Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Thebes of The Seven Gates
Thebes of The Seven Gates
Seeing a different horizon?
01 Morphologies
10
Isiaurbino
2013
02
26
www.isiaurbino.net
03
Traces
34
04 Booklets
Translations
Game-books
Routes 1 and
More routes
Giovanni Lussu
Thebes of the seven gates
14
52
52
60
2 61
68
05 Narrations
Arno Schmidt 73
The horror! 80
Remember, my beloved 90
Semasiographic writing 94
Electric ants 100
The song of the morrow 104
72
06
The talisman
Pasta with sardines 1 and 2 110
Synsemic caponata 120
Another caponata 124
110
07
Engraved, suspended
126
08
A concise history
136
09
Fany
142
10
146
11 Typography?
... so it goes on... 181
170
Index of names
183
Published writings
186
So viele Berichte.
So viele Fragen.
[7]
The School today
The much desired School, the University, was born in Milan
twenty years ago, in 1993, the Polytecnic of Milan. Third
Faculty of Architecture, Bachelor of Science in Industrial
Design.
The impetus to create it was provided by professionals and
graphic artists, who also participated in it directly.
A few years earlier, with the First Public Utility Graphics
Biennale, held in the town of Cattolica in the Romagna region
on the border with the Marche, a historic experiment came to a
conclusion, the result of which enabled new generations of
graphic artists to make their profession overlap with a need
for responsible social communication.
The communication project was aimed at citizens, with a
strong desire for direct participation.
The proposal was then refused by the consensus politics that
found the advertising agencies to be definitely more suitable
tools for preserving their own existence.
The excitement of the moment can still be felt in the Graphic
Project Charter presented in 1989 and signed by a large
number of professionals.
Now, many years later, we need to pay some attention to the
consequences of what was sketched out at the time, and check
out the present-day situation: academies, universities and
private schools have introduced training courses in graphic art
and visual communication. The ISIAs (Higher Institutes for
Artistic Industries) continue along the same route.
The Graphic Project Charter showed clearly what to do, but not
how to do it.
The Arts Award for Communication Design held in 2012 in
Urbino presented for the first time the actual substance of the
training in Italy. This appears inadequate, stationary, and
constantly seeking creativity and good ideas.
However, in this state of creative enthusiasm, the sense of
the discipline, its methodology and its research, are still
missing.
Our history, or the route that, with the passing of time, has
brought us to this point, is quite clear.
What is absolutely not clear is the depth and the preciseness
of the subjects, the objective responsibility of the training,
the ethics and the culture of a profession that still moves
between pleasant aesthetics and the recycling of the dj-vu.
The profession seems unable to get beyond what is offered by
the available sophisticated programs on hand for everybody,
and unable to find a clear relationship for itself with these.
At the same time, its role within society and in relation to
other disciplines does not appear well defined.
Training courses, without a culture that is not only internal to
the profession but driving the project, remain empty and an
end unto themselves.
The last refuge seems to the individualism of graphic design
by famous artists.
In this clearly rather uncomfortable scenario, Giovanni Lussu
points to and follows a completely different path taking us
through the world of visual communication and investigating it
from the inside.
ii
As one who has long been engaged in the training and the
culture of the profession the most significant books
published in Italy are by him or edited by him he presents in
this volume the whole of his career as a teacher, and his
non-proposal for education. Linear and involving civil
commitment more so, even that a commitment to training it
is closely linked to his profession as an artisan of graphic art.
As director of the Urbino ISIA I am delighted with this
publication, which carries a different view of the profession
and will, I am sure, help to make the whole world of training
more responsible.
Roberto Pieracini
Direttore ISIA
[10]
z
There is a certain imbalance, between how school has always
been alien to me and the large amount of time I have spent
impersonating the enemy, meaning the teacher.
Not so much in the primary school, but my aversion was very
strong from the first year of middle school to the couple of
years I attended the Architecture Faculty in Rome, and the few
months spent at what was then the Higher Course in Graphic
Art at Urbino, always strictly with very low grades.
Of course I made some friends who still attend school happily
but it seems to me that in all these schools I learnt very little
and I consider myself, in fact, to be self-taught (but not,
I hope, in the manner of the man in Sartres La Nause, who
adjusted to a new culture in strict alphabetical sequence.
I would prefer to be more like Ekalavya in the Mahabharata,
who was rejected by his teacher Drona on account of his low
caste and withdrew into the forest to learn by himself how to
shoot with a bow and arrow, eventually overtaking even
Arjuna).
The little mathematics I know I learned certainly on my own,
in later adult life, but I have the impression that I even
learned more Latin in those periods when I studied something
on my own account, rather than in the eight years I suffered it
at school.
z
The list of teaching posts I have held, in fact, points to a quite
substantial activity:
ISIA, Rome, 1982-86;
Montecelio Institute, 1989-93;
Milan Polytechnic, 1993-2009;
La Sapienza, Rome, 1996-2000, 2003-06;
Roma Tre, 1999-2000;
Master in Communication and information technologies,
University of Bologna, 1999-03;
Master in Photographic representation of architecture
and environment, La Sapienza, 2001-02;
Master in Paper and Multi-media Publishing, University
of Bologna, 2001-10;
Bari Polytechnic, 2002-08;
ISIA, Urbino, 2006-07;
University of Sassari, 2009-11;
for around 50 years in all, plus an indefinite number
of seminars, courses, workshops and laboratories,
from Cordenons to Ariccia, to Malta and to Rio de Janeiro.
And there is no doubt I have been lucky: I have always enjoyed
myself reasonably well everywhere, and sometimes even very
well, and I have had the great privilege of being around a
large number of young people, one generation after another,
in rotation.
z
Of course, I have never lived off my earnings as a teacher.
