Tag Archives: Brighton

Guest blogger; protest student

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I teach Cultural and Critical Studies to Graphic Design and Illustration students at the University of Brighton and was suitably delighted when, on my way to give a lecture, I spotted this piece of ‘pallet protest art’. An Illustration student, Mhairi Lockett, created this message, so I invited her to tell us more in a guest blog.

Photo by Mhairi Lockett

Photo by Mhairi Lockett

Why did the University of Brighton lock up a student’s protest art?
by Mhairi Lockett

It is soon to be the May Festival here in Brighton and the Guest Director this year is Illustrator, David Shrigley. One of the themes of the Festival is protest art, this is timely as 2018 marks the 50th year since the student protests in Paris. As a third year student of Illustration at the University of Brighton, I have been moved to make my own protest art — pallet protest art.
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From the Archive; You never know when you might need them

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Spread from ‘Blueprint’ showing University of Brighton Gallery and exhibition design featuring salvaged fire doors

Spread from ‘Blueprint’ showing the University Gallery in Brighton and the exhibition design featuring salvaged fire doors

I was reminded of this article when visiting another exhibition, George Hardie …Fifty Odd Years, also at the University Gallery at University of Brighton. (Look out for a review of that exhibition, soon).

Back in 2005, Professor Hardie contributed his collection of rulers to You never know when you might need them, and they feature in the opening spread of the Blueprint article about the show, see above. At the time, my husband, Gregg Virostek, was an Interior Architecture student and worked on the exhibition build, while I was beginning to explore an obsession with collecting. That interest has developed into a research topic, as evidenced by this blog. So, as this article has yet to be digitised and made available online by the originally publisher it, here it is for reference.
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Tomorrow’s Designer; discussion at the Design Museum

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Screen Shot from the Design Museum’s website, detailing the evening’s event

Tomorrow’s Designer: What next for Designers in Residence?
Design Museum
Shad Thames, London SE1
23 March 2016

Chair: Justin McGuirk, Chief Curator, the Design Museum.
Speakers: Indy Johar Co-founder of Architecture00; Gem Barton Course Leader in Interior Architecture, University of Brighton; Ineke Hans of Studio|Ineke Hans; and Asif Khan founder of architecture studio Asif Khan Limited.

The opening of the new Design Museum, its latest incarnation, is getting closer, the stand-alone shop on High Street Kensington launched this week, and the main Museum building will be unveiled in late November. Right now, the Design Museum in Shad Thames is closed. So here’s a review of the last event I attended, back in March, which discussed the “designer of the future” with reference to the Museum’s Designers in Residence programme.
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Shopping Paradise; objects on display

Gallery

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This gallery contains 33 photos.

Outside looking in, the glazed facade of Brighton’s premier flea market, Snoopers Paradise (“Snoopers”), projects domestic objects right into the street. Close-up window-shopping is only possible out of hours when external stalls have been packed away, but it draws people … Continue reading →

Snoopers Paradise; the long view

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Snoopers Paradise Exterior: Photo by Lisa Båtsvik-Miller

Snoopers Paradise Exterior: Photo by Lisa Båtsvik-Miller

Snoopers Paradise Interior: Photo by Lisa Båtsvik-Miller

Snoopers Paradise Interior: Photo by Lisa Båtsvik-Miller

Snoopers Paradise
Kensington Gardens
Brighton, East Sussex
Photographed on 14 January 2016
Frequent visits since 2001

Snoopers Paradise is an indoor flea market made up of over fifty individual stalls, varying in size from one IKEA display cabinet to fully-individuated and merchandised “corners”. The stalls sell a mixture of old and new goods, some handcrafted others mass-manufactured, from around the world and across the centuries. From jewellery to furniture, ephemera and books, china and glass, fashion and accessories, from toys to art and that catch-all, the “collectible”.

The building was once a department store; when I was an undergraduate living in Brighton I remember it selling household goods, the sort of cookers and chests of drawers that furnished student houses back in the 1980s. The history of how it morphed into a paradise for snoopers is a little mysterious and depends on who’s telling it.
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Collecting and sharing; the social life of objects

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First Instagram post, 23 September 2015

First Instagram post, 23 September 2015

In Russell W. Belk’s journal article, “Extended Self in a Digital World” (2013) (available for download, here), the notion that our digital and online presence extends our self – mind and body – into the virtual realm, builds on Belk’s initial thesis “Possessions and the Extended Self” (1988), which posits that “knowingly or unknowingly, intentionally or unintentionally, we regard our possessions as parts of ourselves”. And by parts, Belk goes so far as to suggest they become stand-ins, prostheses, building blocks even, of our selves. Belk’s update looks at how the digital turn both dematerialises the self and ups the ante by networking our presence into a diversity of locations, communities, identities and avatars; we can become “multiple characters” so as “to explore different personality possibilities”.

One particular complication was examined by Belk and co-author Kelly Tian in “Extended Self and Possessions in the Workplace” (2005); “the battle that can take place between the ‘home self’ and the ‘work self’ as the time and place boundaries that once distinguished the two melt”. Admitting and allowing such a “melt” to become a positive enhancement rather than a negative detraction has necessitated accepting social media as part of my practice and most recently, Instagram, the photo-sharing app bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1-billion dollars. From an indie start-up it growth in size and popularity at a rate is now outperforming the parent company by a factor of 7 to 1. Why Instagram? Because I was looking for a way to connect multiple strands of my life – work, research, hobby, leisure, obsession – and Instagram’s informality, flexibility and outreach makes it a potentially useful tool. I have a project in mind, and by restricting my usage of Instagram to that specific task I hope to employ social media without lapsing into narcissism.
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Symposium; Hewison revisits heritage

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Old postcard found on Pinterest.

Old postcard found on Pinterest.

