This is another piece originally published on SpeakUp, on intellectual property and a recent project of mine.

In 2003, the pop auteur Mellowdrone released an album called “A Demonstration of Intellectual Property”. None of the lyrics addressed the notion of intellectual property directly; the album’s name refers to the fact that Mellowdrone initially gave away the album as unrestricted MP3 files on his website, before offering it for sale as a retail CD.

I, personally, had never heard of Mellowdrone before this. But a friend of mine, who had seen him open up for Johnny Mar, directed me to his web site. I downloaded his music, and indeed, it was catchy enough to stay in my rotation (which is more than I can say for most of the free MP3s one finds online). As such, Mellowdrone effectively wagered his talent against both his royalty proposition and the music industry’s conventional wisdom.

I can say that his bet payed off, at least in my case: I have since bought his full-length album from Amazon. He has apparently been quite successful since then in many ways. One of the songs from “A Demonstration of Intellectual Property” was later used as non-diegetic background music in an episode of Six Feet Under, which could be considered a sort of pop canonization, of sorts.

I am interested in the notion of “intellectual property”, in large part because the term itself is rather oxymoronic: how can you own an idea? If I give you my sandwich, I’ll be hungry, but if I give you my idea, I still have the idea. We both win, n’est ce pas? Ideas don’t behave like physical property.

I wanted to have my own intellectual property demonstration, to see how the concept might operate in the field of graphic design. I assembled an exhibition of posters at a student gallery here at RISD. The show, called “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF”, consisted completely of from-scratrch recreations of notable typographically-oriented examples from graphic design and conceptual art. In each recreated work, I substituted the words “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF, _” with the blank filled in with the author or artists’ name in each case. I ripped off a very wide range of practitioners in this fashion, from Wim Crouwel, to John Baldessari, to M/M Paris. I also included two of my ex-girlfriends, both of whom are practicing graphic designers.

In some ways, this approach is the opposite of what Mellowdrone was doing. Instead of giving away the fruits of my hard labors, it could be argued that I was standing on the shoulders of giants in a bid for attention, which is, like, the ultimate currency in graphic design.

Nonetheless, the act of ripping everyone off was a very revealing one, I found. The verb phrase “to rip off” here is important. I was not “precisely emulating” my subjects, nor was I “loosely borrowing”. When you rip someone off, you are adapting their trademark style to your own ends. This is something that we do all the time, as graphic designers. I will freely admit that in the past, I have adapted some idea I saw executed by some far more established practitioner, and passed it off without so much as a footnote. My early website designs, for example, were more or less reassembled components filched from The Designers’ Republic; for a while after that, I thought I could ride on Mr. Müller-Brockmann’s coattails by making everything I did some sort of geometric abstraction with Aksidenz-Grotesk on top.

It was therefore fantastically refreshing to rip everyone off so blatantly and unapologetically. I could devote my time and effort to marshalling the rip-offs towards an emulation of the original technique as much as possible, without having to invest effort in diluting the spirit of the original to make the work seem more “mine”, which is typical in the in the normal, day-to-day course of ripping someone off.

But even still, the results were not perfect, by any measure. I know this definitively, because for the last phase of the project, I sent copies of each rip-off back to the rip-offee. I included, along with each rip-off, a “receipt” for rip-offee’s intellectual property, which consisted of a deliberately nonsensical but precise-looking tabulation of their ideas. This proved to be rather amusing to compile, in each case. When I ripped off Phillippe Apeloig, for example, I could not rightly attribute all of the modular typographical ideas in his posters solely to him; clearly, he was basing his character sets on work originally pioneered by Wim Crouwel. I stated this in the receipt.

At the moment, I have only received a handful of replies to these thought-crime dispatches, but the few I have received have been quite astounding. Peter Bil’ak wrote me back within five minutes, stating that I had ripped him off incorrectly. To rip him off, I had adapted his type-grid stamp design for the Dutch Royal TPG. I had not been aware of the fact that the stamps’ grid was based directly on Fedra’s metric tables, and as such, the rip-offs’ grid included padding between the character and the grid cell boundary that wasn’t present in the original. Mr. Bil’ak even sent me a PDF mockup of the stamp with the phrase “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF MR. BIL’AK” rendered in a manner he deemed more correct.