I have always been first of all a graphic designer, or a
communication designer or whatever you want to call it.
And I have always been a craftsman, properly registered
in the Chamber of Commerce (and industry, agriculture
and craft trades) for over forty years now.
When, rather reluctantly, I took part in a competition for
a university chair as associated professor, and when I then
iii
z
But what are the needs which design schools have to respond
to?
What are the questions asked by the society we live in?
One case that I now consider to be symbolic is the exhibition
of posters for the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary
of Italian Unity, which took place in May 2011 at Civitanova
Marche, in the context of the Cartacanta initiative (many of the
posters were reproduced in a subsequent edition of Abitare
magazine).
A hundred and fifty posters, therefore, created by the same
number of Italian graphic artists, or communication designers,
and the expression we might well imagine, given the skills
of the participants of a category of operators that presumes
itself to be important, at an important event.
And what does this category express?
A reflection on the national identity, presumed or otherwise,
on the occasion of a fairly debatable anniversary?
A discussion, an opinion? A viewpoint? A declaration of
patriotism? A blistering criticism of the unification process?
Some kind of meditation on the visual traditions of Italy?
On how they have come together or otherwise in modern
graphic art? A dream, a premonition? In other words, some
content that would justify such a vast mobilization?
Nothing of the kind.
The one hundred and fifty designers drew, without a care
in the world and each in his or her own way, the number 150.
These events, as we, as graphic artists or designers, know, are
eagerly awaited because they finally allow ones creativity
full rein and allow one to escape every so often from the
fetters of daily toil; they are fairly similar to children
exchanging picture cards: if youve got that one, look what
Ive got.
However, a hundred and fifty children would without doubt
have done more interesting things, and certainly more amusing
ones.
Whats more, these figures in the graphics, from the pure
visual or pseudo-artistic point of view they are restricted to,
all appear cleaned up, all mercilessly produced or anyway
processed on a computer using commercial application
programs, all worked over and reworked dozens of times,
without anything of that lumpiness, those palimpsests of often
dramatic superimpositions and cross-breeding that are such a
part of todays visual universes. In brief, they are decidedly
futile.
And so we ask ourselves: what school do we need in order to be
able to produce these images?
The answer is easy: we do not need any school.
[12]
z
I am unconditionally in favour of all forms of individual
expressiveness, being convinced that anybody can profitably
engage in them: jam labels, embroidered table mats, wood
engraving, painting for leisure or for gain, little machines
cobbled together in an amateurish way, as Galileo did as a
child, and also cooking, singing, gardening and the numerous
forms of DIY, and finally posters, leaflets, book covers and
trademarks or logos, call them what you will which I,
too, have done a lot of.
For all these wonderful activities there are, if one wants,
iv
z
Of course, in order to be able to face such a responsibility we
have to start from the beginning, from a primary school that
allows children to develop the intrinsic potentials for graphic
representation that are characteristic of our species.
It would then be nice if the middle school were really able to
offer an abundant supply of the base that is so often lacking in
young people who arrive in higher education; and lots of other
things would be needed as well, such as a better society.
z
This new type of metagraphic designer must certainly have
a good basic mathematical knowledge, without which we can
understand very little not just about science but about the
whole universe of today and tomorrow; only this will enable
them to dialogue and interact with the different fields of
knowledge that make up the world.
If this knowledge were dealt with correctly, experimentally
and from a design point of view, we would see that anyone can
acquire it, and that it is also fun and really creative.
But with todays graphic artists and designers it is no use
discussing these things: they are absolutely unable to argue
about anything, for the simple reason that they do not know
anything and do not do anything to find out about anything,
and they cannot therefore come up with any opposing ideas
except prejudices, and then silence, and then paralysis.
Perhaps it is the teachers, rather than the aspiring students,
who should take an entry test to get into these schools.
[13]
z
The positioning of graphic design in architecture faculties has
given rise to the worst aspect formalism, intrinsic in that
traditions notion of composition. This means that the final
configuration of the communication artwork, instead of being
triggered off by an analysis of the message, as one would hope,
tends to be shaped by starting from considerations formal
ones, in fact that are external to it, as in the practice of
most of the so-called rationalist movement (which did not
actually have much that was rational in it).
We cannot now expect very much, substantially, from university
courses in communication design, and if they were closed it
would not cause very much damage, either for graphic art and
certainly not for the national economy; all requirements,
whether real or presumed, would be met more or less in the
same way.
It would be much more profitable if semesters could be set up
on visual communication, which would today be of use to
everyone, not just to future architects in architecture faculties
but also in any other degree course, both of a so-called
humanistic type and of a so-called scientific type, so that each
person could do best what he or she needs to do.
z
Libert! Egalit! Fraternit!
[14]
z
However, to tackle the immense present and future challenges
referred to above, and to ensure the management and the
evolution of this complex situation, specialized operators
would be useful.
How can these complex communication planners be trained (and perhaps we should at this point call them something
01
Morphologies
The primordial plant (Urpflanze) will be the most wonderful
creation in the world. Nature itself will envy me. With this
model and the key to understanding it, one can invent an
v
collected over the years (stones, bones and roots) and I blew
soap bubbles into trellises that I had built by welding copper
rods, and the students used their ingenuity to create projects
and little machines.
[15]
However, I was in danger of having a particularly violent
traumatic experience the first time I had to do examinations:
in my aversion to school, I considered exams, from which I
myself had suffered horribly, as a cruel evil, and to have to
inflict such an abomination on others seemed to me
impossible.
Fortunately, the examination candidates were considerate;
they accompanied me gently to the altar of sacrifice and,
laughing and joking, they made the event as far as possible
bearable.
