limited language: rewriting design: responding to a feedback culture

limited language: rewriting design responding to a feedback culture

Colin Davies, Monika Parr inder

limited language: rewriting design respondi ng t o a f eedback cult ure

Birkhaussr Basel , Boston' Berl in

Layout: Oskar Karl in This book is set in Monotype Grot esque (captions and references), Berli ng (body t ext) and Monoikos (all headers), Oskar Karlin designed Monoikos specifica lly for t his book,The t ypefa ce is based upon Monaco in 10pt which was used on th e original Limi ted Language websi te. Cover image: Luna Maurer + Kri st in Maurer De Zee naar Harderwi jk (The Sea at Harderwijk) www.dezeenaarharderw ijk.nl Comm iss ioned by SKOR Foundat ion Ar t and Public Space . The Dut ch coas t line at th e Ooster scheldekeri ng in Zeeland is st reamed live (w it h sound) t o pat ients at t he St. Jansdal Hospit al in Harderwijk, The Neth erlands. Every fi ve minutes a film st ill is archived online and patie nts receive a weekly post ca rd of images shot duri ng t he previous week, Technical real isati on: @Xit Courtesy SKORjP hotography: Teo Kr ijgsman

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009934863 Bibliogra phic inf or mati on published by t he German Nat ional Library. The German Nati onal Librar y list s th is publica t ion in t he Deut sche Nati onalbibliografi e; det ailed bibliograph ic data are available on the Int ernet at htt p:// dnb.d-nb.de. This work is subject to copyr ight. A ll rights are reserved, whethe r t he whole or part of the materi al is conce rned, specifica lly th e right s of t rans latio n, reprinti ng, re-use of ill ust rat ions, rec it at ion, broadcast ing, reproducti on on microfilm s or in ot her ways, and storage in data bases. For any kind of use, permission of t he co pyr ight ow ner must be obt ained.

© 2010 Limit ed Language

© 2010 Birkhauser Verlap AG Basel· Boston Berli n P.O. Box 133, CH-4010 Basel, Swi tze rland Part of Spr inger Science+ Bus iness Media Printed on ac id-t ree paper produced fr om ch lori ne-free pulp. TCF 00 Printed in Germany ISBN: 978-3-7643-8934-5

98765 432 1

www.bi rkhauser.ch

FDr i ouki«, Joseph and Christian FDr M ia an d Eve

Acknowledgements Thanks, To everyone who has cont ribu t ed to th e Lim ite d Language projec t over t he years, For publishing the book

Bir khii user Verlag Robert Ste iger. Commiss ioning Edit or Daniel Morgent haler. Editori al As sistan t A rc hite ctu re & Design For the design

Sofi a A ndersso n. ass istant designer Am alie Bore-Hansen, assista nt designer Oskar Karlin , Web and book con cept and overall design Luna Maurer, f or her generosity in discu ssions over t he cover For sub-editing the text

Emma Ang us M ic hael Clarke All the kind coll eagues who have helped with reading, advisi ng and recom mendati ons to the publishers

Jeremy Ayns ley, Jess Baines. Adri ana Cerne , David Crow ley, Adr iana Eysler, Ian Horton, Joel Karamath, Joe Kerr, Dene Oct ober. Rick Poynor, Sarah Temple, Tony Todd For research fund ing and research leave in th e preparati on of this book London College of Commun ication Royal College of Art University of th e A rt s, London Un iversit y of Wolverhampt on Everyone who has so generously suppli ed image copyright Finally. from Colin , Monika (f or her endless pati ence). my children (again).

Mum and Dad, and Emma. And from Monika,

Ben. Bet h and Lynne f or discuss ions about t he book, and everyth ing. Matt. Mu m and Dad, fo r everyth ing. In me mo ry of

A lice Swanso n who died on 8 July 2008. Ben Kin sella who died on 29 June 2008.

The Limited Language project In brief..

In detail...

The original idea, which ignit ed the Limited Language project, was to create a brand that used the Web as a platform for generating writing about visual communicat ion. The idea of the brand in this context was a deliberate conceit - to explore how word s, like images, are commodities. C utting, pasting and recycling are all properties of conte mporary image cu lt ure and are present in th e way we generate ideas. Thoughts and con versation s are cut and pasted from one context to the next, taking on a new signicance in each. Limited Language aims to capture this as a working process for new writ ing. Anyone can be part of Limited Language by respond ing to tri gger articles. We encourage people to recycle comments in their own research, as we collage them int o our own writing. An y comment event ually used is credited.

We began writing under the guise of Limited Language in London in 2005, as two lecturers/ practitioners in visual culture and theory. We were searching for a way to engage with visual culture, largely one in which image is read as text. We were aware that the words we wrote with, in many ways, shared the same outcomes as images. To us, word s and images have the same systems, same st ruct u res, same fetish and commodity value : you can buy and sell words, ideas and criticism as you might a Picasso, a bag of ch ips or pornography. Sometimes, of course, that's a Citroen Picasso. What we became increasingly conscious of was the way that, although some might talk of the possibilities of language as unlimited - of the procession of images, simulacra, as unending - to us, Language is Limited in two respects. First, the vocabulary of postmodernism; its flattening of critical positions into an atonal mantra of relat ivism - where high and low culture lose their magnetic North and become one and the same. The second is in the visual realm, where increasingly our worlds are shaped by sound bites, lists made up of top tens, anthologies, page layoutscommunication concertinaed into byte size representations via SMS messaging, the looped voice mail, a scrolling message board, or the chat room - where text and image are brought together in an online stream of emoticons and fcuk©ing abuse. From this starting point, we dec ided that our subject should be process. And, if we were

to write about the creative process, then we should at least explore how processes from within design culture (a culture of recycling and mash-ups etc .) inspire collaboration and cross-media!cross-di sciplinary practice and by extension new ways of generating and distributing wr iting about process. Limited Language is an attempt to weave these modes back into a framework - a nar rative to be used, re-used and again recycled. Not, we promise, just another rehash of the remix though - a cop out, to fill media space - but here we re-use and rec ycle as a deliberate technique because to revisit concepts in different contexts, at different t imes is to enrich, expand and hopefully capture the serendipity of creative process. On the website, designed by Oskar Karlin, we decided to invite practitioners and critics to post essays on subjects from their area of discipline or expertise, with relevance to issues of 'process'. The aim became to explore how ideas and processes transfer across disciplines. This idea informed the Web design, whereby we run three concurrent articles at once, allowing readers to read! comment across debates. The articles posted on the site are not intended to be 'finished' (although many are) but rather, provide ideas and questions which allow responses to integrate with the original text. These responses often take on a life of their own: existing articles may divide and multiply... paragraphs from one topic may be isolated to

generate new thinking elsewhere. Our remit always intended to go beyond a traditional design blog, where discussion is an end in itself. The Web here - immersive, responsive, collaborative - becomes a useful mode of facilitating research. In turn, this becomes synthesised and redistributed through print publishing: from journal articles, published lectures to this book. (But the book is a starting place, every article ends with an URL for the conversation to contmuel] Our writing on one topic migrates from the Web to print, via lecture halls, and back again. It is an ongoing 'collaborat ive' process. Just as walking down the st reet is as much about the mutterings and the conversation that you hear as it is about what you see, we use this feedback culture to construct our cr itique. Th is critique focuses in particular on the process and experience of design , visual cult ur e and the everyday. In Photoshop you can 't save to print unless you have 'flattenedthe layers. We don 't aim to flatten, but to produce a lamination of outputs, a composite for use and resale .

Book methodology Which design audience?

What is feedback culture?

We started out by looking at visual communication but any demarcation between practice d isciplines was soon corrupted and the site came to occupy the in-between space of process and practice: how we craft/create/ discuss/think/reinvent. We write about art, design, architecture, sonic and visual cultures and practitioners from all these disciplines have contributed writing to the site too - some of which we have included in this book.

Feedback culture is one of the cultural spinoffs of the Web 2 .0 inspired velvet revolution in cultural agency, where design increasingly facilitates, rather than simply providing bounded social practices in communication. Whilst many get themselves into (postmodern) knots discussing the true benefits of these cultural changes ; websites such as Twitter and Facebook are changing how the world is perceived and how we perceive ourselves within it . Increasingly the image has been sidestepped by 140 digit tweets and downloaded MP3S - screen based culture is fast being eclipsed by touch-screen tactility. Everyday, through screens, keyboards, wireless networks and Bluetooth accessories we are performing agents in a feedback culture. We have taken the responses from the Limited Language site as our starting place. Sometimes it has been a simple passing-ofthe-baton where we write on a subject and the responses have carried on in the same vein - maybe fleshing out more detail or giving a more mappable path - but equally tied to the original writing or response. We do not agree with everything written by others under the Limited Language banner but, rather, enjoy the serendipitous path it might inspire us to follow. Many of these journeys can be found in the writing in this book .

Structure of the book

The book is organised into chapters which do not follow disciplinary lines but coalesce around certain themes that have emerged as recurrent concerns over the years. The book layout is divided into two columns. The first, in black, is a starter article which has already appeared on the Limited Language website or elsewhere and which has tended to frame some sort of question or provocation. The second column, in colour, is our reflective response. This reframes the question in relation to some of the feedback received on the site (whilst taking into account its new context and changing events since originally posted). The starter articles comprise both our own writing, and writers and practitioners we asked to contribute to the Limited Language site. The book can only cover a small proportion of the writing published on the site over the years and we are equally indebted and inspired by those not appearing within these pages. We had no absolute criteria for selecting material for the book but have tried to choose the articles that captured certain themes and investigations regarding practice and process. In the end it can only be an arbitrary selection to try and give a feel of the ongoing Limited Language project. The responses to the starter articles are not only re-realised in our own writing but we attempt to explore the thinking process through the practical work, which has always inspired us (although the work is never physi-

cally represented on the Limited Language site: each article in the book ends with an URL for you to return to the Limited Language site . We decided upon a text only website to provide a focus on words (and thinking) as apposed to image/colour/text: the predominant blog format is image/text...image/text etc. On the site we have made use of hyperlinks to allow readers to go off elsewhere to feed the need for images and the physical realm! As design historians, this book seeks to revisit old work as much as new, and to explore how it materialises, and focus on its making. To this end we show sketches where possible, to try and capture work in progress. We're interested in what designers are doing and try to make sense of it in a wider context: its relationship between disciplines is as important as its cultural ramifications. Beyond the book... the Limited Language Web-platform will capture how our reflections here coalesce in a feedback culture: readers of the book can post onto the Limited Language website - providing a point of departure for new discussions in an on-going process. Each chapter's opening spread includes keywords that we have identified as critical moorings to the proceeding essays. In brackets, we have shown their Google hit rates when added to the word 'design'. This is of course ever changing, but it gives an idea of what is out there.

Table of contents 8

The limited language project

10

Book methodology

15 17 25 33 41 49 59

Cr it ical moments The problem with design / What voice can design have? Design in cris is / Too much history Pat ronising Prada / Crit ical effects Love/hate / Base and superst ructure Shock and awe: t he polit ics of product ion / The process of consumpt ion Mult iverso / Embodied inf ormat ion

67 69 77 87 93 99 105

Agency Modernism 2.0 / Designers of possibilit y Design polit ics / Design and th e good cop/bad co p scenario Ben Wilson / Noti ons of visibility Work et hics / How much of th is can we ta ke? Escape from the t yranny of th ings / Susta inable design Sta te Br itain / Rebuilding protest

113 115 125 133 143 153

Tactics Visual comm unicati on in 0.4 seconds / The buzzword and creat ivity Rethi nking t act ile graphics: a proposit ional metho dology / Rethi nking craft Boredom, b'dum, b'dum... / Boredom to f reedom Part of th e process / Community service Slow tim es... / The slow fas t

163 165 173 181 189 197

Topophilia Skyline and cityscapes / The bumps of fl at ness - th e terr ain of design Ana logous citi es I Captu ring t he imaginary Exposing t he line in fil m and video I The curve of imaginat ion Report f rom th e Hawk-Eye camera / Soft f orm Kodak moments and Nokia digit s... / Used condoms and f orgott en names

205 207 215 223 231 237

Sensibilities The sacred and the holy / Transient urban spaces The ext ra ear of th e other: on liste ning t o Stelarc / The paras it ical and t he para -crit ical Earl ids and brainlids: on thoug hts and sounds / Sound Polaroid White cube noise / Between t he gallery and t he st reet Images of images: phot ographs of pain in war / The slow look

247 249 255 261 269 273

Mediations After digital .. / Sense making? Digit al glass / Digit al behaviours Speech, wr it ing, print... / Serifs and conduits New readi ng spaces / Print vs. screen This page is no longer on th is server... / The infl uence of neighbours

282 Collaborators' biographies 284 Biographies 286 Index

Limited Language Ezri Tarazi Nicky Ryan Johnny Hardstaff Limited Language Limited Language

Lim ited Language John Russell Esther Leslie Mario Moura Aaris Sherin Lim ited Language

Limited Language Julia Moszkowicz David Crowley Limited Language Limited Language

Limited Language David Phillips Adam Kossoff Tom McCar thy Limited Language

Lim ited Language Joanna Zylinska Angus Carlyle Mon ica Biagioli Lim ited Language

Limi ted Language Jon Wozencroft M ichael Clarke Max Bruinsma Lim ited Language

Critical moments The problem with design / What volce can design have? Design in crisis / Too much history Patronising Prada / Critical effects Love/hate / Bose and superstructure Shock and awe: the polltics of production / The process of consumption rtutttverso / Embodied tnformatlon Till s chi] P!~ r

f"

pI0"'5 how
fro'" pol Lt i<;$IC v I 0 "'r>cr; mllth
Keywofd8 Hlstofy (217.000,000) Marxism (550.000) Problem SOlvH11l (10,800.000) Violence (:24.300,000) Keywo,ds and thei, Goog le hit 'ale In eDnI""cllon with t he word design.

Limited Language

What votce can deslgn have?

The problem wlth deslgn In Fear of Small Numbers: A n Essay on the G eography of A nger, l Ar jun App adurai com ments on how t he West is increasingly dom inated by a fear of the lone bomber wit h expl osives strapped to th eir ches t . Surely, a more rat ional fear would be the pani c of spotting the lone de signer wit h a portfolio, packed wit h high problemsolving principles st rapped to their ches t . Problem solving, the methodological bedrock of de sign, is the semant ic key to a designer 's belief th at they are in a position to change society. Social problems and design form a symbiotic relationship , somet hing politicians and cult u ral commentators alike find alluring." The 'de signer as cult ural-med iat or', has an esta blished hist ory in Brit ain : from the Great Exhibition in 18S1 to th e Festival of Britain in IgSI. 3 During this period , th e designe r's role as cult ural medi at or has evolved into the 'problem-solving' or 'social-e nginee ri ng' concep tio n of design we wit ness t oday. The trouble wit h problem solving is it s conti ngency. The problem could be anyt hing: global warming, soci al hou sing, over-consumption or even 't he Jewis h problem '. Indeed , th e scar of the Holocaust is incised, in pa rt, by th e work of designer s who (ofte n unintention ally) cr eate d the blu eprint s for mass killing; d rew up plans for the work camps, rati onalised and set the train timet ables and so on. Today, it should be rem embered th at one person's problem is anot her's home or fight for free dom or means of tr ansport. Much conte mpo ra ry design has taken on th e role of cult ural beautician or plastic surgeon, p rovidin g a global parlour plied with consumer goods , manicured with good intentions; all plucked from a repository of modernist thinking. It 's like Ig80s Alessr' wit h a social consc ience . In Wallpaper"S magazine, Dieter Rams (the influential de signer for the German con sumer electronics manufacturer Braun) , listed the Ten Co mmand ments

The original article took i . ue with the figure of the designer as already expert problemelver with their oft -quoted claims for 0 ial responsibility. De ign and . 0 ial respons ibility aren't directly linked . They are part of a matrix of hi tori ally . ituated relationship between people, contexts and media in whi h de , ign is embedded . An ironic C') take on this thinking an be seen in a T-. hirt that , ays Desiqn will save tile world. A counterpoint to this thinking was on show at the ompost modern og conference hosted by AlGA, the professional association for design in Arneric a, \\ ith its aim to 'connect the dots' on de 'ign and social responsibility. Here, inventor Saul Griffith' pre entation started with the image; Desiqn WOlI 't Salle tile world. Go volunteer ill a soup kitchen you .... Replie on the Limited Language website,

to Tile problem unth de iqn, were Ie s polemic, more ponderou than the sloganecring above; the equivalent, perhap ,of an wering the que tion 'What voice can de ign have:' with more que lions . Thi has provided u with the opportunity, here, to explore what's at stake in the . hift from de ign author and outcome. to design proce . This isn't to deny de ign a \'oi c, but re-cast it a. one pro .e .s , amongst others, of asking question: about the world . If, as igel ross suggests, there is a 'designcrly wa, of knowing ',' then what would be a dcsigncrly way of a king questions: An alternative to the black-clad designer with hi problem-solving principles of grids and typographi layouts come from 1ich I de Certeau in '[ lie Practice of Everyday Life.2 From the top of the World Trade enter, \\ here the viewpoim that transforms the l

Starter er
ity into a rational layout is an illusion, De 17

T-shirt by Osika LLC f or Ar t ef act ure (2008).

Text fr om a presenta t ion by invento r Saul Griffit h at th e AlGA conf erence Com post modern 09, as it appeared on several Int ernet blog sites in Spri ng 2009. htt p:// bit.ly/sa ul_griffith http: //bit.l y/compost modern09

.rteau

10

cur emerge ,a pede m an, on

t he trcet ' 111e t reet bee orne . the oppo ing 'ot he r of the 'ie\\ atop the buildmg. l

capmg

th Imaglllar, totalizations produced b~ the of good de sign: at number 4, 'Good design help s a product be underst ood' and at number 6, 'G ood design is

eye the walker e pen ence the lit. \\ it hout

hone st '. Here, fashionably repackaged, is the old Modernist d ichotomy: de sign's raison d'etre of mor al instruc t ion

chance and po ibrlity. For thi , the pedestrian

precon eption ,\\ hich make. him receptive to

(and our de igner] need a multitude of ta .t ics

alongside it s de cor at ive, consumptive self.

a. evinced from the details of ev ryday lif .

Pick at the sti t ches and you find the dilemma for all design: its relationship to commodity and the dialectical t en sions bet ween use and life-function. Every design will add to the flow, creating an ever-grea te r d ist ance between act ua l use and th e symbolic orde r it falls w it hin: an upturned box, a p icn ic table, an IKEA table, a Habitat table, a John Lewis table, a Heal's table,

Thi: e: .pcrience of the street i. analogou to

a Marcel Breuer table et c. The list ex pa nds to become a se ries of eBay 'tags'. Likewise, non-branded trainers and anti -globa lisat ion T-shirts validate the system they inte nd to cr it iq ue. In a modern capit alist world, where the route to soc ial influ ence is pock-m arked with the fallout of political sp in and unrealistic ass umpt ions of design's public impact , design's dilemma is this: what voice can design have? Design need s to go beyond the rhetoric of manifestos (whic h have become the bo red pat ter of fingerti ps on the t able while you wait for the next big idea t o come along). Des ign needs to be a series of small ideas - mini expl osions, eureka moments - wh ich atom ise and sett le in un expected places. A few immediatel y come to mind suc h as th e par adigmatic and well publicised work of architectu ra l collec t ives like Brit ish FA T (which stands for Fashion, Arch it ecture and Taste) and mu f (a group of arch itects and artis ts ) and product de signers like Dutch Droog de sign. One could also add Swedi sh Front De sign and graphic de signers like the French M/M (Pari s). Altogether, they present work of different and often opposing sta nces as to how de sign should live in the world. All their work is more about the 'process of de sign ' than probl em solving alone. Back in 2000, Droog's Do Create collec ti on included a met al armc hair that own er s bashed into shape w it h

t he notion of process in d sign . The W
111

which these alternative Image

de: umer translate into design thinking

(and real people') was teased out in replie to the article on the Limited Language I\('b:ite...

laulua l hllner,' tu lio for Virtuul Ty pography.

One reply quoted

head of th

comrm-nung that '[a] problem with design

education ...1 that it ignore. the accompanying que ·t ion .. , 'lIld then continued . 'It's not he nrnera that leterrnines the per pecuve, It's ba ically wh re ou position your elf an I wher you ar 'looking If vou ha c th· c apabilIt~ to orienta C'

our elf and de errrune our

po iuon ou ha c

IC'r) goo I

J

ar

And yet .. lame . ouuar points out a ten -

sion between old \VC' tern ideal and design : I n the "problem vith [e ign ing"

1<1

n cnoueh tor de i 'ncr

be political

tu,

that de Ign-

\\1." had to

II It, cultural comm ntator ,

coneeptual arti t . people vuh an int llectual agenda, not JU an ae: thcuc on, . Whil t de Ign can 't he . iiuated outside a larger network of \"I ual di : cour e .wh.u' in t r u me nta l is the way thi I: conceptu ali ed . ocial rc ponsibility 111 modernist European/American de , ign has coa lesced

around spccific , morally neutra l tag . : de ign for l haritv, the em ironment and I f-you

0

on . ('I he

-do-a-f 1m-aho ut- t he -Holoc au t -~ ou 're-

guarani .cd- an- O car line of th ought But neutral de pon . ible,

111

I

.J

m i an illu ion . ben irrc-

that it can't be held to account ,

Anne Ru h propo , 'soc ial respon e-abilny'. This IIauld involv ' re .po nd ing in dialogue With each projec t or cenano, rather than acting on pre - ct idea about socially re pan ibl desicn . Starter er
19

'In the mot fundamental .cnse, then, rc pon 'ihility is the ability to re .pond. It is not ju t the

willingness to a i, but also the ability to under stun lone' actions ."

