A few months ago, I wrote an article about the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound, which ran on SpeakUp and is archived here as part of Writing Design Criticism. My initial assesment of ffffound was super-mega-thumbs-up, but the more I’ve used the site, the more I got kind of bothered by certain fundamental aspects of it. So here’s a devils’-advocate rebuttal to my own article. Indeed.

OK, so: ffffound is to graphic design what Napster was to music. Seriously. Look: I used to blow hundreds of dollars at Other Music and Tower and Satellite and Fat Beats, et al, making my feet sore walking to as many record stores as I could in one fell swoop, all to find that elusive catchy hook or strange beat that I’d overheard someone cooler than me talking about on the train or someshit. But: then came Napster, and its various P2P children and grandchildren, and I didn’t have to leave my seat. Based on the music-snob knowledge I’d already amassed, I could feed the right words into the search engines of the darknet (PDF), and lo: all the music I wanted was just a status bar away.

Now, I go to a record store maybe once a year. Yeah, of course I go to see bands I like whenever I can, and of course I always buy CDs and other merch direct from the table, to assuage the guilt from my gluttony, and to support the music — in that order. I love music with all my heart, and it is that love that keeps this cycle so fantastically well-oiled, throughout all the complex circumlocutions and moralizations that surround the muddled notion of digital copyright infringement.

Similarly (nay, analogously), I used to buy books and read blogs and ferret out design morsels in the library and elsewhere… but now I just look at ffffound. For example: the other day, while I was doing a diagram for a collaborative book my class is putting out on lulu, I skipped through both my personal ffffound archives and those of the ffffound front page, and lasered off about 20 letter-sized images that somehow spoke to what I was doing. Each reflected my idea in some facet of their design — in their type contrasts, maybe, or in their visualization methodology, or in their basic form, or what have you — but they all were from seriously far-flung sources, only temporarily united in the service of my quest only by virtue of their status as ffffound objects.


Figure 1. Some of ffffound’s most popular images.

I pinned them on the wall, sketched a bit, conferred with my colleagues, sketched more, and knocked out the diagram. In the course of all this, I did not pause for a moment and sink into a comfy chair with my well-thumbed edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, nor did I lovingly tease any slowly-oxygenating prints out of my graduated colleagues’ flatfiles, or anything like that. I pretty much stayed in my standard I-am-designing-shit pose, which was: hunched over a computer. Printouts notwithstanding… If I’d had a monitor that was large enough, or if I hadn’t needed to collaborate with my friends in order to do the thing that I was doing, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the lasers (which laserprints — let’s admit it — are totally screentastic in their glossy quick’n’dirtiness).

The point is: ffffound has emerged as a single repository where I can instantly gratify my urge to see new design thingees. I can root through dozens of pieces of other people’s work, with nothing to give me pause, making no payments of any kind, and with no consequence. It was one thing, back in the early days, when the Internet was brand-new… wow! So much design, so much of it from far away, and all right at your fingertips! But you still had to work for it, and engage with your subject matter. To do design research — and I use that term provisionally here — with a computer, you had to balance queries to Corbis with those to Nexis. You had to know when to root through your bookmarks for samples from some weird blog, and when to hit up Flickr or the Prelinger archives, or when to pack it in and buy a fucking stock image of a woman walking along a beach with a sunset.

Or when to stand up from the computer and look in a book. Or when to talk to someone who would know.


Figure 2. Good design. Via ffffound.

Ffffound gives you all that stuff in one place, all conveniently pre-curated by a slaverishly devoted volunteer staff of designers and design fans. You don’t have to have been blessed with one of its coveted invites to subscribe to its main RSS feed, and then there you go: a fountain of fresh design, photography, and art, right there in your feed reader, with new stuff piped in from the zeitgeist minute by minute. Sure, the system hasn’t got any tags or search boxes, yeah, but with a modicum of hunting around, you can find a user whose tastes appeal to your desires, and subscribe to their individual feed. And kablam: their graphic tastes are at your fingertips whenever you like. Ffffound’s look-but-don’t-post invite-only policy promotes a distribution model similar to that which was engendered by Napster and its P2P descendants, in which a small number of taste-making uploaders can distribute a schmorgasboard of content to hordes of downloaders in a vastly asymmetric fashion. But by passing out invitations through the social network of its users, ffffound follows in the footsteps of OiNK (the now-legendary BitTorrnet music hub) in creating a self-reinforcing community standard. Invites only go to those who users think would use ffffound “right”, the nature of which can only be gleaned from observation.

