Hidrazone - Digital Arts Reviews & News

The Visual Story by Bruce Block 2nd Edition.

The Visual Story by Bruce Block 2nd Edition. ISBN-13: 9780240807799

Doug Aitken succeeds in communicating his own creative influences and passions through a series of conversations with visual practitioners who have worked with some essence of exploded narrative – from the hard edge of commercial practice to esoteric though influential artists. This is an essential manual to the reconfiguration of the audio-visual world in a post-digital culture – though while maintaining a contemporary stance manages to avoid reference to work defined by digital practice. Spanning the past 50 years we are taken into the aspiration and working methods of film-maker’s such as Robert Altman, the artist Pipolotti Rist and architect Rem Koolhaas all tantalizingly laid out with a clear sense of “expanded” design. Fortunately the book does not follow the dangerous path of breaking the narrative of book structure and is orientated around functionality rather that designed for designers!

The tone of the book is set up in the preface – an interview with Noel Daniel, the editor where Aitkin tells us “the experience of nonlinearity and fragmentation is with us all the time. They are sometimes seen as dangerous and are ofter associated with chaos. But in many ways they’re truer to reality”. For the most part the choice of interviewees is indisputable and when taken as a whole remain consistently enlightening. Pablo Ferro talking about his optical title sequences is really essential reference for today’s digital practitioners – the first commercial motion graphics jobs I was given 10 years ago was to recreate this digitally for an interactive cd-rom.

This was the best £20 i’ve spent on an art/inspiration book!

PUBLISHED BY: D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.

FORMAT: Paperback, 7 x 9.5 in. / 288 pgs / 310 color / 65 b&w.

ISBN: 9781933045269 ISBN10: 1933045264

PUBLICATION DATE: 11/15/2005