#1 resource. 1 political. 1 project. 1 discourse. 1 humor.

[friendofthecrows]

I posted 13,486 times in 2022

That's 7,462 more posts than 2021!

1,003 posts created (7%)

12,483 posts reblogged (93%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@friendofthecrows

@i-was-once-a-flower

@araccoonthatlikesmurder

@nucg5040

I tagged 3,398 of my posts in 2022

#hal rambles - 690 posts

#goncharov - 148 posts

#funny - 125 posts

#shitpost - 87 posts

#ask - 69 posts

#tumblr - 64 posts

#good things - 60 posts

#art - 58 posts

#unreality - 45 posts

#goncharov (1973) - 42 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#you're definitely very friendly with your friends though. you are unhinged but you are free. go put that dirt in your mouth! go eat that bu

I sent 8 gifts in 2022

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

It's so impossible to be annoyed at strangers when you come up with elaborate explanations for whatever it is they're doing.

Two middle-school-aged kids pushing a giant cart of hoodies down the street? Yeah, it could just be a family side hustle. OR they could be fundraising to buy the materials needed for an elaborate scheme to rob an old folks home, which sounds awful, but their specific target is Great Aunt Joan, the most wretched creature to ever live, who bequeathed her entire (sizable) fortune to an already elderly chihuahua named "Lemon" who no one knows whether he's named that because he constantly looks like he's just bitten a lemon (and he does love to bite) or because of his deep, relentless, bitterness.

The guy running down the sidewalk, almost knocking people over? Yeah, he could be late for an important meeting. OR he just got news from a cohort that the chihuahua, Lemon, who they kidnapped as part of a scheme of their own, is ESCAPING and is rushing to try to contain the bastard.

The man yelling and it's obnoxious but he's too far away to tell what he's saying? He could be shouting some pitch about stuff he's selling. OR lemon's tiny, hungry jaws have latched onto the front of his pants and won't let go. The man is in a panic. He's yelling to his friend at the hardware store to get the vise grips. And industrial-strength disinfectant.

823 notes - Posted October 31, 2022

#4

Listen, if this was the latest shipping discourse or whatever I wouldn't care and I wouldn't get involved.

But this is about censorship in an archive.

I am extremely passionate about the preservation of information.

Even from a basic ethical standpoint, if you create an archive dedicated to preserving fanworks, you cannot simply turn around and start deleting "problematic" works from said archive.

3,618 notes - Posted August 15, 2022

#3

If this gets 20,000 notes in the next 2 weeks I'll make a Goncharov remake.

Edit: I can see some people working very hard for this to reach 20k! That makes me so happy, although time is meant to be up. So I'm giving it 10 more days (now the goal would be Dec 14) to reach 10k. I really want to make this movie, but I need to know there'll be support! We're already working on it (see pinned post for details) so I don't exactly want to call it off haha. Let's get it to 10k at least ❤️

10,544 notes - Posted November 21, 2022

#2

I don't care if people "aren't motivated to produce as much" we don't NEED to produce as much as we do we are OVERPRODUCING and it's killing the planet. Businesses shouldn't NEED to constantly have higher profits than last year to please stakeholders. Making enough should be enough. And actually, I think people will still want to work to have nice things or even just to work and contribute. That's actually a pretty fundamental human drive.

10,671 notes - Posted April 26, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

I compiled this a while ago but I was just looking for references and found the file so...

Best places to find reference photos:

Body types, poses, and anatomy:

http://reference.sketchdaily.net/en

https://www.posemaniacs.com/

https://quickposes.com/en

https://www.characterdesigns.com/#home-section

https://www.adorkastock.com/sketch/

https://line-of-action.com/practice-tools/figure-drawing/

https://www.proko.com/browse/tools?af=242

Giant anatomy reference tutorials Pinterest board:

https://www.pinterest.com/deedee1232/body-reference/

General:

https://unsplash.com/

https://pixabay.com/

https://www.pexels.com/

https://stocksnap.io/

https://www.freeimages.com/

https://kaboompics.com/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

https://morguefile.com/

https://www.flickr.com/

https://www.dreamstime.com/

https://pmp-art.com/

https://www.freepik.com/

https://photobash.co/

https://picjumbo.com/

https://burst.shopify.com/

https://magdeleine.co/

https://wordpress.org/openverse/

See the full post

11,482 notes - Posted October 31, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[liv--andletlive]

viva viva: beginning a contextual report

viva script [revisited] ZAO acts as a prologue. Its trajectory serves as an early iteration of what I now understand to be the intricacies and nuances of both my process and practise. ZAO established four fundamental themes; 1. Collaborations / Collectives             2. Language as Object                      3. Experimental Research Methods                               4. Narrative

The nature of briefs often demands engagement with spaces that are deliciously rich, yet equally knotty and complex. The weight of navigating these spaces individually can be incapacitating. Yet working as a collective established a culture in which humour and play are the toolkit to toy with muddy social, political and cultural ecologies. The collective is a negotiation of four individuals agency, ego and ownership to exist, think and intervene as one body. Although I present this as a surrendering of sorts, in retrospect, I think it was a kind of self-medication. I bore easily, I am easily distracted. The collective became more of a group of friends trying to make each other laugh but weirdly, this was where I found myself most productive, engaged and excited.

