizing is done to live things too, like Jaques Cousteau in his red cap and yellow submarine. Or baseball players, who might look ordinary out of their costumes.

In fact a lot of re-presenting of the world takes place when we develop something for the kids. Maybe it’s a result of our desire to protect children from, while still preparing them for, the world. But we never return back to the basics entirely. Kid tools and books often connect utopia with reality. This can also be said of publications such as The Whole Earth Catalogue, or Willy Flekhouse-designed Twen Magazine. Both were reinventing the world, creating everyday things that seem uncommon. But like their common counterparts, they were designed for everyday people–like us.

Well, Governments play this game too, imbuing our daily lives and transactions with the color of something familiar yet alien.

2.

In science fiction we often find worlds like our own but different. Aliens look like humans or animals. It’s often like looking at a fun-house mirror (eg, Windsor McKay). In near-future science fiction (Blade Runner), we’re able to peer into a world that’s only slightly ahead of our time–a convention that allows for critical commentary about contemporary issues without seeming too political: there’s still a mirroring going on, but it’s dressed in a strange costume so as not call attention to itself.

In many contemporary Japanese video games, tv shows and films, a signifier (lets say, an Italian American plumber, to offer one example) is dislodged from its ‘original’ (or previous) context and placed in a world that recombines with other dislocated elements (say, turtles and mushrooms) to construct a new (super mario) world. Howl’s Moving Castle jumps across centuries and continents. And maybe Mario’s world is even more bizarre, but there’s something that we want to connect with. What about these characters do we identify with? Is it the way they represent the underdog, the working class hero, filtered through strange lenses and cultures. Mario arrived in the US from Japan (like the Super Sentai, aka Power Rangers) and became one of the worlds most iconic (and profitable) figures. We play their video game, or draw a piece of fan art, or even “cosplay” (kosupure in japanese, contraction of costume + play) a manga character. We pretend we are the character who, in way, is an abstraction of our selves.

3.

Our ease in character/self-identification is hardly surprising when we look at the first books we read growing up. Cartoons and comics are by definition simple drawings that caricature at the same time as they help introduce young readers to the real world. Richard Scarry teaches us about cars by showing us imaginary ones driven by human-like animals. Chris Ware also redecorates the world, including its signage, in a recombination of the everyday and the nostalgic that is still surprising and new–a modern spin on Windsor McKay. Finding that new thing is very much the challenge, as when Mckay drew ‘imagination,’ where he equates new forms of pretending with the progress of mankind.

4.

Some graphic designers have taken on this challenge by passing the briefs given to them through their own signature hand (eg, Tadanori Yokoo).  Edward Fella has chewed up the painted signs he’s shot on his polaroid and spit them back out soaked in his signature saliva. With his typeface Babyfat, Milton Glaser runs gothic letters through an imaginary beveling machine rendering a new and unexpected form. And once that form was popular enough to appear in supermarket posters, he caricatured himself, running this poster for a Simon and Garfunkel concert through the Glaser machine.

Perhaps it’s not strange then that these designers—all three of whom have work on display at the MoMA—are sometimes referred to as artists. They grew up alongside pop art, which elevated the applied arts while also supplying fine art to the masses.

5.

There are plenty of other artists who make pretend in their own esoteric ways (Marcel Dzama, Aya Takano, Rita Ackermann, Paper Rad, Nara Yoshitomo, Matthew Barney). But if you’re familiar with these artists, you’ll agree that there’s a lot of abstracted reality echoing in their work. There’s also a way in which, like a lot of the work I’ve been pointing to, images of childhood bear shadows of more sinister realities. Yes, making pretend is about our “make beliefs,” but it’s also about our “beliefs”–our awareness of what is real and, often, terrifying.

6.

I’d like to make one caveat about art and its relation to the real before wrapping up tonight’s talk. Fake Louis Vuitton handbags and wallets, sold on the street: Do they have the currency of the the real? It’s a test in a way for these wallets, just as it is for art I’ve shown you tonight. The relationship between the pretend and its reflection. But that’s not all.

You see, I want to make clear that with the exception of this wallet, I have been sidestepping a discussion about forgery, fakeness, or trickery. I don’t want to have a conversation about whether this baboon centaur exists (We all know it doesn’t) or whether the men of Apollo 11 in fact walked on the moon.

