Some Magazine #17—Look

A Magazine For Visual Inventors Issue #17 Winter 2023/24

Some Magazine Look

DAVID HORVITZ, ELEONORA MARTON, BLATANT SPACE, CATELIJNE VAN MIDDELKOOP, MELODY “LEMOON” BOSSAN, ROB LOWE (SUPERMUNDANE), FILA GRAPHIC LAB

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Content 5 Sven Völker Editorial 10 Melody “LeMoon” Bossan Summer Memories in Les Issambres 20 Eleonrora Marton Easily Distracted 36 David Horvitz The Garden Is Open 50 Rob Lowe (Supermundane) AI Will Run the Popular 58 Cateleijne van Middelkoop It Is Just About to Begin 68 Blatant Space You and Me 78 Fila Tennis × Some Magazine Fila Graphic Lab 80 Imprint

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Sven Völker Usually Some Magazine is researched, written, designed, and produced two times a year by students of Prof. Sven Völker.

For this issue though, Sven conducted all the editorial work himself as part of a personal research semester in the summer of 2023. Besides teaching Graphic design Sven Völker is a picture book author and artist. His book A Million Dots received the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books award in 2019.

Contributors Melody “LeMoon” Bossan is an AI artist from Nice, France. We talked about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence in image creation and the rapid development of this revolutionary technology. Her series “Summer Memories in Les Issambres” creates a whole new surreal version of her own childhood memories.

Catelijne van Middelkoop is a design educator from the Netherlands and focuses on the concept of “making” in the creative process and the changing role of the designer in the digital age. She views the current, technological change in Design and Art with curiosity and confidence. We talked to her about the present and the

Photo by Olivia Fougeirol

future of design education.

We caught up with conceptual artist David Horvitz to talk about his Los Angeles garden. He transformed an undeveloped wasteland across the street from his studio into an unusual place of tranquility, encounter and observation. He says: “Creating a garden is completely different from my other work. Simply because you never really know what final form it will take.”

London-based illustrator Eleonora Marton loves to create things with her own hands using analog tools. She combines words and images in a fascinatingly simple yet surprising way. Her advice to young artists: “Always make time for personal projects, embrace a DIY approach to things and be persistent!”

Blatant Space is an AI artist who takes us into a fictional world full of unusual creatures. Although they are all in fact made and invented by a computer, the artist is able to give his puppets a consinstent yet surprising style and a character of their own using prompts to feed the artificial intelligence.

The artist Rob Lowe (Supermundane) reflects on what artificial intelligence means for creative professions. He thinks that artificial intelligence could give us humans a true chance to understand what really make us human. He says: “True human lead design may end up being seen as a luxury.”

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Sven Völker

Editorial

Look In one of her many, small teaching experiments, Sister Corita Kent would send her students on a short walk through their house or apartment together with a small child of two or three years old. The child would teach them to look closely at everything, to take it in their hands, to smell it, to shake it, to feel it. Every object along the way, no matter how small, would be a new discovery. The designer Charles Eames – a contemporary of Corita’s – referred to this exploratory looking as “looking deeper.” If today, we open our eyes on a normal morning we are taking a visual trip around the world through the seemingly endless expanses of Instagram and TikTok before we’ve even arrived at the breakfast table. Admittedly, we walked carelessly past all the things of everyday life on our little way. Instead, we saw several sharks, a young couple in front of their camper van, Paul McCartney getting out of a red car, and a hidden beach next to a London pub. The little things in life certainly haven’t lost their fascination to us, but in times of visual hyperinflation, they come into our focus only if they lend themselves to a short “thing” in social media. Eames envisioned a future in which everyone carried a camera with them at all times to train their eyes. Back then, in a time when a camera was at best a vacation companion, this was a rather unrealistic dream. Today the smartphone camera is always with us and our eyes are constantly searching for motifs.

We – least some of us – have become professionals at “looking deeper.”

Reality Thinking about the relation between reality and fiction, I am particularly interested in two technological developments of our times. One of them is artificial intelligence (AI) that is disrupting our so far superior relationship with our tools. In the past, tools were “at our hand,” they expanded and refined our capabilities and increased our productivity. But AI seemingly meets us at eye level and becomes an imaginative counterpart, “someone” that is capable of surprising us with its own creative output. In this issue you will find the AI post-photographic series of Melody “LeMoon” Bossan and the puppets of Blatantspace.

Though using AI software, these two artists manage to create works that are no longer ran5

Sven Völker dom computer generated collages but that follow their personal artistic style and signature.

