Hans Dieter Reichert Masterclass

Brief

Theme: ‘Structure’
Mind set: Easy – enjoy yourself and create
Colour: Black and white and grey (halftone of black)
Format: A4 (final size A6 landscape)

Observe, explore and visualise the subject of structure in our environments. The subject structure can be close to you and your graphic interest such as ‘typographic’ structures but as wide reaching as structure(s) in computers, nature, architecture, the studio room etc. The emphasis is on observing, exploring, visualising and final production.

Generate some text (50-100 words)
Try to find images (copying, scanning, drawings, printing)

Production: Collect your findings and produce a section signature (8pp) design layout with your text and image. Finally combine all layouts to a final bound production.

First of all I started to research into architectural structure to co-inside with my interest in New York City. However, after a while I realised that it was not working like I had hoped so decided to change the subject of the book. In recent crits I have been advised to make some work which is more personal. I also wanted to continue working with typography so I decided to concentrate on the letter Z. Although it is not really personal work, the letter Z is my first initial and I find its structural form very interesting.

I started looking into the history of the letter Z

The letter was based on the Greek ‘zeta’ and was written as so: I
The reason for the structural change is probably due to the fact that is is quicker and easier to write Z.

The letter came seventh in the Greek and Latin Alphabet, but the Romans eventually dropped the letter Z from the Latin alphabet as the sound was never used. It would have been dropped from the alphabet we use today if it weren’t for the fact that when Romans conquered the Greeks, a couple of Greek words containing the letter Z were incorporated into the Latin language. Z was then put back into the Latin alphabet but was put at the end of the alphabet as it was the least used letter.

The Romans adopted the zeta into their alphabet, but since the sound was not used in the Latin language the letter was eventually dropped, and the position of the seventh letter was given to the G. In fact, the Z might never have made it into our present-day alphabet, if not for a few stray Greek words that were incorporated into the Roman language after the Romans conquered the Greeks. In order to write these words a Z was required, and so, several centuries after it was first banished from the Roman alphabet, the Z was allowed to return. However, because the letter was not a part of the traditional Roman language, the Z was relegated to the last spot in the alphabetical hierarchy.

After the masterclass, the group decided to print a copy of our book for each person and bind them all together. Here is the result.

Code (KH Jeron Masterclass)

I attended the masterclass by KJ Heron about interpreting data. The previous day he gave a lecture on his work as part of the Wednesday lecture series which introduced the the main subject of his work; data interpretation. In the masterclass we were given a Log File of 12 hours of his webpage. At first the data looked really confusing but after it was explained to us it became a lot clearer. Every new line of the code represented an individual visit to the website. The information on each line is separated by a space. The information given in the code is the IP address, date, time, timezone, url, browser and other information reguarding that individual visit.

An example would be:

65.55.106.186 – – [23/Jan/2010:00:33:11 +0100] “GET /willworkforfood/category/locations/stuttgart/ HTTP/1.1” 200 31102 projektraum.org “-” “msnbot/2.0b (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)” “-”

Our project for the day was to use this information as a starting poihnt to create something new.

I decided that I wanted to concentrate on the form of the code. One of the most important things in the code is the space in between each information. I wanted to black out the characters in the code but leave the spaces in between white as I was interested in that pattern that would form. Here is the result.