Fascinatingly, the other replies have been in line with this sentiment. The original authors and artists who have felt compelled to address the project have done so to say, “you haven’t ripped me off well enough!” I thought it especially funny to have received a reply like this from Mieke Gerrizten. I mean, isn’t everyone supposed to be a designer? I supposed that doesn’t make us all equal as designers, but hey.

My reply to this sentiment, incidentally, hinges on the definition of “rip-off” falling somewhat short of “exact emulation”. In each ripoff, I considered the precision of the original designer’s work, and used that as a loose guideline. For example, I am pretty sure I nailed the Wim Crouwell piece, but I did not seek the same sort of rigor when ripping off, say, 178 Aardige Ontwerpers, because I don’t see an analogous kind of anality in their work.

I had expected at least a smidgen of outrage from those I pilfered from. This kind of reaction is not without precedent: on April 17, 2006, the New York Observer published an article by Simon Doonan, entitled “How Did I become the Typhoid Mary of the Art World?” Mr. Doonan is a designer based in New York, and for decades, he has crafted window displays at retail shops like Barney’s, using found type from junkyards. In his article, he hilariously details an incedent where the art-world luminary Jack Pierson came to town for a show, and saw a high degree of similarity between his art and the work Mr. Doonan had been doing for decades. So similar was the work, in Mr. Pierson’s eye, that the only possible option was for him to sue Mr. Doonan for infringing on his intellectual property.

This was the sort of response I was gearing myself up for. I have seen otherwise reasonable people, in both the wide-open professional realm and the pressure-cooker of graduate school, who try to claim eminent domain over, say, a typeface, or a printing technique, or what have you. “How dare you use Gridnik! That one’s mine!” It sounds ridiculous, but it happens. Since I was explicit as possible about my method and intentions regarding the intellectual property of those I ripped off, it is possible that my victims have been playing along, and don’t actually see the project as a direct threat to their established aesthetics (and therefore their professional identities).

Because this, I fear, is the trap that the notion of “intellectual property” sets up. The unfortunate corollary to the investment of time and effort that one expends to build up a unique style is the ease by which such a style can be adapted by someone else. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. It becomes bad when your identity as a designer-author is irrevocably bound up in that style. It means your identity can be stolen outright, by anyone with the wherewithal, the tools, and the patience to do so.

Fortunately, we are smarter than that. By experimenting with the more topical aspects of style, we can create an identity that is greater than the sum of the parts of our aesthetics. By resisting the lure of a single aesthetic in favor of a broad-spectrum approach, the bodies of work we craft will inevitably maintain subtle but instrumental common threads, which will add up to a certain je ne sais quoi that observers will no doubt begin to recognize, over time. (In my last article, I described this as having a ™.)

It’s a very tricky proposition, to be sure. Neither my demonstration of intellectual property, nor Mellowdrones’, nor any other object lesson on the subject, in any way implies a blanket, prescriptive approach to dealing with ideas as things*. People should be able to come up with interesting ideas, and use those ideas as the basis for getting paid. That is what copyright law, patent law, and trademark law all seek to address, however disparately (and, some would say, ineffectively). But issues related to “intellectual property” are causing greater and greater convulsions throughout everyday life, from software patent problems to the availability of generic medicines in third-world countries. It’s a bloody mess. But most importantly, it is an unresolved mess, and as such, we’ll have to continue to experiment until we figure it all out.

It’s more fun this way, anyway. I mean, totally.

* I realize that this statement (and in fact any discussion of intellectual property) implies a gargantuan breadth of issues, well beyond the scope of this pithy document. I would recommend “The Ecstasy of Influence”, an essay by Jonathan Lethem for the February 2007 issue of Harpers’ magazine, to those interested in an omnibus analysis of the subject.