Figure 3. Tips for designers who want to be ffffound. Ripped off from this.

Much as psychoacoustically compressed audio files are delivered minus the grounding context of record packaging and liner notes, images on ffffound are ripped from their context and tossed upon the totalizing non-ground that is the sites’ white background. The “quoted from” link that ffffound furnishes is, in many cases, completely useless — bookmarking an image after going directly to its URL simply renders the “quote” link redundant. Furthermore, if such a directly-posted image is from a site with many users (like flickr, say, or facebook) it is impossible to trace the post back to the page in which it was originally situated. The “quoted from” link is also less than compatible with blogs: if I post to ffffound from a blogs’ front page, and the blogger puts up a few new entries, the originating article will move off of the page. To find the source of the image, then, you’d have to root through the blogs’ archive… a task which ranges from eye-rollingly irritating to nigh-impossible, depending on whose site you’re specifically concerned with.


Figure 4. This image is extremely popular on ffffound (as you can see here)… but the user responsible for the flickr page from which it’s taken seems to have copied it, with no attribution, from this guy. Ffffound’s lack of user control and annotation prevents this fact from being noted within ffffound in any way.

And but so: ffffound users could themselves navigate to the right URLs, only posting images when it is respectful (morally, if not legally) to do so. But they don’t. I know I don’t: when I see an image I like on the internet these days, I almost immediately ask, “is it ffffindable??” I have even caught myself thinking this about actual physical objects I see in real life:


Figure 5. Rrrreal llllife ffffound. It was inevitable.

See, what really drives ffffound, though, is love. I love finding and sharing and swapping and trading ffffound images until I’m swimming in them. We all do. It’s sorta like the card game War, and sorta like going to Printed Matter… sorta del.icio.us and sorta HotOrNot (or, more currently, commandshift3). But I am starting to fear that that love may eventually create something nasty. Ffffound already has climbed to the top of many designers’ bookmark lists; the individuals behind some of the more popular design blogs, like SwissMiss and SpeakUp, have presences on ffffound. Such high-profile endorsement legitimizes ffffound as a resource, and allows visitors to gloss over the complex issues of attribution and intellectual property as they ogle ffffound’s visual schmorgasbord. I fear that with each image we post to it, ffffound gets riper for some sort of reckoning in these perilously unresolved arenas.


Figure 6. Escape, from Mandatory Thinking.

We shall see. Will they add more features? Will they take some away? Will the site remain in beta, or will it open its doors to the public? Will an imitator challenge ffffound’s hegemonous hold on “image bookmarking”? Will such an imitator fall first to legal scuffles? Who the fuck knows. I do not. Yeah.

(Anyway. I’m compiling notes for a longer, non-designy entry about me and my big fat life, but in the meantime, there’s always the tumblelogs, in regular and MFA thesis flavors. Indeed. Salud!

Hi. Still trying to unfuck my brain. Doing some work, at my dad’s house on Cape Cod. There was a totally awesome wifi signal for the first two days, but they must have smelled my thirst for internet from afar, cuz it got completely turned off right when my gmail inbox filled up for the first time, which screwed up my fone. This whole sequence of events was actually kind of awesome, cuz it made me throw myself in the ocean, which was cold enough to make me feel as though I was being burned alive.

Can’t deal with people, just yet… at least not in large numbers. One on one, one on two, okay sure fine. More than that and I start to act wack, a mode in which I would prefer not to operate. I do love you, though, I should add. I love you more than ever before. I just can’t think straight, is what it is. Yes.

