Posts tagged psu

The poster I got to make for the fall show in the Autzen isn’t really a piece in the show, but then, it kind of is.  Even more than I thought it was when I made it, in fact. The show, on the temporariness of history and community in the West, needed a poster that clearly evidenced the change it argued was happening in an environment that was familiar, and the abrupt changes to the exhibition space’s area—transitioning from a suburb to a blighted part of downtown to a mostly brutalist university campus—were ideally suited for it.  Maps themselves are interesting in this regard not only because they are terribly ethereal to begin with because of their obsession with accuracy, but also because their primary representational medium has shifted so greatly in the past two decades that the way they used to be viewed hardly exists at all anymore.  Heck, the way we view maps online has changed abruptly about five times since the internet came into being—anyone remember Mapquest? One thing I hadn’t expected in the design, though, was how temporary the stasis point I picked was.  The day we got the posters back from printing, Google Maps’ place-markers lost their solid black outlines for a subtler darkened outline for the first time since the Google Local service was introduced in 2006.  Of course, the accidental comment of the temporariness of what we recognize as stable changing between the time a poster is sent to press and is posted to promote a show—or the time between when we see something we recognize and check again to find it’s been altered, replaced, or removed—about how temporality affects us makes for quite a decent surprise addition.

The poster I got to make for the fall show in the Autzen isn’t really a piece in the show, but then, it kind of is.  Even more than I thought it was when I made it, in fact.

The show, on the temporariness of history and community in the West, needed a poster that clearly evidenced the change it argued was happening in an environment that was familiar, and the abrupt changes to the exhibition space’s area—transitioning from a suburb to a blighted part of downtown to a mostly brutalist university campus—were ideally suited for it.  Maps themselves are interesting in this regard not only because they are terribly ethereal to begin with because of their obsession with accuracy, but also because their primary representational medium has shifted so greatly in the past two decades that the way they used to be viewed hardly exists at all anymore.  Heck, the way we view maps online has changed abruptly about five times since the internet came into being—anyone remember Mapquest?

One thing I hadn’t expected in the design, though, was how temporary the stasis point I picked was.  The day we got the posters back from printing, Google Maps’ place-markers lost their solid black outlines for a subtler darkened outline for the first time since the Google Local service was introduced in 2006.  Of course, the accidental comment of the temporariness of what we recognize as stable changing between the time a poster is sent to press and is posted to promote a show—or the time between when we see something we recognize and check again to find it’s been altered, replaced, or removed—about how temporality affects us makes for quite a decent surprise addition.