30/30: Ads for Alfieri & Lacroix by Franco Grignani
Launched in 1896, the Milan-based printer of Alfieri & Lacroix found its truest leader in Dario Morani, a pharmacist and sportswriter who joined as general manager one year after it was purchased from its founders by Antonio Crespi in 1924. In addition to Morani, Crespi hired his former military school classmate Antonio Boggeri, a musician and photographer, to work alongside him. The time was deeply formative for Boggeri and by 1933 he had opened the legendary Studio Boggeri, a design office that employed Bruno Monguzzi, Bruno Munari, Max Huber, Walter Ballmer, Enzo Mari, Bob Noorda, Albe Steiner, and many others. From the beginning, Alfieri & Lacroix pioneered a then-new form of printing known as zincography, or photogravure. The method was ideal for Boggeriâs evolving style, which mixed tones and rhythms like music and layered images atop images like filmic montage. The deeply synthetic and persuasive style suited both commerce and Fascist propaganda. While Morani abstained from joining the Fascist party and was placed under constant surveillance, Alfieri & Lacroix printed travel guides to Libya and even an illustrated edition of Benito Mussoliniâs Voci DâItalia alongside children'sâ books and orchestra posters.
In the postwar years, Morani needed to restore the printing houseâs status as a high-quality commercial firm that remained technologically cutting-edge, and he turned to another Studio Boggeri alumni to help: Franco Grignani. Trained in architecture and reared in Futurism, Grignani took Boggeriâs methods and built on them. Where Boggeri made planes, Grignani made worlds. His twisting, liquid forms blur, stretch, knot, and puddle in space, and then fuse back to the flat plane on which they sit. A few of these posters date from 1960 and their formal experimentation culminates in Grignaniâs most famous commercial work, the pseudonymously-created Woolmark logo from 1964, which debuted in London in the moment of Bridget Rileyâs paintings (Riley was an art director at J. Walter Thompson until 1962) and Mary Quantâs fashions, along with the birth of psychedelia. Often rendered on black, Grignani's compositions are variously evocative of the photographic negative, the projected image, and the illuminated imagery of the computer screen. By 1970, a photo-driven montague technique that started as a way of mobilizing the masses by synthesizing a coherent utopian ideal was being used by Grignani to evoke a shattered, dystopian dread in his covers for Philip K. Dickâs Time out of Joint and Ray Bradburyâs The Day It Rained Forever.
Commissioned by Alexander Tochilovsky, Director of the Herb Lubalin Center of Design and Typography, for the exhibition "Thirty: 1985â2015," in which 30 critics reflect on 30 pieces from the collection for the Center's 30th Anniversary.
What is a circuit? At its simplest, a circuit is a closed loop, but most circuits are more complex: they contain multiple routes, flows, nested loops, and more. Some are serial, some are parallel. Some are diagrammed, some are not. This workshop will probe the visual form of the circuit, its technical and artistic representations, and its metaphorical and cultural extensions.
Over ten years before he established information theory at Bell Labs, mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon published his masterâs thesis on A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits, which used boolean algebra to model electrical systems, and, in the process, helped Bell to simplify the phone system. His famous diagram of information theory has the feeling of a circuit:
Above, from top: Shannon's information theory diagram; Shannon with Theseus and the maze.
Years later, Shannon would investigate artificial intelligence by placing a mechanical mouse in a circuit-based maze. The mouse was named Theseus, after the original Greek hero in the story of the labyrinth. As artists Olaf Nicolai and Jan Wenzel describe in their book Four Times through the Labyrinth, the myth of labyrinth arose in response to the growth of the city, and, indeed, centuries later, Thomas Pynchon observes the same idea in The Crying of Lot 49:
San Narciso lay further south, near L.A. Like many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway. But it had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky; and that, she supposed, would set the spot apart, give it an aura. But if there was any vital difference between it and the rest of Southern California, it was invisible on first glance. She drove into San Narciso on a Sunday, in a rented Impala. Nothing was happening. She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. Smog hung all round the horizon, the sun on the bright beige countryside was painful; she and the Chevy seemed parked at the centre of an odd, religious instant. As if, on some other frequency, or out of the eye of some whirlwind rotating too slow for her heated skin even to feel the centrifugal coolness of, words were being spoken. She suspected that much.
Pynchonâs character Oedipa Maas traces her way through the overwhelming circuitry of San Narciso in the way that the Greek goddess Ariadneâs thread helps Theseus find his way out of the terrifying labyrinth in the myth. As Sadie Plant, who translated Nicolai and Wenzelâs book, observes in her own brilliant essay âShuttle Systems,â
Ariadne's thread, and the famous contest in which the divine Athena tore mortal Arachne's weaving to shreds, are among the many mythical associations between women and webs, spinsters and spiders, spinning yarns and storylines. [âŠ] If the weaving of such magical spells gives priority to the process over the completion of a task, this tendency is implicit in the production of all textiles.
For Plant, the string is a route and the textile is a circuit. In the collaborative, communal, distributed, and often unrecognized work of weaving, she sees the origin of the modern information age.
Ulrich Beck, who sadly passed away this January, saw the modern age as a set of loops as well. Some of these circles were virtuous, many were vicious. Unchecked globalization produced atomized and often alienated individual subjects while unabated technological acceleration produced a social order that was increasingly incapable of dealing with the threats it had created. Modernism, said Beck, had gone off track, hit a dead end in the ever-forward maze of progress. It now must reflect on how to place itself back on course. Only a more reflexive form of modernism could counter the crisis of Beckâs risk society.
Above: One solution to the Knights Tour.
We could go on and on along this route, weaving a careful Knightâs Tour across the 64 squares our chessboard, only to pause and remember theorist Friedrich Kittlerâs observation that
The last historical act of writing may well have been the moment when, in the early â70s, the Intel engineers laid out some dozen square meters of blueprint paper (64 square meters in the case of the later 8086) in order to design the hardware architecture of the first integrated microprocessor.
But, as architectural historian John Harwood rightly points out, there are others who see the modern printed circuit board as not symbolic but factually direct, a thing that represents primarily through its own illegibility or opacity:
[Microchip drawings] are unique in that, unlike drawings of earlier logic machines, there is little distinction between what is being represented and the representing. They are not symbolic. [âŠ] These designs were in fact not meant to be seen. [âŠ] They are the most complex patterns people have ever made, and because of their intricacy they can be deciphered completely only by a computer.
Above: Sam Lucente, Diagram of Dynamic Random-Access-Memory Chip (1984).
Thatâs curator Cara McCarty in the catalogue for her wonderful â90s MoMA survey Information Art: Diagramming Microchips. Over two decades later, the artist Trisha Donnelly would include these same diagrams in her MoMA show Artistâs Choice. Both McCarty and Donnelly see circuits everywhere they look: in town grids and textiles, modern architecture and Mondrians.
Above, from top: Turin city plan; Anni Albers wall hanging; Mies Van Der Rohe interior for Dominion Centre, Bank Pavilion, Toronto; Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie.
Is there any escape? Whatâs outside the closed circuit? Keeping the circle closed may seem to make us secure, but as Hardt and Negri assert, we now live in the world of Empire, in which all subjectivity is inside the global ring. Writer and theorist Suhail Malik suggests a more activated perspective, at least where art is concerned. Art, he instructs, must exit the Contemporary Art world to save itself. Contemporary Art, in other words, may be a dead end.
To conclude as we started: What is a circuit? Maybe it has less to do with what you produce than how you arrive. Maybe it describes something not individually comprehensible but complexly coherent. As any group would, over the next few days weâll look for ways to tie it all together.
Above, from top: Western Union wire-wrapping methods; Sidrax Organ by Ciat-Lonbarde; Stripboard practice circuit; electrical engineering notation; wire-o binding sample.
Assignment:
Our task is to publish a printed primer on the circuit, as it relates to our work, our world, and ourselves, assembled from loose-leaf dossiers (8.5 x 11 inches) in routes selected by each of you, with no two copies the same. Spiral-bound and ever changing, these primers will have no beginning, no end. Finally, as a class, we will produce a single flat âcircuitâ that lays these various sequences out as a whole.
Rough schedule:
â Friday, 1â7pm: Kickoff class (45 mins), desk crits and ideation (2 hrs), short presentations and knowledge sharing (1 hr), additional development until we break, first-draft dossier pages due for Saturday morning.
â Saturday, 9:30â7pm: Workshop (bring one copy for every member of the class) and critique pages (2 hrs), revise pages with feedback (1.5 hrs), break into groups of two and sequence all dossiers according to a rationale (1.5 hrs), bind and make circuit books and wall display (4 hrs+).
â Sunday, 10amâ1pm: Finish wall display (1 hr), final crit and discussion (2 hrs).
