A context centred graphical news magazine

Nicola KAYE / Stuart MEDLEY
2008 Conference

Our proposal seeks to bridge the gap between art and design through a collaboration between colleagues in visual arts and graphic design. This comprises research from cognitive and sociological backgrounds. Specifically, we are involved in constructing an on-line/off-line magazine built entirely from information graphics. Our research examines the potential for visuality to reconfigure news information. We are exploring if this approach has the potential to generate its own particular aesthetic range to bridge art and design.

Our common research interests lie in exploring what Jeffery P. Jones has termed alternative media through spaces of interpretation and communication away from mainstream notions of news, information and public space. It is our contention that the scope for art and design as tools for non-profit information dissemination has had scant exploration.

While we adopt Hans Rosling’s (www.gapminder.org) call to liberate the public data held in user-unfriendly formats, our approach is new in exploring the possibilities of a context-centred graphical news magazine in examining what constitutes ‘liberation of data’. The key idea is to visualise data as a communicative tool through which to expose inequalities as a function of globalisation.

We propose that globalised contexts demand alternative communicative spaces to mainstream media that allow diversity, plurality, intersubjectivity and new forms of interrogation.

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About the author

Nicola Kaye is a lecturer in visual arts and co-ordinator of the Master of Arts (Visual Arts) course at Edith Cowan University in Perth. Currently she is examining the social application of visuality in developing alternative communicative spaces, and is completing her PhD analysing these concerns within an online/offline dynamic. She has had a number of national and international exhibitions and conferences dealing with how to build social awareness through visual art, specifically in her online residency and exhibition Physical/Virtual Sites at PICA in (2005-2006). Some related experiences include, exhibiting in the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) (2004, 2006, 2007), curating Representations of the Real (BEAP) 2007, exhibiting in Shanghai (2002) and Guangzhou (2007) and a lecture at Glasgow School of Art in (2004). She is presenting at the forthcoming International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA) in Singapore.

 

Stuart Medley is a lecturer in graphic design at Edith Cowan University in Perth. Formerly he lectured in design at Otago University in New Zealand and has presented design papers in Turkey and Lebanon. His work has been consistently published in Neomu magazine in New York. His designs have been published in several reference books including Rotovision’s, Grids: Creative Solutions for Graphic Designers, and Harper Design Imprints’ Typographics 5, Big Type and Design Rules. Medley has been a professional communication designer in Australia for 14 years. He has worked in print, multimedia, animation and video graphics. Currently Stuart is a partner in, and the designer for, Hidden Shoal Recordings, a critically acclaimed record label with a growing stable of international artists. He is completing his Ph.D. in the area of visual perception based on the paradoxical premise that less realism in an image equates to more accurate communication.