Author: MK

It’s coincidental that Shawn just posted in the comments of the post below that he found the distances between Tube stops on the London Underground misleading.

Coincidental because I was browsing through the archives on Edward Tufte‘s website today, and found the comparison between the standard Tube map (a beautiful, useable document) and a map that charts where the Tube stations actually are, rather interesting:

Tube Map
Geographically-accurate Tube Map

Perhaps one should carry both maps with them (and of course, an A to Z) on their journeys.

Public Lettering is a website that details some of the many fonts and types of lettering present on public signs in central London. Advertisements and commercial signs were ignored; the focus is on signs installed by more “official” sources. Lovely photographs.

Wayfinding in the city is a massive and fascinating topic – reading the texts and looking at the photos on this site is one illuminating part of that beautiful puzzle. Where corporate branding intersects with wayfinding is an complex problem. Related to this, I found the entry about Central Saint Martins interesting:

“As first planned the Central School of Arts & Crafts would have had carved lettering on the corner but all that was executed was the original name above the outer entrance doors. A name change to Art & Design in 1966 was ignored, but in 1989 the college was merged with St Martinâs School of Art and became part of the London Institute. The name placed outside in the early 1990s is an example of how not to do it. As with most corporate identities, this one decrees that all buildings are signed in an identical way regardless of age, history or style.”

(This post shares some of my thinking around my thesis subject at the Université du Québec à Montréal. It’s long (click on the link at the bottom to keep reading), but an easy read. I’d appreciate any comments.)

In “Perform or Else”, Jon McKenzie describes the relationship between cultural, organizational, and technological performance. Each type of performance has its own sphere of actualization, cultural performance representing performance art itself and the academic study of performance; organizational performance representing the corporate world and its demands on workers and systems to “perform”; and technological performance, representing the machines whose performance we rely upon to conduct our daily business. McKenzie states that these three types of performance will create a synergy which will ensure that “performance will be to the 20th and 21st centuries what discipline was to the 18th and 19th, that is, an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge.” (McKenzie, “Perform or Else”, pg.18.) McKenzie argues that this unspoken command, “perform or else”, bears all the hallmarks of the speed and tension of contemporary existence: you must perform or you will be replaced.

In the period shortly after World War II, a court reporter by the name of Horace Webb responded to the “perform or else” challenge posed by the difficulties in creating accurate transcripts of court proceedings with the current stenographic techniques. He had become frustrated with the inefficiencies posed by stenographic methods of court reporting, and developed the method of court reporting known as voice writing, or verbatim reporting. This method has a unique invention at its core, a device called the Stenomask. This object is a mask that fits over the lower portion of the face, with a built-in microphone. By enclosing the microphone inside the specially-designed mask, a reporter is allowed to speak without being heard by other people, and to keep background noise away from the microphone.

In the “art imitates life” department this week, artists Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert will soon perform a piece entitled “How To Sue“, which will consist of taking the San Francisco-based New Langton Arts gallery to court for copyright infringement. The artists allege that the gallery stole one of their concepts and applied it to a call for submissions and upcoming show at the gallery. The artists presented “Selling Yourself and Not Your Art”, a performance focused on the phenomenon of self-help industries, at New Langton Arts. Shortly thereafter, the gallery created a call for submissions based around similar ideas.

Right about now, you may be asking yourself: “Self-help as art? What will they think of next?” This example and other forms of lifelike art are explained by Allan Kaprow, the artist credited with creating the first “happenings”: “Despite formalist and idealist interpretations of art, lifelike art makers’ principal dialogue is not with art but with everything else, one event suggesting another. If you don’t know much about life, you’ll miss much of the meaning of the lifelike art that’s born of it. Indeed, it’s never certain if an artist who creates avantgarde lifelike art is an artist.”

Taking the gallery to court for copyright infringement, in a case that the plaintiffs will most certainly lose (will they lay claim to the entire field of self-help and sue Dale Carnegie next?) is perhaps as close to lifelike that art can get in the nation that is arguably the most litigious in the world. The only way that this performance could become more of a spectacle would be to have it presided over by Judge Judy, who delivers compelling performances regularly via cable TV.

The artifice that is television might make this piece a little less lifelike, since the presence of cameras changes everything, and the chances of your case being heard on Judge Judy or other courtroom reality TV shows are rather small. Court proceedings, for most people, are devastatingly lifelike as unwelcome apppointments held in desolate concrete boxes, far away from swarms of cameramen. But a televised court appearance would make Fletcher and Reichert’s performance more of a spectacle, certainly – lifelike art meets courtroom reality TV. Perhaps I have a concept forming here – does anyone know someone at NBC? I volunteer to be the subject of the pilot episode, since surely the artists will try to sue me for stealing their idea of litigation-as-art.