Above, from top: Entry sign at MoMA's Good Design show; the Eames splint on display in MoMA's collection; the Eames splint; the Bionic Power leg brace.
In 1942 Charles and Ray Eames produced a leg splint made from lightweight, inexpensive molded plywood, a material they would continue to refine and innovate with in the decades that followed. The object, a product of collaboration with the US military, was soon acquired for the Museum of Modern Art by Eliot Noyes, who, along with Philip Johnson and Edgar Kaufmann Jr., helped to establish MoMAâs targeted advocacy of low-cost, everyday, primarily consumer-driven design known as âGood Designâ for a series of shows Kaufmann initiated in the 1950s. The impact of the Good Design movement still drives much of the popular understanding of designâs social utility and ethical objectives.
In a lecture called âDo the Math,â Bill McKibben estimates the world will have emitted an additional 565 gigatons of CO2, enough to raise the global temperature by a perilous 2°C, by 2028. The milestone comes nearly a century after the establishment of MoMAâs architecture department and its landmark survey of International Design. Peak oil will likely arrive soon after that, around the centennial of the creation of the Eamesâs leg splint.
In 2008, Max Donelan founded Bionic Power around a different kind of leg prosthetic, one that harvests energy from human motion itself. Noting that granola bars have about 100x amount of energy / unit mass as batteries, Donelan shows how a simple leg brace can be used to power a light or, in an extension of the Eamesâs military origins, keep soldiers in contact on-the-go. More collectively, Pacesetters, another project from 2008, proposed a platform that would allow the capture of 5â7 watts of human energy per footfall during a busy subway rush hour, enough to power a highrise buildingâs lights over a 24-hour period.
With the example of the Eames splint and its contemporary extensions in mind, I wonder what the 100th anniversary of the âGood Designâ shows of the 1950s might look like and what social utility a centenary update might propose. What sort of ethical claims might this new show make? And how would it bring multiple products â connected, renewable, everyday, low-cost â into alignment with one another? And, because questions of energy are always related to questions of timescale, how might the political scenario be changed if these revised âGood Designâ shows of 2050 were widely embraced by 2150?
I'm a fun-maximizer. Work is hard, but I work hardest when I'm having fun. When I joined Project Projects five years ago it was really fun. We were five people in a shared office. The server was held together with tape. But we worked our asses off. We got a new office. We grew to 18 people. It was still fun. We created identities for museums and academic programs. We invented original and compelling interactive projects for artists, architects, philosophers, and publications. We made engaging spaces. We developed complex identities and strategies. We did challenging books and editorial work. We contemplated the cultural possibilities for new tools. We worked globally and locally. We spoke and wrote and taught and advocated for design with our clients and beyond. We hustled and hustled -- eventually, we all started to need to find fun in new places.
Prem started a gallery, and he started having more fun. Adam started an independent press, and he started having more fun too. I got a chance to spend six months in Rome writing, collaborating, and learning with some of the most intelligent, talented, and creative people I have ever met. That was a hell of a lot of fun. I am a really lucky guy.
At a certain point out on my own, I realized I wanted to stay out on my own. I wish the team at Project Projects all the best. They are so talented and I have learned tremendously from each of them. Iâm grateful to have been a part of the studio. In Italian, "ciao" can be used for both hello and goodbye. I think this is great. Ciao Project Projects -- it was fun while it lasted.
Above: Adam, Prem, and I at Michelle Obama's National Design Awards luncheon at the White House in 2011.
Since we met in December, I've spent some time thinking and writing about Content Management Systems, or CMSs. Nearly every web project we do at Project Projects these days seems to start with curious clients asking about the CMS we'll be using. Inevitably, they've heard about a few. Wordpress? Drupal? Cargo? Expression Engine? I always cringe at this, and try to explain that the process begins by establishing some goals, asking some questions, and iteratively moving from general functional requests to specific functional objectives. The assumption is that we'll pick the right CMS, or CMSs, for the job when we understand the job itself -- and often we'll build a good chunk of it from scratch too.
But people aren't wrong to ask these questions. When you find out your parents are moving to a new town, inevitably you wonder what life will be like when you get there. Can you walk to the library? Is there a good movie theater nearby? Are the neighbors nice? Where can you go for a hike? New spaces establish new relationships. A CMS is like this too. Some are created for writing blogs. Some are created for managing images. The original CMSs were actually DMSs and were created for managing large sets of documents in distributed office environments in the early 1980s. A well-designed CMS is not an all-purpose tool -- its creators likely endowed it with a point-of-view. Indexhibit wants you to make a portfolio, so if you want to make a blog you have to hack it up a bit. Wordpress wants you to make a blog, so if you want to make a make a store you've got to add a plugin or two. Expression Engine creates a strong distinction between the front-end presentation of content and the back-end editing environment. Drupal tends to conflate the two.
Above. Tumblr's original homepage.
Tumblr is a CMS that is similarly opinionated about how it should be used. In a 2005 post that anticipated Tumblr's origins a year later, blogger Jason Kottke defined a "tumblelog," from which Tumblr gets its name, as "a quick-and-dirty stream of consciousness [...] really just a way to quickly publish the 'stuff' that you run across every day on the web." The tumblelog is a speedier, simpler form of blogging (also known as microblogging) that's focused on sharing data objects themselves instead of the posts that otherwise have to frame, contextualize, or contain them. In Tumblr's case, seven such objects may be posted: texts (closest to conventional blog posts), photos, quotes, links, chat transcripts, audio, and video. As a result of this structural decision, producing content on Tumblr is less like essay-writing than like creating an unending, identity-driven moodboard or collage -- one that expresses a specific idea in some cases, but, more commonly, suggests a whole and more diffuse sensibility. Tumblelogs are ever-updating, somewhat prolonged, variable in media, public by default, and identity-driven by nature. Kind of like a thesis, I suppose.
But isn't Tumblr basically a tool for reblogging animated GIFs? Yes, for the simple reason that doing so is in many ways a culmination of the qualities of tumblelogs I've listed above. To update Tumblr constantly and forever with original content is impossible; it helps to copy something from someone else every once in awhile. Animated GIFs are not just variable media, they are hybrid media -- proto-image-videos often enhanced with text, overheard soundbytes, or breezy quotations. They are the Tumblr ĂŒber-content. Their subject is frequently pop culture, that most public of topics. Reproducing them paradoxically produces identity by creating a heightened sense of affiliation. None of us is an island, after all -- especially online.
What would it mean to view a thesis as a content management system for projects? What would it mean to view other creative formats this way? Is a typeface a content management system? A poster? What about a book? Or a sonnet? It seems to me worth exploring some of these questions in our time together, and, along the way, seizing some of the more opportune qualities that CMSs and particularly tumblelogs offer: speed, ease, dissemination, reproducibility, and so on.
One last note: My time with you is incredibly short. Just three four-hour workshops and some office hours. It's not enough to plan an exhibition, especially one that's months away and integrated with so many other departments at RISD. However, if you want to see an exhibition as a CMS for a collective display of thesis research, one that helps to structure and make public the work of the group, then I think this project could certainly feed into that one without the limited wallspace, budget, access issues, or other constraints of the actual exhibition. You could see it, in other words, as proto-exhibition -- one in which compression of message and connectivity of content are certainly requisite.
Warmest wishes for the New Year and see you all in 2014!
Cheers, RG
CLASS BLOG
Our class blog is located here:
http://risdwinteression2014.tumblr.com
Each of you will receive an email inviting you to join the blog as a member to the RISD address listed above. Let me know if you do not receive this email invitation. Once you log on, youâll see that Iâve added content for each of Tumblrâs supported content types. Iâll repeat these here. Please consider them an introductory set of readings for our class.
TEXT: Cory Arcangel on the aesthetic effects of file compression. [PDF]
PHOTO: "How CMS works" diagram
QUOTE: The Boston Globe's Craig Fehrman on Hannah Sullivan's book "The Work of Revisionâ
An equally big part of this change, Sullivan suggests, was a shift in literary technology. In 1850, Britain was producing about 100,000 tons of paper per year; by 1903, that number had increased to 800,000 tons per year. Printers started setting type by machine, which was five times faster than setting it by hand and allowed page proofs to be easily shared and corrected. Before long, authors were guiding their books through a long and potentially fertile process: first a manuscript, then a typescript, perhaps a magazine serial, and finally a series of proofs for the book. âOne thing it allowed for that revision by handwriting didnât is massive structural transformation,â Sullivan says. âSome writers reduced their work massively, and some expanded it massively.â
In all this, the most important technology may have been the typewriter. Today we equate a keyboard with speed, the fastest way to get words down, but as Sullivan points out this wasnât always the case. In fact, a typescript offered a chance to slow down. Most Modernist writers, like Hemingway with âThe Sun Also Rises,â wrote by hand and then painstakingly typed up the results. That took time, but seeing their writing in such dramatically different forms -- handwritten in a notebook, typed on a page, printed as a proof -- encouraged them to revise it aggressively. âMuch as I loathe the typewriter,â W.H. Auden wrote, âI must admit that it is a help in self-criticism. Typescript is so impersonal and hideous to look at that, if I type out a poem, I immediately see defects which I missed when I looked through it in manuscript.â
LINKS: Blogger Jason Kottke on tumblelogs in 2005 and on "the death of the blog" in 2013. Also, The New York Times on Scoop, its in-house CMS.