But it’s nice to work, again. My dad’s house is not at all equipped for graphics design, so it has been a total MacGuyver adventure. I have done the following things in order to get shit done:

• disassembled three floor lamps and cobbled the components together for a photo shoot that thankfully did not burn the place down
• ripped up a rag and used it to tie off garbage bags which were wrapped around ungrounded extension cords and dragged through puddles
• drove across most of cape cod to go to a fucking mall, to get yet another USB cable, cuz I forgot mine
• smashed an epson magenta ink cartridge with a hammer, to get pictures of splatters
• concocted just the right mix of ketchup and balsamic vinegar to spill down a sheet of paper, in leu of ink
• chopped several ballpoint pens in half with a cleaver, before I figured out the ketchup/vinegar trick
• chopped up a forsythia (see above) but did not kill it

…. I can rightly claim to have done other nutso shit, but that’s the top of the design-related list. Now I’m going to try to write some shit. Writing is what I thought would be the easiest to kickstart, but — suprise, suprise — it’s the hardest. So. In leu of anything decent, here’s most of an email I sent to David Reinfurt, in which I explain what the deal is wi the the whole cavalcade of ripoffs. Mr. Reinfurt is teaching a studio I’m in this semester, and he is awesome. Yes.

We haven’t talked in a month or so (egads!) but so let me fill you in on what my intentions are in this project. It’s a large project, parts of which fulfill the requirements for some of my other classes. What I have been doing is producing a series of posters wherein I rip someone off. The attached zipfile contains several examples; they range from established designers, to more obscure practitioners, to well-known artists who work with type. The idea is simple: I choose a piece of work by one of these people and replicate it as faithfully as possible from scratch. That is to say, I don’t just open up their JPGs and fuck with them. But I substitute the text “I AM TOTALLY RIPPING YOU OFF” for their words. You’ll note that in some cases I have added ancillary text, when either the nature of the off-ripping or the target of the ripoff demands it.

This is an object lesson in intellectual property and the rather contentious and ill-resolved idea that one can “own” an idea. This has been a hot-button issue in software (e.g. open-source, DRM, proprietary interoperation protocols, etc) as well as elsewhere in all fields related to cultural production… if you have not already read the attached essay by Jonathan Lethem, it’s a good read on the topic (amusingly, I would have simply linked that article on harpers’ website, but they made the whole thing “available to subscribers only”, sort of proving my point, in a way).

The manner it relates to our class is in what I am doing with this stuff. In the “art world”, recent innovations have forced the uptake of intellectual property pragma that relates to some of the nonsense with software. It is one thing to make a masterwork painting that is a completely unique physical object; it is quite another to make a digital piece of “art”, using the same production tools as designers, film-makers, et al, and then artificially limit the works’ distribution by only producing a limited number of, say, DVDs, or digital prints.

Works like these rely on constructs like “certificates of authenticity”, which are analagous to software license certificates and the like. In theory, you can make infinite copies of the data that comprises the Ubuntu open-source operating system, or of Microsoft Windows, or of Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle”. Duplicating the latter two, however, is illegal, even though both of these things have been produced with the same sort of toolchains that enable distribution of an unlimited scope (they’re both bits and bytes, at the end of the day, after all). Intrestingly, “certificates of authenticity” serve as a currency of sorts… an apt comparison as art collection is often compared to a futures market.

It is a touchier subject with artists and designers. In the attached article by Simon Doonan, he humorously details a situation that arose where the artist Jack Pierson claimed eminent domain, as it were, over Doonan’s aesthetic. Pierson tried to suggest that he had some sort of exclusive right to use found junk signage in his artwork. This argument implies that Pierson’s identity as an artist was solely based on style and technique.

