Interim Examination Presentation

Yesterday was my interim examination. The aim is of course, to judge my work produced this past year, reflect on what I have learnt, themes emerging, strengths and weaknesses and what could happen next year.

The exam was in form of a panel of 3 tutors, the Head of the course, one senior tutor and my personal tutor.

So, this is my space at the RCA. I thought I should start with this as one of the good things of the RCA is the studios – and of course your space shows something about yourself.

This is for ‘Design Without’, the elective I had for the last 6 months, an intensive course of one-week projects. It helped me to ‘train’ my brain to come up quickly with ideas and resolve them in one week, engage with new concepts and new approaches to my work, explore further video and experiment other mediums as well, challenge myself and just try new things. With Design Without I have a better understanding of research and I’m now able to articulate ideas better and see what works and what it doesn’t.

Drawing by touching from Savvas Zinonos on Vimeo.

Drawing without touching: An experiment of the senses. The brief was asking to consider a desirable augmentation of one of the senses. Instead of enhancing one of the senses I decided to remove one – but in a way, when you remove one sense, the other senses enhance, so it worked. I blindfolded myself and asked my flatmate to hand me objects I’ve never seen. With this experiment I had a different understanding of the tactile sense, everything became texture and shape. Further questioning is how blind people visualise objects they have never seen.

The panel seemed interested in this and asked me if I just discovered something there or it exists ‘out there’ and what if I drew the same object after looking at it – a probable next step. I admitted that it probably exists out there but I haven’t explored it further because it was a one-week project.

This is my response for the FUSE project, which asked us to question the assumptions we make about typographic languages. I was interested to perform language/typography through a medium and see how this becomes choreographical. I’m also planning to bring more people in and see how they communicate.

I stated again that people seemed interested in the ones without the rubber bands but I found this problematic because the gestures are created because of the rubber band, so it probably doesn’t communicate what I want it to communicate.

A project I’m still experimenting with, the brief for this project was about coercion and how governments use consumerism to distract and manipulate the masses. I was interested in the language politicians use, how they ‘re-arrange’ and distort reality and present it to us as the truth. This reminds me the rubik’s cube. I’m looking at articles and quotes by politicians. For example in this video, the initial quote was “The continent is enjoying a very fortunate era” by the German finance minister.

This is again a project that has to do with politics. The brief was asking to re-map Europe and I came up with the idea to ‘re-map’ the myth of Europe. I continued the story and I made it to adapt in today’s Europe situation. I’m using the mechanism of tiles to reveal the real meaning of words – Asterio becomes Capitalism and so on.

At my presentation I showed this mock-up as well, which is a long strip which can be places on a wal in a space for a spatial performance.

The mechanism for ‘Re-map’ Europe is actually inspired by this project, which was a collaboration between the V&A and the RCA. We were asked to respond on the theme of the future of the poster. My response was commenting on the nature of the poster – through the loop of future, present and past, it suggests the omnipresence of the poster as something being static, something that gives you information (the piece of paper you take, and the poster as something that has an expiry date and something that leaves in the street (throwing the paper on the floor).

This is for Visual Research, the mandatory drawing elective. I had a very strange idea of what VR was in the beginning and what it was trying to do, although at some point it became something that I can have a break from everything else and just produce stuff.

An animation exploring and questioning the nature of an object – ‘drawing with drawing pins’.

Drawings for a brief that had to with observing objects again – using the technique of frotage.

A brief for landscapes – I look at my bed sheets as an aerial photograph of a landscape

I’ve never spoken about the Cultural Interfaces project on my blog. This collaborative project with students from 3 different courses of RCA was sponsored by Blackberry, aiming at communities of London.

Our project was for Hackney Stream, a class of elders who learn how to use computers. We ran a couple of workshops with them and found out that the reason they go to Hackney Stream was to come together – and particularly at a Spotify workshop we noticed how many stories they have to say about music and their culture. So our brief was to bring these cultural, technological and social elements together using music and story telling. We wanted to make them start conversation between them and come together.

 

So we introduced a device that has three play lists, each one distinguished by a different colour, one private, one shared with friends and relatives and one shared with the rest of Hackney/the world. By shaking it, it skips a song, by tapping it on surface twice it likes a song, which later goes into a top 10 list of Hackney Stream with the most liked songs. It also has a recording button which records stories for Hackney Stream or to be shared with other people.

I never had to do collaborative work for such a long time and it was a very useful experience. I realised how everyone has a different role and the level of commitment you have to show to this if you want a really good outcome, because if one doesn’t turn up at the meetings and stuff, the whole thing goes bad.

 

FEEDBACK:

They seemed interested in the work presented although they pointed out that it’s all unfinished, experimental work. I’m aware of this, and as my elective was all about one-week projects, I took advantage of that time to experiment with a lot of different stuff so I can take themes that emerged from these projects – such as language, interactivity, motion and probably performance – to take further in the second year.

‘Sorting out’ mode

Lately I have been busy with reshooting my rubber band project and I have also made the video for ‘The future of the poster’ project:

Here are all the letters with and without the rubber bands (and there you go, watermark on my photographs as I’ve noticed some people reblogged my work on tumblr without crediting me)

Rubber band typeface (2013) (Composition) from Savvas Zinonos on Vimeo.