CHAT: Rhizome's Michael Connor talks with theorist Lev Manovich
AUDIO: David Karp on the founding of Tumblr
VIDEO: Marjorie Perloff lectures on her book "Unoriginal Geniusâ
CLASS SCHEDULE
Our class schedule and assignments are listed below. On 01/17 and 01/31 we will meet in the GD MFA conference room from 10am to 2pm, with a break for lunch from 12:30-1pm. I will also have office hours by appointment (20 mins per student) from 2-5pm. Email me directly if you would like to set up a time. Meetings are first-come, first-served.
FRIDAY 01/17: Create eight original Tumblr posts derived from your thesis. Seven of these should follow Tumblr's pre-existing formats (text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video). By original I mean simply that you should take the photo, conduct the interview, generate the link, record the audio or video, etc. Use your best judgement. For the eighth post, create an animated GIF. Tag the posts with your name #firstlast and send me the tag landing page as documentation of your work. Complete these posts by Thursday, 10am. At this time I will select notable posts for discussion in class and tag them #discuss. If you're eager to be part of this roundup, attempting to get my attention with clarity, precision, provocation, graphic dazzle, or some other method will likely serve you well.
FRIDAY 01/31: Remake, revise, or revisit posts by seven of your classmates in each of Tumblr's formats through the lens of your own thesis. As with originality above, use your best judgement here as to what constitutes a remake. For the eighth post, write a short text describing your choices with links to the original posts. I will re-check tag landing pages on Thursday at 10am and select notable posts for discussion. See also Artforum's "The Year in Re-â.
SATURDAY 02/08: We will meet at Project Projects in New York for a "creative critique,â an attempt at critical co-creation rather than pure reaction and analysis. This will extend the project by remaking the entire blog itself into something else. My deepest thanks to our amazing creative critics:
Jennifer Benka, Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets
Sarah Hromack, Director of Digital Media at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Troy Therrien, Chief Architect, Cloud Communication Software at Columbia GSAPP
Before Tuesday 12pm, please meet as a group and come together with a short, open brief for how the entire class blog could be remade, reperformed, reproduced, or refracted in some critical way. I will pass these along to the critics. When preparing your brief, tell the creative critic as to how you'd like them to prepare (readings from the blog, outside the blog, ideas, images, questions, etc). Be considerate of their limited time and plan to come in with an open, collaborative attitude -- your goal is to empower the critics to be active participants in the work.
FRIDAY 02/21: Each group must produce a report, in PDF and for the class blog, on the state of your briefing -- both visual and verbal -- for my final review. You can handle this a number of ways -- each group member can do their own page and you can simply deliver them together, or you can work collaboratively to shape your brief. I'm interested in knowing the following:
What was your original brief? Who was in your group? What roles did you play?
What did you discuss? How did you engage the critic? What was your process?
Did you revise the brief at all? Did you come to any conclusions?
What did you produce during the session? Drawings, diagrams, lists, visualizations, etc
What are the next steps? Where did you determine this go from here?
What did you learn from the class? What are some parting thoughts on The CMS?
REFLECTIONS
I was amazed by the work and discussion that this class produced. In many ways it was one of the simplest workshops I have ever attempted â really just based on a single idea â but the students pushed this idea far beyond what I ever had expected, much to their credit.
Following the first class and second classes, we pooled our notes. Listing them below, discussion topics included:
The thesis should include both large and small projects. It shouldn't be all virtuoso projects with no smaller-scale works. It must be paced.
You can make projects out of research â an image archive can become a project.
If much of student work is essentially destined to be circulated on the internet, what if we design with this eventuality in mind and treat it as a constraint?
âLet Tumblr be Tumblr.â The CMS will fragment the content, but it will also network it in a way that would be difficult without a mediating force. Past attempts by the students to form an overarching structure for their group show had either proved impossible or become acrimonious. Perhaps simply creating a shared space is enough to allow those connections to emerge organically.
Itâs possible to look at a CMS politically as something that allows for certain kinds of speech and restricts other kinds of speech. Is it a totalitarian regime? A democracy? What is the governmental model for our groupthink exercise?
Tags can feed into our project and we can feed on existing tags. Tags work magnetically to attract content from outside the discourse or the academy to our work.
Is tagging an action? Is it performative?
What does it mean to make this early, tentative work public? Does it force authorship? Does it remove the scrim of privacy that school carefully creates around individuals learning their craft? Is it good to work in public or is this part of the problem?
Itâs important to develop your own resources and references to ground your work. Invisible Cities is amazing but it also belongs to everyone. What readings, sources, and research in your thesis are your own? How are these currently positioned?
Why does the thesis need to be so humorless? It really doesn't.
A thesis is improved by thinking about its opposite. A thesis thatâs concerned with algorithms has to consider things that are made by accident or intuition. Often the thesis isnât so much about one thing as it is about the tension between something and its opposite. Many of the most interesting experiments and projects come from this exploration.
On this last point, students attempted to âbreakâ the CMS in a number of compelling ways. They made chatbots to create chat posts with. They stretched images to be so long as to crowd out other studentsâ posts in the scroll. They constructed serial stories from multiple post types and posted them in reverse-chronology so that they could only be read when looking at that individualâs page. They rethemed the blog so that it was unreadable or misleading. They correlated GIFs to the emotions listed on sports fan blogs. They played with Instagramâs square image format to produce abstract compositions. And so much more.
The final groups were asked to remake or translate the entire blog into something else. One group attempted to dilute the blog into something unrecognizable by reblogging a flood of posts from beyond the class, bringing the blog back to something like the state of the internet itself. Another retagged key entries and used this system to propose an exhibition scheme for spatializing the work. One team focused on a single post and derived an entire short play from it, which they performed. Another used Richard Serraâs âVerb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself,â (1967â1968) to perform a series of algorithmic and the photographic operations on the blogâs content itself. Finally, one group acknowledged the short one-day workshopâs limited time by opening a set of speculative potentials, which they described in short parables that envisioned the blog as inverted reality, as historic narrative, as physics lesson, as stage set, etc.
Earlier this year I learned I had received the Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize for Design 2014â5, an honor that will bring me to the Eternal City for six months starting in September to record a series of audio pieces on walking in Rome. An excerpt of my proposal, âWalk with me: Responsive guides to Romeâ is shared below. Translator William Weaver, whose interview spurred my proposal, passed away last November, about two weeks after this was written. He will be greatly missed.
My project came into focus after reading a taped, transcribed interview from 2001 with celebrated translator and former American Academy in Rome member William Weaver by the Paris Review for their series, âThe Art of Translation.â I have been interested in Weaver for some time, having delighted in his translations of Eco, then Calvino, and then other Italian authors since I was in high school. But Iâm also interested in the figure of the translator within the discourse of graphic design. In his essay âDesigner as Author,â designer Michael Rock proposes the translator as one of three alternative models for articulating a designerâs activity. âDesign is, in essence, the clarification of material or the remodeling of content from one form to another,â he writes, calling translation âa second art,â that is âneither scientific nor ahistorical,â with each attempt at translation conveying a certain time, place, and attitude. As with the role of the translator, âthe designer is the intermediary,â Rock suggests.
The Paris Review interview with Weaver is wide-ranging and digressive, covering everything from how Weaver first came to Rome with the American Field Service during WWII, to his travels, his process of translation with various authors, his thoughts on language and performance, and his work as an opera critic, biographer, and teacher. However, there were four anecdotes he shared that help to trace the contours of my proposal. Iâll splice the first one in here. Weaver describes refining a translation:
Quite often it can be technically correct but not sound right. The rhythm isnât quite right, and maybe it just needs a comma somewhere, or something like that. This is particularly true of Calvino. With Invisible Cities I read the whole book aloud. Charles Darden, an American friend who was studying music in Siena, about twenty miles away from my house, would come over for weekends because I had a huge Steinway, which he liked to play. And on Saturday after dinner we would have an extra glass of wine, and I would read three or four âInvisible Citiesâ -- my weekâs work -- to him. It was an enormous help. It wasnât a question of getting the words right; it was a question of getting the sound, the pace and the cadences right.