To the both of them, artificial intelligence is a new tool that allows them to create what they want to create. The other technology that I am specifically interested in is augmented reality (AR), which we covered in detail here in Some Magazine three issues ago. AR glasses and other devices will soon connect very inconspicuous the physical real world around us with the unreal and non-physical digital world. The combination both, of artificial intelligence and augmented reality, will most likely turn everything around us and our relationship to it on its head. In a very near future, we will not be sure where reality ends and where fiction begins. It will be scary, it will be complicated but it will definitely be exciting.

Author One could assume that in a digitally prefabricated world, the role of the author is changing fundamentally. The truth is, it has already long been so. Marcel Duchamp presented his readymades in 1913 and changed the role of the artist from a “producer of something” to somebody just “pointing at it.” With modernism entering the stage though, our culture has not become more boring, but many times more exciting, surprising and comprehensive instead. And yet, it not so much a glamorous and self-reflective art world or that of high culture I’m worried about, but rather the anonymous discipline of design. The designer gives form to everything in everyday life, but hardly ever makes himself or herself visible and remains largely anonymous instead. Anonymous services though, are at a much higher risk of being automated. When it comes to creating variants, computer will take over, they are already doing so today. When it comes to ideas, experiments, mistakes, in short, when it comes to “human action,” we humans will remain irreplaceable. We need to embrace these areas of human action, we need to make mistakes and make everybody curious about them.

Manual work and mental work In an increasingly technological future, we may in a weird way be less working with machines. How laborious it was in the 19th century to typeset a page of text and print it on a printing press? How often in the late 20th century we restarted our computers, installed or programmed software and then had to do it all over again in the end because some adapter didn’t fit or a hard drive broke? How much time have humans spent on, with and in machines over the past one hundred years? In a future full of artificial intelligence, our work will require the ability to choose, in the Duchampian sense, from a mass of options. The ability “to look deeper” will be in high demand. This – or instead, we might make more things ourselves with our own hands just because we like to. Whatever the future of work in art and design looks like, it will present us designers with some challenges. While I can imagine very different tools of the future, it’s hard for me to imagine that in the end it won’t be this magical connection of the head and our hands that makes human activity something

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Editorial so unusual, unique, and at times frightening. We look at the world, think about it, and change it – unfortunately, we don’t always do it in that order and not always to the better.

Blind We are visual creatures. We also smell, taste, touch or hear, but seeing is by far our strongest sense. A high visual competence in such a visual world is certainly of great advantage, and our skill has developed. Just imagine a person from the 18th century trying to use Instagram. Such a person would be completely overwhelmed just a few posts down the timeline.

Reading images and signs is a necessary art of survival that we have learned to master excellently and without which we would not get very far. The decisive break today is that the boundary between fact and fiction is dissolving. Where previously it was quite clear what was fairy tale and what was the truth, today there is an endless flow of stories that lie somewhere in between. The person in the foreground might be real, but the background is invented. The face is his, but an Instagram filter makes it appear much younger and prettier or older and more wrinkled. You will see (and hear) somone speaking fluently japanese who has never ever learned to do so. Our world will be full of such convincing hermaphrodites flickering between truth and lie.

For over one hundred years, we humans of the post-postmodern times have turned ourselves into outstanding visual athletes. We made visuality our superpower. Now we are about to change the rules of the game right in the middle of it. Will all this result in some new weird kind of blindness?

This issue of Some Magazine is dedicated to the skill, the craft and the pure joy of looking.

Prof. Sven Völker Editor

Illustrations on previous pages and title by the author svenvoelker.com instagram.com/sven_voelker

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Melody “LeMoon” Bossan

Summer Memories in Les Issambres

All pictures created by Melody “LeMoon” Bossan using the AI tool Midjourney

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Melody Bossan is an artificial intelligence (AI) artist based in Nice, France with a background in video production and marketing.

Her post-photographic work expresses her memories, fears and dreams in a nostalgic and disturbing style that she calls herself “absurd realism.”

prompting my memory in an AI has done exactly that. MJ brought it to life, and then I felt like the newly materialized versions of my fading memories were amazing, and I kind of wanted them to be true. I believe this is all part of the post-photography artistic approach that goes beyond traditional photography. It’s the new way to explore the possibilities of expression, blurring the lines between reality and imagination, and pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved in visual art.

How much of your personal life and experiences have gone into this series?

I grew up in Les Issambres as a kid and a teenager. It’s a really small coastal village on the French Riviera in the St-Tropez Gulf.

I remember spending a lot of time playing with water, enjoying the heat, going to the Luna Park, or hiding to smoke cigarettes.