The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art redefines itself through architecture, becoming a gem among asphalt and salt water.

Come for the art, stay for the view. As the new Institute of Contemporary Art building nears completion on the Fan Pier of South Boston, the bar for provocative architecture is being raised. Designed by the avant-garde team of Diller + Scofidio + Renfo, the new ICA is the largest commission to date for the firm. There are a lot of firsts for this project: the first new building for the ICA, the first project for the redevelopment of Fan Pier, and the first standalone building for the architects. And much like a first time, it left this reviewer feeling anxious, thrilled, and a little let down. On a cool spring afternoon I joined a work-in-progress tour of the museum with several eager journalists. Due to open on September 17, the museum is in a frantic home stretch to deadline; construction noise nearly drowned out presentations by ICA Director Jill Medvedow and architect Liz Diller. But even behind the scaffolding and caution tape, there was clearly a spectacle nearing completion. And even at this early stage, the new museum feels surprisingly one-sided. Approaching the site from the harbor walk presents a visually stunning work of contemporary architecture. Imagine a pliable wooden boardwalk breaking free from the ground to shift and form spaces, stairs, and a giant shelf. An exterior staircase, beginning at the water’s edge, winds upward from the pedestrian path and passes through a glass wall. This path then continues upward to create an indoor theater on the second level. The form eventually doubles on itself, returning toward the water as a heroic cantilevered box. The gallery spaces reside within this floating cube. For all of this dynamic energy occurring on the water’s edge, the museum’s entrance is located on the flatter, city-facing elevation. Something begins to fade.

One has to traverse a sea of parking-lot asphalt to enter the lobby. Inside, the museum experience begins with what will be a glass-enclosed lobby where the ceiling slowly dips toward the water’s edge: It coordinates with the slope of the theater seating on the second level and the exterior stair along the harbor walk. At the triangular crevice where the ceiling and the floor meet, the lobby dips down four feet to house a future bookstore and gift shop. To the right of the lobby, a passage leads to the learning center for children, a restaurant, and an open shaft for a giant glass elevator, which will transport patrons to the galleries and theater housed on the upper floors.

Entering the top floor of the ICA, the vastness of the galleries comes into focus. Taking advantage of steel super-trusses quietly tucked behind plaster walls, the two galleries are columnless. Multiple rows of zigzag skylights are somewhat reminiscent of an airplane hangar. Walking toward the doorway that hovers over the riverfront, an immense glass-walled hallway, stretching the width of the building, comes into view. This corridor connects the two galleries that are separated by the elevator/stair core, and it acts as a smaller, light-filled third gallery space.

The highlight of the top floor is an anteroom behind the glass-walled corridor, dubbed the mediatheque. This room is actually a bump-out in the building’s cantilever that creates six tiers of stadium seating looking down to a tilted window. Due to the pitch of the floor and the angle of the glass, a horizonless view of water fills the window frame. This surreal room will include laptops to access museum archives and video installations.

What inspired this unique building form? Diller explained that she and her colleagues drew the typology as an extrusion of the harbor walk; the voids between this wooden path become interior space such as the lobby and theater. Since the harbor walk inspired the architects as a form generator, it seems ironic to find the museum lobby’s only entrance on the city side of the building. The future restaurant will spill out on the harbor walk with a series of sliding doors, but this is not intended for museum access.

With its relocation to the sparsely occupied South Boston wharf, the ICA must become a destination in itself, without the aid of an active urban street. In time, the remaining open spaces of Fan Pier will be developed into a mixed-use neighborhood of businesses and residences. Creating a dynamic street presence prior to an actual street is a tough assignment. The comparatively dull ‘rear’ entrance of the ICA leaves the urban definition to future buildings, and it feels like a missed opportunity. In some ways this parallels the problem of single-family American homes, where one enters the house through a cluttered and unfinished garage rather than through the symbolic front door.