Meanwhile, I had got to know the mathematics teachers
Giordano Bruno (who was to become director of the ISIA thirty
years later) and Angelo Gilio, both pupils of the great
probabilist Bruno De Finetti.
Together with them I had signed the application for the first
computers in the school two small Commodore 64s, among the
very first home computers of those years. Before buying them,
the scientific committee had to meet specifically to discuss if
they might obstruct the full deployment of creativity, as
some teachers feared, or not.
And together with them we quickly asked for a meeting with
Andries Van Onck, the Dutch designer who came from the
Hochschule fr Gestaltung in Ulm, and who arrived at the ISIA
in 1984, I think, to hold a course.
I had appreciated it very much when, a few years before, I had
come across his written piece Metadesign that appeared in a
famous issue of the review Edilizia moderna dedicated to
design (no. 83, 1965), which dealt with meta-design procedures
for generating forms on a mathematical basis.
We were hoping, along with him, to be able to start up
programs and research but Van Onck, alas, had left behind
those more juvenile ideas of his and, still urged on by the
waves of cultural anthropology of the previous era, he made us
a speech that was certainly inspired and impressive, in which
he proclaimed the two new buzzwords, Myth and Ritual.
Right, one of the many little telephonic drawings, actually
done in an attempt to survive the interminable teaching-staff
meetings, which I still associate indelibly with ISIA.
[16]
Anyway, with the two Commodores we did a lot of things, all
distinctly experimental: the two Alberi (Trees) and Chiocciole
(Snails) programs by Luigi Bonessio, in retrospective decidedly
pioneering, the simulation of the starfish preying on the snail
with the black turban by Francesco Perilli (from an article in
Scientific American, as were many other things), the cycloid
and epicycloid dynamics of Susanna Quaranta and Giovanni
Callori, then various little Martians, applications of the Game
of Life by John Horton Conway etc.
In that same period, on an Apple II (or rather, on one of its
clones), I was trying, as a concrete work opportunity, to create
a parametric star an extension in various directions of the
star devised by Michelangelo for the pavement in Campidoglio
square (Il caso della stella a dodici punte [The case of the
twelve-pointed star], in La lettera uccide, pp. 84-97).
Below, the parametric star (ur-star).
Variables:
a) relationship between the axes of the circumscribed ellipse;
b) number of points;
c) number of concentric rings;
d) value of the exponent in the ellipse equation.
The one designed by Michelangelo is repeated four times in
the third line.
Parametric trees.
Variables:
a) verticality index; relationship between the length of a
branch and that of the branch of origin;
b) angle of the first fork;
c) number of branches at each fork.
The presence of pseudo-random functions guarantees that, for
each group of variables, each time the program is run it
generates a different example of the same species.
[17]
The school was not very interested in this research: they were
anxiously awaiting the purely applicational CAD programs, and
several times they tried to make me see that I could have done
something more useful.
In addition, relations between me and the school began to
show cracks and the appointment as chairman of the scientific
committee of August Morello, an authoritative exponent of, to
me, not very congenial Milanese design and a rather autocratic
person himself, finally induced me to leave the school, but not
without having first developed a rather difficult and ambitious
syllabus for the following years course.
However, the story does not end here.
My syllabus for the ISIA Morphology course for the academic
year 1986-87.
Looking at it today, I do not think even four years would have
been enough to carry it out.
02
Save the children!
Hand-in-hand with the mathematics on the previous pages,
there was another question to deal with, as further evidence of
the inseparability of the whole.
This is a story I have told and these are the pictures that I
have shown many times.
The facts of the matter are written in more detail in my La
lettera uccide (pp. 48-57) and, in a slightly different version,
in Linegrafica no. 296, March 1995.
It is enough to mention here that it was a so-called drawn
poetry workshop that took place in a fourth elementary class
in Rome Municipality in the context of the local authority
libraries initiative Il gioco della rima (The rhyme game).
I spent five days in class, with seven librarians assisting me.
Large sheets of paper (50 x 35 cm), large brushes, liquid
paints.
Day 1: slide-show of the most varied kinds of scripts images
prepared for the occasion which for many years had comprised
vii
[...]
The basic interpretative element that is emphasized
graphically is unrequited love the unreachability of the
beloved person, the insecurity deriving from it, the anxiety,
and altered perception.
I tried to render these feelings with the design of a font for
Greek that would suggest this alteration, through missing parts
and segments reaching forward but unstable.
In the font in Latin characters, used in the translations and in
the transliterations, I adopted similar criteria, both as a
vehicle for a poetic message and for the visual coherence of
the page.
[55]
[56]
A game comes out
A popular Hebrew song about the months of the year.
The Italian translation is turned round, so as to follow the
progress from right to left of the Hebrew script.
In the middle, between the original and the translation, the
transliteration into the Latin alphabet, arranged so as to
indicate the music.
[57]
I have a dream
Martin Luther Kings speech of 28th August 1963.
The English original is the one written by King himself.
[54]
[58]
Sappho
gota Kristf
Johnny Clegg
[64]
Routes 1 and 2
Two-phase exercise.
As I have found only the acetate projection copies that were
prepared for discussing the results of the exercises with the
students, and the names were on the back of the paper
versions, I cannot give an indication of the authors.
Route 1
To represent (on an A4 sheet, photocopiable in black and
white, with a one-centimetre, white margin) the route that the
student takes on Wednesday mornings to reach the workshop
from his or her own home, using exclusively lower-case letters
of the alphabet, executed freehand and approximated to 12point Frutiger 55 body text.
The orientation of the sheet will be vertical, and that of the
letters horizontal.
As only the letters of the alphabet can be used (excluding,
therefore, punctuation marks, numbers and any other symbols),
the only room for manoeuvre is the directly linguistic content
of the communication and the arrangement of the letters on the
sheet.