This goe further than orientating one. elf to a. k: From where am I speaking: To whom: nd with \\ hat bia : What can my tools do: And rucially, what can 't they do: This ill'. about the abstract idea of SOcial rcspon: ibility and more about an embedded prar ti e that i ethical and accountable: And yet, again.., for out tar, the problem with po .t rnodern Western de. ign - exacerbated by it binge on French philosophy - I' that its context might already be bankrupt. In tead he looks to a Latin Renais ance, pecif ally in typography. 'I philosophy, no cultural theory, no marl' [uckmg head-stuff, hut just sheer passion and fasctnatlon for type, and a willingness to plav and explore, without the constant fear of eros iru; the ill-defined boundary betw 'en layer d irony and. irnple naivety. And really the l.ann how u the .imple an swer to "the problem \\ ith de Ign (in the Anglophone world]": it ha n . ou I.'III

'0

A reply to outtar counters that thi i 'a rather eli hed view that non-western [cur-

reml- Latin) = .oul

= pa: sionau-'.' what is oul? It would seem to be a deep level of human engag meru \\ ith the world around it: for instance, demanding not lust instinctual answers, hut real que lion . We might find oul in graffiti on the . tr ct of. ao Paulo-... But, an 't it be found anywhere 0,

where need is spoken with an authentic voice: Take just two examples ... luqaad, is a Freestanding shade canopy, made out of di arded oil cans, in the Indian village of Raiokri on the out skirt of 1 ew Delhi. This was built over a period of three month by ninety member. of the village, led by anjecv hankar, who 'e interdis iplinary work draws on practice aero art, craft, design re carch and archnecture. iI/gMt! i a Hindi term for attaining any objective u ing available re ource at hand and, in thi project, both cooking oil and repurpo ing are central to Indian culture. hankar 20

a sledgehammer and a rubber-lined (hence unbreakable) porcelain vase that gained character th e more it was dropped or smashed against a walL Here, Droog was investi gat ing process, rather than commenting on a global condition of violence. But they are equally likely to engage in 'changing the world ': Urban Play, implemented from 2007 and on, has been described as 'an international project... [th at] believes th at st reet-level inventiveness, energy and innovation is th e future of creat ivity in th e city... [cjreated as a cat alyst to inspire cre ativity in the public dornain.' Droog are int erested in new materials and th e cros s-fertilisation of technologies and pro cesses. For them, design is quintessentially a temporal phen omenon, a 'moving forward'. FAT'S architectural work such as The Blue House, a house /offic e/apartment finished in 2004, is always technologically pre cise and cognate, but the overall impre ssion is filmic. It is a collage of the visual objet d'art of urban exp erience, remixed and pre sented back to us. The FAT methodology is the antithesis of the New Urban ism movement, which uses the paucity of ideas in much conte mporary architect ure to validate old thinking, old architect ural form s and class divisions. New Urbanists say their gated communitie s are in respon se to th e needs of occupants, unlike the top-down ideologies of the 1950S and 1960s moderni st building programme s. FAT and muf respond differently to the same criticism . Their work is designed to grow from the middl e; it's about communication and engages in participatory workshops with the local community. muf's small-scale urban design projects are another example of this working ethic. Design needs to reflect the mores of its time s rather than produce a banal B-movie of an imagined community. Networking and a cross-fertilisation in methodology between th e digital and analogue worlds (different to inter-disciplinary practice) will become increasingly important to design th inking, be it MySpace or t he more tangible network of projects in inner city areas across th e world, Good design develops incrementally and , in a

Limited Language

I

Cr itical mome nts

I

The problem with design

Jugaad, a public art projec t wit h Sanjeev Shankar (2008). Phot ograph by Sundeep Bal.

A can lid being cut off . Photog raph by Sanjeev Shankar.

Cans being c leaned in big commu nal vessels. Phot ograph by Sanjeev Shankar.

The Fant ast ic Norwa y carava n.

Br0nn0Y Kunst base, Nor way. A n arena f or contemporary art f or t he last public space in the village of Brenneysund, proposed fol lowi ng works hops with the local comm unity by Fant ast ic Norway (ongo ing).

reflect s: 'Initial reoi .ia ncc in the village to work ith an out sider and e xplore the discarded oil ca n, a common ~) mhol of "waste , II a: an important challenge... Globa l issues of environment, sus tainability and recycling can inspire [people] only if they are linked to their daily lifestyle . Through deep human level engagement, there was a gradual change in perception II

globalised community, good design projects bounce off other ones . In these small explosions of technical nou s and creative spirit we see the materialisation of social concerns; environmental issues, globalisation, consumerism, ethics et c. But, not as doctrinaire monoliths, rather as small-scale , individual investigations into contemporary culture. What if a designer's social responsibility (should they feel the need) was to ask questions rather than emphasise problem solving... What if designers were to st op mak ing simplist ic overtures to saving the world ... What if they were to stop the mantra for sociallyresponsible design that ignore s the issues of religion , politics and personal taste... What if they were to stop telling consumers that the choice of one de sign over anot her eq uat es to sound ethical/political judgement... If only de signers could st op measuring the impact of design solely on how big the problem is. Instead, wouldn't it be better if they focused on how important the question is? See f urt her images here www.lim itedlangua ge.org/i mages

Ref erences 1 Arj un Appadurai, Fear of Sma ll N um bers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke Universit y Press, 2006). 2 Robert Levit & Ellen Levy, 'Design w ill save t he world!' in Har vard Design M eqezin e. Spring/Summer 2006. 3 Or, in Brit ain, per haps even going back to the fi rst design schools fo unded in t he 1830s. 4 The Alessi design colle ction gave us t he iconic designs of t he 'Juicy Salif Cit rus Squeezer' by Philippe Starck and the Bird Whis t le Kettl e by M ic hael Graves amongst others , 5 Wallpaper" 103,guest-edited by Dieter Rams, Septe mber 2007,

and ...gradually, the entire community was inspired... The fabrlcauon process and vision of il/!J(/(/ef became an integral part of village life and its people. Fantastic Norway is a group of architects whose red caravan - which travels around from town to town as an open-door, working office - embodies the idea of the soc ially responsive, 'public architect '. In each scenario, they find out through a 'mapping process' what project s are needed and how the y might come about ; in interaction with local residents, traditions, media-outlets, politicians and planning processes (all facilitated by scrving wafflesl], Erlend Blakstad Haffner sugge: ts that 'People don't necessarily knoll' what they need . But this proce ss helps them find the right arenas and form s, through architecture, to politically anchor them ." Thi s isn't instrumental [top-dew n) but 'd iulogi al' de sign. More colloquially, we might call it reciprocal : where there is genuine dialogue and people's particularities and feedback are looped into the proce ·S . No 'Big Idea', no one-size-fit -,Ill and no de signer ,IS author. Instead design in this mode i - project specific, experimental, open and value comes
Starter artIcle

23

in terms of impact or contcxtuali: ed in terms of movements. Instead, it ' to continually trace and re-trace design shift ' as increments. For Bakhtin. the dialogic has an imagination . As doe the term project, a verb, where the etymology of ieci is the act of throwing forward.. 1- Design 's voice projects into a continuum of critique, consumption, and contribution . What can design 's voice contribute to the social imagination? Set: full responses + carryon the conversatron here

ht: p;lItIl1y.cc/chapter 1_1

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24

Limited Language

I

Cr itica l mome nts

I

The problem wit h design

Ezri Tarazi

Design in crisis At first sight, all branches of design seem to be prosper ing. De sign activities all over the world are increasing exp onentially, filling th e sky with br ight new stars. Design reacts to technology faster than art, and this is very conspicuous as regard s to the d igital developments that have been ta king place ever since the mid-1970S. Designer s have been involved in this digital revolution from its very beginning and actively influenced its development. This was not a frin ge cult ur e, but an integral part of the digital revolution . They created the mou se, th e window, th e button and th e Web's visual experie nce. Wh ereas art is st ill trying to comprehend the video innovation , design det ermined th e way in which people work and act in th e cybernet ic world , But at th e same ti me design is going th rou gh a cr isis. Grey clouds gather bene ath its wings - eth ical issue s related to consum er ism, pollut ion and the exhausti on of raw mater ials as opposed to temptat ion, t he creation of endless collections and the sterility of renovat ion. De sign finds its elf coveted by new disc iplines that boast of deal ing with 'aest het ics'. The weak flutter which began wit h plastic surge ry to correc t damages after accide nts or war, grad ually becomes 'redesigning th e hu man body' for capr iciou s aest hetic reasons. Stand ard operatio ns, such as nose jobs or skin grafts are replaced by new inte rventi ons th at include 'overhauling' th e bod y and cosmetic surge ry. The physician no longer heals. (S)he 'creates'. Th e intention is more to design than to cure. 'Body designer ' or 'appearance designer' are more correct terms to define the se professionals, and they are closer in their intention to fashion de signers and hair st ylists th an they care to believe. See fu rt her images here ww w.lim iteotanquaqe.orq/ irnapes

Starter er
Too much history De ign and hi tory are hackl -d, ,f not synonyrnou : de ign suff r from either too rnuch hi 'tory or too ltttle. Design is (often) ubordinate to art, in part becau 'e of a lack of sane tioned hi. tory, but equally is kept in It. place by a connec tion to the hi torical pas 'age of Con sumerism and Capitali: rn. De ign ha lustonans but, it could be argued, lacks a Giorgio Va ar i or a Clement Greenberg ' - critics whom act a ensign or, even, a disunc t avant-gardism to forge an Intellectua l separation from apitalism : without this, de . ign I marooned. Ezri Tarazr, an I raeli industrial designer, in his article, pies a cri: is in de 'i rn bel au, c of it . unan hored nature. Its very popularity in recent time ha refloated it upon the public con .ciou: n '5 ' but without the proper l oordinates to whence it came, it will remain a gho: t ship . Design. for Tarazi, i becoming splint red . It I. \,. rating a collect ion of urfaee inci: ion \\ her the intention is more to de I m than to cure. AWl' wrru-, the notion of a cr isi i. beconung rru rea ingly frequent fodder in contemporary de ign - for instanc ,IDe:ign] Cri is at the 2009 Milan Furniture Fair which explored the relation hip between creativity and e risi . One c .hibu was Spamghe tto/ a visually baroque wall coveri ng which recycle ' junk-email, 'in order to turn the ugly pam into a beautiful wallpaper...'. Spamghettu makes visible a contemporary problem and repurpo: es it to another end . Rut it also brings a broader question to mind : can we de rgn our .elve out of a cri ' is beyond Imply making the ugly beautiful." In re pondin to Tarazi ' dilemma - to de ign or to lure? - replie to the po t addre cd de tgn' heritage a, part of the 25

problem . \

lame Souu ar ugge t .vcr-

uunlv the 19bo . mhen cd

.1

dp Ign culture

rnouldcd u- a 'product of modcrni: m - [inl

an era when there wa a popular app .u te tor grandiose per, onal visions. and for bing led'

I

1\ modernism of Tay lor ism and lord Motor

Company, '[ojhsesscd with uuliry, effuiency

and rationality ,II inspired production lines as much as it inspired the Bauhaus or l.e Corbusier. It was also a modernis m bloated by the vic tors of World War T\\'(): the

I S.\ ,

It is the diaspora of European thinkers and practitioners who went to America during

and after the war, many staying on long after appeasement, who, to this day, influence how design is critically asse: sed and, in many cnscs, the creative process itself Theodor Adorno,

l lerbcrt Marcusc, Eric h Fromm - under the leadership of lax Horkhcimer - arrived at Columbia niversity, finding themselves in the eye of the approaching pop-culture storm . The Frankfurt School, as they were collectively known (referring to their original academic institution), began to asses, the culture ' of Europe from the vantage point of the

I SA ,

They

provided the cross-disciplinarity in critical invc 't igat ion whic h informs liberal arts education today: a mix of sociology; philosophy; p: ychoanalysi: and anthropology. Commodity became the new enernv , Ever since this period, in the cross hair of muc h l ritical thinking is the predatory role of commodity. Design is the most vi iblc foot soldier in the advancement of a modern material culture. Design, technically and aesthetically, develops for the most part unimpeded by the counter flows of avant-garde movement s. Avant-gardism periodically self-audited its advances during the same period.u check and balance of politic and ae .theucs. The con umer culture born in the

1 960s

(reaching its nadir in the 1 990S) amplified the voice of disciplines from photography to graphic arts, product de , ign to architecture. But today, there is an irony in design activities increasing exponentially because, by and large, it is driven by the post modern 26

Lim it ed Language I Cr itic al moment s I Design in cr isis

Spamghelto: junk wa llpaper cover ing by To Do. Tec hnical Partner: Jannell i & Volpi (2009). If consume rs provide the dimens ions of t heir room, To Do's software can produce a wall paper design th at 'wraps' around objec ts, such as win dows or pictures.

Moving by Ezri Tarazi (2005), Phot ograph by Stud io War haft ig Venezian.

rupture of high and low culture (if indeed this split ever really occurred outside of certain philosophical discourse). Essentially, this link to consumerism negated the cognitive thrust of design and designers which underpins Tarazi's original post. An important conceptual framework. Iirst taken up by the Frankfurt chool, and since used in sociology and cultural studies, is that of kitsch. Kitsch is an important conduit bet ween the worlds of art and de . ign. When

Tarazi suggests that 'des ign finds itself coveted by new disciplines that boast of dealing with "aesthetics", kit. ch is influential. Here, we are arguing kitsch on an economic level not a post modern 'O h that 's so kitsch ' level! Design, historically, is written up as part of the mechanics of modern taste formation . It is a component of a fashion industry of surface and simulacra. Sewn into the very sinews of this relationship i the notion of kit sch. The intellectual and cultural formations (and interactions) with kitsch act as a catalyst in how design is under tood, con . urned and to some extent, created. As one commentator observes

by the late 19th century: 'Kitsch was the only art of the period which involved uncondition ally almost the whole of society." It' the very reprodu ibility of design which both provided an everyday language of visual form whilst equally acting as an opiate to dull the senses, attaching it to the danger of kitsch (...picture Philippe Starck's gold-plated machine gun lamps? ...). You an see how design lits the bill when Clement Greenberg explains that: 'Kit

h is mechanical

and operates by formulas. Kitsch i. vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of it . customers except their money - not even their time." Rut what is embedded within this notion of the commercial and the kitsch is the intr insi power of popularity; pop culture. Design provides a readily available, literally off the Starter artIcle

29

hclf con truction of identity It

I

thi verv

popularitv, an I bv - 'te n inn voice, 01 lesign culture which makes it auracuve to cultural tudies in the latter half of the zoth centurv, Commercial de ign provided the huikluu; blocks between hIgh and 10\\ culture. Kit ch could be seen a. an authcnuc voice of the cll enfraru hi cd - those' who did not frequent art galleries or read more than pu lp fiction . The hierarchy of high and low was substituted by 'taste cultures', Andrew Ros: , in his book j a Respect: lntcllectualsand Papillar CIIIlIIre, articulated the relationship bet ween taste and id -ntity thus: ·...an un table' politi al definition, variably fixe'd from moment to moment by intellectual. and tastcrnakcrs, and in this respect, i ' ofte n seen as constituting, if not repre: enung, a political identity for the' "popular classe ," So kitsch can be seen as both [a)political, a. in. trurnental for identity in a fragmented world of consumption (which brand best reflects the true me"] or, equally, instrumental in providing a clear dividing line between high and low in the visua l art . The point where our examples do coalesce is in the relationship bet ween material culture/design/ kitsch and the popular. All side. see kit ch as an active agent. Either this is positive, a in identity politics; camp aesthetics for instance with an element of l.yotard' Postmodcrn

Condition (where 'anyt h ing goes). Or, in its negative incarnation, it becomes an aesthetic corruption . Finally, we need to place this analysis

Il1

an ethical context, as both Tarazi 's or iginal essay and it responses on the Limited Language w bsue raise ethical issues, A James Souuar suggests these are issues '[of) commu nication on a human scale...which rl.all) rneans not one person telling everyone else how it is, but an opportunity for a community and JI\eLIl) of voices to be expressed, and for dialogue to take place'

III

Design is part of the cycle of consumption and identity. You consume to declare your ubjective place in an increasingly unstable 30

Limited Language

I

Crit ical mome nt s

I

Design in crisis

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absence of poliuc and because of it con urnptivc nature, become unsu minable. Braidotu l nil for new form . of eros -

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Critical moments

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Design in cr isis

Nick y Ryan

Patronising Prada

Critical effects What's at stake when avant-ga rde critique

'When I buy art, I want to keep it separate. You don't

of consumerism t ransf rs 'edgy' prestige to a

want people to think you are doing what you are doing because you want to make your company better.'

brand? How might this appeal to or patronise

(Miuccia Prada]' In

a sculpture by artist Tom Sachs entitled Prada Death Camp caused outrage when shown in the exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at the Jewish Museum in New York. The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelmarr' reported how he had 2002

received 'anguished ernails' from Holocaust survivors stunned at the inclusion of the model of a concentration camp made from a Prada hatbox. The controversy generated by the exhibition inevitably drew attent ion to the fashion brand and speculation about its response to an artist who had also created the Prada Toilet in 1997 . Well the critics needn't have worried, 'We really like his work, ' said Pandora Asbaghi from the Fondazione Prada (a contemporary arts foundation owned and managed by Prada), who also confirmed that Prada had given Sachs an unlimited supply of shoeboxes. Indeed Prada liked Sachs' work so much that he was commissioned to produce a site-specific installation for his very own exhibition at the Fond azione Prada in 2006 . In the accompanying press release? we are informed that the artist's work mixes status symbols of mass culture with 'the symbols of American wealth that see s in luxury, conformism, and designer labels a reinforcement of their elite social status'. So here we have a luxury brand commissioning art that critiques it s own institutional working practices. Of course this is nothing new for Prada (or many other brands) who have extended patronage to a range of 'cutt ing edge ' practitioners including photographer Andreas Gursky and architect Rem Koolhaas. What is at st ake in the corporate appropriation of 'avant -garde' positions within the parameters of the

an 'art savvy taste community? Although these were the questions posed in t he original art ic le, repl ies focused less on stakes and more on a complex range of effects; from simp le, 'good convcrsut ion' to consumers re-affirming 'a sense of them elves as culturally sophi ·ti-

cated, clever decoders'." But appealing to an audience's knowingness isn't the same as appealing to their awareness, an aim of critical practice. And when the c riti cal dis tance it depend. on has collapsed, it's criticality it elf which is at stake. This response ask; where might criticality be found today) It's worth taking Miuccia Prada at face value when she says, 'Whe n I buy art, I want to keep it separate.' Her comment acknowledges, by implication, tha t the conflauon of art and commerce destroys t he very conditions of distance needed for the cri tical autonomy of practice; an 'outsider ' position that attracts the Fondazione Prada in the first place. As Jade Adams-Woods com ment on the Limited Language web ite reminds us, it's only when 'Art and fashion continue to work within different value system ..' that their collaborations can resonate 'beyond the synthetic su rface of Iaslnon'," Bac k in

2 0 01 ,

in 50/-10, New York, a

notice appeared in the window of a small gallery: 'Opening oon Prada'. I That year, the Prad a Flagsh ip store did open on a site once pa rt of th e Guggen heim Museum . However, it was by architect Re m Kool haas, not lichuel Elmgree n and Inga r D ragset , artists of the origina l not e. Their pro mised 'store' mate rialised in

20 0 5 ,

as Prada lvIarla, in the Texas

Desert nea r to the town synonymous since the

1970S wit h t he minimalist artis t Donald Judd . Starter artIcle

33

The rub: the door of the full-scale construction, complete with retail fillings . upplicd by Prada, was never meant to open . A permanent public sculpture and critique of gentrification via consumerism, it eeks to address it. con text, one gentrified by art tourism . In thi. installation (Readymade,'), and "10m Sach . Prada Toiler (1997), we have a link back to the historical avant-gardc. When, in 1917, Dada - and Marcel Duchamp's urinal! fountain - aimed to negate and re-energi c art with everyday life, the critical effect relied on distance between autonomous art and the rna .s-produccd everyday. This autonomy hides the way that both art and the everyday operate one within the other. Rut, if this distance was once nominally upheld, it is unsupportable today . 0,

what happens when artists appear to

transplant this critical tactic, ready made, into contemporary culture? This is a culture, for lean Baudrillard, in which we he in a 'desert of th real',' l Iere the referent of the 'real', critical to Duchamp's critique, has abdicated , Prada

Marfa, for instance, is made urreal by the desert; both as a backdrop recalling the sublime register of nature and also the sublime register of recent advertising. In addition, the Prada brand is already a quasi-autonomous entity which, as I icky Ryan puts it in the original po. t, 'obfuscate commercial operations'.

market has been a hot topic of debat e for some t ime. From th e per sp ective of the brand, Prad a is able to construct an art ist ic identity for the business that obfu sca te s commerci al operations. For artis ts, who are generally canny and know ing in relation to corporate cu lture , there is the po ssibility of subversion from wit hin - a t actic used by the histor ical avant-garde to facilitate critical d ist ance. However the patronage of artists like Sachs and t he public endorsement of M ichael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's permanent Prada Marfa inst allati on in Texas, inevitably endows Prad a with an ed gy appeal and gives the company an opportunity to neutralise the critique of its 'other' . So is th e nurturing of cultural cac het through an association with the arts an effec ti ve strateg y for a luxury brand like Prada? Armani , Lou is Vuitton, C artier and numerous ot her brands also engage wit h the arts through patronage and sponsorship . Do con sumers reall y conflate Prada's image with the innovative, crit ical and liberal value s associated with 'avant-garde' art? The identity of Prada may be constructed to appeal to an art-savvy t ast e community who get the irony and complex codin gs of conte mpora ry art, but aren't they also just a little bit too cynical and worldly-wise to enjo y bein g patronised in this way? See f urt her images here www.li m ited language.orgj images

Today, if there is till a sense that abounds

that art and commerce work in different value

Refe rences

systems, then it's either a con. truction or an

Quoted in Michael Specter, 'The Designer' in The New Yorker, 15 March 2004, www.mic haelspect er.comjnyj 2004j2004_03_15_prada.ht ml

intellectual difference, Rem Koolhaas, a leading architect for Prada, -mploys both technique . Koolhaas, is known for his rethinking of the relationship b 't II' -cn retail and urban spa e in writing1 and in prank '. The Prada Transjormer even: structure (a pavilionof arts)

III

2

3

Michael Kimm elman, 'A rt Review: Evil, th e Nazis and Shock Value' in The New York Times, 15 March 2002, www.nyt imes. comj2002j03j15jarlsja rt- review -evil-th e-nazis-and-shock-value.ht ml Fondazione Prada press release on Tom Sach s, 2 Mar ch 2006, www.fo ndazioneprada.orgj enjcomu nicati j TS.ENG.pdf

coul, outh Korea make: this literal.

Based on a tetrahedron, it rotates to for 'ground differC'nt programmes: art, Cinema as well a style event for the brand. Within the more 'trad itional' private pace of commerce - the flagship store, - it is murals, installations and dlgital mtcrfaces that interrupt the usual 34

Limited Language

I

Critical momen ts

I

Pat ronising Prada

Prada Toilet by Tom Sach s ( 1997). Card board , ink, t herma l adhe si ve, 28 x 29 x 22 inche s.

Mi chael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's Prada Marfa (2005). 'It's not reall y a Prada sto re, and it' s not quit e in Marfa, so it must be art .' Photograph by Marshall As to r, htl p://bit.l y/2u6TSe

'Repairs are under way at the burglar ized Prada "store " outside Va lentine' as report ed

in the Houston Press, 27 Oct ober 2005. Photogr aph by A.C . Conra d.