Weaver couldnât refine the translation entirely on his own. He had to do it over successive dialogues with a friend. The language was not just read it was performed, and it was done in a convivial setting, with wine and music. It is especially fascinating that Invisible Cites -- a book that is structured as a series of conversations and whose subjects include topologies, urban inventions, endless potentials, and a guided tour -- was translated this way. Calvino was interested in cybernetics: he gave a well-known talk in 1967 called âCybernetics and Ghosts.â Cybernetics is a discipline that attempts to theorize the complex interaction of people and technology through the metaphor of guiding or steering. Integral to cybernetics is the notion of feedback, a word with many meanings.
Weaverâs next anecdote touches on this:
I had problems with Calvino because he thought he knew English. He would fall in love with English words. Every now and then he would fiddle with a sentence in his English. At one point he fell madly in love with the word feedback, and he didnât realize that in America feedback is like closure or spinning out of control, something you hear constantly on television. Itâs jargon and clicheÌ, and you canât use it anymore. The word is dead to literature, but to him it was new and fascinating. He thought it was fun and so he kept putting it into this story where it really didnât belong, and I kept taking it out.
Feedback is a set of reactions to be read and interpreted. Here, Weaver resists Calvinoâs feedback about âfeedback.â He rebuffs Calvinoâs reaction to his suggestion, his critique. Though Weaver suggests the word is trendy and âdead to literature,â Calvino, whatever his English fluency, may have been right. Itâs still a word thatâs with us. Weaver points out that itâs constantly heard âon television.â This, too, is telling -- a technological word that arrives mediated by technology. Objects that broadcast an output signal like televisions and radios may get feedback distortion from receiving that information back as an input signal. Indeed, in cybernetics feedback is how technology shares information about itself to be interpreted by someone or something else. Between the oar and the oarsman there is feedback. Between the boat and the water there is feedback. Like Weaver and Calvino, or Weaver and Darden, or Weaver and almost anyone he describes, there is always a dialogue. Today, the word feedback is often aimed at a collective subject. âCall in and tell us your feedback,â says the anchor on the nightly news.
The third anecdote Iâll splice here from Weaverâs interview is about the mediating effect of technology on language. Iâll set it up by explaining that just before this point in the interview, Weaver has described how mass media has lessened the use of regional dialects in Italy:
I had a gardener in Tuscany. When I first knew him in the early sixties, weâd be in the vegetable garden and I would say, Arriguccio, do you think itâs going to rain today? He would look up at the sky, lick his forefinger and hold it up and say, No, I donât think so. I think itâll be OK today. By the end of our association, twenty years later, I would say, Arriguccio, is it going to rain today? And he would say, Well, thereâs a low-pressure mass moving in from northern Europe ... He would quote me the TV forecast, which is always wrong. He was much better when he licked his forefinger! Obviously, not just his Italian but his whole life had been influenced by television.
As someone who spends so much time outdoors caring for nature, the gardnerâs lived experience is reliable, and he has developed a number of techniques for reading his environment on which others, like Weaver, have come to depend. With the mediated language of the weather report, the gardnerâs home-grown intuition is substituted for abstracted data, to less accurate effect. Despite the fact that more standardized Italian might make the job of the translator easier, Weaver seems to mourn the change. Perhaps language is more straightforward, but in that case thereâs less to translate. The localized, instinctive, human source, which provides so much of the translatorâs spark of insight into the deeper meaning of a text, is gone.
Finally, Iâll bring up a soundbyte of Weaver describing his walks in Rome:
At Moraviaâs there were a lot of Italian people, but there were Americans too. Thatâs where I met Francis Steegmuller. He liked to take walks, and Rome was a great city for walking. In those days people would call you up -- Elena, who liked to take walks, would call up at lunchtime and say, What are you doing this afternoon? Why donât we take a walk? You can walk practically everywhere in Rome and you see interesting things. I used to do the same thing with Eleanor Clark, who was a serious walker, with her notebook and her pencil out. Moravia took endless walks every day by himself. I would run into him on the street, and he would say, What are you doing? And I would say, Nothing. Heâd say, Well, letâs walk, and weâd just walk up and down the streets with no particular aim. It was a city where you really felt that you could meet anybody. I mean, I could have met the pope. Well, I actually did meet the pope!
In HTML, a hover (or a:hover) is one of four pseudo-classes that can be added to an anchor. Links have two anchors, a source and a destination. The markup for a link defines them both. A new link can be expressed as a:link. Once it's been visited, it can be expressed as a:visited. The moment of clicking the link can be expressed by a:active. Approaching the link, nearing it, can be expressed with a:hover. Unlike new and visited links, hovering leaves no visible trace and creates no visible record. It's a game of peek-a-boo. For a moment, the page reveals something more about itself than it has first expressed. At this moment we glimpse some key vulnerability -- what it would like you to do, what you could do, what it thinks you want, what it wants you to want.
We used to point at what we wanted with a mouse or a trackpad, including the verbs to thread it all together with meaning. This PRINT that. This SAVE that. This LOAD that. This this this this BOOKMARK. Pointing required confirmation, and it created a delay. I'm pointing at you, you said. You're pointing at me, it said back. Correct, you said. That all took a moment. In that time, it was easy to change what we were pointing at, or decide not to point at the verb that would make the pointing real. To hesitate. To reconsider. Across the room, you might glimpse someone, who might furtively look back for a moment. Suspended for a moment. Verbs, however, are literal. Once verbs were involved, you were involved. You'd made a choice.
In the age of touchscreens, though, the hover state has started to disappear. Touchscreens use direct manipulation. Here, there is no confirmation necessary because there's no distance. No one knows you're watching. You're invisible. Then, suddenly, your touch signals a presence, a desire. It feels more immediate to you, but the touchscreen is in the dark. It has nothing to tease you with, to hint at, to make you want, because it doesn't know you're there. And crucially, it's mute. No verbs. Not this ROTATE that, just a gesture. Not this CLOSE that, just a gesture. A mouse grazed. The touchscreen gropes. Instead of a softshoe, there's a cartwheel. Instead of acknowledging the screen, the new illusion is attempting to dematerialize it.
This is an understandable progression. Perhaps it's the course we'll stay with. Nevertheless, I will miss catching a reflection in the shop window late at night. Watching ripples on the water after someone's been sitting by the lake. Feeling the breeze kick up all of a sudden and then fade away, leaving the world silent and still. Not gestures I've made, but momentary, vivid, fleeting apparitions that inhabit an unknown space. On a screen, images might fade up over columns of text like ghosts only to disappear again. Grave faces in black and white might colorize and and glint back at you. A cursor might swing like a flashlight in the dark, never coming to rest. Day-glo gradients might twist like kaleidoscopes on a cracked display. I might skim the surface of words and find worlds upon worlds. I might see my breath and gasp, for a moment, at the invisible made vivid. If interactive technology really is a branch of cinema, as technologist Ted Nelson insists, I hope the show's not over.
But energy moves around. As I write this, the Democrats and Republicans are in a standoff, with the US government in a state of temporary shutdown. At some point, there will be some kind of resolution, though not necessarily a lasting one. For now, though, the story is about the standoff. Standoffs are interactions that precede real choices. Each side attempts to signal to the other what could happen, but communication is oblique and obscured. Earlier versions of this standoff linger in the background like a haze. The two sides sit in an unnatural state of suspension. They are not flying high or standing still. They are circling each other. They are hovering. You can never hover forever.
Remarks from Graphic Design: Under Discussion panel
To celebrate the Cooper-Hewitt's iteration of Graphic Design: Now in Production exhibition on Governors Island in 2012, co-curator Ellen Lupton organized a panel discussion that included Michael Bierut, Alice Twemlow, and me. I was delighted to take part. AIGA/NY has a full video of the discussion here. My comments are below. â RG
Thanks so much to Ellen and to Glen and everyone at AIGA/NY for asking me to parcipate tonight. I'm honored to join Michael and Alice onstage. Ellen asked us to keep our comments brief and to share a work that surprised us, an omission from the show, and a few questions for the group. Ellen, I will do as instructed.
Graphic Design: Now in Production catalogue (2012)
Speaking of instructions -- I contributed an essay to the show's catalogue about graphic design education, so let me tip my hand now and say that I'm far from a neutral observer here.
Off the Wall, Yale Thesis Show (2010)
Over the last decade, enrollment in graphic design graduate programs has been on a steady rise. Ellen and Alice both run graduate programs in design that were founded during this time, and all of us including Michael have taught at the graduate level.