The representation must be unmistakable: the sheet must be
able to comprise an instruction manual for a purely ideal user,
who does not know the topography of Milan or the geography
of the region and who travels by public transport.
The simplicity of the design will be appraised: efforts to
reduce the number of letters necessary should not, however,
be made at the expense of research.
For example, the information could be tabulated, by arranging
the different methods of locomotion on different lines, or one
might consider space as a function of time between one phase
of travel and the next, etc.
The choice of the text should therefore be made according to
the layout that one wants to pursue (it would not be very
interesting, for the purposes of the exercise, to describe the
route by transcribing a pure oral communication).
Given a certain route and given the design constraints, the
possible solutions are obviously limited; choices must be made
and syntheses carried out, by exploring in particular the
relationship between the letters and the whiteness of the
support.
[66]
Route 2
To represent (on an A4 sheet, photocopiable in black and
white, with a one-centimetre, white margin) the route that the
student takes on Wednesday mornings to reach the workshop
from his or her own home, using exclusively the signs for
numbers 0 to 9 (approximating 12-point Frutiger 55 body text)
and straight-line segments, arranged horizontally or vertically,
and all executed freehand.
Attempts at visual poetry are not considered relevant: the
numbers or segments cannot be composed to form letters.
xi
[68]
More routes
A workshop held with Daniele Turchi, and with Nino Perrone
and Liborio Biancolillo as collaborators.
As on the previous pages, this was also a matter of
representing the route from home to the Polytechnic.
In this case, as is evident, no particular constraints were
imposed.
[72]
05
Narrations
This section gives the results of operations of transcoding
literary texts.
A subset of this type of exercise, which included some pages of
forty-one A6 booklets (and therefore, unlike part of what has
been presented in the following pages, all resolved in
sequential structures), was published in Progetto grafico
no. 6, June 2005, pp. 8-25, with the title Piccoli libri dalla
Biblioteca di Babele (Little books from the Library of Babel).
Together with Antonio Perri we attempted an analysis of these
operations, in particular for the booklet compositions: here
are some extracts:
[...] There are a lot of very complex questions lined up in the
field, which have been bitterly disputed by contemporary
theoretical research.
They are however enlightened by the very design nature of the
artefacts examined; the latter therefore constitute, according
to our reading hypothesis, a single, vast experimentation
workshop on basic themes of visual communication.
It is the design as ought to occur more often that is the
preferred key to solving theoretical problems.
[...] The notational strategies adopted in designing these
booklets bring the reflection back onto the concrete field of
what graphic art is and what its role is in understanding visual
facts.
In particular, this banishes the persistent common fallacy that
graphic art is simply cladding, and that the designer has the
sole task of providing an alternative expressive substance to
the verbal one, as if it were a case of dressing texts that are
already formed, with already-assigned structures and
constrained to the one-dimensional temporality of the verbal
xii
language.
This notion of interpretation through transcription, almost
through automatic substitution in fact, emphasizes the
verbocentric domain (the tyranny of the alphabet discussed
by Roy Harris), and ends up by denying, in the case of these
booklets, the active role of graphic design in giving a complex
visual form to a text whose only pertinent articulations are
originally aural-verbal ones.
There is no doubt, in fact, that each of these booklets, each in
its own way, with results that are more or less significant but
with each one structuring in any case its own notational
syntax, reconfigures the text with considerable expressive
coherence.
[...] The students, in choosing the notational code, identified
each time what level of content and/or expression of the source
text to present again in the visual target text, thus reminding
us that a phenomenology of translation must also take into
account aspects of the substance formed that are not
immediately relevant aspects that may be defined as extralinguistic, but that are never extra-semiotic or extranotational.
[...] The internal coherence of these visual texts authorizes us
to ask an even more fundamental question: what is their
degree of independent usability (meaning independently from
the literary text that was the pretext for it), not just aesthetic
but cognitive in the most general sense?
And again, looking ahead to the prospects of communication, is
the existence of visual texts that can ensure full usability,
provided with all the complex baggage carried by the supports
and by the traditional languages plausible?
In other words, is it possible to envisage narrative texts that
are independently and completely visual, which are able to
convey all that is currently the prerogative, for example, of the
novel form, with the emotional involvement, the indignatio,
the knowledge of the circumstantial surroundings, the empathy
towards the characters, the plays on words and, obviously,
lots more?
Left, the space of the appurtenances that accompanied the text,
in which each composition can be approximately located.
cold, descriptive register (translation)
notation
depiction
warm, expressive register (interpretation)
[73]
Arno Schmidt
It was the first year in which the Industrial Design degree
course was activated, again in the Faculty of Architecture.
Workshop with Mauro Bacchini (100 hours Lussu, 50 hours
Bacchini); subject experts Manuela Rattin and Matteo Ricci.
[73-76]
shapes.
Continuous or broken lines, as far as possible of a constant
thickness, may be used.
Freehand symbols may not be used, except for alphabetic texts,
which must be approximated to the usual Helvetica light 10point body text (if created on a computer, they must actually be
in Helvetica light 10-point body text), including any titles.
Only lower-case letters of the English alphabet, numbers from 0
to 9 and punctuation marks (comma, semi-colon, colon, full
stop, and round and square opening and closing brackets) may
be used; the total number of alphabetical symbols, numbers and
punctuation marks (including both those used for texts and
those that may be used in some coded function) may not be
more than 500.
Care must be taken to ensure that the final photocopy is
centred (there must be a margin of 10 mm on each side of the
sheet).
The deadline for handing in compositions is no later than the
end of the day of 26th May 1994.
[86]
Another interpretation, with different constraints and in A6
booklets, of Conrads Heart of Darkness.
