hmm, since it’s already halfway into this week and it looks like i won’t get a chance anytime soon to write any extended pieces, i’ll just sort of babble a little about some of the speakers/talks i’ve atteneded over the past week.
- stephen prina – part of the usc sofa visiting lecturer series, stephen is a contemporary artist, and last thursday afternoon, he showed one of his recent films, a 20 minute… visual and tonal study. actually, i was nodding off. too many all nighters last week. his talk afterward was very interesting though. i took notes for the time that i could stay (art history class forced me to leave early). he talked about some of his work revolving around transcription and translation, i suppose the actual work itself being a metaphor for what the work proposed. hmm, does that make sense? he was talking about as an artist, guiding, but not legislating interpretation. all in all very interesting. wish i could have stayed.
- matthew carter – typographic god, spoke for an hour and a half at a potlatch sponsored aiga event. i missed out on the open bar, free food, and the chotskies, but i got a great seat and heard him tell stories on designing mantinia (ligatures through kerning table), walker (0-width interchangable “add-on” serifs), vincent and fenway. um, also a font he did on secrecy (using each letterform to extend beyond the normal n-box to overwrite other text on the page. i don’t know if this was actually done with any programmatic elements or what…). he didn’t go in depth about the georgia and verdana commisions he did for microsoft and didn’t bring slides, although i did ask so he did talk a little about the screen vs print process (cap online has a good feature on georgia, trebuchet, and verdana (1997)). also, apparently type designers everywhere hate fontographer 4.x
- simon leung – he came and spoke tuesday at usc as part of the new faculty search. i believe the school of fine arts is looking for a new tenure track sculpture professor… simon’s work was very theoretically and philosophically grounded, reflecting, i suppose that he’s lectured art theory at uci and nyu. i had heard some of his stuff at the art in motion festival panels earlier. his synthesis and recall of theory was really impressive. um, i’m not sure it made some of his work more appealing, but i guess at least it justifies them to some degree. the annoying thing about art talks, is that there’s always some snobby middle-aged art lady (always, trust me) who will pose (and try to impose) a supposition and try to pass it off as a question which the artist will have to try to gracefully rebuff over and over and waste everyone’s time. some people just like hearing themselves talk.
oh yeah, i probably bitched about it before, but the aiga los angeles sucks so badly … i couldn’t really believe it at first. it’s quite sad (i was shocked). for some unfathomable reason, the whole site is served ssl as well. insync.media should be ashamed. luckily, the link to their site on the launch page is broken. and they’re “a new breed of communications company,” presumably one who can’t do web design worth shit.
