The goal of the assignment is to redesign the work of one artist according to the methods of an other artists. The first artist is the musician and composer Brian Eno. The other artist is Kenneth Goldsmith. Kenneth Goldsmith is a conceptual poet who defines his work as “uncreative writing”. He makes use of existing texts — in print and online alike. By applying techniques of appropriation and sampling, he follows a process in which writing proceeds of self-induced formal constraints. Brian Eno deals with the issue of creativity quite differentely. Collaborating with Peter Schmidt, he created the ‘Oblique Strategies’ in 1975, a deck of cards designed to help them break creative blocks by encouraging lateral thinking. They then published the cards and made that system available to a wide audience.
Well, the most uncreative way I could think of redesigning the tips is to let somebody else do it for me. I went on craigslist.com to search for advertisements of graphic designers in India, Thailand and China, as I know their income per capita is way less than in Europe. I sent out about 30 mails where I reformulated the assignment:
"Hi there,
I am a graphic design student from The Netherlands, and I am working on a project that asks a manner of working that is as uncreative as possible. Therefore, i came up with the idea to not do the assignment myself, but instead letting someone do it for me, via internet, for a small amount of money.
I´m not sure if you´re willing to spend a little time on this, but you may decide for yourself how much effort you put in it. The designs could be really simple, if you have a fast way of producing a lot of different results, that would be great. I have a list of 120 design tips (motivational stuff, for when you`re stuck), every tip needs to result in a different design. So that would be 120 designed tips, each on A4 300dpi.
You can find the tips here: http://rtqe.net/
Remember, you can keep it as simple and easy as you want, anything goes!
Since i`m a student, my budget isn`t that spectacular.
I can offer 12 euro`s (via paypal) for your services on this project.
It would be great to hear from you!"
Ten minutes later I received a mail from Muni Sekhar, a web / graphic designer from Bangalore, India, that reveals his interest. We had a skype conversation to clarify the assignment.
We agreed that he makes one tip as a trial and if I´d like it he could continue.
So this the first tip of Brian Eno´s Oblique Strategies "Abandon normal instruments", made by Muni Sekhar:
As I tried to give him as much freedom as possible, any result would have been surprising me. Although he couldn't have taken the sentence more literally I quite enjoyed that he created a full image, whereas I told him via Skype that even a handwritten scan would be fine for me.
I told him that it would be a pleasure for me if he would continue, and a week later he sent me the remaining 119 tips, all following that model: one sentence in one document with a picture underneath it each.
I made a gif out of the first 20 results Muni Sekhar sent me.
On the information data I can see the exact time and date the images where created. He made the first 30 on the first day after we skyped, on 12 March, 2014. All the rest was made on March 18, the date I set as a deadline and you can also see that in the images itself: After various ways of typography he slightly tends to use the same typeface, size and weight over and over again.
I did some research where he might got the images from he used for each tip and ended up with the result that he mostly took them from google. I find it interesting that although there is a locational and cultural difference the general public must somehow make the same associations. But maybe Muni Sekhar also picked the most european results as I as his client am European.
For a class presentation I chose a poster as the most appropriate manner of showing the results.
(100 x 170 cm)
I called the project Uncreative Outsourcing.
In addition to make the project complete and to elucidate the concept, which is far more important than the actual result, I will probably depict the whole story in a book.
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