'Cowboy hat in terrupts the fantasy of luxu ry as the install ati on is restocked' as report ed in t he Houston Press, 27 Oct ober 2005. Photograph by A .C. Conrad .

homogenous retail experience with external factors: from the Fondazione Prada' art through factory footage from ltaly to ales of Prada fake ' a ros the world. If we follow Koolhaa , 'differen ernanife t it elf in the ubjcctive unpredictability of the mtervenuon , providing 'ro ugh lu ury' in contra t

to

the

rnooth marble rninimali m of the store.' Invariably, with habitual use, rough art (and e onomox reality'] he orne the de orauvc inrcrfa e in the cornrner ial realm . And, it' criti ality It. elf which

I.

in danger of becoming

d corative. Iial Fo ter comment .: 'In a wry move Koolhaas now copyrights hi ' catchy phrase, as if to a knowledge this commercial curdling of criti al concept on the page." A more nuanced lineage from Duchamp to today can be traced via the neo-avam-gardc of the late 1 960s. A ' Foster argues, the latter had al

0

looped hack to the historical avant-garde,

but in doing so shifted practice. They were to 'develop the critique of the conventions of the traditional medium, a performed by dada... [eu .]..., into an inve: tigation of the institution f art, Its perceptual and cogmuvc, nru rural and di : l ur i\ . parameter ', In utuuonal Critique 'o ught to expo: the relation bet ween art and ev -ryday life that, in earlier work, had remained hidden. l Ians Haa ke juxtaposed the corporate logo of museum spon or with photograph of a ociated (and often e. .plouative) a uviue ,both set against the 'autonomous' backdrop of the gallery itself. The gallery ae thetL i ed these documents, but it al. 0 brought these ex hangcs into the realm of everyday awarene. . Inst it uti onal Critique, which is always Site-specific, provide an alternative engagement bccaus it can't be read sernioucally a ' signs and icon . In tead, it con ern ' it. elf with art 's pro esse and their effect . As com ment on the web ite revealed,

miotic has

informed a generation of de ·igne r· 1 who, m turn, 'use th

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creat "clever' an I

'radical" layer d me age for comrnerce readv-to-decode In two minute like

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But, design is lived and not [just] read. An alternative spatial engagcm -nt \\ ith d sign would trans fer emphasis from it.' meaning It ,

to

cff cts. For instance, a emiot ic reading

of Prada ,\ far/a might throw up echoe of Du hamp, whil t a spatial/temporal readin can tea

out ih \\ ay: it addres es urban

i ues . Thu , if you trace the effect of th culpture on local. ' through the

110lWOIl

Pre

(replete \\ ith break-ins] it become evident this a continual proce s,..

I

A Jeffrey Kipni: argue, 'lived spa et already a political space, However; hom x-niscd retail mall. and gallery space. era ,the pornancitv and heterogeneity needed to cnlranchi c politic al space. Koolhaas' store - both

G1U

c

and effect of what he calls the 'commcnlaltsed k- crt of Sol 10'111 with its echo of Baudrillard's comrnoditv rhetoric - propose. de . ign as an opportunity to reinie t the heterogeneity of politic al pace

Into

I

'e\\ York.

0,

nal cult ural event " or being open

ho. ting exrerto

art that

critic ises the brand, allow: for the kind of unpre-

dk tahility that bring life to spa . Crucially, thi practice I not ocial, poliucal or Critical

In

It 'elf. 1100\l'\l'r

In

It effcc t It

could he. It' the de . ign of po ihility . Of the controver: ial art - and lab 1Prada pur ues, lame . . outtar cornrnc nt on how ,. It' hard to Imagine that an of th item - or the conver. at ion: they nuuute

'1' >

make any real iiffercnce to the i. lie. th~y ar

uppo I'd to be about ',

1

lthough we 'd

agree, following the idea that political pace is lived and not read, any blanket c riuquc that commerce neuters art i meaningle s - a. are sweeping calls for r it i al pra tice.'

1\ design of possibility would he asses cd on a case-by-case basisTo locate criticality, if we follow Haacke, we will han' to look at a work's residual effects, We may

l

e them :

in the audience re ponse; in the way de . ign frame events and space and,

In

turn, get.

r framed ' by them; and a ' the e effec t ' re in inuate them. elve: in the network of art, cornrn rce and daily life . Critical effect an he . een at the level of auno phencs. 38

Limited Language

I

Criti ca l moment s

I

Pat ronising Prada

Exter ior of Prada Transformer, on the site of Kyunghee Palace, Seoul. Photograph by Hyun .JOQ Chun.

Waist Down exhibi tion at the Prada Transformer , AMO'S As ian Pavili on

for Prada, Seoul, South Korea (concept desig n 2008,opened 2009).

Se-e full resnonsr-s

http:

-t

r arr , on th~ conver ~

(.rl

hHr~

r,.cc ch.l[Jlerl_3

Limited Language

I

Cr itical moments

I

Patro nising Prada

Johnny Hardstaff

Love/hate

Base and superstructure At the time of writing, Pre .ideru Obarna

The purpose of graphic design is shifting towards a future defined as a vocal medium of personal expression and

has announced the imminent do urc of th

authorship. The designer as master of his or her content has become a sustainable economic model, working for

Briti h prisoner ' have b en relea ed and

those wanting to work free from commercial restraint. Seemingly, graphic design has the capacity to say anything it chooses to an audience educated in al1 its nuances and references and who are willing to play its visual games. Why then, within this work, do designers consistently invoke the visual systems of their former oppressors? In the retention of their image, language and techniques, have designers learnt to love their metaphorical captors, these political and industrial kidnappers of creativity?

we have a global economic 'meltdown. Thi

Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological response found in hostages whereby they begin to exhibit loyalty to their captors. I Is this in effect in graphic design author-

Guantanarno Bay Detention Camp. The fir t returned to Britain. At th

"arne moment

response will try to tea e out the ideas

In

the

original essay bv Johnny I lardstaff in a postObama, post-Cuantunarno era - a conic: t t hat influences any response to the original. The original article ernbodie that rare thi ng in design: a polemic . Johnny I Iardstaff i angry because, as he sees it, in a time of relative economic boom there are not many in the de ign community entering into a politi al/ ethical affray with th corporate c tablishrncnt - unlike the avaru-gardist movement: between the two World War ' that took i sue with the

ship? Industry has never been smoothly serviced by the creative arts. There have always been rebel1ious attempts at rejecting the status quo, both formal1y (graphic designer Ken Garland's First Things FirstManifesto, 1964 and 2000Z) and informally, with militancy being the daily agenda for countless commercially successful designers. Has the shared experience of this continual conflict mani fested itself in a mutual dependency? It's easy to see how the Canadian anti-advertising magazine, Adbusters' or artist Barbara Kruger" knowingly invoke the sophisticated language of advertising to further their cause and art. But does this employment of developed media languages betray a designer's innate attraction to their efficacy and emotional gravitas? Or, is this about the thrills of conjuring the aesthetics of 'the enemy' with the forbidden and the taboo? Deep down, do we really love the enemy, or do we just love to make enemies?

- against both the pleb ian and the ruling

Why are the infamous punk designer Jamie Reid," contemporary graphic designer Aleksandar Macasev" ~nd

can be observed in the election of Pre idem Obarna is a re-engagement of graphic de ign

bourgeois tatus quo, both in visual culture and politic ' more generally. Today, mdividually or collectively, thi lack of gusto i. e pecially noticeable in VI ual communication . A call like thi trie. to galvani e the .omnoleru bea t of ideology and i. firmly e uubli ..h d in the Ilumani.

I

lod rnist tradi-

tion of the individual - the authorial voi e (corporate) class , It is this question : '11011' much do we want change? ' Which is pre "d ent and foretells the campaign for change in l

s politics. However, noll', there is an under-

standing that binary loganeering needs to be rep laced by a more plural engagement with hange . Of course, how much will change in the world-order i

till to be een ... What

and the political; the political po ter has ri en from the ashes and holds currency once again. The rno t visible example is perhaps the Starter er
41

1992 / 97 - Johnny Hardst aff - 3 spreads fr om Sketch book 1.

2002 /04 - Johnny Hardstaff - Sketchbook 3.

Obama / lope po ter by street artis t Shepa rd Fairey which has become synonyrnou . \\ ith the 20081'

elcction campaign, even ironic.

This is an example of the contingency of visual form : how graphic design can monitor the changing po litical /ethical /cul tural vi ual pulse. In the con rant flow of image. you can sea developing economy of visual culture one as paradoxical and as unp redictable as any monetary economy. Meta phori ally, the vi ual economy has it s own stock exchange - where the present and the pas t are bartered; rising and falling in value, generatio n to generation . When the African -American middle classes collect slavery memorabilia or when there is a preo cupat ion with swas tika ' and ar tifacts of the Holocaust , it is, in part, 'conju ring the aesthetics of "t he enemy" wi th the forbidden and the taboo' as the original article propo scs and it is an 'example of professional admiration ' too. In a reply to the article on the Limited Language website, graphic design his toria n teven I feller, who has wr itten widely on symbols of hate, provides an example of this when he comments, 'It's not that I want to he the enemy - or love thy enemy - but rather f have seemingly endle: Fascination with yste rns of power (and oppres ion) and how

they are mad e manife t through our de . ign

profess ion ." The se examples are t he actions of a dynami economy: an 'image eco nomy'. In

Vi~iall,

Race, and Mode rni ty, Deborah

Poole defines the three principle el merus needed for a rob ust imag eco nomy. Firstly, an organisation of production [the designer or image maker) . Secondly, the circu lation of goods [images/artefacts) incl ud ing the technology of dissemination . Thi rdly, and this overlaps wit h t he second, 't he cultural and discursive systems t hrough which graphic

writer and art director Steven Heller? (to name three diverse examples) attracted to the swastika and/or other fascist imagery? Is this paradoxical given design's initiatives for social progress? Or, given that Hitler is said to have 'personally' designed the NSDAP swastika 'logo', is their interest simply professional admiration? Why, as Steven Heller asks in his Graphic Design

Reader' do some African-Americans collect racist memorabilia? The emotive reasons for doing so are complex. But within graphic design, which pales in comparison, has the victim come to love the abuser in some way, having perversely thrived under the tough love of their industrial masters? Do designers now seek to perpetuate this oppressive presence? Has counter-culture's dependence upon mainstream commerce bred an intimacy which has now, inevitably, become an attraction?

If so, is this attraction beyond the designer's control? Are there certain graphic qualities, colour combinations and iconographic forms, that are psychologically resonant for mankind? Is there a hierarchy or taxonomy of efficacy and power within graphic attributes themselves...the raw materials naturally loaded, if you like? Certainly, the term 'graphic' is imbued with preternatural appeal. This is a vivid, lurid, shocking and desirable quality. But is this innate or is it that the industrial origins of graphic design have shaped the language of political manipulation and extremism? If we are indeed seduced by the potency of hatebased visual systems, does this mean that our attempts at social reform and responsibility are 'designed' to fail? So far, social reform through design must surely be, globally, the most pitiful and unsuccessful of graphic projects. Is our collective heart not in it? Secretly, do we love to hate? See further images here www, lim ite dlanguage.orgj images

images are appraised, interpreted and a. signed hist or ical, scientific and aes t hetic worth'.' She points out it's important 'to ask not what specific images mean bu t, rath er, how images accr ue value'. Images ca n gain and lose value du e to market fetishisatio n, becoming me morabilia or more d irectly ideo logical rea on 44

Limited Language / Cr ttic al moment s / Love/hat e

__

•• n

lJnstIIJIt~oIlo1tp/1~

~_

_.n

_por1r.lllet~~

-

..-,_ ..-_.-

.

Unstable portrait of Joseph Goebbels by A leksandar Ma ca sev (2004).

ww w.goebbels.info/goebbels·campaign.ht m '[the] Joseph Goebbel s project was about media cu ltur e executed t hrough the very means of mass communication. [Steven] Heller once asked why didn't I use [ Edward

-

Louis] Bernays for insta nce. Well, because out side of professio nal circles no one has heard of him. So I used the Nazi propaganda masterm ind and yet anothe r play on the swast ika t o convey a message about...well, conveying messages.' From an email exchange, 16June 2009.

•

whuh allow a re-aniculation of meaning and even u e . Think of the culture jamming and

ethk al ranee of, say, / u lbusters magazine, mentioned b) Johnny liard. tuff. The value

[meaning] of Images, graphll or pictorrnl, l an gain and 10, e value both culturally and economically. It could be araucd that the ,\ a lib of today i not the irrational ') rnbol of the 1930 ', It ' value has accrued incc, and III

a more rational, market-driven manner of

collcc table and historiographies.

t\ more contemporary example of the ima e economy, and an example of the direct action in visual communication advocated in the original essay, i the political roster. Fawwa« Traboulsi, in his foreword to Off the

l\Ia//; Political Poster. of lite Lebanese Civil IHIT':, comments: 'Eve ry day, rosters are torn in the treets of the cities of the world at the hands of per. ons who object to their rnesage, . But you might not be corn nt with woundmc a poster with a krufe or a lance: you might attempt to kill a poster." The power of the graphic image i: .ee n

Ref erences St ockholm Syndrome was a term coined by cri minologist and psychiatri st, Nils Bejerot, aft er hostages in the Norr malmst org robbery in Sweden in 1973def ended th eir captors on release, 2 The First Thing s First manif estos called fo r a 'mind shift' in design pract ice away fro m purely com mercial ends, 3 Adbust ers magazine is a 'Journa l of th e Menta l Environment' , Edit or Kalle Lasn and the magazine's spoof adverts became a visible force in t he ant t-consurnertst 'cultu re jamming' movement in t he late 20th cent ury, 4 Arguably, Barbara Kruger's most iconic work is I Shop Therefore I Am (1987), a parody of Rene Descart es' philosophical observat ion, 'I Think Theref ore I am', This later served as advert ising f or London's Self ridges department store, 5 Jamie Reid is best known for his 1960s connect ions t o t he Situ at ionist s, 1970s graphics fo r punk band the Sex Pist ols, In th e 199Os, he designed club flyers which incorp orated his inf amous punk ransom note t ypographic style and t he swasti ka with contemporary corporate logos, 6 This references Macasev's Unstable Port rait of Joseph Goebbels in part icu lar, 7 See the covers of bot h: Steven Heller and Jeff Rot h, The Swastika: Sym bol Beyond Redemp ti on (New York: A llwort h, 2000)and Iron Fists: Branding the 20th Cen tury Totali tari an Stat e (London: New York: Phaidon Press, 2008), 8 Steven Heller, Graphic Design Reader (New York: A llwort h, 2002),

in the prolifer. lion of posters of politic al leader . I lany Hrit i: h newspaper. carried c' litonal image during the Iraq War of po ter and mural. of Pre, idem Hus

in, hi image

puru tured by a volley of bullet, for in ranee. Thi i, a brutal reminder of the contingency of graphic Imagery and also how 't he efficacy of reprc: entation relie on a cea eless e: change with oth r repre .emau ons'.' But, it I also a positive example of the power of de ign. '0

often, calls for change in design in

the polemic mode focus on the artefact (and material production) as the site of change. Political and ideological agency is identified in the, i .ual outcome as a possible new Iangun e: a Ilardstaff put. it, a vocal medium of exprc

ion and authorship. An e 'ample of

thi can he ecn in a comment b) Sirn Down 'Let [the client bos

I pa,

Ing c andy-, outed

mh I of need, fear md

b -longin all morn mg , \\ nh our

0\\

n

OIL

'0

u fOi produc thai we

l,1I1

e in the afternoon,

count rpomt in a comment from Jarne 46

peak \n 1.1 Limited Language

I

Critical moment s

I Love/ hate

Souuar: [the el 'd e igner ...don't cern to want to he pan of

,I

elf-organising corn-

mumty of vouc .x elehraung a diver uy ol points of view and l ncouraging par ucrpauon and ...hanna 1 hl') \\ ant to tell it - to I

It

how they ce

'bran I " el briti :, tars - and

to

get peopl to pa. aucnuon to rh -rn...hut who

actuallx cares? An alternative approach in today' climate

I

to look beyond the material out-

lome of political po ter or environmental campaign: and look, in. read, at pro ess as a po ·...iblc : ite of agency. Agency, here, till fulfil ' the aim of creating a dynamic, politically astute, vi ual communication, however a difference is that pro css-orientcd design is the antithesis of the BIG RAI IG , revolutionary design that, ince the I g6os, informs muc h polemical discussion in visual comrnunic ation practi -e. And yet, both want the . arne outcome '. Proce

L a mixture of the 'ceaseless

exchange \\ ith other representation .', the mundane how-to-do-it-in-time for the deadline and al. 0 the more cognitive di cu

ions,

usually har d, which inform the project . It' not only the crcauve arts, but the hard cicnce: through figures like Bruno Latour, that are looking at rh: : for instan e the history of .c ic nu fir fall, where di: cowry

IS

'a process

rather than a point of occurrence' ...a proce: s of 'making sen

together'.

A lohn Fore .te r observes. 'Ry re ognizing de ign practice as conversational proces es of making sense together, designers l an become alert to the . ocial dimension of design procc: ses, including the organisational, institutional, and political-economic influcnccs that the) will face - neces arily, if al

0

unhappily at lime. - in everyday pracuce.'

A: Fell on the web itc put it: A de rgner

I

cnuallv a part of a larg r social machine

Starter er
47

See lull responses + carr I on Ih converse .on

re

ht to:/I' my.ccrcnap ter 1_4

R I

II III

II

H

,.

48

If

Limited Language

I

C ritic a l mome nts

I Love/ hate

Limited Language

Shock and awe: the pouttcs of production

The process of consumption 'If one can d

The Igg6 right-wing thesis Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance! is the book that acted as a conceptual sou nd bite for fram ing the technique and technology for bombing people (a lot) . In the aftermath of g/II , the off-the-peg response in de sign consumpt ion was a proliferation of Khaki and camou flage, and an upturn in the sale of Humvees and suv vehicles . Now, th e shock and awe mantra has fed int o an 'age of anx iety' and a 'culture of fear ' in the Western psyche. De sign's response has been an aesthetic of shock and awe . Thi s can be seen in the Audi adZfrom 2005, in which a ca r explodes in a Western financial district. As the bla st fragments land , their letters reform as 'Vorsprung durch technik' (progress through technology): a t agline as relevant to the ad 's creation by CGI (C omput er Generated Imagery) as the zeitgeist of shock and awe. And, it can be see n in the advert's darker doppelganger the same year in a viral depicting a t errorist, sitt ing inside a vw Polo, detonating a bomb: 'Small but t ough"> CG l, rapid protot yping and ingenui ty allow designer s to quickly resp ond to any cu lt ural sit uat ion. The ori ginal Shock and Awe essay states four charac teristics are needed for its application : total knowledge, cont rol of the environment, rapidity, and brilli ance in execution . An exa mple, in it s most corporat e form , was th e MP3 phenomenon and de sign' s re sponse - an invasion spearheaded by the hardware of the iPod but backed up by an infantry of advertising, graphic de sign and moving image whil st coordinated with iTunes soft ware . It was a classic shock and awe scenar io. Other examples might sit more comfortably with a traditional leftist critique. For instance, Philippe Starck's Gun Collection of lighting for th e Italian lighting compa ny Flos is based around 18 ca rat gold plat ed gun s - one with a Kalashn ikov AK-47 as it s up-stand, a Beretta bedside lamp and a MI6 table lamp. This can be

ign a vase that an serve a a

catalyst for world peace,' says lew York -bar ed de igner Ron Gilad, 'I will get re-crrcumc i cd .'

I ii, 0\\ n va e, Run Oller by Car, describe. its production methods. Run over by different cars, each vase is unique (with the result. from a Mercedes sedan the best...], G ilad is interested in procc s rather than politics: 'I am only a designer, but the impact of politics i inevitable, and a reaction in 3-1> bone rc .uh . Th e observer decides its connotation, be it poli tical or ae rhcu c.'' As the original article showed, the violence of our time: is rene ted back to us through the prism of the commodified object. The everyday commodity invariably makes the poignant and the political- even as kitsch - banal. And yet, the day-to-day i a live environment . In thi ' sense, it': no less politically charged - although certainly lcs well theorised - and provides something differ nt

to

the usual di scourse at

the interface of art design, politi

' commod ity

and the public phere . It's here thi re pon: e take it. departure. Change comes through action . If we look to vi ual culture then it i posters and pia ards which give visual pre ence

to

prot sting

voices in t he public domain [even if t hey can 't change things in t hemse lves). Art, like film, m dia tcs the (violent) world, ex tract ing its fragme nts and splicing t hem back togethe r as meta-comment ; reflection, for t he long run . We an .ee t his quite well in Collision, a short animation by Max Hau ler, Here , Islamic pattern and American quilt, the vernacular of two different cultures, kalcido cope into the geometry of nag to the rhythm of artillery fir ,firework and the muezzin 's call to

prayer.

lthough the film draws on the

everyday, and i downloaded ba k into it via Starter er
49

~ : :~ * .. • ..

. .....

* .. " * ...

* .. *... *... *... * * * ... • * ...... * ...

~ ::~

Collision, an ani mat ion by Max Hattl er (2005), Distr ibuted by Auto ur de Minuit. www.maxhat t ler.com/co llision

Violence is s M ottt ott by R emco Swa rt (2004).

3Guns Table Vase by Suck UK (2003) .

the JX'L onal d ktop, it doc n't b 'come disipated hy 'u c'. \\'.IT 1 luchcll ugge:t that a condition of m xliauon of art i that they appear to sp ak from mythic field of reflection 'beyond .apitali m and out ide history." Even when the) operate through commodity channels, art appear ' to be unaffected. In response to the original artulc. J 'icky has observed: 'Art ha: a tradition of avantgardism (the poliuc: of which is u ually mcon equential] - It I. it. oppo .iu onal stance which i mo. t Important . A tradition, which I le.. ea: il) definable In a \\ IJ r de ign raft / applied-an come: t... Oppo it ion, from this per pective, i. c reat d via a rnrrrorm ' of the lay-to - lay of ou r lives..." When product design mirrors the violent world, it is held to account - although u ually by other ! - for the contradictions encoded In it own ituation . That is, how it 0 ciliates bet ween the pull of th global market and the way It is con. umed in a more personal, 10 al way. Hence, a cr iucal framework has been lower to emerge . This is, perhap , the knowing Wink in th double m aning of FlIlly Loaded Chair h) lexander Reh which i made up of over 450 used 12 gauge hotgun shells. Their red hulls flare out of the hack of the chair, whilst the bra 's tip ' push through the seat like tud , where another might have cu hions. On the \\'''h, it i ' old through Yanko Design, \\ ith it iaglinc: form beyond [unction. 'Form beyond Iunc uon ' knowingl) locate it in a historical di /conu nuum of product crnanuc [what doc it mean"] and everyday li\ ing (what', it Ior']. The de 'ign adage 'form follows Iuncuon ' might more comfortably locate it history In an Eames hair but, a Alan Beardmore remind us: ' ire raft, or for that matter gun " are a good e ample of form following function and alway: e.'ample elegance if you \ lew it from a non-political rand -point '." But, if the modernist chair - or gun - added fun tionality (With beaut) ...) and the postmodern chair" added poetic narrative and play, then both were con truc uve, That i ,the de ign-in-use gaining from atta hed

,I

seen as a bizarre Starck media event until you understand the inspiration for his idea: a cac he of gold plated arm s found in one of Saddam Hussein 's Palaces. With black lampshades representing death, they reflect th e world back to us. Remco Swart has designed ceramic tiles which perform a simple decorative function whilst their kaleidoscopic motif is made up of war imagery: men in gas masks and a woman leaving hospital wit h a baby after a gas attack in Palestine. Viktor & Rolf have, in conjunct ion with l'Oreal, produced the perfume Flowerbomb which is presented in a bottle shaped like a hand grenade, replete with safety pin. Their intenti on: a scent both 'romant ic and aggressive' whilst rem aining 'explosive but also kind of innocent'." Suck UK have made a white vase where the barrels of three guns converge to become the flute , the packaging displays photos complete with red rose. However irr everent, thi s can't be separated from the ant i-war photograph of a young demonstrator confronti ng the Military Police during 1967 Vietnam protests by inserting a flower into th e barrel of his gun. The original image, now on mu seum walls and in coffee-t able books, has arguably lost its crit ical power. What the gun vase might do is reinvigorate some of the issues the gun/ flower image raises, but in a personal context. In contr ast to the more did actic dialogues of, say, a political poster that simplifies t hings to right and wrong, Suck UK's de sign leaves th e emphasis on th e individual's inte rpretatio n. Suc k UK say th at, in America, parents are bu ying it for children who are rediscovering Gun s N' Roses music. This illustrates how pre scriptive readings of the vase's 'meaning' are of limit ed use for underst anding design in a live environment. So, shock and awe can manifest itself in the pimped Humvee and in designer eulogies to the 1960S. These may be consumed polit ically or not . Design inspired by shock and awe may appear to reinforce the message of irreverent, sanitised, glamorised violence or muscular right-wing thinking. It's often

Starter artICle

53

mean in ' - and arming to Iran lend the ever yday via dhllt'my, lu .ury or [amu v.