While the show asks the question, How is design produced?, my essay asks the question, How are designers produced? Increasingly, graduate programs are part of the process. And yet their role has, I believe, been undertheorized.
Cover of In Alphabetical Order: File Under: Graphic Design, Schools, or Werkplaats Typografie
How has the culture of design become increasingly like the culture of school?
Christoph Keller, Kiosk: Modes of Multiplication
At the same, how have new sub-disciplines of design that have emerged from the academy -- like speculative design, design research, design thinking, and more -- expanded the field?
There are a number of projects in the show that have their roots as student work -- what does it mean to include these works in a representative sampling of work from the period?
Project Projects, Graphic Design: Now in Production announcement
Another role I played was that I contributed to the design of the exhibition itself as part of Project Projects. It was a highly collaborative process, involving many designers at the studio and across institutions, and our advertising strategy for the show tried to consider this context of collaborative production...
... by literally installing it at one-to-one scale to the entrance of the Manhattan ferry terminal.
This, of course, is a piece of graphic design, a banner. But itâs also about contexts of display -- it shows a wall from our studio on the wall of a public building downtown to advertise the walls of a gallery on an island across the way. Itâs about how design can move.
In shifting the show from the Walker, with the expectations a museum brings, to a former Army warehouse that includes the only public restroom on the island, we had a lot of discussions about these contexts. How does design enter the gallery? How does it change when it arrives? What might audiences stumbling on this show after a hot afternoon expect to discover?
From our perspective, though, it has been a delight to see a design show sited outside the traditional museum context. The result has been a design show is refreshingly earthy, content to compete for your attention in the way that most graphic design has to -- amidst the utter glut of design we encounter all around us.
Anyway, it would be good to chat about design's ever-changing relationship to the gallery, and I'm sure we will.
Hereâs a look inside the show itself.
Project Projects, Graphic Design: Now in Production exhibition design
We had a number of works in the show as well -- the Inventory Book series, some other publications, and our identity for SALT Istanbul, shown here in installation.
From this perspective, as a designer with work in the show, I'm eager to discuss the parameters for such an inclusion, and what these choices say about the design world we occupy today. The works shown in Graphic Design: Now in Production are eclectic and inclusive -- can we read from this a kind of atheoretical pragmatism in this period, an âeveryone in the poolâ approach to design that signals a break from the highly theorized postmodern turn in the 1990s? I suspect Alice may touch on these questions as well.
Christophe Szpajdel, selected logos
One of the biggest and most welcome surprises to me, then, was an identity-related project with a single designer but an equal sense of thematic variability -- Christophe Szpajdel's black metal band logos.
These âlogosâ fall outside the world of commercial branding and outside the commercial sphere in general -- Szpajdel, a self-taught graphic designer / forestry engineer, has designed over 7000 of these, working in trade for CDs from the commissioning band. In aggregate, they create an almost heraldic tradition for this subculture, confounding legibility, mixing naturalist pattern with Nouveau and Deco forms, and inspiring a kind of performative and even musical reading in their execution.
They are thrilling, and their relationship to identity is throughly complex and well-considered by Metahaven in their book Uncorporate Identity.
Metahaven, Facestate installation
Speaking of Metahaven, their commission "Facestate" was another great surprise. After seeing their first installation at the Walker, we discussed the project with them and attempted to design a space that might be even better for its presentation.
Facestate speculates about a future in which Facebook assumes an uncanny degree of political power -- and perhaps it already has, as the protests in the middle east and, later, across the US might suggest. On Tuesday, Ars Technica announced that Washington State will be the first state to enable voter registration via Facebook.
Cuban Council, Facebook logo
At first this sounds shocking, until you realize that Facebook is basically the body politic writ large -- one day, the success of Obamacare, Pell Grants, or campaign finance reform may rest on attaining a requisite number of likes. In this reality, every morning is Election Day and we never really ever stop voting with our attention.
Facebook's famously blank logo -- a quitely bold lowercase in an innocuous blue box -- is every bit the strategy of a service that aims to build a platform rather than a brand. Far from being aspirational like a fashion logo, Facebook aspires instead to be invisible -- the air we breathe and the literal ties that bind.
Brand New, Voting Wall installation
Currents of Facebookâs consensus-based culture drift through the show on Governors Island -- Brand New's installation, arguably the most popular part of the Governors Island show, asks visitors to vote on which rebranding efforts are most successful, a design world version of US Magazine's "Who wore it best?".
Google, selected Doodles
Differing from Facebook's identity, Google's changing doodles, also a surprise inclusion to me, serve to mitigate any empirical leanings the company may have with a folksy and homespun dedication to day-to-day contexts and constant change.
Facestate's relation to Facebook and Google's doodles nonwithstanding, Graphic Design: Now in Production's greatest omission, in my opinion, is categorical. Amidst its many media-based organizers -- books, posters, brands, magazines, film titles, and more -- interactive design does not appear.
Walker Art Center, Graphic Design in America exhibition
The show has a canonical leanings, following from the Walker's Graphic Design in America in 1988-9, shown here, and the Cooper-Hewitt's Mixing Messages in 1996. Works included in Graphic Design: Now in Production are contemporary with the release of iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and the founding of Facebook and Google. In other words, the show's timeline includes one of the greatest explosions of technological invention fueled by design in recent memory, yet it showcases relatively few samples of this in the exhibition.
What interaction design we do see in Graphic Design: Now in Production isn't called interaction design at all: we see LUST's posterwall through the frame of a poster metaphor, Google's doodles through the frame of a branding metaphor, The Guardian's iPad app through the frame of a publication metaphor. But interactive metaphors are always transitional -- think of the âhorseless carriageâ -- as paradigms shift, they form a temporary bridge to explain the new by way of the old. I wonder what's next.
Khoi Vinh, Subtraction.com
Khoi Vinh, whose influential website Subtraction I might have included in my own survey of the last decade-plus, has wondered where future web designers might go to find their canon. He absolutely has a point. And yet interactive projects are troublesome for museums: they are constantly being versioned, forked, upgraded, and changed.
What's more, there is little reason to travel to a museum to see these projects when we can all simultaneously enjoy them from the comfort of our living rooms. They are site-unspecific and fully responsive to any browsing context, with no fixed form.
Perhaps interactive design doesn't belong in a museum any more than a museum can engagingly acquire or display it. Perhaps, as we have already witnessed at Project Projects, it will simply transform museums themselves. As we already know, the newest wing of the museum is online.
Maybe there, curators can lend their insight and attention to include a sampling of interactive projects from our recent past -- I believe thereâs lots of good work to find.
Ben Pieratt, Dear Graphic and Web Designers, please understand that there are greater opportunities available to you
And while some of this interactive work is self-initiatiated or clientless, very little of it is defined in this way, and even many physical projects initiated by designers are distributed by those same designers and sold in the exhibition's shop. Has increased access to tools of production made the term "self-initiated" finally start to sound old-fashioned?
In short: What kind of work might increasingly educated, post-client designers aim to produce? How might galleries help to better contextualize it? And what kind of graphic design work might not be ânow in productionâ exactly, but soon to come?
I was so pleased to be invited by RGD Ontario to speak at their annual Design Thinkers conference, held in Toronto from 2-3 November 2011. They encouraged me to tackle any subject I wanted to, and, though I considered many options, I was most excited to to continue investigating the use of metaphors in design, particularly in the design of interfaces, which was a topic I had started thinking about in earnest earlier in the spring. That investigation was prompted by reasons I discuss in the talk, but there is some shared territory between this talk and my essay "I am a handle" for the Bulletins of the Serving Library. That essay came first and is the more literary effort; this talk both refines and adds to the essay's thinking, but it's a bit more nuts-and-bolts.
One thing I was happy to see was how many other speakers at Design Thinkers -- including Craig Mod, Christian Schwartz, Jessica Hische, Robert Wong, and even the great George Lois -- reflected on this topic, directly or indirectly, through their own talks.
As I was preparing the talk the world also said farewell to the incredible Steve Jobs, and I think much of what I've described here represents a study of some of the lessons I have learned from his astounding work and legacy. It's also interesting to note how quickly things change. In 2011 the debate around skeuomorphism and realism in user interface design was raging; posting this now, the debate has moved to the subject of flatness. The final part of the talk, which is not included in this video, was to touch on this "life cycle of metaphors," which I argue become more common as they become more networked. Verbally, this cooptation of the original metaphor results in new buzzwords. Visually, the same operation results in new styles. For Apple, removing the buttons people were used to using on their cell phones meant rendering new buttons that were "so good you could lick them" -- a surrogate that was good enough to click. As people have become more comfortable with the flat surface of the phone, however, buttons need no longer signal that same candy-curved surface in order to afford clicking. As Jobs himself noted to the New York Times when the original iPhone was released, not only had he removed buttons, he had overhauled the very operation of clicking-to-act with the principle of direct manipulation. "In [old] systems," he noted "users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or âverb,â to do something to it." However: âThere are no âverbsâ in the iPhone interface."
