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!

Yo. Before I forget, there are many miscellaneous things you should know. I will now list them.

• Bryan and I were up very late indeed making and installing the SPACE ROCKS! poster (as you see above), and it would be great if you came! It’s next Saturday at the GSD, and a bunch of graphic designers and artists, etc, will be speaking about SPACE. And how it ROCKS, no doubt… the full info is here. Indeed!
• In the course of the making of this poster, I paired Johnston ITC with Mr. Barnbrook’s Bastard Fat, which I am like rilly pleased with in some perverse way. I can’t explain that shit. Rilly, you tell me:

• The day after that, though, I got totally busted by the Mason building’s sysadmin for circumventing the school’s print system. He had documentation of how much ink I had (allegedly!) used, down to the microliter or somesuch. So I am now in some serious trouble. Whoops.
• I love ffffound. My paean to it has been up on SpeakUp for a little while, so maybe you knew that, but still. It’s fucking awesome. Yeah.
• My show went up. I call it “my show”, which is wrong, really; I was one of many many participants in what was the graphic design graduate show, which I curated along with Jerlyn and Hoon. So not at all entirely mine (although I did do the identity posters for it) but in my mind I still call it “my show”, however erroneous that might be. Erm. It was a blast, I’ll have you know, yis.
• Through all of these things, I took copious notes on tumblr, where I post both thesis-related and non-thesis-related miscellaneous shit. In the course of our space rocks work bender, Bryan asked me what the value-add of tumblr was, and I described it much as I described ffffound’s allure: more of a value-subtract, really; the lack of control over minutia that you have with most bloggy things (tags, comments, RSS, APIs, etc) make it kind of a pleasure to use. Many of my friends have been using them, because who cares about most blog features? I, for one, could give less of a shit, for the most part, and so yeah hey.
• I got the thirty-inch monitor, like finally, and the ipod touch, on an impulse. Laura pointed out that these are exactly the things I’d throw out my window, if I wanted to make a Yaz record… but frankly I like “Situation” and its ilk as they are, for the moment. The one thing I will always go gaga for is a bigger fucking monitor, and I think I can safely say with this one that I’m good for a little while w/r/t monitor envy and whatnot. Ok. Yes!
• Looking for thesis advisors. Need to find them, like this week. Can’t I summon my recently graduated friends???? Argh.
• Sleep cycle is pretty fucking abnormal. As such I will kill this list now, cuz bleah. But yeah I have to churn out the writing for thesis, so there will be more drivel here soon, I will warn you. Yis!

love ya

-fish

Yo. So I’ve been meaning to post, really… but I will confess: there have been other distractions in the online world. Why conjure up a full-fledged opinion on something, when you can simply ffffind an image or cough up some wierd shit, with a shrug, and be done with things?

Blech. Really. But the recent show I curated (in association with my esteemed cohorts) got me thinking about some shit. And, you know, I’ve got one million ideas, and they’re each worth one dollar… and so. I will commence posting some in-progress writing stuff at this point, and you, the anonymous internet reader, can have at them as per the conventions of “blog” “postings” and what have you. Here, for starters, is a rebuttal to the canonical Graphic Design in the White Cube essay, by Peter Bil’ak. Currently, I am in the process of designing a six-poster series, typeset with both Bil’ak’s essay and my own commentary, targeted for display in an actual “white cube” gallery as per Mr. Bil’ak’s invocation.

So here you go. More work to follow, yes! Ahem.

GRAPHICS DESIGN IN THE WHITE CUBE: A REBUTTAL

I often hear this essay’s opening statement, assertively definitive as it is, repeated by critics of design exhibitions. It certainly sounds convincing. But upon closer examination, it is far from axiomatic. How, for example, can a poster in a gallery suffer from a lack of context? Your average event poster is emblazoned with typographic information: dates, times, locations, and other ancilliary data are most often integrated with form and composition in such works. Books and other published printed matter also typically display their own metadata throughout their construction, from their spines and covers, through their front matter and running titles. In this way, many archetypical graphic design constructs bring much more contextual information with them than, say, archetypical fine-art constructs such as paintings, etchings, sculpture, and the like.

It is easy to say, “Aha, but graphic design is inherently functional. A poster in a gallery, objectified as it is, is not doing the job for which it was purposed, which is to disseminate its encapsulated information; whereas fine-art work like paintings are at home in the gallery space.”