With the more literal Fully Loaded Chair the derruu of another more violent ell'r~da~ i bohe I onto our OIln. Rch, cornin Irorn an Am eruan hunting community,

J

n leek

to tran late n into -ornethmg el e . I" l hair

ac then he he pe

I

e of co u r e but , for a while at lea t, to

offer a 'd iehot om} of comfort and

assumed that thi s 'crit icality' would need to come from a posit ion outside (and a bit to the left) of consumer culture. But when designers reflect our cult ur e back to us like t his, t he visua l reinterpret at ion allows dis cuss ion; not in th e O val office, but in the consumer's living room.

dern i e , One W b -bloggcr, in po e Ion of a s im ila r hell, converted Into a wall-mounted

va e, muse I wond r what it hot . .'

See furt her images here www .limitedl anguage.org/i mages

Without a dehniuve e planation, people tend to draw on memory. This detachment of meaning as a work passes from de ignc r to

user] ) can be seen when Dominic Wilcox

melts dow n plastic toy soldiers to make hi .

I\'clr Howl. Ill' literally and metaphorically rc, yell'S l hildhood memories and II ar imagery. 'O n the one hand they were a fun childhood

References Harlan Ull man, James Wade and L.A. Edney, Shock and Awe: Ach ievin g Rapid Dominanc e (Nati onal Def ense Universit y Inst itute f or Nat ional St rategic Studies 1996). 2 Audi advert (dir. Pieix, 2005). 3 VW Polo viral advert (2005). 4 Polly Vernon, 'We A re One Br ain, One Person, One Designer' in The Observer , 13 November 2005.

tOY th at brought hac k happy rnernorie and on the other, they were a repre entation of II

uh u a oc iated horror. . Thi

I

II ar

a contra 't

that I find lightly uneasy .' However, even

III

thi more troubling pie c, hi own mernor ie aren 't

,Il l('

ible t ot her a nd de ign become.

'material for projecung their

Oil

n oc ial or

poli ual ruique '.

In contra ' t to he equential revealing of inforrnauon of, say, an animation or p de i. n work a gesture: ing all at once.

0,

it

tcr,

give it mean -

even if a de . ign' political

intention are emphatic, cornparauvely the effect only la I a short time. This iak s a temporal approach to de Ign - in pired by Adam Richard , on'. essay A

Desiqn I II'0rk is I ever Done,' which takes into account the effe ts of (and on) design 01'L'f

time. t\ emiotir reading (which sit

more comfortably with the po .t rnod e rn view], for in ranee from Grant Me

rackcn, a rgue

that whil t product design tan recombmc mearun (bowl with soldiers/gun

II

uh

hair ), it can 't provoke nell meaning. ' A temporal approach to de . ign an a oum for nell behaviour In JU tone 54

e.'ample , the Desiqn i air

of

IK

interaction Limited Language

I

Cr it ical moment s

I Shock and awe : the polit ics of

product ion

Fully Loaded Chair by A lexander Reh (2005) .

War Bowl by Domin ic Wilcox (2002).

designers Dunne and Raby focuses on the psychological dimension, of experiences offered by product , As part of a series of objects treating phobias as though they were perfectly reasonable, they de igncd /-luggable Atomic

Mushrooms for people afraid of nuclear anni hilation, In a pattern of treatment, different sizes allow for gradual exposure, Design either needs you to see it in a different way or use it in a different way to draw attention to, or subvert, use , Dunne and Raby argue that there are already so many objects consumed un ritically that we need this kind of critical mediation which questions and challenges industrial agenda: mort' than we need more objects, Mindful of the way that any replacement will soon become the 'new normal', they propose their objects as re .carch prototypes or for rent. Within the global domestic market, designer Ettore Sottsass suggests we aim for 'Objects that won't yield too quickly to pleasure or to the rhythm of consumerism ."! l lerc he is talking about meaning again, hut the time gap is important for therein lie: the potential, however fleeting, for poetry . Drawing on the rhetoric of change through action, Victor Margolin l ] suggests we ask the same question of objects: Ar they active? Active, here, isn't in the literal doing /shouting/marching sense that the e ay started with, but in the discursive sense.., the act of asking questions, For him, these kinds of objects are 'active' if the verdict is still out on what they can achieve (as an active and ongoing discursive pace). Once the interpretation is 'decided ' (even 'yes, this i. political] the object ceases to he ne essarily active. Here, criticality is located not in the object itself, but in its temporal process. Nicky provides a reminder that, 'I think ) ou could argue the authors provide

,j

pretty

idealist it snapshot of the reality of contemporary product design.'lII It's right to question what mute objects can tell us about the world

56

and what they ask of us. And yet, when design finds a political dimension, it 's interesting

Limited Language I Crit ical moment s I Shock and awe: t he polit ics of producti on

bccau: c

locates itself not within 'bi~ 1"

it

politics per sc, hut the 'small p' politics of it own production; challenging its conditions and contradictions. Along the way, teasing out orne of the ten ion ' and po .sibiliues in the relation hip bet ween the industrial design of u e and a world of events.

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Limi te d Language I Cri ti ca l moment s I Shoc k and awe: th e polit ics of product ion

Limited Language

Multiverso The mu lti verse (or meta-universe) is a sta t e of parallel realiti es. I Once confined to the realms of scie nce fiction, as t he d igit al-information world overlays th e physica l world, the multiver se has become an everyday fact. The globalisatio n of markets has been insepa rable from rapid and complex developments in virtual technology. And yet how th is affects our everyday world has often been hard t o grasp. It was only the spee dy collapse of the markets and banking syste m in September 2008, which brought home how everything (including the wol man on the st reet ) is drawn into this process. What became clear in the fallout was that, philosophically speaking, any old ideas we may have had about singular experiences are untenable , be they ind ividuals, single market s, protected rates of exchange or safe pots of cash. All are interlinked. A change in one effects dramat ic shifts in all th e ot hers. Design developm ents are impossible t o sepa rat e from changes in technol ogy and globa l market s. Th is cr itical per iod in the 'global collapse ' collide d wit h Multiverso: N odes, Connections and Currents in Contemporary Communication Design, th e Icogra da confere nce held in Torino, Italy in October 2008 . Planned in the head y d ays before th e crisis, the confere nce's aim st r uc k a more op ti mistic not e: to ex plore ways design ca n 'reco rd and give exposure to a complex and flowing , imperfect world th at is prone to error but that is noneth eless alive for those very reason s'.' Th is is a departure from a Mod ernist tradition of information design, which sought to rationalise and simplify the cha otic world in order to 'explain it' . Nor does it ask us to sub mit to a kind of d at a sublime. Instead, de sign index links people

Embodied information The original piece wa: the tart ing premise of a Limited l.angua e lecture at the kograda .\ flliriller\{) con ferene e which took a It theme, 'node, connec t ion. and l urrent '. For u ,thl repro: em: a dom inan t cultu ral condition in whu h peop le collaborate, meanproliferate; Information l hange ; Image mutate and media 'lo ld' into one another. IIlg

T his re: ponsc looks at co nte mporary prac til e whic h sec k: to rc-cmphasise huma n e xperience at t he cen tre of th is world. And , ;1'; a rewri t ing, it incorporates some of the projects and comme nts t hat eme rged as pcr u nem durmg and afte r the conference. Any old idea of a ingular expc ncncc is now untenable. 110\\ can we engage wit h this cornple . world \\ ithout de troyi ng our own temporal rhythm: hr. tly, the didactk , one-way, top-down model of mforrnauon I. being : t ripped away. In .tead, what I increa ingly heine written into de ign brief I how to harne: a new under, tandin of information a. ollaborauve, Thi: , hlft I clearly visible in the websuc for the Arne r ican de ign l on. ultu ncy i\ lod er ru: ta ' Thi curates an encounte r with t he living. breath ing. and collabcrat ive, orial

Web,' I lodern i tal's only design eleme nt is t he navigati on menu, which takes you to var io us sites on the Intern et where t he ir work can be found and edi ted or com mented on (e.g. Flickr, Wikiped ia eic.) , Il ere , the enjoyment of information cernes out of It S live and col lahorat ive sta tu. eco ndly, as th melba theori t l.cv I lanovich sugge: t. : The cultura l unit Is

Starter ar cie

59

no longer the single image but a large scale st ruct ured or unstructured (such as the Web) image database.' These are the 'billions and billions of images being stored on our laptop s, net work drives, memory cards and so on'.' The question for him is this : I low can all that information out there be translated back to the scale of human percept ion? Manovich's new media examples include the zoom function which allows you to engage with the micro and macro view at once, to ce how things relate, In his view, the most era-defining tools arc the search engine :1I1d tagging functions which do more than give us n -w ways to look at information: they give us a way to sift through it. But, can this help us make sense of the information? That 's a moot point... however, for Manovich and for the immediate purpo es here, the significance i that there is no truth in a single image. Instead, significance omes from the relationship bet ween images. Thirdl y then, this remind . us that any idea. of singular or universal meaning have long since imploded : Meaning is multiplic ito us and relative to situations and context. It's constantly hifung. One artist's rcspon e comes from Peter Luining: Click Clul) : was an art project / website without content except link buttons. Like channel surfing, the link has become the fetish it 'elf. onstantly zapping to chase the new - to capture what we might be missing? At the Icograda conference, the artist/designer Paul Elliman suggested this example served as a metaphor for how we con ume the visual image today, And this call ' for a far more critical engagement with Multivcrso culture. If Click Clllb highlights the extreme of the po trnodern abys where everything is relative and ultimately elusive, then a more pragmatic de sign approach seek. to make sense of the mass of information from the human/subjective per pective. Donna I laraway, a historian of te hno-sciencc, argues that, '\Ve need to learn in our bodies... In thi. way we might become answerable for what we learn how to se ' . ~ 60

(not figuresl] to the global flux . And so we can say that any old idea of a singular experience of design is increasingly untenable. This includes : ideas of a singular author; finite images or texts; self-contained media or stand-alone contexts. Instead: people collaborate; meanings proliferate; information changes; images mutate and media 'fold' into one another. The question of agency (or how little of it we have) becomes renewed . Back in 2002, the music promo Remind Me by Royksopp' showed how the minutiae of a city worker's day is connected to the global flows of capitalism. It is reminiscent of just how un-reciprocal thi s relationship can be. Set to the beat of pop and cued into the media image-circus (then MTV, at the time of writing You'Iube], any critical comment intended by the musicians /designers [approprlatelyl] becomes suckered up too . Design changes come quite simply because the technology allows it. However,as relationships between people, technology and contexts evolve, new ways of thinking philosophically about design start to take shape. One strand of practice that has emerged aims to bring people into a more reciprocal relat ionship with this world. In this process, the manifold ways in which agency can be enabled (and disabled) by design are thrown into relief. One example of this practice is Christ ian Nold's Bio Mapping project." Thi s involves asking local community members to walk around their area wired up to a GPS (Global Positioning System) device which records emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This data is annotated onto maps, which can be used in discussion with councils, to make meaningful changes to the local area in response. Here, there are no 'end users ' any more. People are mapped into the world from the start and, also, all the way through. If Royksopp presented a world that is alienating because it is disembodied, then this project might provide a kind of 're-embodiment' . Nold's project was part of his research for the Royal College of Art's Design

Limit ed Language I Crit ical mo ments I Mult iverso

I Iaraway, like Manovich , take s a post mod ern vie\\ but in a feminist framework . Like th

M ultnv rso premise, Haraway find. enjoyment in the world 's independent sen: c of humour. Interactions programme where 'people are [the] primary subject matter, and people cannot be neatly defined and labelled. We are contradictory, volat ile, always surprising." We can't escape exposure to the erroneous dataverse. New approaches to design will have to respond to (or depart from) the way people are complex, imperfect and alive

OJ too. The

question now is this: How we

can engage with a global, technological world without destroying our own temporal rhythms of living? Or to

In the same \\a) that people's con t radictory behaviour be orne difficult for traditional market anal) . is, ' u h a sense of humour is not

comfortable for humanist and other. comrrut ted to the world a, re ource, In an) of the l' encounter, the only po ibility for human comes if Ill' al: 0 acknowledge the world as a II Itt) agent.. he remind. u (them) that: ·...we are not in charge of the world . \ Ve

a~enl)

just live here and try to 't rike up non-

turn it around: How can design engage with the world through our bodies?

innocent conversations by means of our

See f urt her images here www .limit edlanguage.org/ images

peo ple, these non-innocent conversations

pro. t het ic device - iru luding visualisation technologies," A ' with the world and as with

References

2 3 4 5

The idea of the Mult iverse has been much discussed in science fict ion and f anta sy; but also in cosmology. physics. ast ronomy. philosophy. and transpersonal psychology. Here the term refers to th e realm of virtu al worlds and the digit al inf ormat ion sphere which overlays our physica l worl d. Multiverso Conference. Icograda Design Week Torino. Italy. 2008 htt p:// icogradadesignweektorino.aiap.it/sect ion/111 www .royksopp.com/videos/remi nd-me www .biomapping.net www .interact ion.rca.ac.uk (accessed 7/7/08).

remind us that technology is not neut ral.

Visuali arion prac t ice is an import ant 11l'll \\ a) for designers to rapt ure a complex and flowing, wor ld. Thi . is what interdisc iplinary de , igner Lau ra Ku rgan l ails the \ onf u ing nowhcre-anywhcre-: ornewherc'.'? One e: 'ample of her work I. Million Dollar Blocks, II hie h map relation . hip. between IS tate e pcnditure on pr i oners, the 10 at ions of their home and inn' nrncm on regen eration in tho e am bloc k [i.e, the area where they hve]. he provide valuable tool for revealing prcviou Iy un cen dimcn ions of crrminal jusuce and .ocial policy . In part, t hi. is bel au e the informatio n had prcviouslye: istcd In separate phe res . In part, it ', because visualisa t ion technology can reveal dimen 'ions previously hidden by t heir old rep rese ntational technologies: info charts and da ta sprea ds heets. In his conference paper, Towards Relational De iqn, de igner and curator And rew

Blauv 'It po inted out tha t t he c older 'tel hnologie ' of moderni t information design are rhetorical. I That is, they reflect bark on them elve: , reconfirming what ' already there.

'Vi. ualisation capture the une peered to tell a new tor). 'J11i information i n't fClI , hi .ed but embodied.' Thi would re .onate II ith Haraway. Starter er
61

BioMapping , Greenwich : Emotion mappin g hardware by Chr ist ian Nold (2004-8),

If modern inforrnauon gruplu cs a rc like the

photogr.iphu nap - hot [which isolate a nd fragment the world for contemplation. dcnvmg micr-conncc tcdness] then contemporary visuali at ion are more like the . creen -grab, unprcs 'ion of

,1

disc ursive space.

Finully, then, the unique forms of sin gular media have been eroded in the s\\ nc h from analogue to digital. From print, through photography, film

to

mUSK and so on, media

fold into one another. Common terms arc blended, merged or hybrid media, where one media become. the content of another. t\ more useful term in this context might be articu lated media, ': where the tempo and nature of each media is distinct - even when net worked. Visualisations end up as objects in the world . However rather than think of them as finite objec ts, we would do better to compare them to the \4 paper that us ually pews from the printer on '. end to Print ' during the on-going design stage of any job , l.i ke rapid-response printing and rapid proiotyping they are hath finite 'analogue' objects and a 'd i: cursive' part of an ongoing digttul process. And yet, how can we avoid fetishising this technology? Rapid response technology comes from war: like the global economy, war

IS

not reciprocal but disembodied, with

people reconfigured a: 'collateral damage'. [)e. igners can hi-jack these technologies but - hopefully - to a different and more reciprocal end. That is, engaging with the nature and tempo of technology - and markets - but with our own nature and tempo also articulated , But even here, tee hnology and design experimentation will so often just become the next consumable. This demands more than a simple 'humanising', As I faraway encourage u to ask, I low can we learn in our bodies? And, in doing . 0, que tion our technologies? The critical effects, as discussed elsewhere in this chapter and in the rest of this book, will only he seen

III

the process of

engagement with the world...

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Agency Modernism 2.0/ Designers of possibiUty Destgn polltics / Design endthe good cop/bad cop scenario Ben Wltson / Notions of visibUlty

Work ethics / How much of this can we take? Escape from the tyranny of thlngs / Sustainable deslgn State Britain / Rebuilding protest ThiS chapter elplores how d&$JgnInteracts W II h polities and Idao1ogy:from ethics 10 green polol lr s: art 10 modernism.

Keywords Dissemination (8.840,000) Graphic dcsrqn (32,700,000) Spar.<' ",,'III1~ory (4,900,000) Susteunal» II (y (12.300.000]

Lim ited Language

Modernism 2.0 If you've ever been troubled by what th ey call a 'post modern moment ' - disorient at ed , disconnect ed and det ached - worry no more. Postmodernism is over, acco rd ing to Nicolas Bourriaud th e French writer and curato r behind th e Tate Trienn ial in Britain, held in 2009.1 Inst ead , the alter modern is em erging. Thi s reject ion of postmodernism (after mod ernism) is a reje ction of 'h ist ory as an arrow'. Alter pr oposes multiplicity and otherness. It's the 'reload ing' of modernism for today's (digit al) conte xt ; global, nomadic, creolised but - crucially - connecte d . 'Today we are living in a maze and we have to get meaning out of this maze and t hese are the big sta kes aro und th e altermodern,'2Bourriaud claims. Meanin g is back in fashion! A ltermodern at Tate Brita in was based on four th eme s - Alter, Exile, Travelling and Borders - which provided clu ster point s for Bou rriaud's manifest o of the same name . Here , his int erest is in how artist s can meaningfully conn ect acro ss moments. On e example is Walead Beshty's FedEx Sculptures where a series of glass cubes which had been Fedlix- ed' were dis played, all cracked and chipped on top of t heir packing cartons. The damage, as well as makin g th e cubes visibly un ique, sta nds test imony to th eir di fferent jou rneys and different hand lings. In a world where the shee r number of daily transactions and th eir global traverse is unintelligible (and invisible) th en, for Besht y, it's only in 'palpable moments of error, when... the d ist ance an object travel s results in damage? that we get a glimpse of ot her (alter) realiti es. Places of Rebirth by Navin Rawanchaikul , is a tableaux which is made up of a composite of different Bollywood posters and, in Tat e Britain, st retc hed the len gth of a wall within the theme of 'borde rs' . Rawanch aiku l uses t his to talk about immigratio n. Signs, like people, become d isplaced . One effect, as Bourriaud sugges ts, is 'to illum inat e their hist or y. [Artists working

S arte< ilIllC

Designers of possibility In the original article we asked, via the thinking of the French curator

I

kola

Bourriaud,

'I low do we make sen e of th ultural haos" This 'chaos' i a (digital) cultural condition which is global and nomadic, where infor mation, images and identiue have become creolised: extricated from their origins and tran. formed . Thi is the post modern malai 'e. A better question might be : 'W ho will make . ense of it for us?' In hi earlier work, Rourriaud had coined the term 'semton.u u' .' This term take . its departure from scmiotics/scmiosis.! which describes the process by which meaning is onstructed and under tood (through signs) . For Bourriaud, the sernionaut i the figure who, visually and politically, be t'imagine. the links, rh likely relations bet ween disparate sites'.J As an example, Bourriaud refers to the ri e of the III and the \Veb surfer as one . who connect new 'pal l'S and new narrative . The idea that a I ew ian, with a new mind-set would emerge in the iran ition from ana logue to digital technology had already been fore ccn by media theorist Marshall Mcl.uhan in rite Glltenberg Galaxy' in 1962. These two term, new man and sernionnut , of cour c aren 't important to fixate on as they are of their own moment (male-dominated 1960s/ French [990S theory). I Iowcvcr, we need language to help us think about these things and ' 0 , as metaphor ' to capture an alternative way of operating, they are useful .' Thi. alternative way of thinking can, unsurpri singly, be seen all the way back to the predece: or of the computer, the Analytical Engine, dated 1 71 . Charles Babbage had been working on thi from 1834 with Ada l.ovelace (the daughter of a mathematician and Lord B)ron, the poet). This historical 69

Al term odern World Map, Where Are We Going? (2009)by M/M (Pari s).

Post er/Wa li label for t he exhibit ion Allermo dern atTate Br ita in. 120 x 176cm

approx, 4 co lour s sil kscreen.

'A ltermodern', 'Wander ing' and 'Viat or ised' chapter di viders fr om the publica t ion Altermodern by M/M (Paris) , © Tate Publi shing (2009).

encounter marks a key moment of t ransit ion because, whereas Babbagc's prev ious invention t he Differellce Enqine cou ld do no more than in th is vein] could be said to "viatcrise" them (from the Lat in viato r, "t raveller") . For th em, hist or ical memory, like the topography of the contemporary world , exists only in the form of a network. Signs are d isplaced, "viatorised" in circuit s, and the work of art presents itself in the form of this dynamic system." A significance for de signers is th at this matrix of relationship s - between people, signs and moments - is one in which de sign is already embedded, long before the Bourriaud sound bite machine came along. We can see thi s in the way that the work above speaks through the global service brand and the film post er. However, a difference is th at design usually seeks to era se error, minimi se cognit ive disruption and (re)est ablish meaning . What, then, can design gain by 'reload ing' the late st art cri ticism? A link here is MIM (Paris), th e show's designers who have worked with Bourr iaud since he was a director of th e Palais de Tokyo in Paris , where he developed the curatorial practices that, by th e end of the 1 990S, had informed his first book Relational Aesthetics? Th is book explored art whic h creates 'scena r ios' and gener ate s relationships between people. It was followed by Postproduction: in 2002 which relocated and reconnected the relational into the Internet age. Paul Elliman, a practitioner who works across both art and design, has noted th at if art adds or emphasises the relat ional, then 'design, which is always already relation al by de finition, is a kind of super-relat ional [. ..] in terms of it s production, not just its use or reception',' MIM (paris), for instance, join in the same deb ates as Bourriaud's artist s, bu t using real networks of communicat ion. In the se networks, MIM (Paris)'s design often function s as co-ordinates; points at which the art, de sign and fashion communities meet. If that sounds like the way a multitude of other designers work, then an inte rest here is the way they bring these ideas into conscious practice. For instance, the Altermodern logo and typeface is a confect of ornamental letter de signs with d ifferent images inside. Th is looks like a famili ar postmod ern eclectic

add, the A nalytica l Enqine cou ld pred ict t he outcome of calculations not yet made, In t his sense , it embodied almost all the conceptual elements of the omputcr, Rut when t hinking about this Babhagc, with what lcl. uhan would call a linear Typographic mind (a logic of which women were not in possession), felt his 'imellec was beginning to become deranged' .' It W3 Lovelace who had t he apac ity for lateral and predictive t hinking; t he 'power of seeing all possible contingencies (probahl and improbable . just alike)'. This is the desig n of pos ib ility. It reso nated well wi th the opcrationa lity of the nell' Engine. In her footno tes to a me moir on the mach ine , 1.01' -lnce outli ned her own invention: what we now call software, two hundred years before the hardware 11';1 availab le to run it on. The footnotes themselves - margi nalia have proved more seminal t han the te xt they were attached to , and in the struc tu re of t his wr it ing i a precur. or to hypertext. One note read, 'It mus t he evident how rnulufartou and how mutually complicated are t he co nsiderations', adding, 'AII, and everything is naturally related and interconne ted ..." In a parallel story, whilst Steve Johs worked on the Apple Macintosh from J 9 1 - 4, it \l'a: t \1'0 women II ho were given t he task of developing the G raphical ser Inter face - t h > connecto r between human and software. Joanna Hoffman devised the operat ing system conventions and Susan Kare the desktop icons and visual syste m. I O f all the Mac's innovat ions, it's these that have had the most impact in the long ru n; 'u .er-frierullinc .s' and interface design. It is t his fu nction of women as infrat ruc tu re (of being 't he very "possibili ty of mediation, transac tion, transition, transference - between man and his fellow creature ...."·1 ) which might usefully connect u back to the fun tion of designers writ-large, beyond gender. Could Ill- 'a) that de , i ncrs, too, function as infrastructure?