This was the final exercise, valid as an examination test for
the visual communication workshop held jointly with Angelo
Monne and with Attilio Baghino, tutor, on the Industrial Design
Course of the Architecture Faculty, based in Alghero.
During the semester the students had practised with a whole
set of less difficult exercises of this type, including the
Caponata recipe (p. 174-75).
Alongside, the workshop syllabus.
[90]
Remember, my beloved
The workshop Notazioni e narrazioni (Notations and
narrations), which took place with the collaboration of Lara
Seregni and Luciano Perondi, was based on a tale by Ernst
Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, Automata (Die Automate, 1814).
Hoffmanns text, very representative of Romanticism in the
early seventeenth century, tells of an intrusion of the
irrational into everyday life..
Ferdinand, the main character, following a conversation with
an automaton (the talking Turk) finds himself faced with the
dark dimensions of existence: who was the mysterious singer,
his meeting with whom changed his life?
What is the role of the enigmatic Professor X? Was he present
at the wedding in the village of P., or not?
Since Hoffmann deliberately gives no answer to these
questions (and the charm of the novella derives from this, that
it leaves the reader in suspense after having involved him),
students therefore had, first of all, to work out their own
interpretation, which would allow them to set out a strategy to
deal with the problem posed.
Some lines of Pietro Metastasio, written for an aria in
Alexander in India (1729) and on which Franz Schubert
composed a famous Lied (D 688/4), are quoted in Italian in the
original German text:
Remember, my beloved,
if it happens that I die,
how much this faithful
spirit loved thee.
And if cold ashes
still can love,
even in the urn
I shall adore thee.
1
Work may be carried out in groups of no more than three
students.
2
The proposed text (Automata by Ernst Theodor Amadeus
Hoffmann, 1814) will be represented, through any desired
visual languages but only in black and white line drawing
(without grey shades), on a A6 finished size (14.8 x 10.5 cm;
flat size 29.7 c 10.5 cm.) leaflet of at least 16 pages including
cover, in 80-90 gr/sq.m. white paper, fastened with two metal
staples on the back.
3
One or two pages, positioned wherever might be considered
suitable, shall be devoted to a synoptic representation of the
whole text.
4
One or two pages, positioned wherever might be considered
suitable, shall be devoted to some indications of the reasons
behind the design and, if considered necessary, to the key.
5
The names of the authors will be shown clearly on the cover.
6
No more than 11 letters of the alphabet may appear on each
page, with the sole exception of the cover pages (first and
fourth) and of the one (or ones) devoted to reasons behind the
design and the key.
7
3 copies of the leaflet shall be handed in.
[93]
[91]
[94]
An attempt was made to represent the story, or rather one
aspect of it, through different languages, all having in common
the use of the same technique: ink on paper.
The focal point is the character of Ferdinand who is influenced
by meetings with other characters during the tale.
The whole representation is based on a metaphor: man, like a
tree, grows and suffers the influence of external factors, and
so Ferdinands branches, through meetings and other events,
become stronger or weaker.
The branches of rationality are made up of straight lines,
created with a roller, and those of irrationality are curvy and
irregular, having been obtained by blowing onto drops of ink.
Thorns and flowers indicate if the situation is negative or
positive.
[92]
Semasiographic writing
Workshop of A6 booklets, conducted with Vanessa Capozza and
Luciano Perondi.
From the Story of your life (1998) by Ted Chiang, which I then
translated in 2008 in the Stampa Alternativa series Scritture
(Writings), along with others in the collection Storie della tua
vita (Stories of your life and others, 2002).
The story tells of the arrival of aliens heptapods and of
how the linguist Louise Banks decodes their language.
But language and writing (obviously not linear) are such that
immersing oneself in them means falling into simultaneity and
therefore cancelling and overturning the flow of time.
From Chiangs story:
When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired
the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same
physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently;
the world-views that ultimately came across were the end
result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential
mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a
simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an
xvii
[98]
The part of the story taken for examination is the one during
which Louise Banks and Gary Donnelly try to communicate with
the heptapods.
The system of symbols travels along the timeline, pinpointing
the main actions intercepted inside the circles.
Under each circle, a sort of caption explains the symbols.
[96]
[99]
This is, in fact, a composition from a previous exercise based
on the same story, which was done in the academic year 200102, again at Milan Polytechnic.
At that time, obviously, the horizontal size constraint was not
imposed.
Other workshop results are shown on pages 18 and 19 of the
above-mentioned issue no. 6 of Progetto grafico, June 2005.
[100]
Electric ants
Workshop entitled Representation and narration, based on the
story The electric ant by Philip K. Dick, 1969, published in
Italian, according to the Vegetti catalogue (www.fantascienza.
com/catalogo), in eleven different editions.
A wealthy interplanetary entrepreneur, Garson Poole, is made
to realize by chance that he is nothing more than an android,
an electric ant, as these artificial creatures are
disparagingly called by humans.
In the final scene Poole finds a button that opens a small door
in his chest; inside, there is a device that runs a programmed
tape, the programmed tape.
Poole sticks two fingers into the door and gradually as he pulls
the tape out, reality begins to disappear.
[104]
The song of the morrow
The song of the morrow
This is the last of the twenty stories in the collection Fables by
Robert Louis Stevenson, published posthumously in 1896, two
years after his death.
It is a circular story: the daughter of the King of Duntrine, who
has no care for the morrow and has no power upon the hour,
lives in a castle on the seashore; one day while walking along
the beach, where strange things happened in ancient times,
she meets an old crone, who in the end, after having thought
the thought, she discovers to be herself.
The whole thing is accompanied by the song of the morrow,
played on the flute by a mysterious character.
The title of the workshop, conducted together with Luciano
Perondi, was Sinsemie combinatorie.