My response to this kind of comment is twofold. Firstly, the assertion that graphic design is “inherently functional” (or “always to serve a client”, or “for money”, or any of the other permutations of that idea) is false. Graphic design archetypes may have evolved out of the necessities of information storage and transfer, etc, but that does not make all graphic design objects beholden to this ideal. I would, at this point, illustrate this point with fanatical elucidation of some of my favorite graphic practitioners of the past and present, and the work that they do that straddles the false dichotomy of “art” and “design”… but Mr. Bil’ak has done that for me himself, later in his essay.

Figure 1: Graphic design versus art. Can we please not have any further discussion of the matter?

Second: it is easy to forget that most fine-art constructs are descended from equally functional roots. The craft and canon of painting, as we all know, started out as graffiti on cave walls, and it concerned itself with where one might go for some good wooly mammoth. The illustrious evolution of the practice of painting has led it outside the gulag of functional slavery; why is it “fundamentally problematic” to employ the toolset the gallery offers to reconsider graphic work, in the manner in which it is used to reconsider “art”?

One gets the feeling that, in his opening salvo, Mr. Bil’ak was calling out exhibitions comprised of more pragmatic (nay, functional) design material: business cards, letterheads, no-smoking signs, community newsletters, medicine bottle labels… that sort of thing. An exhibition of “graphic design” of this sort would most likely bore me. If poorly considered, such a show might suffer from a lack of critical context.

Mr. Bil’ak then immediately seems to reverse his position, describing as he does the work of Karel Martens, M/M Paris, and other designers who either directly make art, or who make a case for their design working successfully in the gallery context. Mr. Bil’ak’s invocation of these practitioners — and the fact that their work achieves exactly what his bold initial claim decries as “always problematic” — muddies the essays’ thesis far beyond its syntax. Indeed, before long, Mr. Bil’ak trots out the old “what is ‘graphic design’ anyway” chestnut. He dances around the definition, offhandedly citing (and thus summoning the moral authority of) the established history of the Brno International Graphic Design Biennale, but then proceeding to suggest that despite “people[’s] created expectations”, we can “understand ‘graphic design’ … to mean a field in flux”:

Unlike the work of other professionals, the work of a designer is not restricted or defined by its content; in fact designers are trained to accommodate and express various, often contradicting ideas. It is a ghost discipline as Stuart Bailey writes:

‘…graphic design only exists when other subjects exist first. It isn’t an a priori discipline, but a ghost; both a grey area and a meeting point…’ Bailey calls attention to an area that many designers struggle with: the way that they refer to their activity in their field transcends the established notion of its definition.

… this sort of language carefully positions ‘graphic design’ as a mercurial complement to whatever it is that it may be engaging with. I agree with this notion; in fact, it is a very interesting way to talk about how graphic design works. Mr. Bil’ak seems to conclude that graphic work is at odds with exhibition in galleries because of its fluid definition… the tabula rasa of the “white cube” diffuses whatever relevance the graphic work might bring to the table.

BUT, SEE, IT’S NOT LIKE THAT. ALLOW ME TO EXPLAIN…

Generally, contemporary art museums exhibit designed elements from the entire spectrum of human cultural production. One can go to the RISD museum, for example, and see recreations of entire 18th- and 19th-century rooms, each chock full of silverware, furniture, glassware, tapestries, and countless other accoutrements. Down the hall from these tableaux are enormous collections of Japanese Noh robes, assemblages of Roman sculptures, surveys of contemporary music videos, and other such disparate specimens… all of which fall under the museums’ aegis, the necessity of their construction notwithstanding. They’re all treated as first-class museum citizens, right up alongside the paintings and installations and other “art” material.

Bil’ak is not talking about museums, though, nor is he discussing exhibition space in general. His argumentative feint about the definition of ‘graphic design’ hides a much larger lexical omission: the definition of what is meant by “white cube”. It sounds self-explanatory, right? I mean, all contemporary galleries are just expressions of this nearly Platonic idealization of exhibition space… right?