Heritage in the 21st Century
Centre for Research in Memory, Narrative and Histories Annual Symposium
University of Brighton
Grand Parade, Brighton
7 February 2015

The programme promised critical analysis of literary guide books, prime-time costume dramas, gourmet vegetables and redesigned bank notes, the cherry on top being a keynote lecture from Professor Robert Hewison (Lancaster University), an academic legend, living and breathing. Professor Graham Dawson (Director of CRMNH) introduced the day by highlighting some issues; heritage is cross disciplinary and “slippery” and has supplanted “culture” as the buzz word du jour, but that doesn’t make it easier to define as, since the 1980s, its meaning has shifted especially in an era of the New Right and consumer capitalism. Plus, “tensions” between practitioners and critics, especially in the museum world, make it more difficult to question orthodoxies; leaving us with a big question to ponder, “how might heritage function in the 21st-century, in an age of austerity and new technology?” Co-convener, Professor Deborah Philips was also looking for definitions; “how do you describe heritage”, and provided a clue from The Oxford English Dictionary, which lists the root of the word as “inherited from the French”. I like that it’s borrowed from the language that also gave us “bureaucracy”, and also that Deborah went to the dictionary. Updating that methodology, the pr-installed Dictionary program on my MacBook includes “property, inheritance, value and preservation” in its definition. Then Deborah complicated the issue by suggesting that heritage has “many competing” definitions, and brought in a Guardian travel supplement offering “culture and heritage tours” as evidence, setting the scene for Hewison’s end of the day lecture. A PDF of the full programme is here.
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Issues around archives, part one; Archiving Design Organisations

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Screen Shot of Homepage for University of Brighton’s Design Archives listing the individual archives, news and events.

Screen Shot of Homepage for University of Brighton’s Design Archives listing the individual archives, news and events.

Proving the worth of my own archive (flyers, handouts and notes filed), this post recalls an event that spurred me on to apply for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award. Overlooking the time-lag, another prompt to this post is the fact (and it’s a surprise even to me) that archives have become central to my methodology. During my doctoral research I’ve attended a number of academic events at which issues relating archives have been discussed; in this and a subsequent post, I’ll attempt to document those debates.

Archiving Design Organisations
“A Design Archives seminar funded by the Design History Society”
University of Brighton
Grand Parade, Brighton
6 June 2011

Being (at the time) a Visiting Lecturer at University of Brighton and therefore on an events mailing list, news of this day-long-seminar popped into my uni inbox…I was enticed…

Curatorial Director of the Design Archives, Professor Catherine Moriarty, welcomed delegates and identified three themes running through the day’s talks: the historical legacy of design organisations and the responsibility of telling their histories; the current activity of design organisations and how to manage material, record activity and make the past public in a digital age; and, shifts in the way designers work, the future of the design profession and of representative organisations. Catherine also posted a write-up of the event, here.

Professor Jonathan M. Woodham, then in post as Director of Research and Development, recalled how in 1994 the Design Council was reorganised following a report that recommended vacating its Haymarket headquarters; staff cuts of 90% followed. During an event at London’s Design Museum Jonathan voiced his objection to a proposal that the Design Council’s photographic archive be relocated to the Museum, pointing out that “it was a free and public library created with public money, so why should we pay to use it”. He later invited the Design Council to deposit its records at University of Brighton’s Design Archives and “two enormous pantechnicons of material” arrived; 17 years later “we’re still mining it”.
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From the Archive; Paul Davis spreads joy

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On the occasion of Paul Davis’s latest exhibition reviewed on the Eye blog, here’s a reminder of an earlier show that I was privileged enough to stumble across…

…and if you’re in Tokyo, you’ll find Paul drawing a…
Line in the Sand
at
Ginza Graphic Gallery (ggg)
DNP Ginza Building, 7-2, Ginza 7-chome, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061
Until 28 February 2015

Paul Davis on Eye Blog

Monday 12:47pm, 1 June 2009
“Paul Davis wakes up in Brighton”
by Liz Farrelly
Eye Blog

On first viewing, Paul Davis’s exhibition of word drawings felt a tad bleak, on a sunny Friday afternoon wind-up to a Bank Holiday weekend, during the Castor + Pollux Private View right there on Brighton’s holiday-making seafront, with pleasure jostling business for attention. A few days later I revisited the work to discover more light among the shade.
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From the Archive; Nostalgic for Ampersand

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Good conferences are a joy to attend, and Ampersand proved to be a pleasant surprise. Last June, at short notice, Eye requested that I cover it. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I’m neither a web nor graphic designer (core audience), but I got a lot out of it, and more importantly, so did that expectant crowd. This year’s conference is on 28 June 2013; but as there’s nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, so here’s my review from last year.

Ampersand Conference Eye Blog

Ampersand Web Typography Conference, Brighton
Organised by Clearleft and compèred by production director, Richard Rutter
Attended 15 June 2012

Monday 2:36pm, 25 June 2012
“Let’s hear it for the hinting slaves”
by Liz Farrelly
Originally posted on Eye Blog

When keynote speaker Phil Baines asked the full house at the second Ampersand Web Typography Conference, “Who’s a graphic designer? Who’s a web designer / developer?”, a show of hands revealed that three-quarters of the audience were web-based practitioners (up on last year). Ampersand is a two-way street though, a place for print-based, art-school-educated graphic and type designers to discover the special requirements of designing for the web, and for websters to learn about type, how to use it, and what the type foundries are doing to meet their needs.

Ampersand delivered on all fronts. If at times it felt like Type 101 or Web 101 – depending on which camp you were in – a bit of back to basics never hurt anyone. And, as Baines pointed out, “designers need to talk to one another”, so it follows that both camps should propagate a mutual understanding of parlance.
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