With Make Pretend there’s a third element. It’s the hand, the artist, the inventor, the performer, the provocateur. It’s the maker of pretend. That person is an active participant, a critical voice in the back and forth of real and fiction.

JS Boggs draws a detailed cartoon of a dollar bill and then uses that bill to purchase something. Tom Sachs remakes a big mac extra value meal but gives it Prada skin. When these two artists borrow elements from the real world, we are able to track what value is lost, what remains, and what is added. Pierre Huygue, Momus, or Paul McCarthy also borrow characters from the world (a Manga character named Anna Lee or Walt Disney’s Pinocchio) and recombine them with other unexpected elements also abstracted from reality (copyright laws or violence, albeit with ketchup instead of blood).

Through their acts of abstraction and recombining they make something that helps us challenge systems and ideas in the real world. The artist stands on the line between the borrowed element and the artwork. It is a triangular relationship, with value passed between each of them. And moreover every time that act takes place, there is a metaphorical zooming back in space, echoing and re-imagining the act that came before.

Epilogue

I once met an American Indian in Grants, New Mexico. His name, which I’ve never forgotten him pronouncing (dool-ZAA-AAH), means Walk on Edge. They’re words to live by, he told me. And the more I hear that expression come up, the more I understand its message. On the frontiers of art and experience, you must walk the line between fantasy and reality, terror and delight, youth and adulthood, designer and artist, what’s been before you and what’s yet to pass. And you call it whatever you want. I like to call it Make Pretend.

I am thinking i do not want a total narrative coherence. It is too perfect and dishonest. Use failure in presentation to show the cracks.

(start with error screen with title. go to leaky faucet (or whatever video it is when i begin to talk))(saying this to show an awareness of what i am doing-see kinross article in dot dot dot 2 to understand why) What I want to show you tonight is a set of images that have been culled from the web-google searches mainly-from books, and from my own work and photographs and edited down again and again into these remaining images. I am interested in them because in some way they represent things not going according to plan. We could call them failures or malfunctions or errors, but that implies they have no use-they are a dead end-an unwanted result. However, each of these images, to me, represents the potential for something to (improve, evolve, do something, what is it?).

In many ways, I am a failed designer. I rarely finish projects, here is an example (show humiditiy project for dan’s class) and when I do finish, the projects are more about me than they are about the content or any sort of message. But, that is why I am here at Yale. I believe we are all failed designers, and if you do not believe that then I wonder why you are spending $80,000 here when you could be making that amount working elsewhere. But, in being a failure, it opens up the potential for one to fail. And when you are able to fail the horizon of possibilites is limitless. If you only allow that an image has one form-the one you intended when you captured it (show yoda image here) then a timeout error while uploading a picture has no intrigue. (show forbidden web page here) A web page in which the facade between user and server is dropped is only a frustration. (show moire pattern here) And moire pattern is simply a failure of the dot pattern to render properly. However, people like Karel took this pattern and made it a part of their work.(maybe-Karel’s parliment stamp or other moire pattern thing he did).

Some degree of failure is actually expected. We have rubber stamps (show rejected stamp here) to pound onto anything deemed unworthy. In the same way, the stencil implies the purpose of the object is equally as functional redefined as something else. And, the image element in html has an alt attribute which is there in case the image does not load.

(show image of dirt path here)However, no matter how much design, planning and anticipation of failure occurs-every need cannot be accounted for over time, and that will leave room for more failure and, thus, for more innovative ways to achieve a solution.

One way to utilize failure is through reinvention (this term involves having a base element but changing some or all things involved with that base element so that it exists in a new space.) Karel reinvented defective washers that a shopkeeper gave him as printing somethings(what would these be called?) Paul reinvented discarded mechanical parts as an ever expanding typeface. The butcher bar was a butcher first and without any alteration to the premises became a bar. And my favorite example is Prince. Yes, his career was not doing so well, but by reinventing himself as a symbol or maybe we could call it a logo-with a name that nobody could remember-he generated more buzz than his best album he ever made.

Another way to utilize failure is through repurposing. Abake took a common mistake in photography and utilized it to show the differences in styles of a particular Martin Margiela collection. Tim Davies has used the flash of his camera to prposefuly obscure the subject’s faces in paintings. Work in Progress utilized an out of focus image for a hussein chalayan campaign.

(show pie in the face)Why is this funny? It relies on using an object in an unexpected way to achieve a new interpretation of that object. Tibor did this with his AIGA poster.