Thinking of an identity of the area, the main aspect is this big hub for transports; the place has a huge bus station, taxis and piers going to the Asian side of the city. The city is connected to all the other areas from this point. And thinking of the frenetic rhythm of people moving into traffic and public spaces, without looking around, ignoring the routes they cover everyday (because part of the daily routine), made us wanting to try to stop them, interrupting their journey asking them to draw, to leave a sign on the pavement.

We started doing this out of the pier, where boats were coming from the other side and we had big groups of people coming every few minutes. The idea was to collect a series of their “impressions” on the pavement, whatever they wanted to draw, sketches and messages in a place where people don’t stop, but just walk pass quickly to the next destination.

Together with this, it was interesting to look at other people’s reactions to the drawings. Someone was carefully walking on the side, others stepped on, someone stopped to look at them.

Every drawing is a sketch, a frame of the “story” made up and left there by the people passing. Our aim was to pause people, slow them down for a minute, and breaking their routine asking for a mark in a public space.  Where other people could see it.

A way to “define a private space (people were drawing into circumscribed squares) into a public space”.

Everything happened in about 2 hrs. While time was passing, the “collection” of drawing grew.

Considering all this information I just wrote as a background, I thought that the narrative I need to represent for the project could be a flip book, where the all the drawing (just the drawing, not the pictures) one by one come to place in the page. Eevery time I turn a new page, one more drawing is reproduced. Starting with a blank spread (the clean pavement at the beginning of the day), every piece is going into place filling up page by page the all space.

In order to do that I need to trace all the drawing and to scan them, then I need to recreate the sequence…

The project consists of highlighting the hidden grids of the space where the BA Graphic students spend their time in school.

Every room has 4 walls, and a wall is the bearing element of the building, in the same way the grid is for a 2d document. I’m going to shoot every wall and to map every room with 4 grids each.

This is a selection of places to map: the 1st, 2nd and 3rd year studio, the photo studio,letterpress, screen printing, etching, context and typo studio, the cyber cafee and the 2 floors of the computer room. Every place will have its title and a little plan, his 4 pics and traced over it (on tracing paper placed on top of the picture) the grids.

The idea is to use a voice recorder,  I’m going to spend the next 48hr with 3 other people and I’m going to record everything that will be said, from when we meet to when we will say bye. Then I’m going to write everything down and I’ll try to reconstruct the sequence of the different conversation on paper.

If everything said verbally, once turned into a written text is not editable anymore and makes a statent, the idea is to make I statement out of a random conversation made by 4 different people and see what kind of statement it is. Perhaps, the statement of a weekend out

Every person has a different tone of voice a different carachter, and will have a different typeface.

It’s a bit if I was going to make an acting script out of a normal day, only based on verbal communication. There might be some kind of running heads showing the time of the day to contextualize the conversation.

Each of us and there might be notes describing the external scenario (but that might be irrelevant).

The main intent is to try to shape the time and attention of the dialogue.

…Written language lacks many of the means of expression that spoken language has: facial expression, gestures, variations in tone of voice and so on…

some background might help making things more clear:

While you are reading, pg 195

Writing is more than just recording, it enables us to organize our knowledge better and update it more easily than would be possible using speech and memory alone.  As readers we can then take in a text unhurriedly, at our own speed; we can dissect, analyze, and evaluate language and content, and we can react to it with deliberation – possibilities that are reinforced by typography and its greater formality and standardization…
…by recording and distributing language in this way, in a nonpartisan and irrevocable form, words are exposed to searching and critical scrutiny. In that sense, text becomes quite vulnerable. Philosophers have often greeted written text with scepticism, starting with Plato (in his dialogue Phaedrus), who believed that recording text would be detrimental to memory, that it made people forgetful and was no more than an aide-memoire…
…Plato’s next objection is that you cannot conduct a discussion with a written text. Ask a question and the response is silence. And if, as a philosopher, you send your thoughts into the world recorded in writing, you can then do nothing to change them or clarify them through elucidation or rewriting.

And from B.Mau again:

In book design the event occurs in the thickness of the page. In the turning of the page the power of the page is released. it is not a matter of producing surface effects, but rather of designing the time or sequence while ensuring that surface effects do not disturb the readers experience of temporal depth by clogging her cone of vision. Typographic design becomes fundamentally about shaping time and attention.

Starting from my laptop and from a screenshot of an indesign document (the software used to make grid), I’d like to trace grids from other things around. The next one could be my computer desktop, then the laptop itself, then how things are disposed on my desk, and then looking at other things around that could be mapped.

I’d like to try to zoom out to the entire room, the planimetry of the house and the area from google maps.

The Idea would be to look at the hidden structure of things and their sizes.

Ok ok, the 2 posts below are about what I found, but I forgot this:

Powers of ten by Ray and Charles Eames: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

From B.Mau’s Massive Change, just copying here a few captions:
For most of us, design is invisible. Until it fails. In fact, the secret ambition of design is to become invisible, to be taken up into the culture, absorbed into the background. The highest order of success in design is to achieve ubiquity, to become banal. The automobile, the freeway, the airplane, the cell phone, the air conditioner…have achieved the design nirvana. They are no longer considered unnatural. They are boring, even tedious.

Grid designs are inherent to maps, urban spaces, and agricultural tracts and the layouts of buildings, streets, and highways; the rectilinear shape of industrial products offer further evidence of the grid’s ubiquitous presence.
Rectilinear systems of spatial division, based on the shape of monitor screens and the organization of information presented on them, also increasingly determine the visual environment. The computerization of much of the world has resulted in momentous changes in how we perceive our physical surroundings. This digital remapping has meant a marked increase in the impact of grid based systems on daily life. Although many of the connections taking place through information technology are invisible, they can nevertheless be visualized in terms of the pathways along which information travels.
From morning commutes – whether in car moving along a highway, a high speed train on a magnetic rail, or even a walk through the grid of city streets – all the way to the last check of our emails at night, we involve ourselves in a limitless , overlapping network of grids, which act in obvious or hidden ways to order our movements, our work, our thoughts, our leisure time, and probably our dreams. Since most people are not pleased to see themselves locked into overlapping systems of straight lines and right angles, many grids are hidden.
The first significant impact of the design of the grid in Western civilization took place during the Italian Renaissance, with the introduction of perspectival illusion, by developing the visual convention of one or two points located at an imaginary distance, from which all subsequent renderings of space would derive. Once the grid was laid over the frontal picture plane, with objects and people located at a measurable distance between the viewer and the point on the distant horizon from which space appeared to move forward, the precise ordering of space according to tools of measurement was suddenly possible, and illusionistic perspective quickly became a universal convention.
The grid slowly evolved from a device used to aid in creating an illusion of space to a system imposed upon space itself.
The universality of the grid was matched by its relative invisibility as a tool that imposed its own priorities and values.
Avant-garde movements in Russia, The Netherlands, and France focused on the grid, so to speak of its utilitarian function. In the years prior to WW1 in particular, the grid was embraced as a symbol of the modern era.
Malevich developed a philosophy around the square, the proliferation of forms representing a kind of absolute rationality were converted into a nearly mystical system for depicting the unseen structure of the world.
The de-natured grid, removed from the context of spatial representation and transformed into a basis for artistic investigations into a new category of plastic, non referential space, defined the way most geometric abstraction was practiced during the twentieth century.