This discrepancy between the symbolic orientation of the new ICA versus the reality of public access is the weakest link in an otherwise uplifting architectural experience. Diller + Scofidio + Renfro have the talent to create beautiful, contemplative spaces. If we could briefly turn their gaze from the water’s edge back to the city, we might get a building that works as a dynamic space on all fronts.

What separates Moss consumers from the masses is that they are paying for more than just ownership of designer housewares. They are paying for the right to experience them.

‘Please Do Not Touch.’ That’s the slogan Murray Moss has adopted for his chic SoHo design store, Moss. In style points, Murray wins. Moss has been at the cutting edge of household hip since its inception in 1994. Over the years Murray and his enterprise have gained international renown for their discerning selection and presentation of highly designed ‘everyday’ objects and furnishings. Amidst a stark white backdrop of lacquered platforms and polished glass cases, designer household products are elevated to the level of art in Murray’s museum-like setting.

Printed signs stating, ‘Please Do Not Touch,’ are affixed to each display and continue the age-old museum tradition of disallowing physical contact with the work. The omnipresence of smartly-suited salespeople wards off the wandering hand, in case the metal guardrails don’t do the job for them. Whereas museums discourage touching to prevent the degradation of delicate artworks, Murray Moss has imposed this system of separation in a retail store for household furnishings, products that in their essence are meant to be purchased and used. While over time, touching might degrade that Noguchi sofa, or leave smudges on a Jacobsen teapot, the real impetus behind the ‘Please Do Not Touch’ campaign resides in the depths of the human psyche.

The purpose behind separating people from objects is to nurture the desire that Murray Moss sees inherent in all of us. In denying the basic human instinct to reach out and grab that which is visually appealing, Murray and his team promote an inner tug-of-war of longing and frustration, thereby increasing the value of the unattainable. Lacking a tactile perception of the object, we are left in a mental and emotional frenzy to wonder about its experiential aspects. Enter Murray as our counselor and personal guide.

As Moss shows, inaccessibility does wonders for social value. By emulating the standards and practices of the modern museum, the Moss ethos blends culture and shopping while unabashedly cultivating desire, the hook that keeps design professionals, celebrities, students, and even tourists at its door. What separates Moss consumers from the masses is that they are paying for more than just ownership of designer housewares. They are paying for the right to experience them.

On a warm Saturday in spring, I wandered down to SoHo to check out the scene. Moss had just opened its new arm, Moss Gallery, one year ago in order to provide a dedicated arena for highly curated collections of limited editions and prototypes. In only a year, the distinction between the gallery and the store is becoming thinner and thinner. Michael, a salesperson of six years, informed me that these days, both sides of the business are based on themed exhibitions curated by Murray Moss. Objects that have been displayed in the gallery may certainly later appear in the store, with their retained exhibition history as added social value.

Within the store I was dazzled by case after case of pristine cutlery and kitchenware, as the lingering aroma of leather upholstery tantalized my senses. While walking through this designed wonderland, I began to wonder if indeed these objects retained the chronicle of their past lives as art, once removed from the glass vitrine and taken from the context of Moss. Moss was sleek. It was sexy. And amidst its minted spectacle I felt slightly intimidated. I left without touching anything, and the allure of Moss persisted.

At home I turned to the Moss website, and that’s where I discovered the ‘Gifts Under $100’ corner. In the store I had completely dismissed the idea that affordability could even exist in the presence of $17,000 seating. It seemed almost indecent. But according to the Moss website, it was possible to enter Moss and witness for instance, ‘a Hella Jongerius embroidered ceramic pot next to a stainless steel Fisher space pen next to an Edra pink leather Flap sofa.’ It was in this sentence that I laid my best hopes. That was no ordinary pen. It was a highly covetable Chrome Bullet Fisher Space Pen, advertised in the under $100 section of the Moss website as being able to, ‘write upside down, under water, over grease, in freezing cold, boiling heat, and in outer space.’ I imagined it sitting pretty behind the glass case at Moss, surrounded by other more expensive but equally enticing wares. From there, I might not ever know if the space pen could indeed live up to its lofty advertising. In the vitrine it existed as no more than a desirable shiny object, but the fact that both NASA and Murray Moss had endorsed it made its polished chrome-plated brass seem all that much shinier.