There wasn’t a lot to do except enjoying the weather and the sea. I also experienced wild fires 2 or 3 times as a kid, and I remember having to evacuate the house, bringing with me only a few toys. The firemen were sleeping in our garden and pumping the water from the swimming pool because the flames were right there. It was terrifying. So, the series is 100% inspired by my own memories and real life. I even included my own photos as base prompts for some of these. I really like that you chose this series because it is the most intimate I made so far. I cherish it a lot because I was able to recreate some memories of mine. This is funny because one of the pictures in this collection has won an exhibition in NYC in January-February 2024, and the theme was “My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened.” I feel like

What kind of software do you use and how do you produce the pictures?

I use a text-to-image AI tool that works using Discord called Midjourney (MJ). There are many other services out there, but I fell in love with the aesthetics of MJ. I’m mostly interested in photo realistic images, and it delivers flawlessly. I’m also using Photoshop Beta a lot, which has integrated awesome AI tools like the Generative Fill, which allows you to edit part of an image with a prompt, a true game-changer. Adobe Lightroom and Snapseed are also part of my toolbox for fine-tuning images. Finally, I have a Topaz suite (Gigapixel and AI Photo) for AI upscaling that allows me to enlarge AI pictures for printing. When the result is not satisfying enough, I’m using Stable Diffusion and ControlNet, which gives amazing results.

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What inspires and interests you about this technology?

When I first heard of these text-to-image tools back in August 2022, I immediately felt a strong attraction to them. I tried Dall-e and Midjourney and ran out of free credits very fast. I preferred Midjourney, so I took a subscription in September. It felt a bit Q.

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All pictures from the series “Summer Memories in Les Issambres” were created by Melody “LeMoon” Bossan using Midjourney.

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Eleonora Marton

Eleonora Marton is a Venice-born author and illustrator based in South East London. She’s interested in the interactions between images and words, words and space, space and objects, objects and other objects, objects and humans, humans and the mundane, the mundane and stories, stories and narrative fragments. In addition to exhibiting her paintings, drawings, posters, and fabric works internationally, she creates books and zines. She is the author of two children’s activity books, DIY ABC and Bigger (Cicada 2016, 2017), the picture books Monstres De Maison and Noël & Léon (Grasset 2020, 2022), and the concept book The Itch (Pato Lógico, 2021).

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All Photos: Installation views of Swiss Institute Off-site exhibition: In the Garden of David Horvitz, 7th Ave Garden, Los Angeles, 2023, Photos by Rio Asch Pheonix, Courtesy of David Horvitz Portrait by Olivia Fougeirol

7th Ave Garden, Los Angeles

David Horvitz

The Garden is Open 37

David Horvitz is a Los Angeles based artist whose expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps or gastronomy. In the past few years he created a very special small garden on an abandoned lot across the street from his studio.

How is the garden today, three years after you started working on it?

Oh, it got a little destroyed yesterday.

Someone came and took his anger out on it. I had just started to water the garden – sometimes I do these very slow waterings where I just turn the hose on – just a little drip – to get like a deep watering going for maybe half an hour, maybe 20 minutes. And so I water a tree go back to my studio across the street to do some work. And typically when I’m in the studio, I leave the garden gate open. I have a hand-painted sign in English and Spanish that reads “garden open” and prop it up next to the gate. Then, I’ll post on Instagram that the garden is open.

Sometimes I find people inside when I return. This time, it is early afternoon when i return and I hear a lot of noise as I walk in. So I think we have a guest, which is cool. But suddenly, there’s a lot of banging noise. When I look, I see someone frantically running around, grabbing wood and shovels and doing crazy stuff. And I’m like, “I have to leave.” I cannot stop this guy, he is armed with garden tools. We call the police, but sometimes they really don’t know how to handle these kind of situations.

While we wait for the police, I hear things breaking and objects shattering. I have all Q.

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these mirrors that are being smashed and destroyed. Some guy went on a roof next door and looked down. Saying, “He’s destroying the garden.” And then finally I see him walking out of the garden without any shovels or anything, just walking down the street. Finally, the police show up and ask, “Where did he go?” And I sent them that way. While the police are away, I talk to my neighbor who tells me that the same guy also attacked a corn vendor and flipped his cart over. And then this lady comes out and tells us “Oh yeah, I’m his landlady. He tried to set his apartment on fire.” And then his sister shows up, asking us “Where’s my brother?” And then his dad shows up, like “where did he go?” So I started learning all this stuff about my neighbors. It seemed, like my garden just happened to be on his route. I would imagine, the garden could be a place of healing in a sense. With him alone in there, it was like something interesting about him seeking out a garden to deal with his emotion.

Has the garden survived?

