David Bowie was “facing his own mortality” says Barnbrook

 

The cover of David Bowie’s Blackstar album was designed to reflect the musician’s mortality according to collaborator Jonathan Barnbrook

Source: David Bowie was “facing his own mortality” says Barnbrook

“He always wanted to do something interesting, often to the annoyance of the record company,” Barnbrook said. “He understood the value of the image on a record cover, when other people had forgotten about it.”

The designer added that Bowie was, more than anyone else, the artist responsible for bringing “art-school thinking into the mainstream.”

[…]

“This was a man who was facing his own mortality,” said Barnbrook. “The Blackstar symbol [★], rather than writing ‘Blackstar’, has as a sort of finality, a darkness, a simplicity, which is a representation of the music.”

“It’s subsided a bit now, but a lot of people said it was a bullshit cover when it came out, that it took five minutes to design,” he added. “But I think there is a misunderstanding about the simplicity.”

The use of abstract shapes was developed from Barnbrook’s previous controversial cover for The Next Day album. The design features a white square covering an old photo of Bowie and was influenced by Constructivist art.

The black star graphic also carries deeper meanings, said Barnbrook.

“The idea of mortality is in there, and of course the idea of a black hole sucking in everything, the Big Bang, the start of the universe, if there is an end of the universe,” Barnbrook said. “These are things that relate to mortality.”

For the vinyl edition, the star is cut out from the black sleeve so the record inside is visible.

“The fact that you can see the record as a physical thing that degrades, it gets scratched as soon as it comes into being, that is a comment on mortality too,” said Barnbrook.

[…]

He would look at the stuff, and talk about what he liked and what he didn’t like, not in a rude way, just clear and explaining his reasons why, he was also fulsome in his praise when he liked something. Sometimes he would throw a spanner in the works and ask me suddenly to do something completely different for the project for an hour. That was quite a refreshing way of working and often produced good results as it meant you put aside all of the responsibilities of the project for a moment and could just play.

He was always really respectful about the people who bought his music, so he wanted them to understand the ideas. There was no point in doing something when it was so obscure that people wouldn’t get the reference; it had to relate absolutely to the music.

He understood the value of the image on a record cover, when other people had forgotten about it. We had a renaissance in the 1970s and 1980s of album covers because the format of vinyl, but then it dropped when CDs were introduce. There are still good record/CD covers around, but a lot of time nowadays the cover just had to be “nice”, it wasn’t a thing that provoked discussion, our covers wanted to have that discussion again. Some people hated them, some people really liked them.

[…]

The Next Day was the most divisive one, because we didn’t do quite what people expected, which was a nice new picture of David Bowie on the front. We decided to play with that idea of image expectation.

Some people thought they’d been cheated because it’s a reprint of an old album cover, which is a bit ridiculous, because the cover was in the concept. I think it just puzzled a lot of people too who just “didn’t get it”, which we thought would happen.

However there were a lot of people who also recognised it was a very brave thing to do, something quite new. I dont think anybody other than Bowie would have taken that risk. He was really interested to see how people were reacting to it.

[…]

I’ve always been influenced by Constructivist art, so there was the influence of Kazimir Malevich and John Baldessari on The Next Day cover – the obliteration but also the spiritual, meaningful context of the abstract shapes. That followed through on ★, definitely.

The main thing of course is put over the emotional feeling of the music, that’s what a good record cover does, it lets you know somehow, somewhere within it, what the music is about, or what you believe the music is about is confirmed in it. And there’s not necessarily any logic to that you just have to get somewhere in that area which you have designed, and hopefully it will work.

[…]

He always wanted to do something interesting, often to the annoyance of the record company. Especially with Next Day, they were quite shocked with the cover, and they were pretty sure that it wasn’t going to work. It actually became a very successful viral campaign.

[…]

After all it’s an album called ★, with a cover that has a ★ on it, which doesn’t sound like a leap of imagination. But there was so many tangents we followed, until we realised that it has to cut through the noise of what is going on in the world. We see so many images every single second when we search the internet; it’s a directness that is needed. The simplicity of the design also left it more open.

It also has to appear in many different kinds of media: on a website, on iTunes, in reviews, and in newspapers. These are all practical considerations for it, and as a designer you would always work within for the parameters you have. For instance, it’s not actually written “Blackstar”, it uses a symbol ★, and that symbol goes through different technologies, so it can be used wherever.

“If You Get The Scale Right, Space Stops Being Space to Become Mind” Xavier Corberó – SOCKS

“If You Get The Scale Right, Space Stops Being Space to Become Mind” Xavier Corberó – SOCKS

Spanish artist Xavier Corberó spent about forty years designing and building his own house, an intricate maze at the outskirts of Barcelona in the town of Esplugues de Llobregat.