One week and $50 later, a drab gray-brown cardboard box landed on my doorstep. Measuring in at 10” x 12” x 8,” the box had endured a significant amount of abuse in the exchange between couriers and handlers. I maneuvered my way through layers of tape to reveal an endless shroud of brown craft paper. Nestled within its folds lay my treasure, neatly encased in a candy-bar sized plastic snap-box and surrounded by a thin cardboard sheath. With $50 I had acquired more than just a fancy new pen, I had partaken in the aura of Moss.

The casing was smooth, adorned with the glossy image of an astronaut standing beside his roving moon-lander while a brightly colored American flag floats proudly in the gravity-free vacuum of space. From our vantage point on the moon, we see a glowing blue Earth in the background beyond the craters. Sliding the case from its packaging revealed the simple black and white Moss decal self-consciously branded to the cardboard’s interior. Only now, it was mine, and I could do whatever I wanted with it. A small printed leaflet offered a guarantee of the space pen’s abilities and 1960’s advertising information about the merits of its sealed-pressurized ink cartridge. Words like ‘precision’, ‘thixotropic’, and ‘tungsten-carbide,’ wrenched the space pen from its stature as art object and immediately thrust it into the realm of science and use. My gut reaction was to tear the pen from its felted plastic crater bed and lick it before running rampant around the city, terrorizing every bathroom wall and bus window in sight with bad poetry.

Once in my hands, the first thing I noticed was a giant smear on the space pen’s formerly flawless casing where my fingers had touched it. My heart sank a little, the way it does when spaghetti sauce falls on a new shirt. Perhaps Murray Moss had it right. And like that the myth was shattered.

There is an inherent disappointment that comes with purchasing at Moss. While there is an initial elation of having received a shiny new object, this momentary euphoria can never compete with the imminent descent of an object from art, to the levels of human use and abuse. The space pen writes like a dream, and I imagine the Verner Panton cradles the human figure just as well. After subjecting the pen to the cold depths of my freezer, and a pot of boiling hot water, it still wrote (even upside down). Without venturing into space, I was satisfied with the Fisher Space Pen’s ability to withstand the most extreme environmental conditions I could fabricate. At the conclusion of my testing, the chrome-plated casing had lost its luster, and was scratched from the ill-effects of capping the lid to the back of the pen. Even so, at one point the space pen was the very object of my desire from where it sat under Murray’s guidance at Moss. Through shifting the balance between function and style Murray Moss once again holds a captive audience in wait of the next best thing to appear on his horizon.

The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art takes a bold step to redefine itself through architecture

By: BRYAN BIESER

Come for the art; stay for the view. As the new ICA museum building nears completion on the Fan Pier of South Boston, the bar for provocative architecture is being raised. Designed by the avant-garde team of Diller + Scofidio (now Diller Scofidio + Renfo) the new ICA is the largest commission to date for the firm. There are a lot of firsts for this project; the first new building for the ICA, the first project for the redevelopment of Fan Pier and the first stand alone building for Diller + Scofidio. And much like a first time, it left this reviewer feeling anxious, thrilled and a little let down.

On a cool spring afternoon I joined a works-in-progress tour of the museum with several eagerly awaiting journalists. Due to open on September 17th of this year, the frantic pace to meet the autumn deadline was strikingly clear; the construction noise nearly drowned out presentations by ICA Director Jill Medvedow and architect Liz Diller. And behind the scaffolding and caution tape what was developing on that cold, windswept pier? In terms of the basic aspirations for the new ICA, I would say that yes, this building is quite spectacular.