The seductive simplicity in Mr. Bil’ak’s employ of the image of a “white cube” masks the very complex set of social, economic, and spatial conditions that are produced by the contemporary gallery as much as they nourish and sustain it. The explication of these dynamics is beyond the scope of this document in a big way — those interested in the minutia of such things will no doubt enjoy Frederic Jameson’s “Postmodernism (or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism)”, if they haven’t already read it — but suffice to say, the notion of a “white cube” is dangerously dismissive.

I don’t even need to dissect the architectural and socioeconomic frameworks in which contemporary gallery space is enmeshed to prove this. Mr. Bi’lak illustrates it himself, if you read the remainder of his essay with care. After positing his definition of ‘graphic design’, Mr. Bi’lak then goes on to describe the conceit for “Graphic Design in the White Cube” [the exhibition] and how it dovetails with the exhibitions put on by renouned practitioners (like M/M Paris) and accomplished curator/authors (like Rick Poynor). Notably, from this point on in the essay, Mr. Bil’ak ceases all references to “white cubes”. While listing his fellow art/design luminaries’ various shows, retrospectives, collaborations, and whatnot, Bil’ak makes reference to specific galleries in specific places. Moreover, he freely invokes larger-scale events, such as biennales, and he includes full-fledged museums alongside contemporary gallery spaces in his enumerations.

Really, at this point, Mr. Bil’ak’s thesis could be restated as something like:

“Exhibitions of vanilla, boring graphic design work — like letterheads and pamphlets — won’t really work in theoretical idealized display space, as alluded to by some contemporary art galleries.”

… which, yeah, I agree with. Beyond that, any issues incumbent in showing graphic design in a gallery are not necessarily systemic: bad work, whether you call it ‘art’ or ‘design’, will not make for a good show. Bad gallery space will likewise negatively affect the shows held within.

And, really, thank god. As Jane Jacobs said in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Everything that happens in the world happens at some place.” Many notable practitioners have utilized the unique features of the galleries they have placed their work in. Consider Sarah Sze’s mind-bendingly complex gallery installations, or Yayoi Kusama’s sale of her own work as a protest against the Venice Biennale (which she mentions in this interview), or Jenny Holzer’s employ of the Guggenheim’s spiral as a single long line of text … to say nothing of Matthew Barneys’ subjugation of that same space to his fantasmic whim.

These precedents make Mr. Bil’ak’s proposal for “Graphic Design in the White Cube” [the exhibition] read as anemic at best, and irrelevant at worst; my suspicions of such were confirmed when I saw the documentation of the show. Mr. Bil’ak’s notion of commissioning design work for the gallery implies an opportunity for performance that was squandered, and the posters that the participants ultimately produced are largely unremarkable.

Figure 2. Poster example with process sketches. From Graphic Design in the White Cube, the exhibition.

The posters themselves are displayed alongside process sketches. While I take it the sketches were to provide “context” for the work, their formalized presentation had no analog in the conventions of contemporary gallery space, and as such their presence was at odds with the work they were ostensibly there to support.

Most notably, the gallery the exhibition took place in was not a white cube. There were finished wooden wall panels in some places, and some lighting fixtures were non-trivially ornate. In the documentation photos, at least one curtained floor-to-cieling glass window is visible. If this sounds like a nitpick, I assure you it’s not: Mr. Bil’ak’s fundamental assumption is that his show is specifically designed for the generic non-place of his notional “white cube”. The fact that his chosen exhibit hall deviates nontrivially from this notion is quite telling.

(to complicate matters, “White Cube” is the name of a famous gallery in London, which is the home base of several high-profile YBAs. As far as I can ascertain, Mr. Bil’ak is not referencing White Cube of London at all.)

I would submit that demonstrating graphic design as functioning in a gallery space is unnecessary, because “art” itself is a specialized form of design. I have “art” in “quotes” for a reason: most Westerners have a romanticized idea of “art” as a volatile bromide, concocted of passion and creativity in the name of fundamental human expression. We know this is hardly true, if we think about it, but such is the myth we construct to explain “art”. This myth aligns the contemporary gallery space as a selfless cultural bastion, a la a museum, when in reality a gallery is more akin to a store. (rem koolhaas wryly notes this, and its urbanistic implications, in his essay Delirious No More).