My thanks again for RGD Ontario for the opportunity, inspiring occasion, and good company.
*This talk was given at the Tishman Auditorium, The New School as part of the event "[Project Projects Project Projector](http://aigany.org/events/project-projects-project-projector/)," sponsored by AIGA/NY. As a prompt, Adam, Prem and I were asked to speak about how our passions informed our practice. My comments about "computational poetics" (for lack of a better phrase!) follow below.*  I want to start with this familiar image of Google auto-complete. It's interesting how the web is a kind of machine for generating and organizing text -- you put text in, you get more text out. And there are algorithms that structure the text output, so when you make a search, you expect something specific to happen as a result.  Hereâs [a website we made last year](http://projectprojects.com/the-divine-comedy/?view=thumb) for an exhibition at Harvard that takes its name from Danteâs famous epic poem -- it has a different kind of search bar.  You input text, but the field doesnât behave as youâd expect -- rather than searching the site, it searches the entire web. And rather than behaving consistently, its behavior changes, cycling through a series of searches from Google Images⊠ âŠto Wikipedia⊠ âŠto an Italian translation of your search phrase.  This isnât anything new -- machines have always changed the behavior of text, and the creation of a new tool often alters the usage of an existing one. This is a great interest of mine, especially in my critical writing. This is a slide of a series of re-printed artefacts I organized for the Italian magazine Mousse last year all about how machinery affects the speed at which we read -- it was called â[Time Warp](http://blog.linedandunlined.com/post/15307396171/time-warp).â The article started with idea of time as a pliable, formable material. On the left we see how photography altered language. This image depicts George Demeny, one of the early experimenters in chronophotography mouthing the phrase *je vous aime* in an effort to teach deaf patients to speak. On the right we see how the typewriter altered language, and specifically poetry, in a poem by Alan Riddell. The poem is called "hologrammer," itself a new technology, from Peter Finchâs collection of *[Typewriter Poems](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B002FKB46W/linedunlin-20/)* -- the poem consists of one phrase âthe exposure and reconsititution of an imageâ blasted into particles and then recombined.  The [sestina](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sestina) is a poetic form dating back to 12th Century Provence that works in a similar fashion to Riddellâs poem, breaking apart a fixed set of parts within the poem and then reconstituting them -- itâs composed of six six-line stanzas and one three-line stanza. The words that end each line of the first stanza are rotated algorithmically to complete the endings of each line for the following five stanzas. All six words are then used, two per line, in the final triad of the poem. This is a diagram of the sestina algorithm.  This is a different kind of diagram of the sestina, which I designed for the Yale Literary Magazine, where Prem and I first met, in fall 2000. Itâs a color sestina in which the black values of CMYK are rotated according to the sestina algortihm -- in the final triad, two black values are added together, which is why those lines are so dark in color.  I made this poster a few months after the color sestina. The headline of the poster, âSenior Project Exhibitions,â is made from the names of the artists who are part of the show -- one letter from each name is installed on a wall-like elevation.  Though I wasnât yet familiar with it, [this poem was destined to become a major influence](http://blog.linedandunlined.com/tagged/Emmett-Williams) -- you can see the similarities to the poster I showed a moment ago. This poem is called âsweetheartsâ and itâs written by Emmett Williams, who was a Fluxus artist, a Concrete poet, a theater critic, and a publisher. Williams was the editor of Peter Finchâs collection of *Typewriter Poems* that we saw earlier, where âhologrammerâ was from. âsweetheartsâ behaves a bit like âhologrammer,â taking a single word -- âsweetheartsâ -- as its entire structuring device. But unlike âhologrammer,â where only one phrase is discerneable and the rest of the poem is more about pattern and shape, "sweethearts" is an entire book-length love poem about a âheâ a âsheâ and a âwe,â all of whom inhabit this single word. Because the phonemes are not rearranged, the words rhyme both verbally and visually -- this page reads, âears that hear her swear her heart.â  Williams used the form only once. When he passed away in 2007, I decided to continue his exploration of the form. This is a Williams poem I wrote in 2008 based on the word â[spraypaint](http://blog.linedandunlined.com/post/403645259/spraypaint)â -- last year, JĂŒrg Lehniâs spraypainting robot [Hektor](http://hektor.ch/) installed the poem at the [Utrecht Manifest Biennal for Social Design](http://www.utrechtmanifest.nl/).  My search for words in a Williams poem begins with a very different sort of auto-completion exercize -- another hacked search bar of sorts. This is a terminal window that shows the output of a Perl script for a given word, in this case âspraypaint.â I put out a call for a [Williams Word Generator](http://blog.linedandunlined.com/post/403644030/468) in 2008, and within 24 hours we had this up and running. Thereâs actually a lot of work thatâs being done on computational poetics right now, but much of it focuses on the mechanics of screen reading and machine learning -- Iâm most interested, at least right now, on the computer as a kind of composition tool, like a typewriter.  Two years ago, I installed [a series of Williams poems at the W/â Gallery](http://withnyc.org/#derg). the gallery usually shows pairs -- one person *with* another person -- I was paired with [Dan Eatock](http://eatock.com/), who installed a series of clipframes in various permutations.  The source words for my Williams poems were the words used to describe Danielâs piece: âclipframesâ and âpermutations." The installations are site-specific -- in this case, the words were installed using press-on letters scavenged from a dozen or so LES hardware shops.  I like when these individual interests find opportunities to merge into client projects. [This is an identity](http://projectprojects.com/experiments-in-motion/?view=thumb) we made for a collaboration between Audi of America and Columbia GSAPP -- it was called âExperiments in Motion.â The project asked students at the architecture school to explore how new technologies of mobility like driverless cars and programmable groundplanes will reshape the city, and how the city will reshape the car. Our identity explored a kind of âfield theoryâ as the letters are allowed shift and reorganize themselves according to the bounaries of any space they inhabit, a meditation on nonlinear motion.  The website pushed this identity further, pairing the letters with animated GIFs by illustrator [Santtu Mustonen](http://www.santtumustonen.com/) and allowing each student to have their own customizable Tumblr theme, distributing student research onto a network that could be monitored in real time by the projectâs two coordinators.  The opposite of this formless letter field is a letter space, a place of occupation -- in this case, a square in the New York Times that was made available in support of Occupy Wall Street. The letters, drawn from a sign held by one of the protesters, read simply, âOccupy All.â  Letters in particular configurations have always been thought to have the power to transform our circumstances -- hereâs an ancient example, the âmagic wordâ [abracadabra](http://blog.linedandunlined.com/post/403568525/a-wikipedia-reader) written in the form of an equilateral triangle with Aâs at each of its three points. This configuration could be worn as a slip of paper around the neck for protection. It summons powers that might not otherwise be there and reminds me a bit of that âhologrammerâ poem we saw earlier.  The artist Paul Elliman writes in his essay â[My Typographies](http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/my-typographies)â that writing can give the impression of things and things can give the impression of writing. The forms of clouds in the sky, the lexical structure of DNA -- information often has a typographic flavor. Ellimanâs work is featured in the â[Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language](http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1231)â show thatâs on at MoMA now. In the showâs organization, itâs preceded by a hallway that includes [Guillaume Apollinaireâs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_Apollinaire) poem âIl pleutâ (âIt rainsâ), which is shown here. Dating from 1930, these early types of concrete poems were known as [caligrammes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligrammes) -- poems that are in the shape of the thing they describe and made possible by what the wall text describes as âthe kaleidoscopic environment of France in an age of technological and scientific innovationâ -- a new technological context.  New technologies change the shapes of buildings, too. How might we conceive of a caligramme to describe the work of a contemporary architectural practice? This is the menu to [our website for architects Weiss/Manfredi](http://projectprojects.com/weiss-manfredi-website/?view=thumb). It arrives onscreen at a scale equivalent to a building and structured with the asymmetry thatâs characteristic in a lot of their work.  The site is organized to resolve the tension thatâs often present in architectural websites, between large-scale visuals and large-scale graphics -- the web allows for multi-state, modal experiences where both the visual and the graphic can collide and commingle. As a result, my visual shorthand for the experience of the site is that the user is âon an elevator trying to read a posterâ; that is, moving through a simulated architectural space, looking at a fixed graphic object.  This poster-like menu idea comes out of work we did for [a much earlier website](http://projectprojects.com/alec-bemis/?view=thumb&keyword=website&side=y) for a different context -- the music writer and Brassland label impresario Alec Bemis.  Here the psychodelic split-fountain printing of a rock poster becomes a kind of palimpsest on which content-specific postings are placed, layered, and removed -- itâs website as poster wall.  