VEER INC.

Veer are a very cool company that provides visual elements for use in professional creative work, such as graphic design, motion design, advertising and filmmaking. Their products include stock photography, illustration, typefaces, and unique merchandise. This New York outfit is very sassy and won the 2008 Webby Awards Winners for Best Use of Typography.Who needs substance, when you have so much style?

Reel Families – the junkheap of private culture

Reel Families

Amateurism deflected the chaotic, the incoherent, and the spontaneous into leisure and private life so that public time would persist as methodical, controllable, and regulated (Zimmermann 11).

Written by Patricia Zimmermann in 1995, Reel Families, is the first historical study of amateur film.  It provides an in-depth account of amateur filmmaking and equipment from the late 1890s to the present, focusing on the changing discourse of aesthetics, creativity and innovation, standards of production, rhetoric and politics.  Zimmermann charts the progress of science, industry, leisure and private life, while firmly situating amateur filmmaking within the domain of ‘upper-and middle-class leisure’. 

The discourse on amateur film technology positions it as opposed to professional technology, or as the intermediary between both the past and the present: filmmaking to chronicle family life.

Two historical articulations of home movies:

Represented technological progress as a popular tool and remedy for interpersonal relations.

They retrieved the past as material could be measured and quantified in footage or reels like workers in time and motion studies.(Zimmermann 44)

In the 1950s, ‘the position, function, and definition of amateur film shifted from aesthetics and technology into a social configuration exclusively administering bourgeois, nuclear-family ideologies’ (Zimmermann 111). It’s interesting to note that familialism, ‘an ideology and social practice that emphasized family relations above other kinds of social or political interaction, wedded amateur film to the blissful domain of the home’ (Zimmermann 132). The domestic domain, a world of women and children was generally captured by a man behind the camera.

The book provided me with an excellent overview of the medium. Still lots of investigating to do!

Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film
By Patricia Rodden Zimmermann
Published by Indiana University Press, 1995
ISBN 0253209447, 9780253209443
187 pages

Visual Complexity project

visualcomplexity is a beautiful website showing the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is ‘to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web’. Some are not genuine complex networks, but ‘they either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject’.

I love it, because it makes me look at how information and data is (and could be) ‘mapped’ in different ways. I’m also a sucker for the pretty colours and patterns!

Bookshops

Anyone who buys from Amazon may be interested in Zoomii. It’s a virtual bookshop, where you can browse the shelves, before placing your order with Amazon. Looks great!