As such, contemporary practitioners of “art” can be thought of as multimodal designers, who target “white cube” space as they work with it, like a medium in its own right. By “white cube” space, I mean contemporary gallery space as it is regarded by the myth of “art”. While “white cube” space never manifests itself as an architectural ideal — a gallery is always some place — the application of the “art” myth serves to impart some of the non-place attributes of that ideal. As such, “art” practitioners can gear their designs towards a generic gallery context, but they are free to engage their presentational surroundings and create site-specific works.

-fish

YO MY WALL IS UP!! Come to the fucking mason building and SEE!!!! I’m very happy with this shit. I know you’re not supposed to like your own shit, but I am taking an exception this time, and liking it. Yeah!

Also I have a new article up on SpeakUp and Writing Design Criticism. Do tell me what you think if you have some time to waste. Because I love you, and your opinion is paramount. Indeeeeed yes!

Anyway that’s it for now. I will be unbroke in about two hours so talk to you after I buy some food and eat it. Until then.

-fish

Whooooo. Yeah so I just put up my review of the Cooper-Hewitt’s National Design Triennial up on Writing Design Criticism. I’m of the opinion, as are others, that the Triennial was rather wack. I mean, did anyone like it? All my designer friends have had rather unkind words for it thus far. Maybe those of you who are not all-encompassing design nerds? Do let me know, because I am curious.

I wanted to get into all sorts of other shit in the article, like about how it’s kind of odd that COMA did the book and the identity for the show AND were featured in it. That’s odd, amirite?? I mean, COMA is fantastic, really… they came up here for a visiting designers’ workshop last spring, and they were the guest critics for the thesis reviews, and they’re excellent critics and designers and all that, BUT… WTF?? I would like to know WTF. And also the heavily preemptively defensive tone the curators seem to be taking is also quite something. HRMMMM, INDEEEED!!

But I do recall hearing some guy on the radio, circa the year 2000, defending the Millenium Dome. This dome was the temporary home for a monstrous, all-singing, all-dancing show about humans and how generally awesome they are and will be in the future, which ran through the year 2000. People generally hated it, even when on drugs, and it’s pretty much been written off as a failure since. But so the guy on the radio was talking about how gigantic expos such as that are typically received poorly in their time, but remembered fondly, and that such would be the case with the dome.

After reading that Guardian precis, I dunno about the dome, but the radio guy’s thesis sounds rather believable… it’s easy to be like, “last triennial was SOO much better.” I myself can’t weigh in on that, as it’s the first I’ve been to, but hey yeah. Do let me know what you think, indeed.

But so yeah. Trying to finish all open writing projects, now. Got a few more. Some are typical grad-school pre-thesis nonsense, some are for my own shits and giggles, and some are bits I hope to actually get into print sometime in the possible future. That, I think, would be very nice. Even Jacek, from 2+3D, was like “yeah, it’d probably benefit your career to have something published in English,” and I agree with that… to which I would add “… and also in actual print and not on some sort of blog.” Indeed.

I do love me some blog, though, although I still find “blog” to be one of the most repulsive neologisms ever crafted. I’ve been writing blather on the web for about 10 years now, and the practice has thoroughly fucked up my editing techniques. In the case of that Triennial article, for example, I wrote the first draft in Word. I cleaned up my grammar and whatnot, and then moved it into InDesign, where I simultaneously typeset the article, wrote the footnotes, placed images, and re-edited the fucking text. After that, I went through the whole thing again in Movable Type. It is the act of publishing the stuff online, though, that lets me see the real gaping horrid errors. I’ll fix like one error, rebuild the whole page, and then look at it anew, and with each pass I’ll find all the stuff that eluded me when editing in any other program. I think the scrutiny comes from when I originally had an “online journal”, which I updated in Emacs over dialup; in such an environment, retyping and reediting is a royal fucking problem.

Not that my shit don’t stank, or nothin’. I am sure the piece is far from perfect. But hey.

Another thing I should mention is that I have been nerding out so thoroughly these days, to the point where my social life is basically done. It’s quite sad. Now that there’s more light in the day, though, I’ve had it with such nonsense. So you (yes YOU) should call me up and buy me drinks. I promise you all types of entertaining conversation and observations, really. In fact, there’s a party here at Mason (yes, the studio, but it’s the best I can do right now) this friday after Open Studios. You come by there, that’d be an excellent start. Yes. Word. Allrite. Talksoon.