The students were given no other constraints apart from
Stevensons story.
The circularity of the story, however, lent itself particularly to
emphasizing some combinatory character, which the students
were encouraged to research.
Below is the sonnet I composed for the students, to have fun
with them and make the workshop successful; for some strange
reason it was left out of my final report by the school
authorities.
Sonnet of today and tomorrow
There were twenty-five of them in the convent,
And they made songs of the morrow
There were those who were sad and those who were glad
There were funny things and strange objects
Each person there was intent on his work
And if at times their efforts were in vain
They just had to listen to the cold wind,
To open their ears to the singing of the morrow.
There were lots and lots, almost a hundred,
And the force ran through their hands,
I say it loud here, I do not repent of it,
And they heard the sounds from far off,
The notes that the wind brings in the evening
As it sings the song of the morrow.
A little childrens theatre carved out in cardboard, where
surroundings and characters clearly come onto the scene as
desired.
[105]
[101]
[106]
Eight rectangular tiles, each divisible into four according to
the axes of symmetry, produce 32 equal modular elements
leading to a total of 1,048,576 (32E) possible narrative paths.
[107]
A real musical instrument: eight copper pipes of different
lengths (established with the consultancy of a master lutemaker), hanging on eight metal supports fixed to blocks of
cement, form a tonal scale.
Each pipe is associated to an event, and the three authors
performed the Song of the morrow to a musical score for three
voices, one for each character in the story.
By modifying the score, numerous variants in the narration can
be obtained; but since one can obviously give a more general
interpretation of the event, it is possible to play numerous
other stories as well (the students produced, with the same
instrumentation, a score for Red Riding Hood, too).
[108]
A cloth book bound in velcro: the twelve pages can therefore be
re-composed, changing their sequence.
Since the format of the pages is a double square, and therefore
two pages with their long sides placed alongside each other
again form a square, this results in the six sides of a cube,
which can be assembled using the velcro elements.
In this way the parts of the action that take place inside the
cube (the castle in the story), and those that take place outside
can immediately be highlighted.
Photographs printed on the fabric are integrated with sewn
and embroidered elements in an object that has a considerable
synaesthetic, visual, tactile and sound effect.
[110]
The talisman
Pasta with sardines 1 and 2
One of the first exercises, in two phases, in the first workshop
I held with Mauro Bacchini (100 ore Lussu, 50 Bacchini,
Manuela Rattin and Matteo Ricci, subject experts) in the first
year that the Architecture Facultys Degree Course in Industrial
Design was activated.
In that year the workshop examination test was the one on the
story by Arno Schmidt (p. 73).
I did not, in fact, find the recipe on the left, which was
supplied to students in a sequential form without distinction,
in the Talismano della felicit by Ada Boni (where, in the 1949
edition I consulted the nineteenth pasta with sardines is
nevertheless very charmingly presented), although I do not
remember where I took it from.
I am unfortunately unable to go back to the authors of the
compositions, except for certain of those in phase 2 which
have already been published in my La lettera uccide.
[111]
xx
[114-115]
or that the tools are always below; but one might also decide
that a certain ingredient and a certain related operation are
identified by one single symbol.
One may also prearrange (see point 2) a dynamic mechanism of
symbols, which change into others through a certain number of
stages.
One could establish on one of the axes a temporal progression
(even a mediocre knowledge of cooking techniques enables one
to hypothesize implementation times also for those stages that
are not specified in the original recipe) and on the other axis,
the intervention of ingredients and operations, or one could
try to visualize the recipe in stages, presenting the state of all
the elements for each stage.
4. Key
The same side of the sheet (always complying with the
minimum margin of 10 mm. from the edges) must show the key
for understanding the system, so as to make decoding possible.
The space available will be a rectangle that will also have
maximum dimensions of 190 and 277 mm.
The symbols, if shown, must be the same size as those laid out
in the grid and the alphabetic writing must be approximated
to Helvetica 10 pt, as given for the previous exercise.
A balance must therefore be found between number of symbols
and available space: too high a number of symbols will, in fact,
not leave enough room for the relative decoding.
5. Other considerations
It would not be reasonable to prearrange the symbols without
having an idea of the structure of relationships that one wants
to follow (one might find oneself, as noted above, with too
high a number of symbols and with little room for manoeuvre);
in the same way, it is not reasonable to think of the structure
without having an idea of how to generate the symbols.
The need for numbering, and thus for using linking arrows,
etc, must be resolved while keeping the constraints in mind,
and therefore by designing possible appropriate symbols.
A not-very-interesting solution to the problem could be, for
example, the mechanical substitution, in the basic text, of all
the words with the same number of conventional symbols
arranged in the same order (and the even-less-interesting
solution of arranging symbols alternative to the letters of the
alphabet would anyway not comply with the constraint laid
down at the beginning).
To carry out the exercise, no specific knowledge is required;
an understanding of the constraints and the exercise of
reasoning powers are sufficient.
On the other hand, the exercise may be an opportunity to get
to the heart of a whole set of current aspects of visual
communication.
From the design point of view, regardless of the specific
content (pasta with sardines), the problem is not far from that
of designing a system of symbols for a control panel, or of a
system of icons for an interactive multimedia publishing
product.
From a meta-design point of view (meaning studying design
methodologies and structures independently of specific
applications) the problems implies a reflection on the
visualization of transformations and aggregations.
In particular, the fact that it is a matter of predesigning a
script (a finished set of decodable visual significants,
equipped with rules for aggregation) should be considered.
Compared with the previous exercise, the fundamental
xxii
[120]
Synsemic caponata
The workshop entitled Sinsemie (Synsemias) held at the IUAV in
Venice in the summer of 2007 by invitation of Giovanni
Anceschi, in the context of his New Basic Design program.