I decided I will drop the idea of removing the rubber bands as it doesn’t communicate. From the beginning I found it a bit problematic. Those gestures are created with the use of the rubber bands and removing them doesn’t really make sense.

My next plan on this project is to paint the rubber bands with glow-in-the-dark paints or some kind of paint that is visible under black light, and probably use other people trying to communicate in the dark with the rubber bands.

A new punctuation mark

The brief we had for last Wednesday was set by Jonathan Barnbrook, which asked us to create a new punctuation mark for the English language.

The punctuation mark would express an idea or ideology. It can be experimental, serious or humorous. Examples given:

Punctuation mark could express:

• the feeling of ‘believing in nothing’
• the idea of the text is part of ‘information overload’
• commercial text ‘would you like fries with that?’
• ambivalence, feeling two opposite things at once
• a pause which has more meaning and truth than the words around it

He also encouraged us to think about:

• consider how punctuation is used, the new mark will have to be simple, work big and small and in one colour.
• think about the uses of typefaces and language, things like texting and email have changed the way we see and write language.
• if it is appropriate or you are feeling particularly eager, you can do more than one punctuation mark.
• this project sounds quite heavy but it can be taken as lightly or as seriously as you want.
• choose your subject matter within a specified time limit, otherwise you can spend ages worrying which area to follow.
• should this punctuation mark have some time factor involved or be completely static. your idea should shape the way it is to be presented.

First of all punctuation is only seen in writing, it’s something that structures speech but is not actually seen when we speak. It creates a relationship between two sentences.

It’s also visible that each punctuation mark evolved as some kind of a symbol. For example the full stop for me represents a cycle, like when a sentence finishes, a cycle, a circle finished, hence the shape of it.

With the question mark, the mark evolved from the word question itself

Looking at punctuation marks I remembered the Greek polytonic system and how much I hated Ancient Greek at school. SOOO many punctuation marks, too many things to remember. I actually tried to refresh my memory and see if I can learn it now, and surprisingly I could understand it better now. Also the punctuation marks made sense in Ancient Greek when specific letters had different lengths of speech or a slightly different pronunciation.

Also, the greek question mark is the english semi colon, and an upper-full stop is the semicolon for greek.

Punctuation marks should be really easy to write, and as I observed they have to be maximum 2 movements of handwriting, otherwise it becomes a smiley or a symbol.

Talking about movements, I relate to music and different accents and symbols used to ‘colour’ the melody. for example the thick dash you see above means pause, and the dot with the line above means ‘in continuation’, so in a way, if that could be applied to a text can be translated as ‘shut up’! (the picture is something I found on the internet but I thought I should include this as it was very funny).

There are many people that already created new punctuation marks, and there are some that already exist in the english language! For example on the left of the picture above, everything except the small reversed question mark (which means irony) already exists in the english language.

These are some punctuation marks the poet Herve Bazin created, from left to right is Acclamation, Certainty, Doubt, Love.

So what my punctuation mark could be? I started thinking about political and social use of punctuation marks, how can something protect the reader from political statements or brainwash?

In today’s life themes going around are the ones I stated above, well in my opinion, that need to be expressed in punctuation marks.

I remembered this speech by Charlie Chaplin and how powerful this is, maybe it seems to me like that because I never saw him talking, and when he talked he said such meaningful things.

Of course later the next step was to look at V for Vendetta and his revolutionary speech.

I started analysing these two speeches and how to make a punctuation mark showing empowerment. The fist was a visual I started picking out. Also a mark was needed to show that something is a statement.

I started playing around with these ideas and being scared of creating a punctuation mark that doesn’t look like one, I sticked to the dot. First I started seeing empowerment in the means of a bigger  dot above the normal fullstop. Then a bolder fullstop for sentences that make a statement. Hm, these need development.

I suddenly jumped from there and thought about ignorance. Ignorant to change the system etc. I related ignorance to sleep and the repeated z’s for indicating sleep in graphic novels.  So adopted it to make a punctuation mark for ignorance. Obviously it needs some more development, but this is a starting point.

My feedback was positive on the research I’ve done for the revolutionary speech and I was encouraged to take that further – I’m always interested in language anyway.

 

Also, it’s the first time I’ve done a presentation for my project, I always take the final outcome or mock-ups and stuff, without putting them into a structure. Maybe it’s an intuitive sign that I’m getting back to being neat again, as one of my goals for RCA was to get dirty (maybe unorganised too) and very experimental.

Logo development-testing typefaces

I’m between 3 typefaces

Optima: because it’s a humanist typeface and makes a contrast to the simple, mechanic/structural logo.

Gill Sans: a classic modernist typeface and I think it suits to the logo

Futura: its geometric and simple aesthetic suits to the logo.

I placed the versions in order of ‘boldness’. Maybe I can adopt the use of both Optima and Futura as they don’t look so much similar.

Logo development

I decided I’m taking forward the idea with only my initials. I quite like the ‘S’ on its own but I have the feeling I need to include the initial of my surname as well, to make it look more professional.

So the idea of my logo represents values found in my work, and these are: simple, clean design but also conceptual and experimental, showing it in the form of taking parts out of the letters, as an experiment to see if the letters are still readable.

Comments are appreciated!

 

There is also this version of my name, the ‘full version’, which needs some development