Fabrica: use the day™
Oct. 4th, 2005 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusSome of the students at my Teach Me workshops were from Fabrica, the college run by Benetton outside Treviso. They were kind enough to invite me to see Fabrica, so yesterday I left a grey Venice being lashed by wind and rain (the water was slopping right out of the canals over the walkways), took a train to Treviso, and spent most of the day hanging out in Tadao Ando's elegant building, set amongst vineyards. I came away laden with copies of Colors and Fab, the college's in-house fiction and design magazine.
It was amazing to meet an old friend from Paris there, Pierre, former boyfriend of Kahimi Karie. We went for drinks afterwards, with Juliana from Singapore, Meric from Istanbul, Gulla from Rekyavik. My impressions of Fabrica: lots of lovely work on display, but I'm amazed it doesn't have a cafe, because art school cafes are the places where people from different departments can mingle (or, more often, skulk and huddle in segregated posses). Fabrica feels a bit sparsely populated; there are only about 45 students, because, unlike ordinary art schools which profit from every additional student, Fabrica pays for you, based on your work, your ideas, and an interview. If you're selected they pay for everything, your travel, bed and board, as well as a €500 a month allowance. In return (if I understood it right) they can use what you produce in advertising, projects, and "communication research". It's not a bad system, a kind of apprenticeship in commercial art. There are some oddities, though; no illustration department, but a writing department! The saddest thing is that Oliviero Toscani is no longer around. Something of the soul of the place left with him, I suspect.
When I got back to Venice and fell asleep I had a dream about Fabrica. It was a warren of secret dens, laboratories, beds. Staff from the advertising agency were making a presentation, the usual full-on, multi-racial "united colors" stuff, with pretty fold-out posters. Suddenly I came up with a brilliant slogan: "Use the day!" I wasn't a student, just an observer, so I hesitated to tell them. But I knew they'd want to use it, so I blurted it out. They loved it, of course; the combination of "seize the day" and "use it or lose it". It could be the new "Just do it!" They wanted to make campaigns with it immediately. But we had to enter into negotiations about who owned copyright on the phrase. I scribbled it on a napkin, dated the scribble, and photographed it to prove ownership at a later date. "I'll post it on the internet, just to make sure the world knows the phrase is mine," I thought.
So here it is, Benetton:
Use the day.™
Use it or lose it... the price is one million euros.
It was amazing to meet an old friend from Paris there, Pierre, former boyfriend of Kahimi Karie. We went for drinks afterwards, with Juliana from Singapore, Meric from Istanbul, Gulla from Rekyavik. My impressions of Fabrica: lots of lovely work on display, but I'm amazed it doesn't have a cafe, because art school cafes are the places where people from different departments can mingle (or, more often, skulk and huddle in segregated posses). Fabrica feels a bit sparsely populated; there are only about 45 students, because, unlike ordinary art schools which profit from every additional student, Fabrica pays for you, based on your work, your ideas, and an interview. If you're selected they pay for everything, your travel, bed and board, as well as a €500 a month allowance. In return (if I understood it right) they can use what you produce in advertising, projects, and "communication research". It's not a bad system, a kind of apprenticeship in commercial art. There are some oddities, though; no illustration department, but a writing department! The saddest thing is that Oliviero Toscani is no longer around. Something of the soul of the place left with him, I suspect.
When I got back to Venice and fell asleep I had a dream about Fabrica. It was a warren of secret dens, laboratories, beds. Staff from the advertising agency were making a presentation, the usual full-on, multi-racial "united colors" stuff, with pretty fold-out posters. Suddenly I came up with a brilliant slogan: "Use the day!" I wasn't a student, just an observer, so I hesitated to tell them. But I knew they'd want to use it, so I blurted it out. They loved it, of course; the combination of "seize the day" and "use it or lose it". It could be the new "Just do it!" They wanted to make campaigns with it immediately. But we had to enter into negotiations about who owned copyright on the phrase. I scribbled it on a napkin, dated the scribble, and photographed it to prove ownership at a later date. "I'll post it on the internet, just to make sure the world knows the phrase is mine," I thought.
So here it is, Benetton:
Use the day.™
Use it or lose it... the price is one million euros.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 11:03 am (UTC)..................................................................
Liberal "tolerance" condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance (like the multitude of "ethnic cuisines" in a contemporary megalopolis) — any "real" Other is instantly denounced for its "fundamentalism", since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance, i.e. the "real Other" is by definition "patriarchal", "violent", never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs. One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of "repressive tolerance", reconceiving it as the tolerance of the Other in its aseptized, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the Real of the Other's jouissance.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 11:08 am (UTC)what you need you have to borrow...
Date: 2005-10-04 01:25 pm (UTC)"USE THE DAY". Could be the next "just do it", I guess, but the opposite would sound better...something like "Just Breathe", or "Reason to Breathe".
what are...
Date: 2005-10-04 01:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 02:03 pm (UTC)Kahimi mentioned your name so many times in her interview around when she lived in Paris, so I thought " A Momus must be her boyfriend ", haha ^_^;
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 02:04 pm (UTC)I know too many designers and art directors who (amazingly) have never commissioned an illustration; everything is photography now, which to me is a sad thing.
More illustrators are showing in galleries and less in magazines; editorial assignments are a fraction of what they were a decade ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 04:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 04:58 pm (UTC)A digital camera and a bundle of Adobe software costs much less in the long run than commissioning an illustrator.
Which is indeed a sad thing, given how amazingly lush even old magazines, such as those issues of Vogue where they commissioned Dali to illustrate, are still amazing, lush and fresh after all these years.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 05:02 pm (UTC)Last but not least, perhaps the school just doesn't see a commercial future in illustrations - even Disney has given up on the old ways of animation, after all.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 05:14 pm (UTC)Here's a recent article on the subject of the dwindling use of illustration that is worthwhile reading: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126420/
Some excerpts:
"Halftone photos, dramatic and comic illustrations, inset graphics, hand-lettered headlines, and buckets of color enlivened these artful pages. See, for example, the treatment given to a cover story about New York skyscrapers in the World's Jan. 20, 1907, Sunday magazine, which beckons the reader to enter its universe. Today's newspaper designers construct layouts so they can be comprehended in a flash. But the World's designers invited the eye to explore, to soak up detail, to appreciate subtlety, to partner with the brain in forming a lasting mental image. The skyscraper layout resembles an Advent calendar, saying "open me" in countless spaces."
"The heavy reliance on illustrations makes the World look old-timey, but, once you accept the conventions of the period, the pictures take on a three-dimensional quality that rivals the finest modern photography and reproduction. There's something fantastically real to me about this Aug. 13, 1911, World magazine cover illustration of man-meets-beast in "The Submarine's Encounter—Whales!"
"A designer assigned to such an oceanic story today would probably scatter the collected images—whale, submarine, surface ship, dolphin, shipwreck, shark, splashing surf, seaweed, and chase ship—over a couple of pages. But, like many World layouts that Baker and Brentano salvaged, the submarine's pas de deux with the whale tells a complete graphic story on one page; its images stimulate the reader's appetite for text."
~W
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 08:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 08:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 08:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 08:50 pm (UTC)Re: what are...
Date: 2005-10-04 08:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-04 08:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-05 02:23 am (UTC)contrary to what seems to be popular belief, illustration is not a dying field. it simply has to evolve with the times and technology. to "evolve" is not to become obsolete.
for example, the illustration department at my school merges the animators from their department with the animators from the design & technology department. it provides for a nice collaboration: the more technical/computer oriented with the more classically trained.
.......and there are deadlines.
there have always been deadlines.
that point makes no sense.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-05 08:18 am (UTC)