Design Algorithms: Skeuomorphs, Spandrels & Palimpsests.
This event, presented by Dorkbot SoCal, will explore how cultural objects shift over time, with each presenter exploring a single term related to patterns of cultural change.
Skeuomorphs – Garnet Hertz – UC Irvine
“An ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques.”
Garnet Hertz is an interdisciplinary artist, Fulbright Scholar and doctoral candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He also holds an MFA from the Arts Computation Engineering program at UCI, has completed UCI’s Critical Theory Emphasis and is currently an affiliate of the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction in the Department of Informatics. His dissertation research explores the creative, historical and cultural advantages of reusing obsolete information technologies in the media arts, and uses these examples to construct a critical theory of a cluster of related activities: circuit bending, D.I.Y., critical design and media archaeology.
Spandrels – Tim Durfee – Art Center
“The roughly triangular space between the left or right exterior curve of an arch and the rectangular framework surrounding it.”
Tim Durfee is an architect based in Los Angeles. His independent and collaborative work has produced buildings, exhibitions, temporary installations, furniture, urban sign systems, interfaces, videos, and maps. He is a partner of the Los Angeles office Durfee | Regn and teaches at Art Center College of Design in the Graduate Media Design Program. He was director of the Visual Studies Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), and recently completed a Visiting Professorship at Woodbury University.
Palimpsests – Norman Klien – CalArts/Art Center
“A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.”
Norman Klein is a cultural critic, and both an urban and media historian, as well as a novelist. His books include “The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory,” “Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon,” and the data/cinematic novel, “Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86” (DVD-ROM with book). His next book will be “The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects.” (Fall, 2003). His essays appear in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals, on the web — symptoms of a polymath’s career, from European cultural history to animation and architectural studies, to LA studies, to fiction, media design and documentary film. His work (including museum shows) centers on the relationship between collective memory and power, from special effects to cinema to digital theory, usually set in urban spaces; and often on the thin line between fact and fiction; about erasure, forgetting, scripted spaces, the social imaginary.