S arte< ilIllC

71

They mediate between clients, audiences and signs (meaning) and work across areas of knowledge, bringing them together and translating them for alternative engagement . And yet, if designer ' have always fostered the link and likely relations, what make , it different now? Over the years, uggest ions

have emerged on the Limited Language

w -bsue in response

to

a . eries of articles

addrc ing the que. tion of the sernionaut. In

respon e to IVho are the sellliollall/ '? tephcn argue ': 'I am not sure if d . igncrs really ever

aesthetic and yet the po stmodern emphasised d ifference of or igin (this is Victorian, th is is Cy rillic or this is whit e man in Nati ve American Indian head -dress...) and, t hen, the way all we re made relati ve - what Ted Polhemus called going shopping in the 'superma rket of style' ," MIM (pari s) enjoy what happens when images come together at this new moment of int ersect ion , not to relativise, but to produce new meanings, This is the same 'sce nario' build-

link ' which already e ' i u: bu ha desizn not

ing found in relat ional think ing, but going deeper int o langu age; t o build up stories with images. For them, it 's like a conversatio n which becomes the 'eng ine' to produce

,11\1 ays

new images. In anot her example, their visual identity for

capture -

01

point towards - om 'thing lom-

pletelv n w...the) are making, or rnappmg, done thi: ?'UTo which Joseph replies: 'I

do believe. as arti t s or designers we unearth new material - experience - in OUl" work. The debate might be to the consciousness of the ar t? \Vhat the arti t creates \\ ith con

10US

uucnt , the designer might produce a a simple rhetorical . -rrnon of beliep'lII A key figure in the design of po 'sibilit)

of con iou intent might be Muriel oopcr who set up the Visible Lanquaqe Il'ork hop, an interdi ciplinary graphics laboratory founded in 1975, and part of ,l ilT', Media Lab. The de ' igner/ re, catcher David Reinfurt has cornrncnted on how, through experiment ' at the I I

w, they had noticed that, with electronic

ornrnunications, information and image don't just stay within the computer, but operate through networks of readers, writers and u: ers. The group began to dcsian irucrfac s offl'ring 'route', pathways or even self-guided tours through this soft architecture. " ! In lnforlIlatirm Landscapes (1994) Cooper pioneered a new space for this information . What she

had already understood was that information transmitted, accessed and transformed in this way, could be open to an unlimited .ct of connections, meanings; new narratives. Doc . this bring us back to Hourrtaud's III

the Palais de Tokyo was later released on their website for re-use; allowing it to become something else. This is design that sets up possibilities. It's only a modest example of this thinking, but we can see the bigger potential. In 2006, MIM (Par is) had a solo show in London at the Haunch of Veni son gallery. This was an installationcollage of mu ch of their preceding work. Uprooted from it s origina l co ntext, some of their visually baroque, story-bu ild ing work lost its original meaning. However, in a parallel t alk at th e Tate Modern gallery .? they expl ained th at to re-ed it old images to 'c reat e a new history' was a de liberate pr ocess. This is the se nse of creole that affili ates them to altermodern - whe re the connecting of signs is tirn e-, not Sit e-specific. Modernism 2,O? By th e t ime art-cu lt ural ideas suc h as Bourrraud's be gin to resonate in de sign, their mom ents have usu ally pas sed in th e art world. And yet, the underlyin g premise of all of Bourriaud's work - How do we make sense of the cultural chaos? - rem ain s valid . The art world looks to the way artists answer his questions. What happens when the de sign world asks the same of designers too? Modern ism 2.0 was published simult aneously on Lim it ed Language

and t he Eye 810g . on 6 February 2009as a (p)review of Alt ermodem . A review of the show was posted by Paul Matosic - 07/04/2009on the Eye 810g, htt p://b it.ly/24d KII. Followi ng th is, and a visit t o t he exhibition , we've taken the libert y of including some descripti ons of

and Web surfer? James Souttar sugge t

that an alternative consciou practi e marks a hilt from the: ·...traditional sense of the art i t [designer] as orneone with something 72

to '
- --

FedEx Scul ptu res by Walead Besht y (2009).

Left : FedEx® Large Kra ft Box ©2oo5 FEDEX 330508, Int ernati onal Pri or it y, Los A nqeles-Tiju ana t rk# 865282057997 28 Octo ber-S November 2008, Inte rnational Pr iorit y, Tijuana-Los Ange les t r k# 867279774918 2·6 January 2009, Intern at ional Pri or it y, Los Ang eles· London trk # 867279774870 14-16 January 2009. Middle : Fedex® Large Kraft Box ©2oo5 FEDEX 330508, Internationa l Prior it y, Los An qeles-Tijuana t rk# 865282058022 28 Oct ober-S November 2008, Intern at ional Pr iorit y,Tijuana-Los A ngeles tr k# 867279774892 2·6 January 2009, Intern at ional Pr ior it y, Los An geles· London trk# 867279774860 14-16 Janua ry 2009. Right: FedEx® Large K raft Box ©2oo5 FEDEX 330508, Internat iona l Pr ior it y, Los Anq eles-Tij uana trk # 86528205800028·30 Oct ober 2008, International Priorit y, Tijuana-Los An geles t rk# 867279774007 2-6 Janua ry 2009, Internat ional Pr ior it y, Los Angeles ·London t rk# 86727977485914·16 January 2009.

Places of Rebirth by Navin Rawanchaikul (2009).

Acrylic on Canvas, 220 x 720em. Image courtesy of Navin Produ ct ion Co.. Ltd.

and the emerging roll' of the des igner a .omeone who enable

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Rather than Iocu ing on visual or graphic e. pre

ion, de igncrs like Cooper look at the

See furt her ima ges here www.lim ited language.org/imag es

tructurc of information. Lauric Haycock

Iakela and Ellen Lupton comment on how 'Cooper worked to build an electronic language

Refe rences N ic olas Bo urriaud. 'Altermodern : A New K ind of Mode rn' ,

that will upport the work of future de ign -

Inter view w ith K irstie Bea ven fo r Tate Online 17 October 2008.

ers, helping them to make complex, malleable do umcnts in real-time and three-dim nsional space." ? lore recently we can look to vi. ualisation technology which helps envision previously hidden or unanticipated information . In contrast to the . paces of modernist information (bar chan: etc.], which are rhetorical and

2

3 4

5 6

de . igns of po sihility?

The designer of possibility sets up - sup-

N ic olas Bourri aud, Relati onal Aesth eti cs (Par is: Presses N ic olas Bour r iaud , Postproduction (New Yor k: Lukas
8

port. - a po. sibility of infinite connccuon

N ic olas Bourriaud in ibi d .. 22. See also htt p:// w w w.tat e.org.uk/

du Reel, 1998),

reconfirm what's already there, 'Visualisation. 2.0;

Wal ead Besht y in N icolas Bourr iaud , Alt ermodern (London : Tate Pu blishing, 2009). 54. br it ain/exhibi t ions/al term odern /explore.sht m (accessed 5/6/09) .

capture the unexpected to tell a new tory. " Modernism

blog.tate .org.uk/turnerprize2008/ ?p= 74 (accessed 05/r:Y2/09). Ibid .

Ted Pol hemu s, Streets tyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk (London: Thames
9

M/M (Par is) A rt ists ' Tal k at t he Tate Modern , 14 Septem ber 2006 www.tate.org.uk/modern /eventseducationtta lksdiscussions/5958.htm (acc essed 05/02/09).

ornrnunicat ion, here, i understood a. a

proce '. with the de igner, the serruonaut , initiating a point or trajectory and crcaung work whic h i not, ideally, . nared b

own

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tl'£, conversanco hf-fe

http://my,cc/chap er2_ 1 Reader credits Stephen 03/07/2007 This is a rcsponsc to tl • pam about langllage; 'What we see rs an Inc reasmg ly saph'sfocatoJd langlla'JoJ. to diSCUSS co imurur a ron de Igo BUT

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Limited Language I Agency

I Modernism 2.0

BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN Million Dollar Blocks, Brown sville, Br ooklyn , New York (2003).These maps depict relat ionships betwee n us st ate expendit ure on pr isoners, th e locati ons of th eir homes and invest ment on regenerati on in th ose same bloc ks (i.e, th e areas whe re t hey live). This reveals previously unseen dimensions of crim inal justi ce and socia l policy. See also pp. 61 and 64, Architec tu re and Just ice 2006, Spa tial Inf ormat ion Desi gn Lab, GSAPP. Columbia Universit y. ProjectTeam : Laur a Kurga n (project director), Eri c Cadora, David Reinf urt, Sara h Will iams,

IT COST 17 MIWON DOLlARS TO IMPRISON 109 PEOPlE FROM THESE 17 BLOCKS IN 2003. WE CALLTHESE MIWON DOLlAR BLOCKS. ON A RNANCIAL SCALE PRISONS ARE BECOMING THE PREDOMINANT GOVERNING INSTITUTION IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

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Limit ed Language I Agency I Modern ism 2,0

John Russell

Design politics It could be argued that the progressive depoliticisation of politics has been mirrored in recent times by a superficial pseudo repoliticisation of art and design - in other words, the transformation of political action into merely symbolic action or pseudo-activity. The art critic J.1. Charlesworth describes this tendency when he criticises this new politicised art as 'an excess of representation of the political' which he claims is 'an effect of the disarticulation of political agency within western democracies after the end of the Cold War'.l In this respect, Jeremy Deller's Battle of Orgreave (2001), where a key moment in the 1984 British Miners' Strike was re-enacted by many of the original miners , could be seen as the equivalent of Adbusters magazine's anti-corporate gestures. Designers are very good at saying what they could or should do . For example, from the graphic design realm, The First Things First Manifesto (2000), which in itself was an up-date of a 1964 manifesto calling for des igner consciousness, said this: 'We propose a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication - a mind shift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and pro duction of a new kind of meaning . The scope of debate is shrinking; it must expand. Consumerism is running uncontested; it must be challenged by other perspectives expressed, in part, through the visual languages and resources of de sign.? These types of call-to-arms seem to be based upon the generally held belief that, because design is in the business of communication, it is in a privileged position to manipulate this communication to political effect. But, does this ever happen? For instance, on a previous blog on this site Paul Bowman calls for •... all visual communicators to address the world', and goes on to urge: 'SREBRENICA: EUROPE, 1995, DECLARED UN SAFE HAVEN, 7-8000 MEN AND BOYSMASSACRED. What

Star er article

Design and the good cop/bad cop scenario The origina l post by John Russell and its ensuing responses capture a critical problem in all visual culture and, specifically, graph: communication: the possibility of politica l reflection /action . The post and responses can be seen to create a good cop/bad cop narrative through which it tries to interrogate the possib ilities of political affect on visual culture as a whole, and graphic design in particular. The cri tical deba tes regarding the political effec tiveness of art are complex and multifariou: but their very existence exposes the soft underbelly of des ign to attacks on its political forti tude. For,art has long entangled itself with represe ntation. In t he 1 920S George Lukacs, in his essay Cri tica l Realis m and S ocialist Realism , proffe red art a political role: vis-a-vis to provide a critical reflection of society. Or late r, t he eventual rupture from realism with Marcel Duchamp and the Read ymade: the urinal. or a mustachiocd Mo na Lisa, all acting as cognitive attacks on a bourgeois assimilation of aesthetics. In Design, the trajectory of aesthetic and intellect ual inquiry is less clear. The questions asked in the original post are made with a Nietzschian de light (a. bad cop) where the slippage in political realit ies is exposed by providing a modern day conte xt for the observation of Nietzsche t hat it is a 'u tilitarian fact that only when we see things coarsely and made equal do t hey become alcula hle and usab le to us'. I This coarseness and, in modern parlance, dumbing doum of political life is illustra ted by John Russell's reference to t he American animated TV show The Si mpsons which he comments, provides a 'correct ive moral function '. To provide an interpretation of this phenomenon : at its narrative centre The 77

Head - Polit ica l ts Eman (Hea duet o IT schum i (2008) . Kopf an Kopf - P0 litikerport ste rraby . hibit ion po . . Por tra it s) ex Itung, ZUric h. M useum f ur Gest a

SimpSOIIS provides a conllauon of moral and

liberal thinking in contemporary .oc u-ty. In the show the had \ haracter, M r. Burn, (owner of the local nuclear power plant), can we do people?') This see ms to be ask ing for some-

is confounded bv the good blue-collar

thing like politics, but designers/artists seem singularly

nai] of Homer imp on (employee of said

unqualified to communicate political ideas. (Becau se

nuclear fa ility]. The sto ryline often

they haven 't got any?)

a simple moral talc of good and bad, The

What is political de sign ? D oe s it exi st ? What does it do? And what d oes it look like ? Or, is it all pseudo-

use of iron) (a nuclear spill due to H orner's

incompetence, exposes the danger of lai ': ezfaire economic, but will always end happily

ac t ivity? John Miller makes this last point abo ut pseudoactivity in a

;111011'

2002

roundtable d iscussion in the magazine

Octob er, with reference to art criticism/ critical theory: 'Joh n Miller: And of course art writers don't mo stly write for cash (for there is none), it 's more for the position in academia that's secured by publishing. So the payoff isn 't the writer's fee, it 's mostly the prestige that comes from fir st establishing an apparently ne gative relationship to the market per se. As it accumulates, that symbolic capital can always be converted to real

capital. "

for in ranee], compounds the liberal viewer not ion of right and wrong: without any recourse to critical, cog nitive expe ndi ture. The narrative t r u t u re o f The S impsons provides a fal. c con ciousncss: a helief that through the assi milation of radicalism (wa tching the Simpsons as ap posed to a Walt D isncy-csq ue animation , for instance] we achieve an equivalence of being radical. We an equally .ee the same action with Adbustcrs, the Canadian 's u bve rt ising' magazine, where t he words and image s of

See fu rt her images here

hig brand advert: are reworked to overturn

www.lim itedlan guage .org/ imag es

their meaning [utilising the same language of promotion and con umpt ion as the advertising

Refere nces J.J. Charle sworth. 'Twin Towers: The Specta cul ar Disappearance Of Art And Polit ics.' Thir d Text , Vol. 16, Issue 4 (2002), 357·66. 2 The First Things First Manifesto was written by Ken Gar land in 1964and republished in 2()()() in conjunct ion wi t h Adbusters and a few ot her key internat ional design maga zines. With t he except ion of a few m inor wor d and prod uct changes. it remained t he same in text and spirit. 3 Paul Bowman in a reply (26/05/2005) t o his ow n post Il lustrators. rather like women in the Bible. '" Limi ted Language. May 2005. http ://b it.ly/ paul_bow rnan 4 John Mill er, 'Round Table: The Present Cond it ions of A rt Cri t ici sm ', in October, No. 100 (Spri ng 2002).205.

it denounces]. In both c: .amplcs, we ee a .hift from a material to a ' ) mbolic politic. That i. , we watch and consume our politic ', ra ther than haw a material engagement with them : strikes, bomb, and collective revolution . By e.' te nsion, th L lead s to an ava ntga rdc, a ulti mate bad cop, whose response to t he cog n itive, et hical and aesthetic is q ui te u neq uivoca l. Truth is a lie: morali ty tinks; beau ty is sh n .? If the had cop advocates an impossibi lity of po litics or any cognitive, aesthetic, visual language, the good cop uses a soothing rhetori of colle tivc consc iousness. In Britain, this is seen to be played out t hrough i .ucs of class a nd union isation against the idyll bac kdrop of village green and indu trial lands apt's. For

III

ranee, Orgreal'e in northern

England; the site in 19 4, of one of the most trident cia he between mkine miners and S ar er artlC

79

the British Police dur ing t he re ign of Margaret That her. He re, t he Trade Unions acted as t he upcrcgo of capitalism - filteri ng out the more carnal, base cle men ts of t he capi ta list psyche. T his eve nt is recast in the work of artis t Jeremy Deller's The Boule of Orgre(/lle for instance, whe re th e J 984 M iner s' Strike was res taged by ma ny of those origin ally invoked. T his art wor k assim ilates a col lcc uvc con sciousness; where me n fight on the [ro nt line andher in doors' pa t ient ly paint s placard s and fights t he bailiff at t he front door... T he /I o/l-art form of Graphic De ign, with its long histo ry of po litical co mmu nication, is the hos tage bet ween th e two dia logues of nvant-ga rd i .m and commercial opport unism: it wants to be pa rt of th e di sco u rse as bot h insider and ou t icier; producer and con. urner; T hi is pa rt of the t reache ro us grou nd

t hat J.1. Charlesworth ' and others, in t hei r replie to the post, have mined. But ca n po litica l des ign e xist? For ma ny it is unequivoca l: like Ko u rosh his hehga run, who comments: 'My firs t grap hic designs with po litical subjec ts date bac k to 1975 . I de signed a poster for peace in Lebanon t hat was then involved with the civ il war. As an Iranian artist I inte nded to be present in important world issues so in that poster I had a symbolic look at peace t hat was emerging in Lebanon bac k then . I regarded that peace w ith skep t icism and the fu ture proved t hat I was right in my perception. T he

SAVAK

(Iranian

intelligence service) interrogated me' that year on my intention and p urposes." I

ow com pa re th is wit h Shepard Fairey's

'iconic' Bara k Obarna Hope poster, for instance. Part of t he reason why gra phic communicators feel as if they have a legitimate pos ition in contempora ry politics is due to ail interpretat ion of the history of t he cli cip line . Dacia, Constructivism and De Stijl have a t rad it ion in the (political) pos ter. Indeed contemporary des igne r, Hami sh MUir, a founder of Svo, descr ibes the poster as t he graph ic desig ner's ver ion of an artist 's ca nvas. (Although, it is 80

Lim ited Language I Agen cy I Design polit ics

An Obama post er by the art ist Shepard Fairey (2009). He is most well known for his Obey Giani stree t post er series. The Obey campa ign has been described by Fairey as an 'exper iment in Phenomenology' which att empt s to 'reawaken a sense of wonder about one's environment' . http://obeygiant. com/about Design for Obeme. This is a website which collates Obama poster s and rat es th em. The f ounders write; 'Many arti st s incl uding Shepard Fairey have alread y proven that poster art is not a dead medi um in the Un ited Sta tes and have also shown how much of an impact a single poste r can have... At such a t urbu lent (yet excit ing) time in our natio n's

hist or y, collaborat ion has never been more import ant.' http://designf orobama.org/

also worth noting that Svo de politicised their work by using the term 'visua l engineering' when describing their late r work at the end of the 1 980s.) But today, the connection to t hese early zo t h century ar t/desig n movements i appropriated as a visual su rface a lone. It becomes

disarticulated from t he mater ial reality of it s context - of cons truc tion or creation. i\ prime example of t his appropriation is the Constructivist aesthetic which has long influ enced t he work of graphic designers Nevi lle Brody and Jon ath an Ba rnbrook .

t\ visual language thus appropriated, provides a politi s of symbolism rather than an embodied - from cra dle to grave - political sphere of 1920. Russia. Constr uc tiv ism was a movement which aimed at 't he creat ive processing of prac tical materials'.' Here, the 'polit ical' is evidenced within all disci pline, of the t ime: graphic des ign, art and arc hitectu re; not in and of t hemselves bu t as agents in the e xternal material world of housing and lite racy for exam pie - constructing a new era! '[Hly means of intellect ual-mate rial prod uction, the constructivist joins t he proletarian order for the truggle with the past , for t he conquest of the future ," Of course, any visual style is historically contingent and to contemporary eyes at least, can be litt le more t han symbolic at be t, and ironic at worse. Hut , t he processes of pol itics are still available to us - although they might be incr easingly found in a convergence of med ia. Where a 'converge nce is characterized by the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media indu . tr ies, a nd t he migratory behavior of media audiences'." Design as a poli t ical act is difficult to define, but as part of t he process of enlighte nment - lead ing to poli t ical awareness - it ca n be an active partic ipant. Graphic design is in t he process of redefining itse lf in digital cultu re - and the possibilities of convergence - and it will need more than man ifc .tos to recstubli hits centre-of-grav ity. But it i worth remembering, th e Graph ical User Inte rface 82

Lim ited Language / Age ncy I Desig n poli t ics

JOH N RUSSEll \ Vas a popular and charmingjokcsrcr.

