Rec: For the artists and the storytellers
We read the most amazing article for my Information Access in the Arts class this week. (Well, okay, one person hated it. So it's a love/hate kind of article, depending on your frame of mind.)
No lie, library science articles tend to be the stuff that puts you to sleep, but this one- this one is a story. A really good story, that you can't stop reading.
The paper is, ostensibly, about cave paintings in Europe. But it is also about the history of art and culture, and how we interpret it, and therefore it is also about telling stories. It's what we do, what makes us human, and we do it every day in a thousand different ways. Even if you have never drawn a picture or written a story in your life, you are a storyteller.
A huge amount of our lives is spent reading images.
Some of them are abstract marks we call letters which we have learned to group into semi-arbitrary combinations that we call words, which we have contracted with each other to represent objects and concepts.
We read unnaturally frozen moments in time, with bizarre foreshortenings and inhuman stretchings, which we call photographs.
We read drawings and paintings from the merest wisp of a figure to the hyper-reality of tromp l’oeil.
In fact, many of us spend much of our lives making images.
It is easy to assume that human beings have always made pictures.
But it isn’t so.
There was a time when people didn’t make pictures.
Then something happened.
Then they did.
Except the paper itself is a million times awesomer, because it's not just words. There's also photos of the cave paintings, and it's all laid out by Mayer, who is a graphic artist, so it's gorgeous and there's fabulous use of fonts and white space and stuff.
Mayer, Nancy. "Reclaiming our History: The mysterious birth of art and design." Paper presentation to the AIGA FutureHistory Conference, 2004. [READ IT!]
(This is a freely available PDF, from the Conference website. The file is 3.8 MB, so you may wish to right click and save it if that's too big a file for your browser/connection to handle or if, like me, PDFs tend to crash your browser or if, also like me, you want to keep it forever because it is awesome.)
Seriously, if you have any interest at all in art or storytelling (which is, of course, an art) or languages, READ THIS. ♥
No lie, library science articles tend to be the stuff that puts you to sleep, but this one- this one is a story. A really good story, that you can't stop reading.
The paper is, ostensibly, about cave paintings in Europe. But it is also about the history of art and culture, and how we interpret it, and therefore it is also about telling stories. It's what we do, what makes us human, and we do it every day in a thousand different ways. Even if you have never drawn a picture or written a story in your life, you are a storyteller.
A huge amount of our lives is spent reading images.
Some of them are abstract marks we call letters which we have learned to group into semi-arbitrary combinations that we call words, which we have contracted with each other to represent objects and concepts.
We read unnaturally frozen moments in time, with bizarre foreshortenings and inhuman stretchings, which we call photographs.
We read drawings and paintings from the merest wisp of a figure to the hyper-reality of tromp l’oeil.
In fact, many of us spend much of our lives making images.
It is easy to assume that human beings have always made pictures.
But it isn’t so.
There was a time when people didn’t make pictures.
Then something happened.
Then they did.
Except the paper itself is a million times awesomer, because it's not just words. There's also photos of the cave paintings, and it's all laid out by Mayer, who is a graphic artist, so it's gorgeous and there's fabulous use of fonts and white space and stuff.
Mayer, Nancy. "Reclaiming our History: The mysterious birth of art and design." Paper presentation to the AIGA FutureHistory Conference, 2004. [READ IT!]
(This is a freely available PDF, from the Conference website. The file is 3.8 MB, so you may wish to right click and save it if that's too big a file for your browser/connection to handle or if, like me, PDFs tend to crash your browser or if, also like me, you want to keep it forever because it is awesome.)
Seriously, if you have any interest at all in art or storytelling (which is, of course, an art) or languages, READ THIS. ♥