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'3-19 University of Adelaide A CONTINGENT SENSE OF GRAÍT'IMAR Volume ll Volume II of a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Design in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Dean Bruton Adelaide, South Australia November i997 Contents 202 Appendix A Interview Transcripts 203 Bill Barminski 207 Larry Becker 2OB Scott Chase 217 Philip Cox 228 Richard Coyne 238 Julie Eizenberg 245 William Fawcett 259 Neil Hanson 273 Joan and Russell Kirsch 284 Terry Knight 290 ]ohn Lansdown; Gregory Moore 302 Raymond Lauzzarta 306 Lionel March 327 Philip Pearlstein 336 Alvy Ray-Smith 350 Paul Richens 351 John Rollo 357 Sid Sachs 361 Thomas Seebohm 375 George Stiny 384 Mark Tapia 387 Catherine Teeling 398 Robert Venturi; Denise Scott Brown 475 David Walker 425 Robert Woodbury 434 John Woods M2 Marco Zanini 452 Appendix B: Grammars and Art: A Contingent Sense of Rules 464 Appendix C: Relating Computers to designers'Judgement of Good Design 483 Appendix D: Excess and Distress: Design Principles in Context 491, Appendix E: Design Theory Hypermedia Studio 201 Appendices These Appendices contain personal interview transcripts (Appendix A), and refereed papers written during the candidature for this research. Some of these papers are quite directly related to the core area of research, (Appendices B and C) while the earlier papers (Appendices D and E) explore related fields of interest that were informed by the core area of research. Volume II Appendix A contains twenty seven transcripts of video and audio taped interviews with artists, architects, designers and theorists recorded on an overseas tour during 27 luly-3 August 1996 and an interstate trip to Sydney in October 1.996. Interviews also were recorded with Dr Paul Margerison (audio visual) and Richard Wentworth (mail). 202 Bill Barminski: lnterview with Dean Bruton Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles 3 July 1996 Bill Barminski is an artist that uses both traditional and new media. He lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. He works with enamel pa¡nt on canvas and has collaborated with producer and director Webster Lewin and codesigner and technical director, Jerry Hesketh on CD-ROM and internet productions.In 1996 his internet site has won awards from Microsoft. You are an artist exhibiting at the Robert Berman Gallery, Los Angeles and also on the lnternet. Would you say that there are regular patterns or rules or guidelines that you might use that you could articulate or discuss? In my work there is a definite repetition of a certain sloganeering. For me its emphasising what I see in commercial advertising, like the base message is "consume" so that word appears a lot. There are dif- ferent arrangements of the word "consume" and it is broken up to become "con" ot "sume". You have the word being fractured with other words printed on top of it which actually give more of a verbal play. People like to look at it and try to figure out words that weren't there essentially, but they find them. Most of the text I use are essen- tially slogans or anti slogans. They are really the antithesis of what- ever the commercial message is,-like the one that I enjoy using a lot, which is "Enjoy H bomb". I drop tl:re "b" off the word bomb, because it sort of mimics advertising-they get rid of the superfluous in a certain way, so "Enjoy H Bom" is like they enjoy Coca Cola. ls it a kind if iconographic game? Yes, I repeat my iconographic consumer image themes, thing like the Coke bottle or consumable items like hamburgers, ice cream cones etc which in a way are like languages themselves,---{r put any item you like any oval or emblem and it conveys-a meaning. Its like when you put any object that looks like a logo then it becomes a logo. So there's also that play between the language and symbols. These symbols, like convey sometimes more than you think. They are more powerful than what you are writing. I have in the show right now the Shell logo, it doesn't say "Shell" on it anywhere, but it does say "Hell". People walk up to it and think it says "Drink Shell". But it doesn't there is no "S" there. They just look at the logo without even reading it because it's so embedded in the vocabulary. There is the logo type emphasis; there's a typography type of play-Are there any other rules or guidelines that you could 203 recogn¡se that you could use or employ in your grammar? One of the things I do like also with the typography I have and overt text and a sub text which sub text is place, embossed into the surface of the painting with plaster. Then there is an over text and I usually try to make those juxtaposed to each other, as a dynamic tension between the sub text and the overt message. That is a sort of a rule I use. Part of the texturing is like a language or rule that I consistently use by painting modern emblems and objects and making them look really old and mucked up. For me more it is a way of connecting with the European art tradition. You go to Europe and the paintings are old and cracked up and peeling. That's part of the reason why I do that, its fun. The funniest part of painting is scratching them up. Have you ever used computers as part of the process or do you know of artists who have used computers to develop a ser¡es of derivations involved in the art process? Do you mean in terms of how this relates to my analogue paintings or both? Any other work that you do-have you used a computer for it and how does that relate to these pa¡nt¡ngs? I have been using the computer. We did a CD-ROM a few years ago, it's more like a cataloguing effort. We are working on one right now that is like an artwork unto itself that exists only in the computer realm. What's interesting about that is that a lot of the pieces that are being created in there are really derivatives of the "exquisite corpse" sort of idea-where you can create endlessly mutable sensors but where not using necessarily words we are using emblems or icons to create these like pictograms. We have been doing work that's being printed at digital prints. The actual art work is being created on the cornputer then output into digital printer. Actually in this show here it is the first time I actually altered an image in a computer then translated that image on to canvas. Which pa¡nt¡ng did you do first? Those faces in the Gallery the twisted ones. I had been doing really warped out faces before in different ways but I did not actually use Photoshop to produce a weird image. This is the first time in this show. I did not do any warped faces in the early work. They weren't warped like these. They have double mouthed, sometimes anamor- phic, stretched out, but I did not use the computer for that, they were just hand drawn or sometimes you just have a slide and you lay a canvas at an angle for projection. Do you think the computer adds a dimension beyond what you had done with traditional med¡a? The actual work that I am doing on the computer-yes, I am able to create-well to me it's like a whole new life form its a combination 204 of all these other art forms but is has all this interactivity on top of it which to me is really exciting because it's something I would never be able to do in a painting or song or book or video but I can com- bine all those elements and make them navigable to the user. I know I am creating something that doesn't exist anywhere else except being mediated through the computer. Do you see the computer work as taking over from traditional media or will they carry on together? They will carry on together, to me personally I am not going to stop painting and I am also going to do this other thing, its like television didn't end cinema. I've been giving lectures and going to conferences and stuff talking about new digital art as a new medium and its just like there is some misconception about what it can do and what peo- ple are expecting in order of interactivity. People are bringing so many agendas to it I have a definition for interactivity: you click and somethinghappms, that's it, that's all it does. There's other people that think its going to save the inner city, teach people who are uncreative to be creative and so on. Do you think that the difference between design and art? I suppose,-I guess there is a difference but-where does something stop being design and becoming art? It gets to the question of what is art? It is hard to say I know lots of designers who what they are designing is art and I know designers that make something that is really not art. Would you agree with the statement that "Design is computation"? What is computation? Computation as a binary rule-based-a yes-no approach. ln other words, does design have definable rules? Yes, its like its really similar to Haiku.