In feel and in structure, Bemisâs website evokes artist Alan Ruppersbergâs 2004 installation â[The Singing Posters](http://www.ricegallery.org/new/exhibition/thesingingposters.html),â which are derived from Alan Ginsbergâs famous poem âHowlâ and were made by Ruppersberg when he discovered how many of his students at UCLA were unfamiliar with the poem. The wall shown here comprises a kind of guided tour through the poem in the style of the psychodelic posters I described earlier, with precise phrasings written phonetically in the manner of a dictionary speech aid -- thus, through their text, color, and total occupation of the viewerâs visual field, the posters âsing.â  âHowlâ has been described as âa jumble of images and buzzwords that vividly describe the social, political and historic state of America in the 1950s.â Itâs a poem assembled with parts from other places. Ruppersberg cycles through this process once more, breaking the poem itself down into posters and phonemes in order to re-present it. Both projects are about a kind of ignorance -- ignorance on the on the part of Ruppersbergâs students with âThe Singing Posters,â and ignorance on the part of the culture-at-large with âHowl,â 520 copies of which were seized by the U.S. Customs office in 1956, leading to an obsecenity trial that vindicated the poem in the following year. These images show an entirely different context -- Belgium at the turn of the century -- but an evocatively similar project. This is the [Mundaneum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum), an institution started by the Belgian lawyer and librarian Paul Otlet. Otlet appears at the center of the photo on the left, and a later image of him is inset in the circle below. The card catalogues on the left held more than 12 million index cards at the Mundaneumâs peak, which disassembled bits of information from books and publications and filed it so that it could be retrieved electronically via telegraph by people at their homes. The disassessembly I described was done in large part by the women surrounding Otlet on the left -- just one case in which the integral role of women in early computer science has been under-historicized -- the telegraph room is shown on the right. Like âHowl,â the Mundaneum was censored in its time, shut down by the Nazis when they invaded belgium in 1940. Google is now at work on preserving and reviving it along with the city of Mons and the University of Ghent.  [Otletâs Shelf](http://otletsshelf.tumblr.com/) is an homage to Otlet and his work -- it was created by Andrew LeClair and I at Project Projects last summer. Otletâs Shelf facilitates the sharing of libraries in the way that Otlet facilitated the sharing of information. Using a simple Tumblr theme and the Amazon Product API, we created a bookmarklet that allows users to easily add a book onto an infinite shelf for display. We have plans to expand beyond Amazon to Worldcat and other library databases soon.  The growth of Otletâs Shelf has been a nice surprise; there are thousands of Tumblr users and a growing range of applications -- from normal book nerds like me⊠ âŠto voices in the interactive world like SVA IXDâs chair Liz Danzico⊠ âŠand Brain Pickingsâ Maria Popova. Weâve been in touch with a number of librarians as well.  But one of the most graitfying uses has been by this book group, which catalogued its 15-year reading history for friends and family.  Tonight is about how our passions drive our work. Otletâs shelf was born from our shared passion for reading and sharing books. Here it is with my own library⊠ âŠand one of my own favorite books.
 *This text was commissioned by Dexter Sinister for [The Serving Library](http://servinglibrary.org/read.html?id=7912). It was originally delivered as an iChat âlecture,â from a studio in Manhattan to a library in Banff, Alberta, on 11 August 2011 at 12:32 PM Mountain Time.* Good afternoon. I am a handle, writing you with the same software that is writing me. When I carry one idea over to meet another, itâs a metaphor Iâm making. (META means âover, acrossâ; PHERIN means âto carry, bearâ) Most metaphors work like this -- theyâre *comparisons plus distance*, the result of preparing one idea alongside another. (COM means âwithâ; PARARE means âto make, prepareâ) Usually a metaphorâs not a perfect or direct comparison but something more diffuse, a kind of rough EQUIVALENCE, parts instead of wholes. William Shakespeareâs metaphors use this roughness to flatter, to heighten a sense of the singularly incomparable. âShall I compare thee to a summerâs day?â asks the I in Shakespeareâs 18th sonnet, âThou art more lovely and more temperate.â In that sonnet, the I only further woos his you with his inability to simulate her beauty. Then the I concludes, âSo long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.â This is the sonnet as software: run it (or read it) and the avatar of one lover appears to fumble and flourish his way into the affections of another. This virtual pair, this you and this I, these two need not have been real in life to live in our minds. And though the I is trying to construct a sonnet lovely enough to get himself noticed by the you, the I that speaks is not Shakespeare himself -- he is Shakespeareâs construction, his program. Rimbaud, another poet from another time, famously wrote that in writing â[I is another](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061710296/linedunlin-20/).â Thatâs a second type of metaphor, a SUBSTITUTION, where we swap wholes instead of parts. Again, from Shakespeare: âJuliet is the sun.â Here, Romeo exchanges a girl for a star in four simple words. Having replaced Juliet with the sun, we may reflect on how she guides Romeo, how (like the yous in the sonnets) her radiance is so singular and distinctive, and how she seems, at that moment in the play, so far out of Romeoâs reach. Reach, of course, is something that, as a handle, I know a thing or two about. Pick me up, pull me over, place me where you wish. I hold the tools for you to use. Grab and release. drag and drop. Open and close. Repeat. Even my own name comes with something attached: the â-leâ suffix on the end denotes repeated actions (a brook babbles, a diamond sparkles) or things of diminutive scale (a thimble on a thumb, a shuttle on a loom). Like a metaphor, (metaphor) we handles facilitate manipulation, asking the manipulator to operate at a distance. A cook takes a pot off the stove by its handle. a trucker warns about police over his CB radio with a handle (âsmokeyâ) in case the police are also tuned in. in both cases the handle acts as a separator: pot from hand, word from meaning. [Word handles have a long history](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w227c) going back to the epic of Gilgamesh. Some were meant to disguise or encode, while others were meant to differentiate and aid memory in an oral culture. In *[The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400096235/linedunlin-20/)*, James Gleick hears the recurrent epithets of homer in the rhythms of african drums: > The formulations of the African drummers sometimes preserve archaic words that have been forgotten in the everyday language. [...] The resemblance to Homeric formulas -- not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea -- is no accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first. The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne. Beyond these percussive and performative attributes, however, epithets represent a third kind of metaphorical situation, an INTERACTION. Here, the modifier and modified mix to make something altogether new -- not just a memorable sonic product, but also a twist of the natural and the supernatural, the actual and the imagined. Homerâs ârosy-fingered dawnâ personifies the dawn as a goddess and adds a narrative veil to the then-unexplained machinations of daybreak and nightfall. Some experts in metaphor have theorized that the earliest metaphors stemmed from the ancientsâ attempts to describe their dreams, which in Gilgamesh are as a soft mist or mystical vapor, a potent cocktail of earth and sky, easy to see as they block oneâs vision, possible to sense but impossible to touch. Itâs a haze not unlike the virtual reality weâre now in, a dreamy mix of bits and atoms from which all-new metaphors have sprung, including that of our dataâs presence in an unseen, ever-present cloud. Did we distinguish between ârealâ and âvirtualâ things before the computer came along? Much in the past was virtual (or at least metaphorical), even if it wasnât exactly digital. Skies, clouds, dreams, spells -- all involved some sort of virtualization, some form of conjuring, some method of making a world where one was not. In describing these pre-digital worlds-within-worlds, Iâm reminded of the âpataphor, a literary technique that extends alfred Jarryâs philosophy of âpataphysics. Just as âpataphysics extends metaphysics into the realm of the imaginary, âpataphors extend metaphors into a virtual space entirely their own. So if there is thunder, (fact) and that thunder is like a bolt thrown by an angry god, (metaphor) then that godâs whole world, his interactions with other gods, the power he draws from his celestial position, his bolt-throwing abilities -- all of that persists on the level of the âpataphysical -- a networked set of metaphors with minds of their own and implications for the world of the real. And in this way, the gods in the sky are just like the ghosts in the machines we use everyday, machines whose function depends on an increasingly interconnected set of interoperable metaphors mapped onto the otherwise clinically persistent processing of zeros and ones. Glancing down the list new features in appleâs recent OSX update -- whose power they liken, by way of its name, to a that of a Lionâs -- metaphors proliferate. You can easily call up Mission Control for a global view of your system or boot applications from a Launchpad; a robotic Automator helps with routine tasks while a Time Machine transports you to past versions of files. These metaphors work together to give our systems a soul. Susan Kare, who designed handles like myself into the windows of the earliest version of MacPaint in 1984, has often referred to the creation of a new icon as a kind of â[metaphor shopping](http://www.kare.com/articles/nytimes.html).â  Searching for a metaphor to describe the new job of the icon designer, Kare, who also holds a doctorate in art history, reaches for something ancient once more: > The tile mosaics of the Romans can be thought of as an early form of bit-mapped graphics. [...] Similar techniques appear in medieval weavings and tapestries. Hereâs a palette of infinite fills from Kareâs original MacPaint design.  