創造處理: 50與60年代藝術中表格設備的跨領域研究(I)

Thought as a support on which collected visual data and inspiration sources can be arranged in order to facilitate creation and stimulate originality, mood boards have recently received a renewed attention in the academic field, stressing its efficiency as a tool helping designers to solve design problems. The importance such tabular devices have earned in the field can be measured on the one side through the way design education has promoted its usage by teaching its fundamentals to design students, while on the other side the software industry has striven to develop virtual equivalents that can be used on computers. Besides these recent developments, one can observe to which extent such devices have influenced other fields, if we take into account the way screenwriters and production designers have transposed these production tools within the fictional world, by adapting or translating in TV crime fictions the field of applications of the mood board as a problem-solving tool into the case boards used by fictional detectives. Though these recent examples may imply that the device is recent, no comprehensive study have until now delineated the outlines of its origins. The research project aims therefore at reconsidering the history of the device, by charting its presence inside and outside the field of design. Given the prevalence of tabulated-driven creation in different fields of artistic production during the 1950s and the 1960s, a particular attention will be granted to artists, designers, and writers, who used tabular devices, theorized them, accompanied their creative process, or illustrated the principles of assemblage and relationships establishment in their works through the technique of collage. A trans-disciplinary approach of the working practices in design as evidenced by the figures of Saul Bass and Charles and Ray Eames in the United States, those developed almost at the same time around the principles and aesthetic of the tackboard among the members of the Independent Group in Britain, and the development of the cut-ups in literature, photography, and painting by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs will help us to reconsider the similarities existing between these different works, sometimes both at the formal and conceptual levels, and evaluate the reasons that led diverse practitioners active in different disciplines to employ similar principles of production. If, as David Banash has pointed out the culture of collage that characterizes and punctuates twentieth-century creation may explain the similarities we want to underline between these different creators, there are also other factors that need to be explained. The prevalence of the tabular device such as the mood board in today’s creation forces us in this respect to evaluate the cognitive mechanisms at work when it is used.