Not Just a Statistic cam paign (2004), N ew Yor k Cit y,

Poster by Bijan Sayfou ri. Mahri z Publi shers (2009). Saadi (Persian: <5"tU"), was one of the major Persian poets of t he medieva l peri od. One of his f amous quotes is fr om the poem th at focu ses on th e oneness of mankind. The same poem is used t o grace th e entrance to the Hall of Nat ions of the

UN

building in New York with t his call for breaking all barr iers:

YUi 1", It"""<5 <5...!. -.u...!...xJ.l ...s..'.J\...>.Jl"S':"';j~~.J"..xJ.l

<;J t""'J<S YO'Y 1Jy .JJ~I.J ~.J t""'.J"1 .;I ~10' J.;I.J

~J...!.j~
Human beings are members of a whole, In creation of one essence and soul. If one member is afflicted with pain, Other m embers uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you cannot retain.

makes the World Wide Web visible . Literally and metaphorically this interface, might he a lifeline for graphic design as a political a tent . r:

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Star er article

85

Est her Leslie

Notions of vis ibility

Ben Wilson Ben Wilson paints little acrylic paintings on discarded chewing gum that has been stamped into the pavement . His pictures are emblems of contemporary social life. Some are declarations of love, some commemorate the absent or dead, some celebrat e a gang or the bonds of friendship, while others record memories or tokens of ident ity. O ver a number of days or wee ks passer s-by, from alcoholics to hou sew ives to community police officers, are held up for a while in order to involve th emselves in discussions and affective relations with the artis t who appe ar s as a mad drunk, prostrate on th e ground for hours on end, painting his miniatures as city life rumbles around him . Passers-by propose their own images or have their images' contours drawn out of them through long pro cesses of conversation and enquiry. The y contribute sket che s, suggest colours, tussle wit h the artist over what could and should appe ar. Th ey give th eir conse nt to be photographed which produces, alongside th e colou rful micro -paintings, an archive of th e London public in t he first years of the z rst cent ury. Th rou gh th is activi ty, which he has done nearly every day for over th ree years along th e road s from Barnet (Nort h London ) to Central Lond on, Wilson has challenged th e see mingly exclusive rights of the commercial imagescape to de cor at e ou r environment. The images and their commissioning generate, in microform, a red istribution of the ability to particip at e in the system of pat ronage. Wilson has also cont ri bute d to a mapping of urban relations, as th ey exist on the ground. He has brought people and th eir affec t ions to expression . And he has stepped over lines of prop erty and perce ived prop erty. He has been assaulted once by young men, arres t ed twi ce and beat en ser iously by City of Lond on police as the y forcibl y extracted DNA from him though he had, in painting a discarded it em raised a few millim etres from the ground, not committed the

S artet'ilItlC

In I 2, Charle William [)a) wrote, III TIll' Art of .\1illia/llrl' Pailltillg, There arc three kind of material on which miniature arc painted, namely: ivory, pape r and vellum: hut a the fir t two arc the mo ot usual in England, I hall confine my remarks to them ...' Over 150 year ' later Ben \ Vii on added a further material: chewing gum. Wilson's painting . , which use discarded chewing gum as their canva: carry on today the tradition of the m in iat u re which, historically at least , is pe rceived as a legitimate Engli.h art form: To t he English people, the t

art of portrait miniature is" national asset of exceptional worth, and it is rightly considered in . orne ways c.' lus ively an English art .':!

The miniature iyle 11'' exported to the colonies. It i . till" popular art form in Ind ia, for in. tancc, where it ha. materially utili cd the trafficked booty of colonialism. namely ivory. In a paral l ,I drawn from Michael

Redclift in Chewillg GUill' The Fortu ne of Taste, the modern day anvas of spat-out gum ha: a link to I lorth America's colonial past where gum 'came to represent pre-modernity and reoource extraction for ten of thousands of families in the Yucatan'.' The branded names of this gum, Chiclets an I Blacl: Jack, slgnify their own racial overtones of Mexican and African culture. . It is in thi. sense that one can agree with Rcdclifr's comme nt t hat chewing gum is an 'icon of mode rni ty'. So, why thi particular h istorical context for a bloke who paint. on d iscarded hewing gum? As di cussed elsewhere in this hook, art and politics are prob lematic and this is further borne out by the responses to the article on the Web a it wa originally written by Esther Le lie. Comment: from reader - make their own link from Ben Wilson to the politic of 87

Chewing gum pain tings by Ben Wilson, London, htt p://bit.ly/bubblegum_art

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crime of which he was accused; criminal damage. His is politics already instituted and already probed by an art practice that tests its own possibility of be ing in the most exposed way. At the time of writing in 2007, Wilson was involved in a court case brought by th e Crown Prosecution Service . He was charged wit h obstruction for he dallied in handing over his camera when asked by a policeman. His argument was that he had not completed and documented his comm ission and would be breaking the terms of the relationship with his patron. As the case continued, the City of London magistrates' court was treated to exposit ions on environm ent al art and the socially curative powers of public acts of c reat ivity] Thi s little incident is part of a shift of power relation s on London st reets . It is significant th at it happened in the City of London, where paranoia about terrorism is at its highest . But it is also a reflection of an attitude, reinforced by the police, that unlicensed, or unprofitable activiti es, in socially shared spaces are illegitimate or 'mad'. What might be the possibilities of recl aiming public space as a place of non-commodified expression? Do you have to become like a 'st reet person' or 'marginal' to exist as a human in the streets? See f urt her images here www ,limit edlanguage.org/ images

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to a 'Iarxist call regarding t h . 'abst raction of so ial relau ons":" and even de-couple him from the political, as a non-event ." The histor ical context above u uates Wil on's work in a tirneline of artistic practice, whilst bringing into focu. the contingency of production . Wil. on is clear about his social (political) role: 'Our environment i very controlled and what we need so very trongly i diversity. Even galleries, mu. eum , publishing companies are all very controlled. I want to be able to do my work and bypa.. bureau ra y:
work of distribution. Wil on i aware of this other audience when he comments, The pictures [of his work] have th ir own life.i.we live in a digital world . The picture. move around. People take pictures on their mobile phone, send them to their friend . : This process of di. semination is also part of the contemporary notion of vi. ibility - a visibility whi h t he miniature format gently tran 'gresses. Coogle laps, Ge nome Mapping, Digital imaging, eel" arc all clement of this need to see - even the enforced 1>;0.;,\ test that Wilson uffered at the hands of the police is part of t his need to record - make visible. The World Wide Web (as database) is a natura l progre ion in visuali 'ing t he world as carrying on from the 19th century anthropological preoccupation of clas uficntton. Both phenomena prove a way of narrating the world. The databa e and narrative have been crural to many of the debate on the role of digital culture: the digital theorist l.cv 89

Manovich was a major instigator of the debate. And latterly he asks, in the context of globalisation: 'How... to represent the typi al modern experience of living "between layers" - between the past and the present, between East and West, between there and here?"

It is the bet ween layers that is the best way to conccptualisc the reception of Wilson's work. The initial response to l.cslie's or iginal essay, each take a different political, methodological or banal slice in how to understand the work. Manovich sees the database as a cull ural form which is anti -narrative: 't he database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast. a narrative creates a cause and effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are cultural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the

world. "

But in the dissemination of Wilson'. artworks the reverse is true. It is the datuba e of the World Wide Web which provides the narrative. This is a narrative curated on ocial net working sites such as Flickr where an interest group has specifically been created which is dedicated to photographing and showcasing Wilson's work. It is the accompanying irnage tags which reate the narrative structure. ociully generated tags (often referred to as folksonornics] han' b 'come useful in social networking sites where social collaborations are being constructed. Networks of different intere t grcups such as art, wruing, fascism etr., can live independent 'virtual live ", but share commonalties in their tn~ing infrastructure. Thi possibility of database and narrative structure is supported by Marsha Kinder who sees narrative as having a more ideological imperative, which is missing from Manovich: 'By database narratives, I am referring to narratives whose structure exposes or themauzes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all srorie ... the selection of particular data 90

Li m ited Language I Agency I Be n Wilson

(characters, objects, settings, sounds, events) from a .e rics of databases or paradigms, which arc then combined to generate pecific tales. Such narratives reveal the possibility of making other combinations. which would create alternative . tories, and they encourage us to que .tion the choice of categories and of what is included and omitted .

I

This more 'ope n' interpretation of the possibilitic of narrative within the framework of World Wide Web /Database cultures i. evidenced in the digital community which

is attached to Ben Wilson, either tangentially or by notion. of ta te, geography and general interest etc. Googling chewillg gum art Hell Wi/SOIl at the time of writing gets

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World Service ; Yahoo groups to Flickr and, of course, Limited Language, When you leave the locale of the pave ment where Wilson is working and interacting with hi. immediate community, what you find is an atomi at ion of audience ' which does not ncce.. arily mean an overarc hing democracy of taste, or even an appreciation of Wilson's political tan e, but that of a Community and alternative space ' for interaction. What you find is a mapping of alternative cultures, from the banal to the transgre sive. Just a Wil on 's art work can be mapped onto its arucccdcms,

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too can the icchnolo-

gil' that provid its dissemination, e pccially the World Wide Web. The Web might provide a digital wean- of nell' narratives but, it's worth noting Dorothy Kidd's concern about issues of 'sustainability: labour and power divisions...by gender. Some of these questions, of who gc'ts supported, to say what, through which medium, are achingly Iarnilia t" !

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Mario Moura

Work ethics When we leaf through design directories, we seldom wonder whether the work we see was paid or credited or whether the designer was ethically, politically or religiously coerced in any way. Designers somehow manage to keep themselves above the harsher realities of their own society in a plane of abstract, neutral mediation. The very presence of design, and graphic design in particular, in any given society may be presented as an index of freedom of expression. And yet, few people look into the subtle modes of restraint and control that permeate the magazine-lined white cubes of the design studios. Designers so often see their job as value-free or ethically neutral. All they have to do to keep it that way is follow the rules and do the best job possible, regardless of beliefs and values (their own and their clients) and the possible effects of their work. When designers want ethics, they generally turn to 'outside' sources. In other words, design is ethical when it works for ethical clients (NGOS) or uses ethical materials (recycled paper) or encompasses ethical subjects (peace demonstrations), whilst remaining neutral on all other occasions. These causes are undoubtedly worthy but are we, in fact, objectifying ethics? Are we limiting them to certain accepted practices, while forgetting that design itself is an industrial activity with specific internal ethics and politics that remain largely unobserved? Websites, corporate identities or magazines are, more often than not, designed by surprisingly large groups of people structured in hierarchies. The fact that the task itself is creative only makes these hierarchies more tense and difficult to manage . As the work of Italian philosopher Antonio Negri' demonstrates, there is an ongoing evolution from industries based on the mass production of commodities (material labour) to modes of production based on intellectual, creative work (immaterial labour). Th is change requires the

How much of this can we take? T he envi ronrncnt , sexism , rac ism, ageism ...

W hy sho uld peop le ca r a nd what do we do wi t h th ose who don't? Rosi Bra idott i, in her book Transpositions: 0 11

omadic Ethics sug-

ges ts th ese arc t he questions we ne rd to face. A di lemma t hen, for all ethics and politi cs is t his: 'How do you make people wa nt to be

Irce, genero us, decent and caring?" A satisfying defi nition of ethics is hard to find . Gene rally it ca n be under st ood to be

abo ut a mora l res ponsibility to oihers.! I [oweve r, this invokes universa l. timeless ideals and wh ilst we m ight abs trac tly agree wi th th em, t he question is whet her we ac t on t he m. For Braido tti , to be et hica l is to be a co untable. Her int er es t is discover ing t he con ditions mos t conducive to cu ltivati ng and sustai ning cha nge. So, whilst you can tell people to be green (or whatever else) all you like, it won' t necessa rily affec t t heir be haviour. Braidou i arg ues th at , 'No t rationali ty, but rather af fectivi ty co unts here; it is a q ues tion of "wanting to", of dcstrc."}n one instance, this wanting

becomes central to t he d ilemma of G reen.

IVlw cares? a report on consumer behaviour and green branding by Com posi te Projects.' Th is desi re to care is a lso a pere nnial pro ble m for Mar io Mo u ra's original blog, which cal led for a work et hics for design . He re he lament ed th at when design invokes et hics, it us ually locates them externally wit hin pa rticular, well -established areas for co ncern : des ign for t he environment, housing etc. This allows t he operations of design, as an indust rial prac tice, to remain unobserved . It is one of the key obstacles to ethical design practice . For Mo u ra, ethics needs to start at home . In replies to the article on the Limited Language website, a series of ethical issues for the work place came fortl •.1 \'11 But, beyond focus on

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Knit Chair. Designed by Emiliano Godoy.The st rong, flex ible rope connec tion s allow the chair to adapt t o th e user's body and movement s. A ll mate rials, glues and coat ings are natur al and biodegradable. www.godoylab.com

part i ular prob lems and the individuals invoked, it was Joseph who add ressed ho« work ethics connect to world et hics and, as importantly, why de .igne rs might care: '1Im\ development of new ways to control a workforce that is radic ally different from the tr ad itional facto ry worker. Some of th ese t ech niques of control are exam ined in the works of Edward Said? and Noam Chomsky.' Obviou sly these t echniques of cont rol have t o be emb edded in the discourse and methods of every practit ioner at every st age of their career. During the ir formative years, de signer s undergo a behavioural cond it ioning of sorts that effectively blinds th em to th e industrial nature of their own profession. While at school, designers are trained to be creat ive loners who spora dically work as part of a group, whereas out in industry they are frequently small cogs in complex corporate machines consisting almost entirely of de signers employed in different capacities. Designers are tr ained to deal with clients who know nothing abo ut design and who only want their problems solved . As it turns out, in the 'real world ', designers deal pr imaril y wit h other de signer s. Th eir employers are often designer s and their co-workers are oft en de signers . Th e myth of the de signer as a cr eati ve loner is an effective way of d iverting attention away from th e mid dleman and, in fact, from the enti re labour st ru cture of th e design profession . Thi s labour st ru ct ure, far from be ing an abstraction, reprodu ces local and global soc ial dynam ics and rest raints. A valua ble way of connecting design to local realities and probl ems would be to see it as a concr ete job, produced by people who are part of th ei r own societ y and vulnerable to its pre ssures and shortco mings. A better knowledge of how design's inner workin gs and tensions operate locally would undoubtedly cont ribut e to de ep en th e range of it s over all ethical concerns . While it is comforta ble to keep et hical, political and social concerns restricted to conveniently exte rnal goals, we tend to forget that design has internal et hics and politics. I'm not saying that we should forget the larger picture. My point is that the politics and et hics of the de sign workspace are part of that larger picture.

can de rgn he taken .' riously a a \ Oilc, or \'I ual plat form, again t say, female body obic, ufic auon. if the Internal politics 01 rno t tudios, chcm relation hip ell are mgramed, hath lmgin: ucally .md : tructurally, on gender line .... 1'0 ter lecoratc Ill' world not change It. The bottom line here is that we can't ta lk of ethics when the fundamenta l other gender for instance - has not been add ressed . A 1'0 I)' Shop po .tcr hearing the graffi t i 'less packaging, more beautiful' remind s (perhaps inadve rten tly] t hat it ' , not recycl ing that's the issue, hut t he promotion of beau ty. Communicatio n design forms part of t he decorative urfaces of t he world, hu t it (an also he a powerful device for media t ing care, One .t rengt h is the way it connects the per. onal to the global, the rni ro to the macro . \ Ve see this in adverusing . hut we can al 0 , ee it in the device of the arbon footprint. This simple bodily metaphor of human act-and-effect rave people, from individuals to gowrnm('nt ' and from corporation: to countries, the same calc to che k their own emissions against global ones . \ Vhatew r t he cr iti ism. of the . den e, it's hard to deny this communication device captured the popular envi ronme ntal imagination in a way successive campaigners and their actions, designer ' and t he ir posters have so often failed to do. T he i. sue may belong to the global or col lective imagination, but t he cha nnels th rough which we can meaningfully act arc located in the micro -politic. of the everyday. T his lends itself well to lou ra's call for thic to ' tart in t he work place. And yet a problem of 'personali at ion', especially in a consumer capitalist framework, is that it too often puts the onus on individual [con umcr] hange. W hereas, in realit y, thi s means nothing without support from the top : ompany, government etc. In the

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and t he related websi te Lwei)' as a Tree' offer environmental . upport for design consultancies bet wepn the two sphere..In Cradle to Cradle, ,Ii had Braungart and William

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remind us: 'More

See fu rt her images here www lim itedlanguage.org/ images

control (being "less bad") i . not the sam a being good . The planet nill gets d pleted, it just take longer, The overarching aim of their thesi: L change at all levels, which involves questioning . 1.'1 f-intere n, not just extending it. For in ranee, adding an environmentally-

References For instance see Mic hael Hardt and Ant onio Negro, Empi re (Cambridge, MA : Harva rd University Press, 2000). 2 Part icularl y in Edward Said, Representa tions of the Intellectual: The 1993Reit h Lect ures. 3 Noam Choms ky, Necessary Il lusions (Cambridge , MA: South End Press, 1989).

friendly paper option or 'et hi al trata ' to a company or design course can often be no more than ju: t good business sense. The term 'c rad le to cradle' is about waste no longer being an afterthought ( radlc to grave) but considered as a design problem. 1\ design 's next life has to be imagined from the stan . For instanc ,the first edition of the Cradle /0 Cradle book was made out of polymer, a plastic where the ink can be washed off and the sheets re-u ed. The author admit this isn't much usc for a book to be kept forever but, the idea was oon taken up by a newspaper. The, idea, here I

to de ign a [utur for product .

radle /0 radle is coy about the que. tion of ethic : 'Don't make it an ethical que, lion,' ih y tell us, 'make it a quality-of-life problem . But do these haw to be mutually exclu ive? Returning to Braidotti, she argue ' for a kind of pragmatic too but through the concept of u tainability, Sustainability attempts to come to terms with proce.. I.' and interrelation across areas not usually connected. Sustainability an simply be assessed by asking the question: 'I low much of this can we take?' This question goc: beyond cnvironmcntali m and i. able to connect a ro.. all ethical issues

[ra i m, . cxism, ageism ctc.], all

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tin's, in ide and outside of industry and at all levels: by eli nt ,designers, ordinary people. government and

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right, .o ial con structivis m or hippy ideali: m. It' about accountability. I

'or doe sus tainability di count plea '-

ur - for eith r Braidotti or the 96

radle to Limited Language I Age ncy / Work ethi cs

Crad le et hos . If the answer is ye ,we can take it, t hen fine . If the a nswer is that we, or t he e nvi ro nment or our ol leagues or wha t and

whoever else, can 't ta ke much more, th en it is uns ustainable. As a wo rk ethic, sustai nabili ty is about accep ting t he limits of wha t designe rs can (o r ought to ) engage in an d what th ey can e ndu re . III A llan C ho hinov, teac he r of industrial and prod uc t design, provides a good exa mple of getting hi .. tudc nis to q uestion nearly every stage of t heir de ign process, including why they might be designing a pro duct at al l. Ill' gi\"Cs an example whic h i. in. pired by Ezio Manzin i's Sustainable Everyday Project" whe re, in addressing t he se pa ra te 'problems' of care for ill chi ldren and lonely elde rly in t he t.s, one outcome was ne ighbo u rhood -based ch ildcare faci liti es staffed by th e elderly, This re onates w ith an initiative in t he

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whe re

ho using young single people and support for old people d id not result in new d es ign s for single-unit flat o r buzzer dev ices connected to the loca l doc to r. Inst ead , t hey we re bro ught toget he r so elders wi th a room t o spare rented it for free to t he young in return for a small exchange of hel p . This way of t h ink ing dovetai ls wi th service design which, from co ntext to context, looks at 'modifying behavior, redist ribu ting ass ets, goods, activities, talent, and seeks to improve the . ituat io n or contrib ute someth ing new into t he world'." It's this i sue of addressi ng behavio ur which lin ks back to Braidotti . Bratdou t sugges ts t hat in practice, ethics has two phases: a cri tical or rca tive phase and an affirmative and active phase. The firs t is critical of the ine rt repeti tion of hab it , as dlscu sed in the exam ples above .'? T he other is t he issue that t his p iece star ted wit h: how we cu ltivate and s ustai n the desire for change. I lad we taken them in o rder, t he first question ought not to have been, 'II w much of this can we take?' b ut '00 we need design at all ?' See full responses « carryon the converse Ion here http://tlny.cc/cl'apter'2_~ Star er art icle

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Aar is Sherin

Sustalnable deslgn

Escape from the tyranny of thlngs Aaris Sherin 's essay opens up many of the conSeveral months ago, I was asked by a journalist to comment on the excessive consumption of technology by designers. She wanted to know if there ought to be rules dictating how long a person should be required to keep electronics and computer equipment. It occurred to me then that even though Americans consider themselves to be fiercely independent, most of us love to be told what to do . It's easy to think that we are one certification or set of regulations away from reversing the negative impact that humans are having on the environment. The reality is both more complicated and nuanced. If a designer needs new equipment to complete a motion graphics piece about the destruction of natural habitat, and the piece results in large tracts of land being set aside for sustainable agriculture, then who would argue that the replacement of the computer hardware was unwarranted? The right balance of con sumption and use of resources is more the stuff of personal responsibility and individual circumstance than it is appropriate fodder for regulatory authorities. That being said, there is no doubt that those of us residing in the developed world are consuming more than our fair share of resources, largely at the cost of those living in the developing world. The question remains, what to do about it? In Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life,1 John Heskett argues that a postmodern interest in ideas and meaning has been covertly appropriated as a means of creating and selling consumers useless, expensive and exclusive goods that rarely fulfil an actual need. Luxury and our desire for it is nothing new, but what luxury means has been redefined and is now primarily about name-association and branding as opposed to fine materials and higher quality construction. After World War II, a burgeoning middle class meant not only more disposable income but also an explosion of aspirational consumption. Products became badges of social status and economic

cerns and debates about the role of desig n/ designers in a sustainable economy - it was an essay that addressed consciousnesses (as opposed to material things) and this was reflected in the replies it drew from the Limited Language readership. ·...we don't have a rni sion as designers and we only have the power to do something if we art us indiv iduals '.' The above comment captures the pa radigm shift needed in obtaining any sense of a sustainable world: it is through a process of thinking - personal agency - rather than instrumental problem solving alone. Designers cannot choose the problem to solve but rather, t hrough the correct questioning, they can make the problem apparent. These thinking/psychological processes have been called

.mctadesign ' .1 Put simply, what we mean by this is, for example, introducing recycled materials into the production/design of a disposable coffee cup might so lve the problem of saving a few trees (or the ozone) hut it erases (or at least masks) the real question of: why coffee? Why take -away? Why disposable ctc., ct .? To expand this premise we need to look to the reasoning of inventor Saul Griffith. G riffith is quoted in Sherin's orig inal article due to his interc t in the relation hip between ene rgy/ consumpt ion and design. H is reason ing might lead u

to

ask: how many joules of energy are

needed to make a disposable coffee cup compared to a ceramic mug, a glass or a flask? And, crucially, what is the energy expenditu re over t he life of the object? Furt hermore, do we covet the design of a paper cup like we might a hand-made ceramic mug, or the sculptura l form of a Marcello Morand ini cup and saucer

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Adve rt by Enoch Bolles (1937). The Zippo Manuf act urin g Compan y was found ed by George G. Blaisde ll who chose t he word 'Zippo' in 1932. He liked t he sound of t he word 'zipper' so he formed different var iat ions on the word and settled on Zippo, decidin g t hat it had a 'mode rn ' sound.