Back in 1959, when his journey began, the still unknown artist squatted one of the abandoned buildings in town. Progressively, he proceded to convert the existing structures, to build on top of them, transforming a part of the derelict village in a surreal settlement and a huge display for his work. As time went on, Corberó acquired more terrain buying the surrounding houses while keeping building structures, adding stairways and underpassages, arches and enclosed gardens in an evolving composition which encompasses architecture and sculpture. Although the house is still a work in progress, Corberó manages to keep the overall design consistent, providing variety without turning the complex into a pastiche of styles and inventions while integrating anti-tectonic solutions like piers-less arches or isolated columns bearing no weight. The ongoing result, a difficult match between Peter Eisenman‘s early houses linguistics and Adolphe Appia‘s designed-stages, is a juxtaposition of theatrical views like these ones below:

Corberó converted the labyrinthine house in a residence for artists from all over the world. The invited guests are able to get a quiet and isolated space to let them work without everyday life’s pressures. The Spanish artist wished to provide a variety of spaces to enrich the inspiration of other artists, therefore he continued to add nooks, chambers and galleries where the visitors easily gets lost. Over the years the house reached over 10,000 square meters of deliberately anti-functional built space.

King of click: the story of the greatest keyboard ever made | The Verge

King of click: the story of the greatest keyboard ever made | The Verge.

The first thing you notice about the IBM Model M keyboard, when you finally get your hands on it, is its size. After years of tapping chiclet keys and glass screens on two- and three-pound devices, hefting five pounds of plastic and metal (including a thick steel plate) is slightly intimidating. The second thing is the sound – the solid click that’s turned a standard-issue beige peripheral into one of the computer world’s most prized and useful antiques.

Next year, the Model M turns 30. But to many people, it’s still the only keyboard worth using.

[…]

Looking at a Model M for the first time in years, what was most remarkable about the keyboard was just how unremarkable it looks. The Model M might be a relic of the past, but its DNA remains in almost every keyboard we use today.

[…]

The QWERTY keyboard layout was designed for typewriters in the late 19th century and quickly became universal. But by the time IBM released its first PC in 1981, layout was no longer a simple matter of spaces and capital letters — users now needed special keys to communicate with word processors, terminals, and “microcomputers.” In hindsight, keyboards from the ’70s and ’80s range from familiar to counterintuitive to utterly foreign: in the IBM PC’s original 83-key keyboard — known as the PC / XT — the all-important Shift and Return keys were undersized and pushed to the side, their labels replaced by enigmatic arrows. The entire thing looks like a mess of tiny buttons and inexplicable gaps. In August of 1984, IBM announced the far more palatable PC / AT keyboard. Compared to the previous model, “the AT keyboard is unassailable,” said PC Magazine. The AT couldn’t pass for a present-day keyboard: the function keys are arranged in two rows on the far left instead of along the top, Escape is nestled in the numeric keypad, and Ctrl and Caps Lock have been switched. Even so, it’s cleaner and far more comprehensible than its predecessor to modern eyes.

But IBM wanted something more than merely acceptable. In the early ’80s the company had assembled a 10-person task force to build a better keyboard, informed by experts and users. The design for the previous iteration was done “quickly, expeditiously — not the product of a lot of focus group activity,” says David Bradley, a member of the task force who also happens to be the creator of the now-universal Ctrl+Alt+Delete function. The new group brought in novice computer users to test a friendlier keyboard, making important controls bigger and duplicating commonly used keys like Ctrl and Alt so they could be reached by either hand. Many of the keys were detachable from their bases, letting users swap them around as needed. And the Model M was born.

Introduced in 1985 as part of the IBM 3161 terminal, the Model M was initially called the “IBM Enhanced Keyboard.” A PC-compatible version appeared the following spring, and it officially became standard with the IBM Personal System / 2 in 1987.

[…]

That layout of the Model M has been around so long that today it’s simply taken for granted. But the keyboard’s descendents have jettisoned one of the Model M’s most iconic features — “buckling springs,” a key system introduced in the PC / XT. Unlike mechanical switches that are depressed straight down like plungers, the Model M has springs under each key that contract, snap flat, or “buckle,” and then spring back into place when released. They demand attention in a way that the soft, silent rubber domes in most modern keyboards don’t. This isn’t always a good thing; Model M owners sometimes ruefully post stories of spouses and coworkers who can’t stand the incessant chatter. But fans say the springs’ resistance and their audible “click” make it clear when a keypress is registered, reducing errors. Maybe more importantly, typing on the Model M is a special, tangible experience. Much like on a typewriter, the sharp click gives every letter a physical presence.

[…]

“This is like oil. One day oil will run out. It’ll be a big crash,” says Ermita. For now, though, that crash seems far away. The oldest Model Ms have already lasted 30 years, and Ermita hopes they’ll make it for another 10 or 20 — long enough for at least one more generation to use a piece of computing history.

The Model M is an artifact from a time when high-end computing was still the province of industry, not pleasure. The computer that standardized it, the PS / 2, sold for a minimum of $2,295 (or nearly $5,000 today) and was far less powerful and versatile than any modern smartphone. In the decades since, computers have become exponentially more capable, and drastically cheaper. But in that shift, manufacturers have abandoned the concept of durability and longevity: in an environment where countless third-party companies are ready to sell customers specialty mice and keyboards at bargain basement prices, it’s hard to justify investing more than the bare minimum.

That disposability has made us keenly aware of what we’ve lost, and inspired a passion for hardware that can, well, take a licking and keep on clicking. As one Reddit user recently commented, “Those bastards are the ORIGINAL gaming keyboards. No matter how much you abuse it, you’ll die before it does.”

1981 IBM PC/XT

1984 IBM PC/AT

1985 IBM Model M

2014 Unicomp Ultra Classic