Yeah!

-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.

So hi. By most measures, F2 was a damn good time. I had about 10 tons of human beings dancing their respective faces off in my bedroom, with their visages going through a bunch of video feedback loops involving security cameras and whatnot. It was nice to do video again, even if the whole system was largely on autopilot for the night. Juggling the roles of host, video performer, retarded jump-up-and-downer, itunes dj, and finger pointer did not afford me much wiggle-room, but whatevs, just setting up all the RCA cables and little boxes brought back all sorts of memories, like when I’d do that kind of insane shit once a week or so as a matter of course. Yeah.

Anyway. My dear associate James Chae has an article up on Writing Design Criticism, and you should read that shit and tell him what you fucking think, I say.

I, too, have been writing some shit. Some of it may be ready to see the light of day soon, but not just yet, for the most part. Sometimes, you’re jotting shit down in your little notebook or Stickies or whatever, and just one sentence just says all you want to say. That’s nice, but it does not beget essays of the caliber favored by most publishing institutions. For example, I found this in a text file on my desktop just now:

the book Skin and Bones needs chapters on j. mandle performance wear, yayoi kusama, maybe banksy, etc… it does NOT need more puff-piece frippery about OMA/AMO or herzog and deMuron. look beyond the obvious, you idiots.

… and really, I can’t refine or explicate that one any more than that. So, blech. There it is. I will rock you with more interesting shit soon. But not now. But soon! Yes. Thankyou.

-fish

I am so easy, when it comes to dance music. Alls I need is a good mix done by someone who knows how to use a low-pass filter. It’s that easy. It can be anything: house, Warp, 80’s, norwegian black metal, Sufjan Motherfucking Stevens, I don’t care*. As long as you can avoid jarringly crashing the songs together (not easy; such cacophony is SOP for some) and you sweep the mids, you have me at hello.

Not that I’ve been dancing much (with a handful of notable exceptions; most notably the drunken CAVE danceathon depicted above, which maybe I will tell you about sometime) but dance music == work music, and the nights have been quite late here. The writing has been haphazard, but I did get an article out the door for a magazine my dear friends back in RISD architecture are doing. It’s called Public Relations, and when I know more about this publication and its whereabouts, so will you.

Anyway. Also, a few weeks ago I went and got some new pants in new york. I usually get pants from Diesel, but I wanted to mix things up a bit, so I went to the “G-Star RAW” store across from Stackhouse, despite their entirely stupid name. While the pants I got there are nice, the people who work there are retards. Furthermore, they managed to reinforce my conviction that ASSHOLES and RETARDS are the new fundamental dichotomy that defines all of humanity:

Figure 1. Assholes versus retards. As originally referenced herein.

… and so here’s why: when you go to Diesel, the people who work there are snotty, overdressed pieces of hipster trash who don’t condescend to give you the time of day (née “assholes”). When you come out of the dressing room in your putative new pants, they look you up and down and sort of snort derisively. I am not precisely sure why, but this whole routine makes them sell more pants. Like you’ve somehow earned them by dealing with their shit.

But so the “G-Star RAW” people are sycophantic douchebags (née “retards”). First off, the pants guy actively helped me find some pants. That was their first mistake. I do not want nice pants people; I want to be brutally put in my place for my naïve fashion sense and rampant consumerism. Furthermore, he tried waaay too hard to please. I came out of the dressing room in some pants, and one of his pants cohorts looked at me and immediately said “those look nice!” … I went over to the mirror and saw that he was a lying sack of shit. The pants were horrendous, and I in fact sent them back. Plus, all the “G-Star RAW” employees were not dressed in the over-the-top absurd manner I have come to expect from top pantsmen. The whole experience left me baffled, and I can’t say I’ll be doing much business with them in the future.

Anyway yeah. This whole entry was a procrastination scheme, so I’m going to call it over and do some real work. Fuck yes!

-fish

I re-read Harriet the Spy, after like 20+ years, and it was at least as all-encompassingly awesome now as it was then. If you haven’t read this, I would go read it right now if at all possible… it will take you all of 3 hours, max, to get through the 240 pages. That’s not to say it’s simplistic or childish, no, it’s just awesome. Plus the illustrations take up space, indeed yes.

