FORM+CODE: Eye & Brain Candy for the Digital Age

Computational aesthetics, or what typography has to do with Yoko Ono and Richard Dawkins.

Yes, we’re on a data visualization spree this week, but today’s spotlight taps into an even more niche obsession: data viz book candy.

This season, Princeton Architectural Press, curator of the smart and visually gripping, brings us FORM+CODE — an ambitious, in-depth look at the use of software across art, design and illustration for a wide spectrum of creative disciplines, from data visualization to generative art to motion typography.

The nature of form in the digital age is trapped in the invisible realm of code. Form+Code makes that world visible to the community that stands to gain the most from it: artists and designers.” ~ John Maeda

Elegant and eloquent, compelling yet digestible, the tome — dubbed “a guide to computational aesthetics” — offers a fine piece of eye-and-brain stimulation for the age of digital creativity. It features more than 250 works spanning over 60 years of innovation in art, architecture, product design, cinema, photography, interactive media, typography, game design, artificial intelligence, graphic design, data mapping and countless other manifestations of creative culture.

From fascinating historical background to visually mesmerizing showcases to practical guides, the book talks the talk and walks the walk — its website is a digital treat in and of itself, featuring a treasure trove of extras, including code examples and a remarkable library of links to related projects.

FORM+CODE features work by some of our favorite creators and thinkers: Aaron Koblin, Jonathan Harris, Martin Wattenberg, Stefan Sagmeister, and many more across the various facets of culture, including Yoko Ono and Richard Dawkins. Yes, in the same book.

Thanks, Julia

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Experimental Cartography: The Map as Art

What tattoo art has to do with fashion, vintage atlases and Nazi concentration camps.

We’ve always been fascinated by maps — through various elements of design, from typography to color theory to data visualization, they brilliantly condense and capture complex notions about space, scale, topography, politics and more. But where things get most interesting is that elusive intersection of the traditional and the experimental, where artists explore the map medium as a conceptual tool of abstract representation. And that’s exactly what The Map of the Art, a fantastic Morning News piece by Katharine Harmon, examines.

Matthew Cusick, 'Fiona’s Wave,' 2005

Cusick's oversized collages are painted with fragments of vintage atlases and school geography books from the golden era of cartography, 1872-1945.

Corriette Schoenaerts, 'Europe,' 2005

Schoenaerts, a conceptual photographer living in Amsterdam, constructs countries and continents out of clothing.

(You may recall Schoenaerts from our Geography, Topography, and Everythingography issue.)

Arie A. Galles, 'Station One: Auschwitz-Birkenau,' 1998

A grim allusion to Nazi concentration camps, these drawings, based on Luftwaffe and Allied aerial reconnaissance film, were made over the course of a decade.

Qin Ga, 'Site 22: Mao Zedong Temple,' 2005

In 2002, China's Long March Project embarked upon a 'Walking Visual Display' along the route of the 1934-1936 historic 6000-mile Long March, and Beijing-based artist Qin kept tracked the group’s route in a tattooed map on his back. Three years later, Qin continued the trek where the original marchers had left off, accompanied by a camera crew and a tattoo artist, who continually updated the map on Qin’s back.

Paula Scher: The World, 1998

Paula Scher: Africa, 2003

These maps come from Harmon’s The Map As Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography — a remarkable collection of 360 colorful, map-related visions of experimental cartography by well-known artists and design thinkers like Olafur Eliasson (remember him?), Maira Kalman (another TEDster), Paula Scher (and yet another), and Julian Schnabel, as well as more underground creatives whose art is greatly inspired by maps. The book also features essays by Gayle Clemans, introducing a richer layer of insight into the work of some of these map artists.

Be sure to read Harmon’s excellent essay below the Morning News images, which offers a fascinating look at the historical relationship between maps and the art movement, both products of the shifting political and aesthetic influences of the time.

via Coudal

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