As the virtual appears, it acts like the magic mirror of the real, reflecting physical things into digital form through metaphors of use. A virtual pencil relies on the use metaphor of a real pencil, though the virtual pencilâs behaviors are quite different. For one thing, it can draw at a variety of widths with pixel-precision and make ruler-straight lines with a crosshair instead of a pencil lead. These abilities are beyond those of a real pencil in the physical world. As graphical user interface (GUI) pioneer [Alan Kay explains](http://bit.ly/SJ8x7F), > The screen as âpaper to be marked onâ is a metaphor that suggests pencils, brushes, typewriting. Fine, as far as it goes. But it is the magic -- understandable magic -- that really counts. Should we transfer the paper metaphor so perfectly that the screen is as hard as paper to erase and change? Clearly not. If it is to be like magical paper, then it is the magical part that is all-important and that must be most strongly attended to in the user interface design. As magical new things arrive in a virtual space -- the arrow pointer, the lasso, the type tool, crop tool, spinning pinwheel -- others fall away, and still others persist even though we may no longer need them. In Appleâs Lion, Address Book, a contact management application, has gone from a simple GUI window to a hovering date planner complete with a leather binding, bookmarks, and a gutter with visible sewing effects. As archeologist and anthropologist Timothy Taylor explains in *[The Artificial Ape](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0230617638/linedunlin-20/)*, > The existence of objects, such as saucepans, not just allows actions but suggests them. The ability of objects to suggest things this way has allowed the development of special features of objects and special types of objects, where the function is more to suggest than to deliver. > An example would be a fake-fur leopard-skin coat, lacking the original insulating qualities of the fur, but imbued with other qualities, such as a capacity for social signaling. Such an object, in archeological parlance, is a SKEUOMORPH, a classic manifestation of technology as it leaves the realm of natural things. We find skeuomorphs everywhere, from the nonessential rivets on a pair of denim jeans to the paperlike pages of a digital book. I once saw a fellow handle on a bottle of maple syrup whose design mimicked a jug three times its size. You could barely thread a needle through it. Suggestive objects often reify the past in the present. The automobile, originally known as a âhorseless carriage,â retains many aspects of an antique carriageâs form, including the unnecessary spokes on its wheels. [*The New York Times* reported this February](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/weekinreview/13brustein.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all) that âelectric cars, which can operate with unsettling silence, are being designed to make more noise, largely for safety reasons.â But when trying to imagine the past from the present, we have the opposite problem. In *The Information*, Gleick further recounts how English scholar Walter J. Ong plays the âhorseless carriageâ metaphor in reverse, in order to illuminate the fallacy of mapping the literate consciousness of the present onto the oral culture of the past. [He writes](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415281296/linedunlin-20/), > Imagine writing a treatise on horses (for people who have never seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of âhorseâ but of âautomobile,â built on the readersâ direct experience of automobiles. It proceeds to discourse on horses by always referring to them as âWHEELLESS AUTOMOBILES,â explaining to highly automobilized readers all the points of difference. Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. In THe end, HORSES ARE ONLY WHAT THEY ARE NOT. Metaphors of mobility pervade virtual space -- from Homerâs well-known epithet of the âswift-footed achillesâ to Steve Jobsâs well-known metaphor that a computer is âa bicycle for our minds.â Jobs turned this phrase many times, but one of the most explicit comes as part of [a video interview](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c) for the Library of Congress: > I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that weâre tool-builders. now, I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer, and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list -- not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So that didnât look so good, but then somebody at *Scientific American* had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away -- completely off the top of the charts! [...] What a computer is to me is ... the most remarkable tool weâve ever come up with. Itâs the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. Jobsâs metaphor is a comparison that emphasizes the efficiency of the two technologies for human advancement -- recalling Taylorâs idea that objects donât just allow actions but suggest them, the suggestive power of a bicycle is that of speed, progress, and the power of human beings to conquer boundaries. And those actions are precisely what Marcel Duchampâs readymade [Bicycle Wheel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Wheel) from 1913 critiques. Consisting of a single bicycle wheel turned upside-down and mounted to stationary stool, it seems to celebrate -- at least to some degree -- a pointless, going-round-in-circles kind of motion. Duchamp himself frequently compared the wheelâs spinning to âflames dancing in a fireplaceâ or the back-and-forth of a game of chess. Rather than efficiency and progress, Duchampâs wheel is a man-made object that is somewhat accidental yet thoroughly intentional in its design and offers no efficiency or practical use whatsoever. However, in this refusal of efficiency, and in its willingness to break from then-contemporary notions of art, it offers, in place of efficiency, something akin to Kayâs magic eraser: an object that touts its virtual delights over its real-world uses. In this way, it is a different sort of bicycle for the mind -- one that it opens our collective imagination to new modes of aesthetic interpretation -- even as weâre sitting absolutely still. 
 *This class took place in January 2012 during RISD's Wintersession period. A website documenting the students' coursework is available [here](http://risd.gd/Classes/antithesis2/). The results of the class are also described in my talk [Unbuilding](http://blog.linedandunlined.com/post/36122874494/unbuilding).* --- Dear Wintersessioneers, To have big, we need small. To taste sweet, we need sour. To see a letter, we need the space around it. Identity is a study in contrasts; our character is made as much by the things we've chosen not to do as by the things we've done. More than seven years ago, I taught the fall semester of senior thesis at Parsons School of Design in New York. It was the first of two thesis semesters for my students -- I would help them to frame their ideas and initiate a few key projects in the fall, and they would complete their work and install their show in the spring. I taught in the spring as well. Unlike thesis, my course that semester was an elective studio for seniors. Many of the students I had in the fall also signed up for my elective in the spring. Enrollment in the two classes was nearly identical. But the class had changed. Fatigue and frustration had started to set in among the group. Students described feeling uninspired and unsure of what they were doing. As a gesture of understanding and solidarity, I retitled our studio "Antithesis," which, if nothing else, might help to lighten the mood. This is my third Wintersession course, and I've noticed that the dark days of January can produce a similar effect at RISD. Year after year, I join you at a piviotal point: not starting out anymore, but far from finished. In spite of its joking tone, Antithesis 1 was a great success; this year, I thought I'd give it another try. Your thesis, to paraphrase composer Steve Reich, is a gradual process. Our class will take its inspiration from Wintersession's speedier pace and interstitial context. You'll choose one project per set from the three sets listed below. Each project will ask you engage your thesis investigation directly through a given form. The forms are somewhat generic; which ones you choose to engage and how you choose to engage them is up to you. During our first class, we'll spend some time researching and discussing these forms. Later, we'll spend time in critique better understanding what we've made. All three projects will be critiqued first on 01/21 and then again on 02/04, which is my final visit. In addition, all projects should be posted to a classwide website for my review before your visit to New York on 03/10. We will discuss this classwide website in more depth during our first class. ## SET 1: Communities * Tote bag: Design a tote bag related to your thesis research. Silkscreen and produce at least five bags to distribute and record any responses of note. Document the project. * Picket sign: Make a picket sign that helps to illustrate implicit political or power structures embedded in your thesis research. Silkscreen and produce at least five of the signs. Document the project. ## SET 2: Compressions * Single serving site: Develop a single serving site related to your thesis research. Once the site is online, promote it through word-of-mouth and social media. Document the project. * Supercut / trailer: Produce a supercut or trailer related to your thesis research. Upload the video and promote it through word-of-mouth and social media. Document the project. ïżŒïżŒïżŒïżŒ ## SET 3: Contexts * Tabletop: Stage a tabletop still life with objects related to your thesis research It should be equal in size to an ISO A1 sheet. Photograph the tabletop and output this photograph at 1:1 scale. * Treasure hunt: Conceive a treasure hunt whose clues and objectives relate to your thesis research. Ask a friend or a group of friends to go on the hunt. Document the project. I mentioned that during our first class we'll do some research and discussion, and I've assigned each of these forms to two of you. Please come Friday prepared to make an informal presenation on the form you've been assigned. This can be loose, but plan to show us a few useful examples, share a key reading or two, and help to lead a discussion on the possibilities of the form. We'll spend about 20 minutes per group. If there are any questions about the presentations, feel free to drop me a note. I look forward to our time together in the coming weeks! Antithetically, RG
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