Of course, I could detect all sorts of stuff this time around that I missed back when I was a wee lad. The book is packed with all sorts of New York-specific stuff, which now that I consider it very well may be the source of my personal fascination with the city. Plus there was the usual bevy of socioeconomic and social angles that any quote-unquote “children’s literature” is encoded with but is not consciously accessable to you when you’re actually a child… those bits are always a guaranteed hoot during adult revisits, yeah.

Anyway. Now I’m trying to write up a bunch of stuff about how contemporary gallery shows have to necessarily enngage with, and ultimately fuck with, the gallery hosting them to be at all effective. Like this one did… such things provide perspective to the gallery’s fundamentally priveledged viewport, rite? Yeah. I’m not done, or I would have posted it here. If you have any links or leads on that sort of thing, do let me know, cuz I’m sort of blocked at the moment, yes.

Another impediment to such writing, besides my own sloth and ineptitute, is the fact that my new “mac book pro” has either a busted battery or a busted power-management thingy, and as such it turns itself off when unplugged for a few seconds regardless of the charge. Anyone else with such a fucked computer? It’s retarded, indeed, but it definately could be worse, all things considered.

Yes! Now to eat a candy bar, and go home. More when I got it, yeah.

-fish

My greenpoint neighbors had been kind enough to leave their wireless access points wide-open all summer, but that charity ended abruptly last friday. C’est la guerre, no? Right before a big deadline at the Merce job, too.

No internet == no research, == sad. I had just made a list of my research tools, and lookit how many of them are internet-based:

del.icio.us: everywhere I’ve ever been that I thought worth remembering at the time. Say what you want about “web 2.0” nonsense; I do enjoy “tags” in this context, for slicing and dicing my own data, and the data of others.

Nexis: Anything anyone wrote that was somehow officially sanctioned. Nexis is information crack. Whittle away an afternoon searching your friends and enemies! Yes. Unfortunately, Nexis does not support google’s query syntax, which is hard to unlearn. It also doesn’t seem to support the ‘back’ button of the browser.

google: of course. The perfect complement to the two aforementioned services. I’m sure you understand.

The Complete New Yorker: Although this content is largely accessible via Nexis or their web site, reading the original articles in their original context is a rare treat. You get fantastically distracted by all kinds of things (nice old typography in ads, inexplicably anachronistic unindexed blurbes, et cetera), such that it’s wholly worth the 60 bucks and the dependance on physical media objects.

spotlight: I love pdfs. Whenever I run across one, I save it in a big, disorganized folder, which the macintosh OS is generous enough to sort for me.

cigarettes: As disgusting as the habit is, I love the way smoking dovetails so well with my work habits. I get away from the computer once every two hours or so, and in doing so I can clear my head and avoid getting bogged down with some detail. Also, if other people around you are smoking, you can ask them questions like, “So, Chris, what do you really think of semiotics?” and maybe they’ll direct you to some sort of valid resource. Yes.

… see? most of these things require the interweb, which as I mentioned I have been recently (albiet fairly) deprived of. Maybe I shouldn’t have run all those torrents? Who’s to say. Yes.

On an unrelated note, the other day I saw a girl walking down the street, wearing one of those perpetually unfunny “ironic cooper black t-shirt” shirts. It said “I’m cute in front”. I don’t understand this. The text was printed on the front of the shirt, indeed, so was she trying to insist upon her own perceptions as fact? Or making fun of herself and her own percieved cuteness? Or maybe trying to specifically say “stop fucking me in the ass” to someone (or, perhaps, anyone at all)? I don’t know. I want to hate this t-shirt, but I don’t understand it, so I can’t. Phooey.

Ok, now I must order another coffee in order to remain online. Salud, wish me luck.

-fish

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.

so let me bring you up to speed. here is the deal: I am in greenpoint. I am in apartment #3F at 67 driggs, near mcgorlick park. I am subletting this spot from a chick I met on craigslist. I spent all my spare cash on the rent here, and on the rent in my PVD spot, and on a new computer I didn’t really need but kind of wanted anyway, and so no I am closer to broke than I’d like to be, which is why right now I am drinking miller genuine draft. I have an air conditioner and an enormous turbine-sized industrial fan so I am not too absurdly hot. I am trying to work on my book and so far ofer erenfeld, david reinfurt, stephan moore, and a few other kids have agreed to give me interviews, which will give me enough material to prevent the whole project from collasping under the weight of its own hideously self-referential footnotes.