The fir st Zippo light ers sold fo r $1.95 each. And , fr om the very beginn ing, th ey were backed by Mr. Bla isdell's unc ondit ional lif eti me guaran tee - 'It wor ks or we fi x it f ree.', htlp://t inyur l.com / ldudyf

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achievement regardless of how well they were produced. In her 2005 book, The Uncommon Lifeof Common Objects,2 Akiko Busch writes about seemingly ordinary products including cereal boxes, a snowboard, a desk and an Adirondack chair all of which carry cultural significance. Busch's objects take on a dreamy, reverent place in our psyches and this gives them value and in some cases staying power. That objects are richly embedded with meaning is certain. What is less sure is whether greater acknowledgement of this relationship might help us to become better owners and, therefore, better consumers . This is not a small point because objects have, for decades, been made to have finite lives. Manufacturers are terrified of what might happen if products were so ecologically and functionally well made that consumers wouldn't need to replace them. The question of how to keep a viable economy going while using less weighs heavily on the mind of inventor and renewable energy innovator Saul Griffith. Griffith, from whom the term heirloom consumption was borrowed, is an energy junky. He states the job of the designer simply: 'It is to make us use less, allow the developing world to use more, while increasing everyone's quality of life." Griffith believes that it will be necessary to reduce the embodied energy in objects if we want to keep the earth at a temperature that can sustain human life. In practical terms this will require designers to be more efficient, and to make things either very lightweight or last ten t imes as long. Certainly our conception of products will have to change if we are expected to spend decades with them . Some companies and designers have already begun to explore what a new terrain for objects might look like. Inax Corporation, a manufacturer of tiling, building materials and sanitary fixtures based in Japan, uses the technique of backcasting to imagine future products that have a subtly different relationship to their owners . A bath that fills with warm foam bubbles gives comfort without wasting precious water

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for instance: which do we hand on to our family or frie nds; as a heirloom and a re prese ntation of our good taste? i\ coveted, or loved object, can be its link to sus ta inability - we want to keep it rather t han replace with a newer model! O f cou rse the Ilipside of th is thinking is the per il of consumer feu : hism - where we only buy the produ ct in the first place when we are told it is to be coveted. So much greene ry in design (graphic communica tion i: e. pecially at fault here) has played a peek-a-boo game with quest ions on sustainahilny and use: t he first question should always be why does it need to be de igncd? For every design is a culturally active agent , or put anot her way: 'Design is a political act. Eve ry time we des ign a product , we are making a sta teme nt about the di rect ion the world will move in.? Thi reflect s in one sense, the netwo rked world we have alluded to elsewhere in this book - the fluid nature, and the fluidity, of contem porary vi .ual culture and its relationship to community: part of the cosmopolita n vis ion .' This allows for, not top -down relat ions, or even, Eurocentric, bu t the possibilit ies of a 'cultural mixture' in how des ign th inks and engages with the world. For the sociologist Ulrich Beck, we all have a cosmopolitan outlook, whether it's the war on terror, or the Iraq anti-war protest s, we can no longer perce ive the world within the confines of our own ba k yards - the world intrudes and per meates our experie nce or as Beck himself evangelically espouses: 'For in the cosmopolitan ou tlook...there resides the latent pote ntia l to break out of the self-cente r d narcissism of the nat ional ou tlook and the dull incomprehe nsion with which it infects thought and action, and thereby en lighten human beings concerning the real, internal cosmopoli tanization of their lifcworlds and mstuuuons'.' Sustai nabilny will only work if it breaks out of the confines of green problern-: olving and focuse. on the holistic, process led 101

re -cngagernern with t he material world of design . Sustainahility - as a methodology - is a collective of many init iat ivcs made u nder the banner of grt'en and environmental art and de sign, but places them within a broader matrix of aims and processes - what Bruce

Mau named ,\ IIIS.,iI'I' C"'lIIgl'.' The top-down - non-relationa l - design

prarticc is now here more darnag ing than in sustainable design and the need for nell' relational thinking, with its focus on process and commun ity, is para mount: .... rather than be lieving t hat we can design univer ally applicable bluepri nts to hring about sustai nab ility by pr edi ction and cont rol-based . top-down eng ineeri ng, it may be more useful and appropriate to think of the outcomels] as an emergent property of t he com ple x dynamic system in whic h we all part icipate, co-create, and adapt to interdependent biophysical a nd

psycho-social processes'." Design not only has to see itself in t he wider world of t h ings h ut needs to develop relationships with consumers. As Sherin asks , what 'mig ht help us to become be tter owners?' 111is can be brought about hy a process of education with designers becoming more ex plicit in the processes of t hei r work: for how do we knoll' design? And how can we grow to covet an object beyond sim ple monetary value: De ign pract ice , it ca n be argued, suffer from its accessihili ty and reproducibility printed, digitised, scanned a nd photocopied - it literally wraps our lived experience; whilst equally, mass produced, self assembled, Ilat packed and rapid prototyping provide many - if not all - of the material artefacts which inform our lives. As John Heskett in his book: Tooth-

picksand Logos observes: 'design has splintered into ever-greater subdivisions of practice with out any overarching concept or organization and so can be appropriated by anyone' : th is

and the company's concept kit chen provides not only the usual surfaces and fixtures but also includes builtin waste disposal and recycling systems and an area for growing fresh produce. Work shown as part of the exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind' at the Museum of Modern Art in New York skirted the edge of what might be considered marketable products. Noam Toran, a Professor in the Interactions Department at the Royal College of Art, created products to alleviate men' s loneliness by provid ing traces of their missing companions. Accessories for Lonely Men (2001), a collection of eight objects, including a Sheet Thief, a pair of Cold Feet, and a Heavy Breather. Toran's models suggest that de signers can be ta sked with providing comfort and by doing so may help to alleviate our compulsion to constantly acquire more stuff. Michiko Nitta, a student in the same department, explored both our obsession with objects and our de sire for physical closenes s with loved one s by creating wearable products made using vitro-cultured meat production te chnolo gies (see page 219). Her concept would allow consumers to grow selecte d parts of th eir partners on their own bodies. The replic a of an origin al nipple or patch of living hair is de signed to foster memory and human connection and provides psychological rather than physical sustenance. The Danish poet, de signer and mathematician Pet Hein writes of being posse ssed by objects in his poem The Tyranny of Things. Hein suggest s that if one has more than eight objects, one ends up being owned by rather than owning the things in one 's life. The interchangeable use of the terms want and need has led people to think th at it is their god-given right to buy th e products that they de sire . In th e us we work hard er and longer th an many of our neighbours in ot her indus trialised countries and yet we are no happie r with the life that our riches have afforded. After visiting the homes of several European de signers I began to wonder whether they were on to

ubiquity is compounded by its ut ility . Utility itself can lead to a sense of invis ibility and impermanence - more knowledge of t he design process would provide a provenance that m ight help anchor it s ephemeral 102

Limi ted Langu age I Age ncy I Escape fr om the tyranny of t hings

something that the rest of us had missed. First I will say that these people are connected by the fact that they work in design and little else. They come from different countries, speak different languages, are from different generations and yet they obviously had something in common . First, they didn 't have very many things ; and second, the objects th at they did own were well designed, usually beautiful, and almost always supremely functional. My hosts all had a near obsession with the posse ssions that they lived with. They knew the story of the designer, they could tell you why one teakettle was funct ionally superior to it s competitors and they unabashedly revelled in the beauty of objects. And I began to think, 'This is what I want' ...an escape from the tyranny of things. All of which was convenient since I live in New York City, a place where having less is often dictated more by the skimpy size of apartments than by any concern over excessive consumption. I have found that the best objects are not neces sarily the most expensive, and that knowing you will keep what you have purchased tends to mean that you will buy less. I thought that sustainable consumption would primarily be achieved by denying oneself the pleasure of having things. Instead, I have found that smarter choices and a greater appreciation for real rather than perceived value can make me a happier consumer and also a less wastefulone . See fu rther images here www .limited language.orgfimages

nature - t he Zippo lighter is a simple examp le of th is: 'Application for the origina l Zippo patent was filed on May 17, 1934.... The design of t he Zippo lighter basical ly re mains the same to this day, with minor improvements'.' The company promotes its desig n c reden tia ls as part of its market ing strategy, It i t he 'windproof lighte r 't hat looked good and was easy to operate ". I Education, especially museumology, can also help to develop better owners: so often museums focus upon, and thereby increase, t he fet ish value of design rathe r than enlighte ning the proces es - ergonomic and producti on - a ' part of its sema ntic make-up , A posit ive example i. the role of exhi bitions: Beyond G reen' Toward a Su sta inable A rt, curaicd by Stephanie Smith help to br ing design t hinking and art toget her to look at sus tainability - in t his sense it can he seen to, 'respond to the zeitgeist '." '10 close with tcphanie Smith 's ope ning essay in t he exhib ition catalogue, which hegins: 'Sustainable design has t he potent ial to tra nsform our everyday lives th rough an app roach that balances environ mental, .ocial, economic, and aest hetic concerns. This emerging strategy emphasizes the responsible and equirable use of resources and links environmental and ocial just ice, By doing so, it moves past a prior generation of more narrowly eco-cemered or" rrcen" approaches.'!" Se~3

Ref erences John Heskett , Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life (Oxfor d Univ ersity Press, 2002). 2 Akiko Busch, The Uncommon Life of Comm on Objects : Essays on Design and the Everyday (New York: Metro polis Books, 2005), 3 Saul Griffith, Compostmo dern 09, hosted by AlGA, the profess ional 4

associa tion f or design in Ame rica, Hugh A ldersey-W illiams, Peter Hall,Ted Sargent and Paola A ntonell i, Design and the Elastic M ind (New York: Museum of Modern A rt, 2008).

f ull responses + carrv en the conversaiioo here

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Limi ted Language

Rebuilding protest

State Britain In the closing years of the 1960s, the Vietnam war and sexual liberation made protest popular; a time of sit-ins , love-ins and Woodstock. In this milieu the young architectural group Archigram I created the concept of the Instant City, a mobile habitat that could arrive and be bolted together overnight. This provided the architectural landscape for an instant community. In 2007, walking into the Duveen Galleries situated at the heart of London's Tate Britain gallery and stumbling upon State Britain, an installation by arti st Mark Wallinger,thi s somehow recalled the Archigram dream that architecture could bring change. And yet, it wasn't an instant community but instant protest that spread out before the eye. Mark Wallinger's installation created a facsimile of the 'peace camp' that, since the early days of the Iraqi conflict , has become a popular tourist attraction in London. Brian Haw, architect of the original site, has prote sted outside the Houses of Parliament, day and night, since June 2001 and at the time of writing is still there . His camp is made up of the usua l detritus of protest : banners; daubed white bed sheet s; plastic sheeting and posters of the key prot agonist s, George Bush and Tony Blair. The site grew as visitors have collaged their own rudimentary additions to the portable structure of the protestor's stakeout . It's a coalition made up of religious groups, ant i-war protesters and general well wishers. All have added to Brian's 'home'. From the humble beginnings of a banner or two, sleeping bag, cooker and chair, the protest crept along the pavement until it reached fifty metres or more. Like a favella, it grew imperceptibly in the shadow of BigBen until , under a newly constituted law (t he 'Serious Organi sed Crime and Police Act', 2005, which prohibited unauthorised dem onstrations within a one kilometre rad ius of Parliament Square) , Brian Haw's prote st was raided by the police and reduced to a mere fract ion of its original size. WallInger's State Britain was both artwork and

S ar er artlC

Looking back at the ori rinal arti Ie which reviewed the I lark \\'allinger in unllauon Stat e Britaill at the Tate Britain in 2007 (a facsimile of Brian I law' anti -war peace camp), what captures the imagination now is not the role of art, but how the article and the ommcnts it inspired Iocu on the construction of space in its material and imaginative presence. From the late 1950Sonwards, following on from Mart in Hcidcggcr's es ay Build illg, Dwellillg, Thi llkillg,1 t he po liucal/imng ina uve role of space was brough t into focu. in the writings of Gaston Bachclard , l lenr i Lefebvre and ,(jchel de Ccrtcau. 1\11 provided mcthodologi al frameworks to interrogate space emotionally, as part of the everyday and politically, as a cultural phenomenon in Europe and the I SA . Much of thi "thinking i captured in Bachelard: comment from hi. book Poetics ofSpace: .t\ house that has be -n experienced i not an inert box. Inhabited pa e transcend ' geometrical space ." The Home, for Bachelard. becomes a repo .itory of memories, from basement to loft, where, meaning comes through occupation; a moving through space. Thi phenomenological per. pccuvc is counterintuitive to moderni t rationalised arch itec tural space. However; it allows an emotional depth, a psychic threedimensionality to t he modern experience. Lefebvre endeavo ur to provide a conceptual framework which provides a 'unitary t heory'. Tha t is, ' pace as physi al, nature and the organi ; the menta l, abstract and architectonic and finally, the social, how we are actor in pace. These combine to form pace as ocial product. It is ocial "pace/ place which ha preoccupied art and de "ign, whereby they perceive pace a. more than a seq uence of ab tractions 105

Br ian Haw 's peace ca mp, Par liament Square (June 2001 and ongoi ng). 'I saw him get out of his t ent a f ew m inutes before I too k th is.' Br ian Haw is in t he m iddle, his tent on t he r ight. Phot ogr aph by Jennife r Wh itehe ad (2 Febr uary 2009).

Fabr icat ion of State Britain, Mi ke Sm it h St udio (2006). Photog raphy by Project Manager M ichelle Sadgrove.

Ma rk Wallinger's f acs imil e at the Tate Br ita in Turner Pr ize (2007). Photog raph by Chr is John Beckett.

or texts. For Lefebvre an artwork which is . irnplc mimesis, a facsimile of a historical event, would miss the complexities of spatial prnctices: '. pace may be said to embrace archive . Pain stak ingly recreat ed , Wall inger mad e t he sna king t ail of t he origi na l protest into anot her, eq ua lly venomo us, state me nt on conte mporary Brit ain . If th e origi nal pro test was a place you eyed from a bus wi ndow or qu ickly walked past t o a backdrop of traffic noise and police sir ens, t he n the experience became completely reorie ntat ed in the context of an art galler y. It was a quest ion of sca le. For the slogans eas ily read at speed or dis tance (BEEP FOR BRIAN, CHRIST HAS RISEN

a multitude of interseruons, each with its assigned 10 at ion'. Mark Wullinger ha been reported a remarking that he prefers to deal with the world as it i. , than with the que t ion of what art is,

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it might he unfair to scrutinise hi

work too har. hi) in relation to hipatial invest igauons but, that said, it is worth con. idcring the

tare Hritaill installation a ' a

INDEE D !), see med less int eresting as you become aware of the minutiae of its bulk. Wall inger 's installat ion allowed the viewe r t o st ud y the sprawling e nca mpment like an arc haeologica l d ig. One of th e landm arks was a

distil its essence into buildings' and no more so

'b lood ied' T-shirt with the slogan BLIAR, whic h hung

than in the home . The home is at the centre of

from a makeshi ft cross, form ing th e epicent re an d one of th e h ighest point s of the piece . O verall t he struct ure, along it s lengt h, was pockmarked wi t h PhotoShopped images of faces (mainly of Blai r and Bush) wa rpe d into nightmarish gargoyles . These fabricat ed images sat un comfortably next t o photogr aph s of ad ults and chi ld re n; dead, dying and d ismembered in wa r zon es ac ross th e world . Alongside these comput er-generat ed images were th e more t rad itional fare of a 1 960S protest; sloganeering, transc ribed Budd hist chants and peace flags. T he re was a large ca nvas by Ban ksy de picting heavily armed sold ie rs in the pro cess of pa inti ng a peace sign; t he Campaign for Nuclear Disarma ment logo, blood red. Wallinger's installation, the Tate website suggeste d, sits on t he edge of th e police excl usion zone which was enforced by the change in the law th at led to th e original dismantling of the site; 'Wallinger has marked a line on the floor of the galleries throughout the building, posit ioning State Britain half inside and half outside [of thi s zone]'."

tau-rnent on the Importance of home in contemporary culture.

It has been said that 'Capitalism strives to

material culture: the family unit. Brian I law 's home is, in itself, transgre: ive, The capitalist notion of home is stable and fixed (mortgaged bricks and mortar), consumptive (products) and a ne: ·U. of familial Lode. (gender divi rons.: e..uality et .).

A a home, 11.1\\' . naking architcc iurc of prote t . igns become: a sa red place within the yrnbolic extent: of the British Parliament. In reality, the area is one great big traffic i land. It

IS

a non-place on the edge

of the River Thames, b fore you tumble into th re .idem ial sprawl of outh London acres s West min. rer Bridge . It is the very ullness of th original prote t site which makes it rand out in the blur of traffic passing through Parliament quare. The notion of sacred space is not fan-

Was thi s an imagined political frisson th e exhi bit ion did

ciful in the nsc of Brian I law 's original

not need? The work was a success, or not, because it captured one man's uncynical , unmediated acti on : that protest can st ill change thi ngs. Even in the gallery, wit h a silent,

\\ hi h, during the 19 os, wa a high-profile'

deo dorised facsimile of the original, th e graphic language of protest st ill ca rried a faint clarion ca ll to the conscie nce.

site for anti-nuclear prote tors. In one sen c' \\'allinger' fetishlsation of the encampment

protest - or in many other peace encampments: Greenham Common for instance

through art i part of the prot c.. of . uncufying the place; It · ruuali at ion. 'Ritual i not an expre ion of or rc pan c to th i. mad S artet"ilItlC

sacred': rather, something or omcone at red h. ritual. .. 107

Hackney Shelf 2005. Concept and design by Ryan Frank.

Haw's protc t also provides an example of the tensions between contested pace: between individual and state. Thi , in turn, strengthens its sacredness, for: 'sacred space References 1 A rchigram was a group domina t ing t he arch itectural avant-garde in the 1960s and 1970s, see www .arch igram.nel/index.html 2 www.tat e.org.uk/b ritain/exhibit ions/wa llinger/

is inevitably contested space, a site of negotiated conic L over the legitimate owner -hip of acred ymbols'.' \ hen the site was evcntu ally raided by police and torn-down 'l.it could he argued it was an example of defilement; dcse ration. 0,

how can a contested notion of ' pace ,

or the under. tanding of horne, be utilised in everyday onternporary visual culture: We only need to look at advertising to sec the usc of horne and place in marketing. TIlt' larlboro Man derives some of his product strength from being situated 'in place ', the mythical 'Marlboro Country'. Likewise, countIe s products have the byline 'Homemade'. The computer this is being typed on is branded with 'De igned by Apple in California'. Increasingly place - home, city or state - is used to differentiate the produ t. we consume. 'In marketing, product , must he denied hoth in terms of their irnilarity or difference from other object that might oc upy the same social pace (in relation to competitors) and in term ' of their integration in .ocial llfc (in relation to con urners]. ' And finally, space is defined by a geography of barrier making: uptown/downtown; commercial/private,

raffiti and advertising

hoardings unofficially zen our urban environs and, increasingly, we live in a digitally configured topography of wirelc sand Bluctooih communication . Digital technology reconfigures space and crases inside/outside in the process, These arc opportunitic still to he fully exploited by the design profession. This notion of the in ide/outside is exploited in the designs of Ryan Frank . I lis

I lackney Sheljfurnilllre conflatcs the urban outside/inside e. per ience of public/private space, Ilis proce: s involves placing white board at vanous point in East I.ondon and then waiting for the inevitable graffitiing of the board . The) are left for week until they S arle< ilIllC

109

han' 'mat ur ed' to his liking. Then the board ' are removed and transformed into de igner furniture . Thi place: the transgre: iv visual language of urban space into the interior of urban place; the home. See tu ll respo nses + car ry on t he co nvers ation here htt p://t iny.cc /cn aptpr2_6

Reade r cred it s Gaby 28/0~!2007 - '[E ria n Haw ] has been heard adve rt is inq t he vValiinger exhibit ion t hrough his megaphone in Parl iament square ... in th is very si mple ,restu re has turned t he ga ller y int o an exte n.slc,n;;f his protest ... re-assert inq his voice into areas/insti tution s he could not reach. A for m of re-or ient auc n of the represen tation?' Gregor 26/06/2007 -- 'vvhat t he Tate tel ls us is t his: On 2:3 May 2006, to ltow inq th e pass ino r) j Parl iamen t of the 'Serious Or gani sed C r ime and Police Ad' prohibit inG hemithoraces dsmonstrat ions w it hin a one kilometre rad ius of Par l.amcn t Sq uare, the major ity of Haw' s prote st "vas removed . Taken literally, the edqe of this exc lus.on zone bisects Tate Brita in. Walt lnGer has mar ked a line on the floor of the qa lteries t hroughout t he bu ildin q, pcsit ioninu Sta te Br ita in half inside and half outside the border.'