ZAO itself began with a deconstruction of language and narrative. The lecture series contextualising ZAO established a narrative of a particular tone. Its defined ZAO could be identified by the dehumanised presentations of social groups. However, the lectures failed to consider the opposite of this, ‘othering’ through a process of elevation, fetishisation or glorification. It was the unpicking of this subtlety within the presented narrative which formed the conceptual site for intervention.

24HR CULT:  AN ODE TO MY HUMMUS FETISH:  ELEPHANT AND CASTLE TIL I D1E: HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Sarnoff Mednicks articulation is useful when trying to explain what experimental research methods actually are. Mednicks suggests ‘creativity is an associative memory that works exceptionally well.’ Experimental methodologies exploit this ‘associative memory’ of language and its material culture comprised of practices, politics, behaviours, norms, materials, processes and cultural narratives. They are a physical articulation of the subject matter and an unpicking of the ecology they inhabit. 

Around week three we encountered what Dom described as a ‘wobble’, although this felt unproductive and uncomfortable, in retrospect this was one of the most telling moments of the project. Maxine Naylor and Ralph Ball discuss the ‘biological rivalry between the eye and the vocal chords’ in ‘Form Follows Idea’, articulating how language can pose problematic in design contexts. Design itself a visual language and discourse stating:

  ‘words allow us to live in our heads where we can always remain mentally pregnant with ideas, ideas are safe and protected in the deliciously speculative womb. Giving birth is a much more painful reality’. This is useful when attempting to understand the realities of executing these methodologies. ‘The 24hr Cult’ was a kind of labour, disjointed, frantic and ridiculous, soon the body of ’The Channel’ lay in our arms but we were all blind to what it demanded nor what it even was. Experimental research methods are physical explorations of the ecology of a subject, but the disparity between our linguistic and visual language results in a psychodrama. The ‘wobble’ draining and gruelling, but it was a translation process, it was a stretching of our associative memory. It wasn’t until we happened upon a meme that visually and linguistically articulated that which we were trying to say all along that we could decipher that which our project was missing, narrative. THE CHANNEL: 

If language was our object, our design is narrative. This is how Exercise Easy came to be. When we realised our ambition was to manufacture the extravagant facade of truth, toeing to line between the ridiculous and incomprehensible, establishing the scenario was relatively easy. GET MOIST - EXERCISE EASY: 

“Narrative is one of the large categories or systems of understanding that we use in negotiations with reality.” I feel this is critical when considering the tone of these films, they’re playful, light hearted and funny, I suppose, and comedy has been paramount to engage both myself as the designer and the audience as the ‘user’ in the subject. I think its useful to note a few things that were touched upon in ‘Critical Design in Context’ (Matt Malpass) in regards to the function of satire in design and discourse.

Horatian satire: ‘optimistic, less political, humorous [but] identifies folly […] through techniques of antithesis, burlesque and metaphor’. This is what Exercise Easy crystallised, using satire as an instrument to execute this narrative, ‘we are extending our understanding of function and our understanding of agency.(Matt Malpass)’ A joke operates by establishing a preconceived notion and its the abrupt swerve of the expected  evokes laughter, in the disparity between the expected conclusion and the punchline lies an opportunity to highlight, subvert, challenge and critique. However, my practise does so through physical objects and design poetics, when language is comedically clumsy or linguistically restrictive, design poetics can afford a sensitive kind of audience engagement. Satire acts as the mechanics and provoking laughter is its function, ultimately this serves to underscore my design practise as a discourse and a mode of critical reflection of our inherited cultural narratives.

ZAO was productive and ridiculous and fun, but reestablished anxieties that the summer had long numbed me to.

I do bore

 I am easily distracted

   I am highly self-critical

     I have in the past had incapacitating fear of failure

       I am damningly competitive

         and most of all, I am annoyingly self-aware

but I am far from a rarity, I am product of my time. My language choice here is critical. During this reflection of my practise I’ve touched upon notions of my perceived ‘productivity’ a handful of times and I think it’s important to note the presence of the language of capital and capitalism. Collective agency really is my self-medication to the anaesthesia of individualism. This struck me during the project itself as I’d noticed the absence of a certain weight in my chest, and resultantly, my behaviours and choices felt unapologetic, undiluted versions of myself. Before ‘escape’ there were talks of trying to work with new people in alternative ways. After a few disparaging comments rang through the studios about everything being done before, I suppose a large portion of us were in a state of reflexive impotence. Our value, productivity felt invalid as our contribution to our creative market was redundant. CorpDes was a tantrum, a reactionary fit of frustration.