If he had a chainsaw, he could have easily cut down all the plants. All of the mirrors were shattered, but that’s just mirrors. The police came and asked, what’s the value of the mirrors? I explained that I didn’t purchase any of them since I found them on the street. They were mirrors that people didn’t want anymore, but to me, they represented the community. It’s on of those everyday object that everybody possess. I wanted to put them in the garden. He killed a some plants, but not that many. It was as he acted like a gardener who decides which plants to remove and which to plant. He overturned the bench, and when we put it back, it ended up in a better spot.

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David Horvitz, Photo by Olivia Fougeirol

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AI Will Run the Popular

Rob Lowe (Supermundane)

Social media is full of AI generated incongruous juxtapositions. Initially exciting, they are quickly becoming meaningless and repetitive. Most have a retro feel, with their air-brushed softness, looking like uncanny versions of the fantasy art I liked when I was a kid – back then I would have loved them – but there is an emptiness to the horror being generated.

For years we have been told that logic and truth are what we should strive for, but computers have always been better at logic and truth than us. In Olga Ravn’s wonderful book The Employees, a humanoid asks ’Is this a human problem? If so I’d like to keep it.’ The humanoid recognizing humans have issues computers do not. We are messy, wasteful, contradictory and, often, maddeningly illogical. Anything that can be rationalized will probably be produced by a computer to a level that most people wouldn’t question how it was made. I have 51

Catelijne van Middelkoop

It Is Just About to Begin

Catelijne van Middelkoop is a Design Fellow, Co-Director of the Pictorial Research Lab, and former Full Professor of Visual Communication Design at Delft University of Technology, Research Professor “Meaningful Creativity” at SintLucas in Boxtel and Eindhoven, and Sustainable Partnerships Developer at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She focuses on the concept of “making” in the creative process and the changing role of the designer in the digital age. She is also Co-Founder of “Strange Attractors Design” and “The AI-gency.” instagram.com/catelijne_v_m instagram.com/practoraat_ ai-gency.com strangeattractors.com tudelft.nl/en/ide/about-ide/people/former-professors/middelkoop-c-van

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We work in a rapidly changing world.

Our own little creative universes in art and design have changed and will change immensely and now, with the arrival of AI (Artificial Intelligence) everything is faster than ever before. How do you teach design in such times?

In Delft, when I was asked to teach visual communication design, I realized I was most successful by leaving off the design aspect and focused on visual communication instead. Most industrial design engineering students I meet love the ideation part of the design process but lack experience and sophistication when it comes down to visually exploring and deepening those ideas further.

From their ideas, they often jump to conclusions. They really want to come up with solutions. But to what? I started to wonder about what the real problem might be …

Can the students actually, see? Are they able to read what images visually communicate?

I know they can read text, but can they read images, too? So I joined forces with Maarten Wijntjes, a perception specialist with a background in physics and started to focus on visual literacy, mainly on the basics, gestalt principles, texture, color, light, space, materials and all that. And instead of asking our students to start out with making their own visuals [and get stuck in the ideation part], we give them a curated collection of already finished pictures to work with. This selection includes classics, paintings from online open archives such as the Rijksstudio [which are sourced for perception and heritage studies more often], and combine these with the latest, often questionable, sometimes already forgotten creative imagery that we find online. I try to be as inclusive as possible, so we also have images drawn by machines, neglected women, men with non Q.

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was special. And I think with the imagery that is being spit out now, if you don’t edit and tweak it, it doesn’t bring about that excitement. It’s too easy, even though it looks complex. I think there’s a lot to be gained.

Let’s get back to the idea of making, how would you define the word?

To me, making is an embodied way of creating knowledge that can be shared, because it’s tangible and can be experienced. As you can tell I deviated and broadened my vocabulary a little bit from graphic design, because at a certain point I felt it was too limited. Of course there was this distinction between graphic designers who just applied formal elements according to specific principles, the “vormgevers” and the ones that also carefully crafted the concepts behind the work, the self-proclaimed “ontwerpers,” which made what we do sound a little bit better, more holistic. To me it implied that you were also able to make it, and then because you were on a conceptually level you were thinking further ahead it was more important at least. But then this distinction in Dutch disappeared when both terms were translated into the same word “design” and by now everything is designed and design has become a part of a global industry, even when there is no attention paid to any formal elements at all! Referring to these old Dutch words didn’t really seem to make sense anymore. But at the same time, there is some kind of value in the process of giving this shape or shaping things. I’m writing a paper about form giving in the 21st century. And it sounds of course very odd, but let’s take this very old word, re-evaluate it, step away from what design has become, the whole systemic, the large, the intangible, the overly complex, and go back to Q.

