10 December 2010

i know were kinda done for the semester, but my friend just sent me this link. its a pretty rad breakdown of metal. check it out.

www.mapofmetal.com

09 December 2010

12/9/2010 Questions

TUFTE READING

Pg. 160 “Another way to break free of low-resolution temporal comparisons is to show multiple slides, several images at once within the common view. Spatial parallelism takes advantage of our notable capacity to reason about multiple images that appear simultaneously within our eyespan.”

*How would this method of presentation be helpful? Is it always possible (can there be an overload of information) ?

Pg. 161 “Especially disturbing is the introduction of Power Point into schools. Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to decorate client pitches and infomercials” “Student PP exercises show a total of 80 words for a week worth of work”

*How should formatting presentations be taught in school? Should it be? He suggests an illustrated essay explaining something as an alternative to PP. What are other alternatives?

Pg. 169 “For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace PP slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, and images together. High-resolution handouts allow viewers to contextualize, compare, narrate, and recast evidence”

*Typically for a presentation people suggest not to give too much to the audience to read because it will distract them from what the presenter is saying. Tufte suggests several times to give out hardcopies of presentations or note slides to the audience. Would this be a success fulmethod? How would using hardcopies during a presentation compare to using programs such as Word, ID, Illustrator, etc. (digital alone or with a hardcopy)

*Tufte suggests that writing sentences forces presenters to be smarter and it will make consumers smarter as well, after all we can read “3x faster than presenters can talk”. Does having sentences/too many words distract the audience, and how can we find a happy-medium?

*How can Tufte's explanation of how art historians “reason about the causes of visual presentations” influence us/our presentation methods? (art history textbooks are written as a narrative of “distinctive, clearly identifiable styles)

AGREST READING

Pg. 167 “What representation represents is another representation in a chain of signifiers that circulate from one medium to another all the while believing or letting us believe, that there is a direct referent”

*How does this relate to Agrest's interpretation of Allen's view on representation?
*How can we make sense of the “mediated character of representation itself”?

Pg. 173-Photography of Eugene Atget (Paris-urban readings) vs. Allen's opinion on the “legibility of the modern city” (representing the contemporary city)

*How do they compare in relationship to “representation”?
*How does “the narrative” come into play?