I first came across Stephen Willat’s work in the Tate Britain which was showing his piece ‘Living with Practical Realities’ which captured the reality of an elderly lady living in high rise flats. I was taken with the way he presented the information, in a sort of photomontage meets service design customer journey map. I even wrote a little post about it, which turned out to be a bit of a deep dive into his cybernetic methods and research.

For my fiftieth birthday, I requested some of the legendary Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk, I had seen a CNN documentary about it and got a bit obsessed. The Chalk of Champions. Also who knew mathematicians are so obsessed with chalk?

Best thing I have seen this year, reminded me of so may wonderful things…

Had to display a screenshot with a link to the tweet, as the twitter embed widget doesn’t seem to want to display correctly in this theme?

esoteric/ˌɛsəˈtɛrɪk,ˌiːsəˈtɛrɪk/adjective

As a side project I was experimenting with the idea of how the language and processes of digital multimedia design have become more esoteric as it has become more specialised.

John Baldessari and Laurence Sterne.

There is an edition of ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen’, written by Lawrence Sterne, printed by Arion Press with 39 photo-collage illustrations by John Baldessari in his own unique style. Discovered by coincidence after reading Baldessari’s obituary.

I have always liked the coloured circles on his photo-collages.

‘ I think what drives me is some elusive quality of trying to get something right.’

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‘you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!)’

From a Baldessari short film by the Tate and Sterne trying to explain his book.

If the famous NASA ‘worm’ logo was ever to be brought back, maybe it could be revived in the form on this space shuttle concept, the Polymorph space shuttle design by Luigi Colani.

I saw these photo collages at the Tate modern ages ago and didn’t know what to make of them. Really struck me they were using the visual language of service design. But was very struck by their combination of messaging, diagrammatic structure and provocative text. I have spent a while looking around the internet and the artist Stephen Willats seems like both a creation of his time a sort of techno futurist of the sixties and seventies, (feels like early J.G.Ballard to me) and its eerily presentient of lots of service design ethnographic work. I have seen a few customer journey / day in the life diagrams that looked like his work.

Went to see Ashley Bickerton’s show at Newport Street gallery and was very taken with the hammerhead sharks floating around the space. For me Bikerton is something of a throwback to the eighties/nineties New York art scene. But I first saw the shark idea at Serpentine galleries in a show called ‘Some went mad some ran away.’ It was in 1994 and was curated by Damien Hirst, so its funny to see Bickerton displayed again at Hirst’s own gallery twenty three years later. I do find his latest painting horrible though. But the show had a few of the his Floating Costume pieces which are fun. Every one needs an Elvis suit in a glass casket with giant orange floats.