Here is my preliminary note:
Based on a critique of linearity associated with the alphabet
understood as mere transcription of oral discourse,
the exercise proposes to explore the synsemic potentials
between and 1st and 3rd centuries A.D., with the mindset and
the attention of the leisurely tourist, it would have appeared
to be characterized not only and not so much by statues,
temples, public meeting places, colours and traffic, as much as
by the writings that were present everywhere, in the squares
and in the streets, on walls and in courtyards, painted, etched,
engraved, hanging on wooden boards or traced on white
square blocks, all very different from each other not just in
their appearance but also in their content, being at times for
advertising, at other times political, funereal, celebratory,
public, private, even for insults or for remembering jokes; and
naturally they were aimed, if not exactly at everyone, at a lot
of people, and therefore at the many people who could read
and were part of the urban community; and, if not exactly
produced by everyone, they were certainly produced tangibly
by those many people belonging to very diverse social classes;
and they were displayed anywhere, with certain preferences, it
is true, for some designated places squares, forums, public
buildings and necropolises but this was only the case for the
most solemn ones; the others were scattered indifferently,
where there was the entrance to a shop, a quadrivium, or a
piece of unadorned plaster at head-height.
Armando Petrucci, La scrittura (Public Lettering: Script,Power
and Culture)
[132]
Rione Monti
[126]
Engravings on plate
07
Engraved, suspended
In these two years, the course I had to teach was that of
history of the decorative arts.
After an introduction to the history of the Latin alphabet, I
agreed with the students to have two outings.
The first was a visit to the epigraphic section of the Museo
Nazionale Romano (Terme di Diocleziano), with its excellent
introductory room and a huge series of engravings of various
types.
I asked the Course secretarys office in advance to request the
Museums management for free entrance for teaching purposes;
then we went there, several dozen of us, like a teacher with his
class of children.
The second outing, in batches, was an inspection of the area
around the Pantheon (between Piazza della Rotonda, Piazza
della Minerva and the atrium on the street of the
SantEustachio Basilica), where there is a concentration of
writing phenomena with a decidedly high density; those
marked on the plan and reproduced on the following pages are
a fraction of the total (the location of some of them, it has to
be said, is rather approximate and others, after ten years,
have been transferred, modified, or have somehow
disappeared).
To the somewhat diffident amazement of the traders, who
noted these indefinable platoons photographing the manhole
covers instead of the Pantheon dome, we strolled around signs
and obelisks like carefree tourists of writing.
For examination, the students then chose an area or a theme
and tried to make a small survey of it (pp. 132-35).
To anyone who walked around any city of the Roman Empire
[133]
Piazza Augusto Imperatore
[134]
Tiber Island
[135]
Methods of writing on stone
[136]
08
A concise history
Ever since it was published in 1994 Richard Holliss Graphic
design: A concise history has been the best introduction to
graphic design of the twentieth century, and it still is today (I
would have liked to translate it, for our Stampa Alternativa
collection, but Hollis explained to me that the publisher was
interested in negotiating the transfer of rights only for the
whole collection in which the book appeared).
Also excellent are Swiss graphic design (Laurence King and Yale
University Press, 2006) and his recent About graphic design
(Occasional papers, 2012); his text for the catalogue for the
exhibition on Italian graphic art at the 2012 Milan Triennale is
without doubt the best in the publication.
But Hollis is himself an excellent designer who grew up in that
climate of political and cultural effervescence in Great Britain
after the Second World War, so well evoked in no. 8 of
xxiii
[141]
[145]
A general synoptic representation.
[142]
09
Fany
Chinese writing is still burdened by prejudice and
misconceptions that have no other foundation than the
pernicious tyranny of the alphabet and the Aristotelian dogma
of writing as a pure transcription of the verbal language.
Even scholars who are supposed to be learned demonstrate
their scanty knowledge of this system and repeat time and time
again that Chinese writing is a relic of the past, decidedly
non-functional compared with the needs of the modern world,
forgetting that the astounding development of recent years,
right up to the space program, has been entirely created with
that kind of writing.
For a more balanced understanding of the question, I
recommend the excellent La sfida della scrittura cinese
(Chinese writing: the shock of modernity) by the French
sinologist Viviane Alleton (Carocci 2012, Italian translation by
Antonio Perri).
On these pages, two experiments in simultaneous translation,
conducted together with Nino Perrone: the first, more familiar
one (2004-05) was with just a few students, already in the
third year of the Industrial Design degree course, and with
paper dictionaries; the second (2005-06) took place with a
number of first-year students on the same course, in the
xxiv
Recommendations
[152]
Roman Jakobson
Larte della parola (The art of the word)
[150]
Right, how the same propositions on the page above were
presented, in an inexorably sequential arrangement, in the
first edition of the Tractatus in English, published in London
in 1922.
On the facing page, below, the last pages of the text and the
bookmark with instructions for use.
[149]
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tractatus logico-philosoficus
[155]
xxvi
[156]
Danilo Trombin
Come ad Ash-shuwaymiyyah (As at Ash-shuwaymiyyah)
The book is a travel tale and was later published, with the
same title and essentially identical in layout, by the publisher
Apogeo (Adria), ISBN 88-88786-29-5.
[170]
Dizionario incompleto dei vincoli oulipiani (Incomplete
dictionary of OuLiPo constraints)
The lively, unceasing activity of the OuLiPo [Ouvroir de
Littrature Potentielle Workshop of Potential Literature] is
reported on these pages in the form of a dictionary that
explains all the constraints, the rules, the linguistic games and
the paths of meaning created by the French group starting from
1960 [...] Looking carefully at the illustrious writers, poets and
intellectuals who have in the past tackled the amusing problem
of Italian translation, this project aims to summarize, in an
ironic but informed way, the current state of the art [...]