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its roots. What is it that we do? We made things that we could test, that we could feel, that we could experience. And so I’m using the term “form giving” as a bridge to point out the importance of making. The idea of making things with your hands used to be important in elementary schools. The government always said, this is what all children should learn and do, but then it got a little lost. And I don’t think we can go from that to generating anything with AI. To me the real the experience is to feel the paper, to use the right pen or a different pen or the wrong pen. It is the feeling that you can control something or that you have no control over it. It’s these experiences that people can relate to, I think it’s very much like how do we humans want to behave or how can we ideally behave and what role can this experience of making things help in understanding one another. And not just through words.

There is this saying that “humans are interested in other humans.” Do we also want to know, who the “maker” is?

Look at all the Netflix cooking shows with its huge viewer numbers – people are interested in seeing how things are made and who makes it. Even if you don’t taste it, you enjoy seeing others in the process of the making. It’s not about the result only but it’s really about the creative process. And taking away the process by putting it into the computer completely takes away a large part of Q.

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W+K Tokyo Lab commissioned Strange Attractors Design (Ryan Pescatore Frisk & Catelijne van Middelkoop) to create a video and sound for an episode of Tokyo. Now, a 5 min. sub-program within NHK’s “POP JAM DX,” a TV show devoted to Japanese pop culture.

Blatant Space

You

and Me instagram.com/blatant.space twitter.com/blatantspace atant Space All pictures created by Bl using various AI tools

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Fila Tennis × Some Magazine

Fila Graphic Lab

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Illustration: Oliver Johannsen, FH Potsdam Fila Tennis Europe and Some Magazine have founded the “Fila Graphic Lab.” In the future, creative teams of design students at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam will work on experimental graphic concepts for apparel design and brand development.

Fila Tennis Europe brand manager Thomas Olschewski describes the collaboration as follows: “Together with the students we succeed in developing a new, graphic language in which the great past of the Fila brand is harmonized with what there is to come: Heritage meets Future. Through this collaboration, surprising visual impulses will continue to flow into the brand’s identity.” In the past, Prof. Sven Völker has been responsible for the corporate identity of the Japanese motorcycle and automobile manufacturer Suzuki and is looking forward to this new project, where both sides will learn from each other and enter new and exciting terrain.

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University of Applied Sciences Potsdam Prof. Sven Völker (V.i.s.d.P) Kiepenheuerallee 5 14469 Potsdam, Germany welcome@somemag.com somemag.com @somemag_fhp Slanted Publishers UG (haftungsbeschränkt) Nördliche Uferstraße 4—6 76189 Karlsruhe, Germany T +49 (0) 721 85148268 info@slanted.de slanted.de @slanted_publishers © Slanted Publishers, Karlsruhe, 2023 Nördliche Uferstraße 4—6, 76189 Karlsruhe, Germany All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-3-948440-67-1 1st edition 2023 Editor-in-chief: Sven Völker Contributions by: Blatant Space, Catelijne van Middelkoop, David Horvitz, Eleonora Marton, Melody “LeMoon” Bossan, Rob Lowe, Sven Völker Cover illustration: Sven Völker Publishing Direction: Lars Harmsen, Julia Kahl Production Management: Julia Kahl Printer: Stober Medien Paper: lona®offset 110 g/sm and 250 g/sm

A sincere thank you ♥ to our supporters:

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About Some Magazine Since 2010, changing editorial teams of graphic design students research, write, layout, and produce the bi-annual Some Magazine. It is a part of the Experimental Design course of Prof. Sven Völker at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

About Slanted Publishers: Slanted Publishers is an internationally active design, publishing and media house founded in 2014 by Lars Harmsen and Julia Kahl. They publish the award-winning print magazine Slanted, covering international developments in design and culture twice a year. Since its establishment in 2004, the daily Slanted blog highlights events and news from an international design scene and showcases inspiring portfolios from all over the world. In addition, Slanted Publishers initiates and creates publications, focusing on contemporary design and culture, working closely with editors and authors to produce outstanding publications with meaningful content and high quality. Slanted was born from great passion and has made a name for itself across the globe.

Its design is vibrant and inspiring – its philosophy open-minded, tolerant, and curious.

Disclaimer: The publisher assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of all information. Publisher and editor assume that material that was made available for publishing, is free of third party rights. Reproduction and storage require the permission of the publisher. Photos and texts are welcome, but there is no liability. Signed contributions do not necessarily represent the opinion of the publisher or the editor.The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at dnb.de.

Illustration: Eleonora Marton

Some Magazine A Magazine for Visual Inventors Issue #17: Look Winter 2023/24

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