My response to this mess is to rip a wide range of people off, and tell them about it. My poster series thus far includes Karel Martens, Jenny Holzer, Laura Dapito, Wim Crouwel, Ed Ruschia, John Baldessari, Experimental Jet Set, and Erika Nishizato, among others. I have already been given clearance to hang these posters in the Mason lobby, and they’ll be up there for 2 weeks starting around the first. Here is the current plan for the wall:

http://objectsinspaceandtime.com/~/fish/_for_david/_masonwall_mockup03.pdf

The distribution aspect of the project is such: I will also mail a copy of each of these posters to the person who has been ripped off. Enclosed will be in intellectual property receipt, and a complaint form, replete with an obnoxiously impersonal cover letter. I designed the receipts to mimic the simple laser-print transaction receipts from the local 7-11 (see the attachment ipreceipts.pdf for some examples) and I have printed them out at the right size, taking care to rip the bottom edge of the page so they appear as authentic as possible. (to that end, I have a friend in digital media who has several actual receipt printers that I can get access to, so that’ll appear as real as possible).

How people react, both to the posters as displayed in an “art gallery” style context and to having their own work egregiously aped, will draw forth my currency design. I see the project as a dipstick, with which I might assess peoples’ prevailing sentiments on intellectual property issues in design. I have already sent out a few posters, and I will do another round.

But so. As I mentioned, I am in a rather poor mental state, these days. (it took me about four days to write this). I think I need to be away from class for a little while. I am planning to go down to my dad’s house on cape cod for a few days. I’ll bring my laptop and work there, but I need peace and solitude. If I stay here I fear I won’t be able to get out of bed, most days.

What I would like to do is to finish this project up, and work with you individually to design my currency. I really don’t want to ask for this this kind of “special treatment”, quite frankly. Most everyone has offered me an opinion on what I should do, and they all range from “jump back into your work!” to “take all the time that you need!”… personally, I hate to claim any sort of extenuating circumstances for myself. I want to ultimately be treated like anyone else. But I must take exception in this case. I am fine one minute, and a mess the next.

Please let me know if this is agreeable, or what I might clarify. I hope you’re well. Thanks for reading.

Figure 1: Phillipe Apeloig.

So yeah, I am totally ripping you off. Really, when you look at my design work since day 1, it’s what I’ve been doing all along; I’m just being as brutally honest as possible about it, for this project. Yeah. If you want me to totally rip you off, or if you have suggestions on who I should totally rip off, do let me know. I find the most satisfying things to totally rip off are things that are already, in some fashion, total ripoffs themselves… like when early tDR starts to creep into Wim Crouwel’s territory, or Bruce Mau shamelessly aping Quentin Fiore; that sort of shit.

Figure 2: Karel Martens.

Naturally I already tried to do Paula Scher’s swatch posters, but I can’t cram the phrase “I am totally ripping you off” into them, typographically. This is fine with me because the Public Theater stuff is so much more fun to emulate. But yeah, using that same phrase (more or less) on all the posters is part of the game; my friend Christian pointed out that this made it into a sort of All Your Base type of thing, which I agree with. I am all about such image-macro meme stuff these days, anyway (see last image here) so that’s just dandy.

Figure 3: Stefan Sagmeister.

Blech. Yeah. Also I was rereading the first half of Design Writing Reseach and it occurred to me that so so so much of the last, oh, maybe 80 years of critical theory is essentially a bunch of fumbling around in the dark towards an understanding of neuroscience. Like, instead of going right to the source and preparing histologically stained cross-sectioned rat brain samples, and all that, people have been content to sit around in corduroys and talk about indexical signs and that sort of shit. Like, you get the feeling that eventually, theorists just might stumble through all the issues and arrive at something relatively demystified, that acknowledges the whole perception-is-cognition thing without quasi-religious rhetoric getting in the way, et cetera. Wouldn’t that be interesting, if that happened? I think that’d be fucking interesting.

Like, there was this one time I was talking to a professor from MCM at a bar, and he was going on about some logical paradox he had claimed to glean from Derrida, or somesuch, and I mentioned something about V1/V2 and how you can’t look at any one part of the brain as the “soul” or “seat of consciousness”, which really I thought was pretty basic, and he was all like, “oh yeah, neuroscience”, and looked at me like I’d taken his toys away, and the conversation was pretty much dead in the water at that point. I dunno. Funny, yes? Maybe. Another angle on the pseudoscience conundrum; maybe the opposite angle, even.

Anyway. That’s all I got for now, I have to go totally rip more people off now, so I will talk to you later. Yes. Salud.

-fish