Approaching the site from the harbor walk presents a visually stunning work of contemporary architecture. Imagine a pliable wooden boardwalk breaking free from the ground to shift and form spaces, stairs and a giant shelf. An exterior staircase beginning at the water’s edge moves up from the pedestrian path and passes through a glass wall. This path then continues upward to create an indoor theater on the second level. The form eventually doubles on itself, returning towards the water as a heroic cantilevered box. The gallery spaces reside within this floating cube. And yet for all of this dynamic energy occurring on the water’s edge, something begins to fade on the city side of the structure. Moving away from the river walk the new museum feels surprisingly one sided.

Upon entering the museum the experience begins with a yet-to-be glass enclosed lobby where the ceiling slowly dips down towards the waters edge. The ceiling mimics the slope of the theater seating on the second level and the exterior stair along the harbor walk. At the triangular crevice where the ceiling and the floor meet, the lobby floor dips down four feet to house a future bookstore and gift shop. To the right of the lobby is a passage to the learning center for children, a restaurant and an open shaft to house a future glass elevator. With the galleries and theater housed on the upper floors of the museum, logic dictated that a large lift would best transport patrons to the “beginning” of the collection.

Entering the top floor of the ICA, the vastness of the galleries comes into focus. Taking advantage of steel super-trusses quietly tucked behind plaster walls, the two galleries are columnless. Multiple rows of zigzag skylights are somewhat reminiscent of an airplane hanger. Walking towards the doorway along the water’s edge, an immense glass-walled hallway stretches the width of the building. This corridor connects the two galleries separate from the elevator/stair hallway and acts as a smaller, light filled third gallery space.

The highlight of the top floor, hands down, is an anteroom behind the glass walled corridor titled the “mediatheque.” This room is actually a bump out in the building’s cantilever that creates six tiers of stadium seating looking down to a tilted window. Due to the pitch of the floor and the angle of the glass, a horizonless view of water fills the window frame. This surreal room will have laptops on counters to access museum archives and video installations.

With such bold geometries, the question arises of where this unique building form comes from. As explained by Diller + Scofidio, the form is drawn from an extrusion of the harbor walk. The voids between this wooden path become interior space such as the lobby and theater. Since the harbor walk inspired the architects as a form generator it seems ironic to find no entrance to the museum lobby from the water’s edge. The future restaurant will spill out on the harbor walk with a series of sliding doors, but this opening is not intended for museum access. Though the structural footprint is modest, it feels counterintuitive walking to the “reverse” side of the museum to reach the entrance.

Diller + Scofidio also use a folding technique to create prescribed views of Boston Harbor. In fact, any other view but those directed by the architects are almost visually prohibitive. One enters the lobby heading towards the water. The theater space looks over the water. The principle passage between the galleries looks over the water. At its best, this emphasis on the forced view can create a beautiful reflective space such as the mediatheque. At its worst, the view begins to feel like an architectural one liner; especially if the spaces are passed through in quick succession.

With its relocation to the sparsely occupied South Boston wharf, the ICA must become a destination in of itself without the aid of an active urban street. In time, the remaining open spaces of Fan Pier will be developed into a mixed use neighborhood of businesses and residences. Creating a dynamic street presence prior to an actual street is a tough assignment; but leaving the urban definition to future buildings feels like a missed opportunity. This dilemma is highlighted by the discrepancy of the entrance. If patrons are required to enter the building from the city side then why is this façade so flat? In some ways this is parallel the problem of single family American homes where one enters the house through a cluttered and unfinished garage rather than through the symbolic front door.

This discrepancy between the symbolic orientation of the new ICA vs. the reality of public access to the museum is the weakest link in an otherwise uplifting architectural experience. Diller + Scofidio have the talent to create beautiful, contemplative spaces; if we could briefly turn their gaze from the water’s edge back to the city we might get a building that works as a dynamic space on all fronts.

Here’s the working draft of my piece on the Antenna Design show in we saw in Chelsea… go to “Read More” to see the whole shebang. Here’s the PDF if you’re the red-pen type… Feel free to comment it up, rip it apart, etc. I am at your mercy.

Specifically I need a good title. I almost called it “But Is It Art?” but then my gag reflex cut in, and I refrained.

Yes!

-fish