Although language did not seemingly play as poignant a role in ‘escape’, its use did draw parallels to both 2.1 and 2.4. When we begin to build fictions, these fictions develop a kind of logic, in turn, words begin to ascertain new meaning. From ‘ultimate consumption’, ‘disposable cults’, ‘decentralised film’ to ‘charity work’ to ‘Alfonso Jack’, an evolving language is imperative to embellishing these narratives and broader fictions, as it allows for them to grow into their own living kind of ecology.

PT 1: Narrative  Build    Graphics.

Narrative: write brief company history. establish timelines, frameworks and rules within to begin ficitionalising. E.g All personnel to be randomly assigned a department, each person to write self a CV.   [OLIVIA FITZPATRICK: A VER GD AND COOL DESIGNER, A CV]

Build: responsible for props, set. Each ‘employee’ to have standardised cubicle space. 

Graphics: Establishing company ID. 

PT 2: Thinking through performance. Each ‘department’ responsible for group activity.   Design - Charity event      Logistics(?) - PR vid         Human Resources - ‘Faking it’ workshop. 

2.2 established experimental research methods which sought to appropriate the mundane and exaggerate, toy with and parody its material culture. These methodologies were established through organising ourselves into smaller groups and departments of around six or seven. These smaller collaborations were a continuous negotiation of concept working towards a series of micro-deadlines. These restrictions and rules were the intrinsic fabric of our process, stimulating alternative modes of thinking and problem solving. Micro-deadlines drove our productivity to construct the physical space of CorpDes. “invention now lies more in reconnecting, and building authentic, narrative layers of meaning back into objects that have lost meaningful sig- ni cance, rationale and value under the shear proliferation of bad copies.”

Thus, “it is important to re-establish visual contemplation and communication [...] Its time to provide critical, ironic and playful commentary on our condition and our cultures of consumption of both material and in- formation.”. In turn, physicalising our narrative in such away was just as integral to our process. It established a space into which we could think through not just making but equally, performance.

THE BBBC: A mockumentary seeking to uncover the illegal activities of CorpDes, its CEO and untrustworthy employees. Filmed over two days, broken down into a timeline by narrative during week one.

Timeline:

The central concept of CorpDes itself wasn’t an attempt to be a knock off version of the office, but rather utilising a large enough framework to encompass 36 practitioners. The nuances of this were conceived through a series of defined rules and performances. Although the narrative itself I wouldn’t say was particularly original, its wider narrative as a kind of protest in the context of an art school education is one I think epitomises my responsibilities as a practitioner. The pervading narrative of our increasingly marketised education system (especially in the context of neoliberalism) is one machiavellian competition, both on a micro and macro level. CorpDes as a vehicle to allow 36 practitioners to collaborate allowed for us to reclaim the learning space as our own, not a space of which we have bought and so must conform to the bureaucracies and rigid limitations of. Ultimately, CorpDes acts as institutional critique. Its full context allows for the reframing of our thinking of educational spaces. But herein lies a paradox. The limitations of an art school education imposed the very restrictions which provoked and allowed for CorpDes to exist.

CorpDes’s conclusion did not satisfy my yearning for collective agency. Decentralised was a collective of ten.

Acted as the bridge between our immaterial subject matter, blockchain for example, and orchestrating the physical metaphors that acted as a means of understanding their mechanics. Like 2.1, language was the initial area of interrogation in order to establish experimental research methods. BLOCKCHAIN PIZZA, BLOCKCHAIN SANDWICHES: 

The research methods deployed in the live brief echoed characteristics seen in 2.1 and 2.4. Our process was constructed through a continuous use of limitations and restrictions. We had to work as a body of ten. We could not impose our will over the decision making process, but rather this was down to chance and timing. However, the face of these research methods changed as our mode of conceptualising them changed. As we dealt with immaterial subject matters of abstract systems and structures, drawing became integral to understanding. In turn, we used drawings to restructure ourselves as a collective, in turn changing the fundamental configuration of our experimental research methods. This further serves to echo Ball and Naylor’s meditations on language in design as a discourse. As a collective of most likely visual thinkers, drawing became our most effective was of communication. This laid the foundations of our development. FRESH WITHIN, THEREFORE A FATHER:  ALSO, BRUTALIST MAYHEM: 

Decentralised film attempted to restructure the film making process to relinquish our individual agency, control and ego over its outcome. In turn, we wanted to establish a framework of which would facilitate this. As a means of doing so we began to build a body of film footage comprised of varying sorts of shots. Our ambition was for this to act as a library from which anyone could construct a narrative.

Ultimately, our narrative was a provocation of enquiry to speculate on a kind of alternative future, to consider how decentralised systems will impact our cultural ones. To conclude, this exemplifies my purpose as a practitioner. Designing as a method, design allows for speculation, interrogation and enquiry. As epitomised in Fiction as Method, ‘fictioning can be thought instead as an invitation that we strategically extend to the radical unknowability of the future’

viva viva ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- feedback:  evidence/detail processes in explicit detail to make critiques accessible to ppl unfamiliar w projects