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

What follows is a rather annoying essay I had to write for grad seminar, in which I “reflected” on a presentation I gave on my influences vis-a-vis my work. Please excuse the rampant pretense. Yes.

There are a great many things in this world that pique my interest. Of those that fall under the general aegis of my practice and work, I’d say it’s pretty easy to draw a line down the middle of them. On one side, there are the things that I love because something about them speaks directly to my persona.

Figure 1. Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Room, synchronized light bulbs and mirrors, 1965.

Yayoi Kusama’s monumental works, through which she sought (nay, seeks; she’s still a practicing artist) to defray the constant crackle of her neurological problems, inform my process in a way that naturally goes beyond mere formalism. Her work offers a viewport into the war she fights with her own errant brain on a daily basis. As such, it serves as an example of how such a force can be channeled, rather than pacified or otherwise “cured”, into art. I see things like that and I think, aha yes, I could do that.

Figure 2. James Turrell, Live Oak Friends Meeting House, light installation, 2000.

James Turrell, on the other hand, produces work that is austere in presentation, punctilious in process, and clear in intent. My hands aren’t steady enough to make the things he makes, and my mind lacks the zennish clarity one needs to conceive of these things in the first place. I’m attracted to the work, because it offers something I need. Turrell himself, however, is not someone I particularly identify with: we have little in common in most aspects. I’m sure that if we were stuck next to one another on a plane and forced to converse for a time, we’d wind up pissy and uncommunicative long before landing. (Not that that would ever happen; he’s most likely flying first class these days, whereas I’m stuck in coach.)

Figure 3. Karel Maartens, Counterprint, experimental monoprint, 2004.

Unsurprisingly, those few characters who straddle that line are among the most compelling: Karel Maartens, for example, is a supreme master of printing processes and data visualization. However, he does not allow these highly technical and systematized facets of process to rule his work; he still finds value in irregular metal junk, as the monoprints in his “counterprint” monograph wonderfully illustrate. His work multiplexes the calclulated and calming qualities I find attractive with the ragged human aspects I can identify with.

Figure 4. Maya Lin, Topologies, variable installation, 1997.

Ditto Maya Lin: In her Topologies show, she had meticulously and mathematically CNC-routed slabs of wood happily intermixed with prints she made by inking fragments of glass. The stochastic and the inductive were both bent into form by her vision.

This, I think, is what I aspire to do: I would like to harness the edge of my constructed systems. The points at which these constructs break down is frequently where the most fascinatingly unexpected situations can arise. In edge-cases like these, these break-down points frequently serve as on-ramps, as it were; they are where the humanity of the maker can break through the mask of the system to greet those on the outside.

You know, like this:

Figure 5. Unknown Artist, Longcat vs. Tacgnol, apocalyptic cat vision, 2007.