I am doing some freelance work but it won’t pay me for a while. I went, the other night, to Hiro, to see VHS or Beta spin for the Hot Chip release party, and I danced like a complete utter retard, thanks to the unique combination of compounds and music I was subsequently exposed to. I have a fire escape here where I can watch the sun set over the park. I have sort of exposed my head and neck to enough sun to begin the tanning process, but the skin there is still kind of pinkish, and the rest of me is classic computer-geek pale white, so I literally look like a red-neck, which is very sad.

I couldn’t go to a party this weekend up in troy, which is also sad. I went to a party at the new O-R-G studio the other night, where many people including my ex-girlfriend had received summonses for drinking outside, like just before I got there, and they were selling a magazine called “tourette’s”, the mere presence of which in my personal space kind of bugged me out so I spent 10 bucks to acquire the two issues of it that they had for sale, and I was handed them by stuart bailey himself, which I did not realize until after the transaction, during which (thanks to the three or so hastily consumed warm heinekens) I made several comments that (in retrospect) made me sound like some sort of douche, and I will not reproduce them here, for your benefit.

I recently went through all my old fiction writing and found, unsurprisingly, that it was all utter garbage, but amusingly there are bits of it that are so amazingly bad that they successfully transcend and become bad in a fascinating way that catches and refracts all wavelengths of light all around you when you look at them, like a prism of horror sort of. I amused myself one morning by taking the best of the worst of it and typesetting it all neatly, with small-caps numbers and flourishes on the page numbers and hillariously ornate drop caps and shit like that. I will not show you this, again for your benefit.

I get headaches like all the time but I’m out of advill. I am trying hard not to start smoking again.

I’ll let you know more when I know more. yes.

-fish

I just imported my old movabletype archive, with all types of posts spanning a large chunk of my life, going back to august 2000, across multiple CMS architectures and several continents. it’s mostly drivel and all the links are busted, but at least it’s vaguely organized into three eras: the eatshit.diaryland.com era, the secret-floating-textbox hand-rolled-XML-format-based-CMS super minimalist era, and the looks-just-like-this-version but-coded-with-html-tables-not-CSS also-slightly-more-orange and-with-movable-type-2.66666 era.

I do not know why I did this but there you go. someday, I’ll read through it all, but not today, cuz I have school shit. all the images and most of the links are busted; that will be fixed, I am sure, at some point in time that most likely resides firmly in the future.

yes!

-fish

… first read this:

http://www.mkgraphic.com/semiotics.html

… and then this:

http://www.designwritingresearch.org/essays/rock.html

… and finally, this:

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/000723.html

if you are the kind of person that found that sequence of shit even vaguely amusing, and you have an appetite for downloading 10mb pdf files, then this is clearly for you. or just stop by the RISD graphic design gallery any time this week after this monday, for the same thing, only analog. yes!

-fish

so, yeah. haven’t really written on the internet for some time. I used to, with varying degrees of regularity… I have an old MT export file that I’ll put up, to prove this point of fact, but first I have to figure out a way to clean all the spam out of it. blech. yeah. the internet. it’s there… FOR YOU.

anyway I am trying also to kickstart another bloog, for my writing design criticism class. that one actually will hopefully have some life after the class is dead. I’ll fill it with my old articles from classes from the past, and whatnot. I actually like that blog’s template way better than this one, cuz I worked in this completely gratuitous color change thing at the last minute, so the tone of the page in question slowly changes as more posts or comments fills it up. at least in theory. in practice it looks like a typical fucking web page, so BOO.

I am not in a position to be assessing anything, aesthetically or otherwise… I’ve been up all night and I just sucked down the last of a “dunkin donuts” iced coffee. you know that last sip of that shit, which invariably contains a blast of undissolved granulated sugar? that’s what’s in my mouth, right now. indeedy.

anyway so yeah. if you’re so inclined, have a go at talking shit about what I wrote about renzo piano’s revisions to the morgan library, or, alternatively, antenna design’s recent cute lil’ gallery show. do this for me, and I promise you untold riches. yes.

yes!

-fish