Progetto Grafico 31 — “Around the body” — Contents

Edited by Claude Marzotto, Jonathan Pierini, Silvia Sfligiotti

This issue examines in depth the relationship between body and design. The discussion includes a historical perspective while also examining contemporary implications and examples, particularly in the light of digital technology.
Textual and visual contributions are concentrated around three themes: the representation of the body in different kinds of communication processes — from control to advertising, and from propaganda to the exploration of artistic languages; attention to production and process as a part of design in its relational, material and physical dynamics; the historical significance of somatic practices in design education and their new-found importance in present-day educational programs.

Claude Marzotto, Jonathan Pierini, Silvia Sfligiotti
Around the body

This issue examines in depth the relationship between body and design. The discussion includes a historical perspective while also examining contemporary implications and examples, particularly in the light of digital technology.

Claude Marzotto, Maia Sambonet
Vis-à-vis. Face to face with graphics

Visual strategies and relationship dynamics in the representation
of the face.

Lucia Miodini
Measuring men and women. Instruments, theories and practices in anthropometry

In the last decades of the 19th century and in the early 20th century the human body became a field of inquiry in which police identification photos and anthropomorphic measurements played a fundamental role.

Gabriele Colombo, Federica Bardelli, Carlo De Gaetano
Digital bodies. An inventory of production techniques

Maria Pia D’Orazi
Ankoku buto. Dance, photography and visual arts in the Japanese Avant-Garde of the Sixties

At the beginning of the Sixties an experimental dancer named Tatsumi Hijikata revolutionized the theatrical scene with his “anatomic disintegration”: he wanted to rewrite history by building the image of a new body. An entire generation of artists revolved around him, and the body was no longer an object to narrate but a subject that tells itself and its memory.

Elisa Angella, Nicoletta Raffo
The body as a sign in the communication of the Islamic State

Visual investigation and symbolic interpretation of the video document
A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross, produced by the terrorist group Islamic State, in which the body, as protagonist, takes on the role of narrative device.

Silvia Sfligiotti
Taxonomy of the designer

While trying to construct meaning and a role in the world for their practice, designers have helped define their existence to the public thanks to the images of themselves they have created and distributed. From the avant-garde to the contemporary, from the search for objectivity to direct self-exposure:
a gallery of revealing (self) portraits.

Processes

Evening Class, Fanette Mellier, Fictional Collective, Moniker, Erica Preli
What is a designer. People, places, processes

Jonathan Pierini
Graphic Means. Interview with Briar Levit

In Spring 2014 Briar Levit launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for the production of Graphic Means, a documentary exploring graphic design production of the 1950s through the 1990s — from linecaster to photocomposition, and from paste-up to pdf.

Tereza Ruller
Action to Surface. Rethinking the value of surface production in terms of performance

We designers are used to presenting graphic design as a surface‑centric practice. Action to Surface asks where the value of design comes from nowadays and how it establishes links between action, designer and surface.

Giovanni Anceschi
The somatic turning point

Taking a look at art, design and the disciplines of movement to rediscover the dominance of the Leib, the living body.

Education

Roberto Gigliotti, Jonathan Pierini
To make a dance floor you just need to dance. Conversation with Laure Jaffuel

With their work at the Sandberg Instituut, Laure Jaffuel and Elise van Mourik expand the concept of design education with practices related to situation and consciousness of body presence in space.

Chiara Barbieri
Daily Bauhaus: an incomplete glossary

Somatic and sensory practices, key elements in the teaching and lifestyle of teachers and students, are here outlined in a concise array of facts and images.

Azalea Seratoni
The body is education

In the present scenario of design education experiments are emerging that explore the senses as an indispensable condition to produce knowledge through the body.

Off Topic

Roberto Pieracini, ico-D, Francesco E. Guida, Daniela Piscitelli, Giovanni Anceschi
For Giancarlo Iliprandi

Progetto grafico remembers Giancarlo Iliprandi (Milan, March 15, 1925 — September 15, 2016), honorary member of Aiap, through those who knew him.
To accompany our thoughts, Monica Fumagalli Iliprandi has selected some of the images Giancarlo Iliprandi chose for his honorary degree, awarded by the Politecnico di Milano in 2002.

Andrea Antinori, Luciano Perondi
Information illustration: a dialogic analysis of synsemic illustration

Can we observe illustrated artifacts as written texts? Let’s take a look at some examples of illustration whose drawn features are integrated with a non-linear intelligible and explicit text.

Michele Galluzzo
GGK Milano: “Are graphic designers still lead players?”

A mix between graphic design and new advertising strategies: the campaigns of Italian-Swiss agency GGK from the Sixties to the Eighties.