Warning before consulting:
I. The dictionary is deliberately called incomplete, in the
hope that during the days, months and years to come, the
movements creativity will always remain compulsively active
and that it will never finally (completely) come to an end. II.
Some of the entries in this dictionary have a very close link
with the culture and language of the original context. In these
cases I preferred to show some French texts and examples,
sometimes placing alongside them a possible analogy with the
Italian. III. The author is known for only some of the
constraints, and only in these cases is the authors name
inserted in the definition.
[1508
gota Kristf
Il grande quaderno (The Notebook)
Published in Italian also as Quello che resta, this is the first
book in the Trilogy of the city of K. by this Hungarian writer.
The illustrations are by Elena Orlandi herself.
I first chose the book [...] strong, dark but full of images, and
unforgettable [...] I immediately thought of the effect I wanted
the writing to create on the page, which had to be black, thick
and full... I looked at old books for children, and I understood
that that was the effect I wanted to obtain [...] I created a leftaligned layout with quite narrow side margins and the bottom
and top margins quite wide, and with centred titles, again to
give the idea of a handwritten notebook [...] I put in some
pictures: on re-reading the text I decided to draw some
passages and I took the liberty of thinking that the same thing
happened to the twins the main characters in the book, while
they were writing their story.
[...]
I used fine-lined exercise book paper, very simple, unnamed
cardboard for the endpapers, black cardboard for the cover,
and parcel paper for the reinforcements. I stuck my fingers
together with Vinavil, glue paste and spray glue; I plaited them
with red polyester thread. I finished the spine with 38 mm-
[160]
William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Nights Dream
The performance that gave rise to this book was staged by the
then Compagnia di San Giacomo in June 2004 [...] The aim of
this work is to make it immediately understandable how the
work was staged [...] On the odd-numbered pages there is the
actual text, with full captions indicating the intentions with
which the characters pronounce the speeches, and the
associated lights and music; on the even-numbered pages there
is the diagram of the staging of the same extract [...]
On the left, therefore, the speeches of the moving characters
follow the ideal line of movement, while those pronounced
from a static position are composed in small blocks [...]
If a character is on stage and does not speak, the symbol
indicating this is in grey [...] At the beginning of each line
there is a small black square, to indicate the direction of
movement.
[161]
William Shakespeare
The Tempest
In order to choose the numerous typefaces suitable for the
characters of Shakespeares The Tempest auditions had to be
organized, lasting for a few days. We were proud to note how
successful our announcement had been: we had managed to
mobilize a large group of aspiring characters, young and old,
experimental and classically noble. They were there, in front of
us, silent and full of expectation, with their fonts more or less
complete. Thinking about it, we were more excited than they
were: the choice required us to expend a lot of energy [...] We
have only a very little space here to congratulate all the other
characters that played with us, but our memory has recorded
them and sometimes we still see the world through them.
[...]
Double thread stitched book, not done by cheating but with the
greatest diligence. Red and black thread donated by Mastro
Calzolaio in Via Rialto, the best in Bologna.
[162]
The Constitution according to me
From the back cover:
[...] a disturbing text: the Italian Constitution.
The Constitution - disturbing?
Yes, because in this typographical interpretation the
fundamental text of the Italian people emerges in all its
peremptory radical intentions.
Thanks to the graphic solutions adopted, readers can
understand the strength of the constitutional principles, the
xxvii
[164]
[168]
[165]
Stendhal
The Charterhouse of Parma
Lost in Waterloo
Two chapters from The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal.
I have conveyed Fabrice del Dongos route on a line at the
bottom of the page: from south (on the left) to north (on the
right). The geographical positions on this line are not fixed,
because they are an abstraction that should mainly provide the
reader with an approximate position an attempt to tell him
or her continuously (as on the maps scattered around Bologna):
you are here. The only fixed coordinate is the border between
Italy and the rest of Europe, represented by the fold in the
pages.
[...]
Our tutor wheedled out the secret of sewing books from a
printing firm in Bologna, and passed it on in a fabulous lesson
in the computer room a fact for which she is still being
investigated by the professional association of bookbinders.
Plato
The Sophist
[166]
Corpo 12 (12-point body text)
Booklet rebours (the page numbering goes from 48 to 1, and
that of the chapters from 7 to 0), telling the story of his own
dealings.
[167]
Das Grande Laloola Dictionary
The dictionary refers to a famous nonsense poem by Christian
Morgenstern (1871-1914).
This uses a nonsense vocabulary that operates on individual
words in a completely wandering way, working through
phonetic associations.
Each word goes through two explanatory phases.
In the first, according to Lewis Carrolls thesis of portmanteau
words, it is decomposed into its possible main associations.
In the second, some or all of these associations are lumped
together to give rise to some possible definition.
The dictionary is bilingual and, since Morgenstern is German,
each word is examined in English and in Italian.
xxviii
[170]
11
Typography?
I was, certainly, very involved in typography.
[172]
[176]
One of several exercises in approach to typography, at a time
when students who had a computer were in a clear minority.
[177]
[178]
Controforma
Type design workshop held with Michele Patan, subject expert,
and Luciano Perondi.
[174]
Workshop of 150 hours held with Mario Piazza (100 hours
Lussu, 50 Piazza, subject experts Manuela Rattin and Matteo
xxx
Our aim was to have the counter emerge on the printed paper
the counterform of the letter, i.e. that void created by the
chisel which is just as important as the positive form for
[179]
[180]
Notes
By Academy, it is meant the Urbino Academy of Fine Arts;
by ISIA, the Urbino ISIA.
xxxi
xxxii