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Tactics vtsuot communication in 0.4 seconds / The buzzword and creativity

Rethinking tcctue graphics: a propositional methodology / RethinkIng Boredom, b'dum, b'dum... / Boredom to freedom Part of the process / Community service Slow times ... / The slow fast T III [j

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Visual communication in 0.4 seconds 'Beaut iful as the chance encounter, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrel1a.' (Comte de Lautreamont, Songs ofMaldoror, 1869)1 For the Surrealists, the work of Lautreamont was an inspiration, and this line, taken from Songsof Maldoror, captures the essence of surrealist thinking, their search for the marvellous, the surreal, the eureka moment! Some 140 years after a chance encounter between Alfred Nobel, nitroglycerine and silica created dynamite, a controlIed explosion is detonated in secluded woodland in Stockholm in a deliberate attempt to capture, 'the creative moment'. At the detonator stand the Swedish design team, Front. In that moment of spark and ignition, the form of Design in 0.4 Seconds is created - a soft lounge chair made from the mould of the explosion. Front's creation of 'design by explosion' can be seen as part of their broader rationale of creative thinking: 'Every product has a moment in which it is "made". Usually, though, this is implicit. We are interested in capturing - as if to freeze-frame - that very moment of making and make it explicit.' Front's real interest here is how its form is a product of randomness - a product of chance? A chance of sorts, but it 's different to Lautreamont's idea, for while the form of the chair is different each time, you always know - by design that you wil1 get a chair (unlike Rene Magritte's famous pipe!). Front's experiments capture the tension between creativity and thinking, the rational and irrational. It is this tension between the two worlds of inspiration and materialism that seduced the Surrealists, who remain, as ever, relevant today. But how can their work be re-evaluated in relation to visual communication, not least for its endeavours to capture the creative impulse? The geometric and rationalised typographic layout grid for instance, so often the basis of graphic design, would have been cheese wire around the throat of

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The buzzword and creativity Limited Language's ori rinal arucle looked at how design cultivates creativity. We looked at su rreal ism and contemporary practice and t ried to exami ne, in part, a methodology for creativity - an impossib le task? Crea tivity itself has become a buzzword over the last te n years or so. At the beginning of the millenni um Business H1?ek magazine noted: 'Now the Indust rial Economy is giving way to the rcativc Economy' and 't he growing power of ideas'.1 In the 21 st century, reativity has moved cent re-stage; it has economic power, both mater ially and in its cul tu ral capi tal and it has become an increasingly global language of creative enterprise! Crea tivity was originally the preserve of the Gen ius, an intrinsic attrib ute of the maker t hat sepa rated the creative from the mere arusan. ' By the end of the 20th century the preserve of the genius has been overturned to a more egalitaria n not ion of high/ low cultures - as Mike Featherstone comments, a perceived ·...surface "depthlessness" of culture; the decline of the originality/ genius of ar tistic producer'.' This democracy has allowed creativity to become omni den t across discip linary tradit ions: creative roo kery, accoun ting, or imply the creative. As an element 0 esse ntial to design practice, its mechanism is su rpris ingly underresearched. The perennial question; how do you maintain and foster crea tivity? For the purpose of this essay the mechanics of creat ivity brea k down into two main produ ct ive sphe res: the technical and t he psychological. Surrealism i a good exam ple of the psychological invcst igat ion of creative output. O ften simple games were used to fuel 115

Explosant e Fixe by M an Ray (1934). © Ma n Ray Tr ust / ADAGP, Pari s and DACS, Lond on 2009.

the surrealist pirit, its ideological aim of overturning the expected and repeatable in

inspiration in surrealist thinking. Andre Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, 'We are still living under the reign of logic... But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest.? Every idea has it s moment of inspiration, the moment in which it takes shape, but that taking of shape isn't literal like Front 's lounge chair de sign, where the shape captures what is already there. If design creativity is driven by intention, then the Surrealists wanted to shake up convention. Andre Breton said that beauty should be convulsive' - idea s and objects can be transformed into someth ing else through representation. The Surrealists had many rationales for excavating such inspiration, capturing the moment that bridges thinking with the beautiful, the sublime. One that is relevant here is the explosante fixe, literally a fixed explosion: a camera can capture what the eye cannot see - creating a new real ity out of the fabric of our day-to-day world. So, a photograph by Man Ray captures a whirling dancer whose seductive figure, at the split second of shutter release, is transformed into a sensuous lily. ...and st range objects come together in a poem, or elsewhere, and spark the imagination. Like an explosion in a moment of quiet repose... In these 'illogical' methods, can we find new ways to make solving the problems of visual communication of primary interest ? See fu rther images here www .limi ted language.org{imag es

Ref erences 1 Comte de Lautr eamont, Songs oi Maldarar (1869). ? Anrlr A Hrnton, Firsl Manifesto of Surrealism (1924).

creative production. In the Surrealist game EXt/IIi ire Corpse, one per on sets down a line on a page, fold it over, and hand it to the next. Once the page has been full) circulated among t tho . pre cnt , the resulting 'poem' i conceived without con .ciou: nes: intervening. The name derives from the first line produced m thi way: the cxqui: ito/corp: e/ hall dnnk/ the new/wine. lany contemporary designers like Swedi h de 'ign group front, and in Germany, Je rszy cymour, u e technology to catnly .e the relationship bet ween material ' and c reative processes. Both , as we will see, provide very d ifferen t interpretations. In a world of inc reasingly convergent med ia the need for dive rgence - d ivergent thinking - IS required to to p the technohomogcnisauon of the creative process . Th is fear IS articulated by Jon Wozencroft in his rc pon e to our original c 'say - in the field of sonic he comments: 'A for ound, we pass through variou ver ion of th I hotocopier - tape, mirudi c, (DR and dow nloads . oftwarc programs like Pro Tool do give myriad option. for abstraclion hut the 1n11.Kt on [sonic] culture i more determined b . the mode of delivery, not origination any more. There is no more Frank • inatra or Joy Division I do su: peer . Tricky, where arc you?" It is in the Frank inatra era of the 1950 , in psychology and edu arion that we begin to sec a met hodi cal investigat ion of t he role of reat ivity, T he work of American Psychologist , J.P. uilford, i important to ou r unde rsta nding of creativity a. an everyday proce s, and hi early st udies introduce t he importance of dive rgent thinking, commenting: 'Most of our problem olving in everyday life involves diverg nt t hinking. Yet, in our edu at ional practice, we tend to rnphasise teaching students how to find conventional answ .rs." Later (in the era of Joy Division '] this notion of diver icnt /convenuonal is mirrored

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117

DesIgn by monon. Front

Design. 'Vases In movies ar doomed 0 break

I'S a par of a vases unct ion, [Front] made a va e W I h bull rn fall. were he motion ISO e wrth the object' . h p:/Ibl .IY/front_mo· ,on

by another psychologist, Abraham Maslow: who introduced the notion of a two-tiered conception of the creauvc impuls : primary and secondary. The primary urge to creativity is , ubconscious and strive, for the new experience, The secondary is our logic al under tanding of the world where creativity L huilt on our life or learned experien e.

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commonality in defining creativity is that it represents 'the production of novel, socially valued products'," This is a valuable defini tion in contemporary design; .oc ia l value can be sustainabiluy itself, and the novel is often driven by a que ' t for sustainable materials, The relationship between materials and divergent thinking i. dynamically evidenced in the work of ler: zy eymour; Whereas Front 's design, a. di

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lookin at pro e.. a. a thing of and in its If, for cyrnour the pr ce: become sy nonyrnous with the collective: the connections. Hi. work u es new material. as a caialy: t, not for product invention alone, hut for the po .sibilit ie of thinking, communication and social interaction . One sue h event is First Slipper, where the designer provide a micro-environment for a social event including the facillt ies for cooking and the production of the furniture needed to seat and feed a large crowd, Part of the installation included an impromptu library of book that the de igner had read in the run-up to the produ tion. Iii . work interlocks thinking with indu trial proce: e - whether it is the u. e of new organic plastics produced a: a by-product of potato uluvauon [polylacu acid) or u Il1g wax as a metaphor for connecting material. and emotion '.

Iii philo opny i ,'doin ,heing and Starter artICle

119

.haring' and much of his work looks at the possihlluie: of the collective and creativity. Whether it is stacking hairs for Magis or Molineux hairdryers, you cannot help but think of dinner parries or teenage sleep-overs: place ' of communication .

I II u e of open source re hnology to make design . freely available and hi thoughtmapping proie t Th« Amateur Diagram which i. de crib d as an open source pie, further ernpha ise: the use of communication a "a onduu to reativity. Iii philosophy of the Amateur was first tiled as a form of practice by Asger Jorn, the ituationist whoideah ed the "free artist" as a "prole .ional amateur,'''' and actively campaigned against pecialisrn . This position allows the designer access (and possible reevaluation) to the language "and proccsse of de .ign: and its creative possibilities. Thi. philosophy is captured in eymour's

eui Order Chair, the nucleus of whi h is the ever-present plastic garden chair. In the hands of the Amateur it. structure is unsuturcd and then reconfigured to allow ac e . to the dynamics of a hair. The physical mechanic of tension, balance, and material which are era ed from modern day proces ses of produclion are made explicit, we can ee how the chair work : it become a contemporary piece of con tructivist furniture . Thi exposure of the hidden, the invisible, is al

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foam . A material usually hidden - literally beneath the skin of designed objects - becomes amorphou and dangerous in his

Scum works . The scum in uallaticns combine the mod rni t dream of quick and repeatable production, with a darker contemporary notion of violence and unpredictability, eyrnour: work rcpre ems the two loci of

reativity : the p .ychologic al and the mechanical. lie provides a seamless connection between the imple probl rn-solving de ign of the day-to-day with the

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i m of imagination and ideology. In conclu ion, creativity of the primary, 120

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Advertis ing and marketi ng are at t he forefront in the research and applica tion of divergent th inking strategies of crea tive th inking! Ted Baker, London, Chr istm as 2007.

subconscious kind discussed will often come out of collisions bet ween materials, processe.. and thinking , The eureka moment is a constel lat ion rathe r than a strike out of the blue. Se(~

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were also lookinQ at ways to jolt inspi ration into life : From drug tahino to the 'c ut -up ' method of wr it ing, Wha t wouldbe Interes ti nu to looh into woul d be how dig ita l technotouv makes many of these avantuaroe pract ices part of the cay-to-oay creat ion of visual

work . Many of t he oract ices t hat once hot w ired ou r crea tiv e impulse are c ormnon and overyday in our visually mediate d wor: o . This is why the role of

touch and sound are com ing to l he Iore .. How we brinQ these senses into our day -to- day pr-act ices is sornethino both commerc ial practice and ed uca t ion need to address - interactiv rtv is more tha.n screen base d inte rac t ion. vVe need t o r e a l j ~} e this other vvisf:: we end up w ith a wor ld t hat is out of ba lance

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Limit ed Language / Tacti cs / Visual com mu nica ti on in 0.4 seco nds

Julia Moszkowicz

Rethinking tactile graphics: a propositional methodology There is a widely recognised tendency within contemporary graphic des ign towards the production of work that intentionally asserts its off-screen condition, placing itself in the context of a fully rounded three-dimensional world of the maker and his or her creative process. From the textile assemblages of Lizzie Finn to the embroidered newspapers of Karen Reimer, graphic designers and artists are actively generating artefacts that, initially at least , resolutely occupy the time and space of handrendered production. They emerge as objects of design, which are then made ready for contemporary cultures of consumption. As the work of Julien Vallee testifies, they are invariably transposed into slick imagery, transformed from highly structured paper installations, in this instance, into a book jacket design for Tactile: High Touch Visualsl and a tele-visual sting for MTV. Typically, designers and critics have discussed such work in terms of their tactile attributes, describing how off-screen artefacts bring a sense of touch and the whole haptic sensorium (back) into play. In Touch GraphiCS ,2 for example, Rita Street proposes that 'hand made work conveys a sense of personal contact between the sender and the recipient because it's not something you just look at but also have to handle. Even if it 's printed in some aspect, the tactile element makes the printing seem more personal.' In this sense, 'tact ile design ' is viewed in terms of a craft revival, inserting the handrendered artefact into an oppositional relationship with digital techniques, even though it frequently (and ironically) ends up being channelled through computer-based systems of post-production and distribution. Indeed, it is frequently signalled as the return of 'the hand'," Generally, these objects of design are interpreted as creative and humane responses to digital imagery which is eroding the heartfelt immediacy of handmade work. As a result, many interpretations of ta ctile design are viewed

Starter artICle

Rethinking craft Tactile graphic ..,c haracteri: d a. a turn

to

the hand -made [and away from digital). .. If this is a revival of orts, what are we reviving? In the or iginal ar ucle Julia Moszkowicz welcome this mom ntary fo us on production - the enjoyment in materials and making, c raft and skill - hut argues, that as object , they invarrably become (digitally) transposed into the lick imagery of contemporary con sumption. In read, 10 zkowicz locate t he tact ile-t u rn within a broader interest in desig n process. This return to a materiality of t hings can be seen in the work of Kare n Re imer; her work is an attempt to isolate handwork, or labou r, and make it the central proce . s of her de. ign hy making I: I cmbroidcred copie of everyday rna s-produced 'graphic ' ohiect uch a. a gum wrappcr. l lcn-, the value - or 'au ra' - i till' Iocu: on making and, by c .tcn ion, the labour of production, mce the thing It elf, I trash . t\ a departure from thi ,~Io. zkowill. propo es a re\ I lung of Ge . ialt p. ychology, as a methodology \\ hich can po 'slhly illuminate de . ign as proce s. Thi include creativi ty and intuition whu h are so often een a. eph 01eral, and beyond the domain of criticism or mc ihodolog rcul : ru tiny. But what IS missing from t he original article is an engagement wit h craft it elf, as a possible point of departure or re-evaluation of contemporary [inc lud ing digital) cu ltu res. In The ' II//Il re of Craft, Peter Dor mer comments on how: 'Craft relies on ta it knowledge. Tacit knowledg i a qui red t hrough experience and it i t he knowledge th at enable. you to do t hing. a di t in t from talking or writi ng abo ut t hem....'1 This provides an alternative methodology where 'making i thin king, as ociologi t Richard 125

Sennett maps out in The Cm!t .\l//al/." U~ing . cnncus framework, Craft becomes an inter -disciplinary practic e whit h can be found anywhe re where an engagement with creati vity, kills, tools and materials takes place: from computer programming to pencil sketches, through to t he loop of the stitch. This trajectory is also found in Abstractil/g raft: The Practiced Diqita! Hand, where Malco lm McC ullough reminds us we live at a t ime where 'designing' has so often become deskillc d; abstrac ted to a series of pre-defi ned choices on dro p-dow n menu . 1 Knowledge gained th rough making is open-e nded and not discip line specif ,eq ually able to foster old techniques th ro ugh rep eti t ion or innovation of new ones - even with zeros and one. 1 This ope nness of craft as a met hodology dovetai ls well with Gestal t, where as Moszkowicz puts it, 't he Tacit cncapsulaie]s] that Gestal t principle of set ting out with a sense of not-knowing (exactly) where th ings are going, being ope n to the possibility of taking practica l steps and undert aking the "adequate" filling of gaps. It is only late r, with a ret rospecti ve gaze, th at one can conceptualize and systematize this experimental attitude',' A systematisat ion of the open -ended nature of material engagement , become literal in Endless Set by Karen Reimer where an endless set of pillowcases are decorated with prime numbers; each pillowca e is made of the same number of fabric scraps a the prime number decorating it. Prime number eleven, is eleven inches long and appliqued onto a pillowcase made of eleven scrap of fabric. As t he prime number value. in rease they obscure the pillowcases which are made of progressively smalle r scraps. Reimer com ments : 'Eventually the pillowcases will b very thick, useless as pillowcases, becoming sculptures instead . I plan to continue the series unt il I am no longer physically able to make the pillowcases accord ing to th is system . Th is ser ies is a contes t between the concept of infinity and the limitations of my body' . 126

in the context of unholy and conflicting unions; man and machine, stitch and screen or 3D and 2D animation techniques, I would argue that this perceived dialectic or tension between a three-dimensional hand-rendered process and its 'new' technological context is conducive to rethinking the currency of dominant methodological schemes within graphic design criticism; in particular, the tendency to describe social and cultural changes in simplistic, historical and deterministic ways. At least since the early 1990S, graphic design discourse has been dominated by language-based methodological schemes. In the dominant semiotic mode of analysis, for instance, the products of design have been predominantly viewed in terms of their overall visual appearance (or style), the honed decision-making skills of the designer and the semantic significance of individual formal elements.' In

Design Studies: Theoryand Research in Graphic Design, Audrey Bennett argues that Graphic Design theory needs to concern itself with 'rigorous' and highly 'structured' models of 'empirical' research, challenging those methods of analysis that merely seek to identify the individual genius of a practitioner" In this way,semiotic modes of analysis are attributed with almost scientific qualifications. Bennett argues that traditional theories about the 'creativity' of the designer and his or her 'intuition' are no longer 'adequate' to understandings of contemporary creative practice where a new technological, interdisciplinary and collaborative context of making has emerged. This effectively marginalises a discussion of process in any other terms than those relating to 'a new visual language ... that integrates both textual and visual objects'," As the wording suggests, the focus of such critical analysis is resolutely located in the domain of products and outcomes rather than processes and nuanced practices of design. In this respect, social, technological and cultural contexts are reduced to historical inflections which merely contemporise otherwise continuous perceptions of the designer's

role and the centrality of objects. Matt Cooke typically concludes, from a semiotic perspective, that: 'The thought

Lim ited Lang uage I Tactics I Reth ink ing tacti le grap hics : a pro posi tional me thodology

It's the t ransfor mation, or revclau on , through rnak ine whtc h rcpre ents the cr aft

of str ictly following a process goes against our perception of design as an instinctive, intuitive and artistic practice. But the truth is, however informally, the majority of us follow a methodology when designing',' Semiotics, therefore, is generally offered an analytical model that simply formalises and str uctures the othe rwise 'intuitive' approaches of everyday design. For th is reason alone, I can see renewed value in tr aditional theories that have alread y invest igated and framed these ongoing themes. Rather than marginalising creativity and intuition as beyond the domain of contemporary graphic design criticism, let's make them central to its discourse and available for scrutinising. Notions of creative intuition clearly constitute dominant concepts and concerns among practitioners and indicate, I would suggest , more than a nostal gic turn in this age of computing . Such a return to past values is to be interpreted, I would suggest , as a clear demonstration - not of a crafty yearning for the good 01' days of analogue design, but - of a continuing interest in discussing the vagaries and happenstance of design process. I would advise a timely revisit at ion of a Gest alt meth odology, one th at focuses on th e immed iacy of the present moment (of making and viewing, for example), and respects the internal or subjective experiences of the maker as a relationship unfolds wit h the emerging object, through t ime. Its relevance is all th e more pertinent becau se it aspires to analyse and und erst and th e pro cess of doing something in the pre sent tense, placing the idea of real-time experimentation firml y on th e methodological agenda . Contemporary psychotherapist Joseph Zinker argue s: 'The experiment is the corne rstone of ex perientiallearning. It transforms talking about into doing , sta le reminiscing and theorizing into bein g fully here with one's imagination, energy and excitement ." A Ge st alt approach to everyday pra cti ces, usually involves considerat ion of the body, voice and/or a capacity for imaginat ion. The focus of Gestalt methodologies is clearl y on experiential learning, placing value on the exploration of the human subje ct in te rm s of hislher

St rterarlocle

paradigm we are interested in id entif~ 111)( here . \Vork like t hts goes some way to OH'rturning the mistaken belief, whuh : () often abound. in the d igital age, that any return to ' the hand ', 't he Hale of the human ' or analogu prole. ses i imply a romantic gesture. Materral thinking is not a sealedd ialogue' bet ween man and hi. material '. It i-and has become - a proce which is 'open to criticis m and corre tion' ." Thi underrruncs e tablished thinking po rung raft as intrinsically linked to materials, as distinct from De ign, where the act of thinking i instrumental and a such, independent from its materials. In thi s traditional dichotomy: the craftsman is said to ask 'I low?'of his material ', whilst th • designer would ask 'Why?' raft, as we have mapped it, provide . a lear route from the world of making alone, to the cognitive world of 'problem solving'. Problem . olving become ' a tool with which to rethink the pr .es of making wh rc: Th good raftsman...uses solutions to uncover new territor, ; problem 'ol\'ing and problem finding are intimately related in his or her mind. For thi rca on, curio tl~ can ask, "Why?"a[s] well as, "How?" about any project '.' . cnneu argue that thi s tS not new to our age, but rather, has always been true of a certain level of practi c whereby craft engagement with materials ha: been taken out of its comfort zone. He advance two propo itions that illuminate this proce ss of transformation, one developing from the other. Firstly, 'all skills, even the most abstract, b gin as bodily practice ' and following on from this: 'technical understanding develops through the power of the imagination'." It' in this relationship where people perform with and between material and the imagination that the potential of craft thinking enable. the po ibility to re-engage meaningfully in our future( ). In part, the attraction of craft is the way that, in ompari son to the perceived abso127

Event poster f or th e music f esti val We Love Fantasy. Ar t direct ion by Julien Vallee. Design by Julien Vallee, Guillau me Vallee and Eve Duhamel (2009). Phot ograph by Simon Duh ame.

lute nature of digual tel hnology, it allows for 'happenst an e'. Thi . can inc ludc error and .ercndipuou mi takes rnaterialismg in the aesthetic: from wobbly 'hand-d rawn' relationships (such as those with other people/ audience and objects of de sign). The goal of a Ge st alt framework is to support an ind ividual in find ing his/her own answers

lines to the II c of verna ular materials. Following 10 zkowicz, happen. ranee an be 't he variety of human e ..perien e': 'Rathe r

and to develop a heightened sen se of self-awareness and

than yrnptomauc of a carefully formulated

increased self-underst and ing in t he moment of making and do ing. To my mind , this seems a valuable framework for anal ysing the three-dimensional, evolut ionary worlds of 't act ile' de sign, as it pays attent ion to th e ex pe rie nt ial

interpretation...what I ay today might b dif-

aspe cts of the production and con sumption of arte facts, facilitat ing a full er investigation of th e immed iate (and oft en physical) pro cesses of de sign work. As a type of therapy, Gestalt identifies three zones of awareness: inner, outer and middle. Within the course of a counselling session, the client is invited to put these zones into contact with one another; the body, the mind and the wider world are put into an active and conscious relation. Indeed , the aim of the Gestalt approach is to invite a shift from one state of awareness to another, always with the understand ing that each zone exist s in the context of a wider field of personal and socia l complexes. In th is way, Ge st alt offers a heightened sense of integratio n within and bet ween these areas of everyd ay life or pract ice, wit h attentio n being paid to the ways in which t he int imate and public aspec ts of one's 'self and one's work are working together. It is simultaneous ly a macro and micro methodology, and one that is focu sed on feeling present . One of th e main aspirations of G est alt experiment s is 'to create condit ions under which the person can see his life as his own creat ion' ," I believe it can assist designers in making decisions about how things are going to be (from now on); no longer act ing as intu itively creat ive but as selfconsciou s agents of their own creative pro cess. A Ge stalt methodology can assist the de signer in ex ploring the way in which aspects of his/her personal and social agency are inte grated. Indeed, within a counselling sit uat ion, Gestalt techniques are adept at raising awarenes s of what 'figures'

ferent from tomorrow...my awarenes keep changing, with m~ everyday life and my em ironment . . I The distorted but fun tional books ereated by ofia tevi are an example of what we

would call craft orientated design . he writes: They say that a finished book is a corpse and the observer can only see the remains of all the possibilities the bookmaker got to know in the proces ... Bookbinding as every other craft depend on pra tice and perfectionism.

I chose to u e this vehi le to expres the metaphor of imperfection." Although. tevi discusses her work in terms of exploring 'imperfection', this i only meaningful in term of traditional ondition and expectations of th ' Book. A int resting, i the way her inventive stitching, and invesugauon of th format and sequ nee of page , open up the po. ibility of new fun tions:

perforrnauve and interior pa e for the work to inhabit. We an think of raft a reviving an enjoyment in materials and rediscovering skill... but the difference now is, that it 's application that is important . The skill and act of making are not a determined end product, context or condition of usc: ·...the craftsman looks for what else he can do with the tools at hand '."

currently in a per son's immediate field of operation, then encourages a stepping aside from this per spe ctive to see what else ex ists in th e field of his or her hor izons.

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Gestalt offers an effective way of approaching the notion of process that lies at the heart of contemporary discourse around creative endeavour, and could assist in the process of communicating memorable , figural experiences for audiences. In partic ular, the 'zones of awareness' and the notion of figure/ground relations could provide a useful corrective to current emphasis, wit hin semiotics, on the product ion of meaning within structured, syntactic and predominantly formal relationships. Finally, I would suggest th at revisit ing Gestalt methods of analysis - first explored by pioneering designers such as Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gyorgy Kepes in th e inter war years - would complement th e currently retro active tendencies of graphics practice, where the contex t of production is momentarily pr ivileged over the context of consumption and/o r post-product ion. Ge stalt can reconfigure the notion of 'touch' graphics in terms of being touched by or feeling with such objects of design. See f urth er images here www.l imitedlanguage.org/ images

Refe rences Matt hias Hubner and Robert Klanten , Tactile: H igh Touch Visuals (London : DGV, 2007). 2 3

4

5

6

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132

Rita Stre et and Lewi s Ferdinand, Touch Graphics (London: Rockpor t, 2003), 11. Matt Soar, 'It Begins with "III" and ends with "digita l" : The Riddle of Illu st rati on's Dec lining Fortun es' in Ste ven Heller and Marshall Ari sman (eds.), The Education of an Illustrator (New Yor k: A llworth Press, 2000). For inst ance, see David Crow, Visible Signs: an Introduction to Semiotics (London: AVA Publishing, 2003),31-61. Audrey Bennett (ed.), 'Design Stu dies: Theory and Research' in Graphic Design, A Reader (New Yor k: Pri ncet on Uni versit y Press, 2006),5. Judy D' Ammasso Tar box, 'Ac t ivity Theory: A Model f or Design Researc h' in ibid., 74. Matt Cooke, 'Desi gn Meth odologies: Toward a Systemati c Approach to Design ' in Bennett , Op cit. , 131. Joseph Zinker, Creative Process in Gestalt Therapy (London: Vintage Books, 1989), 123. Ibid., 126.

Limited Language I Tact ics I Ret hink ing tactile graphics : a proposit ional met hodology

David Crow ley

Boredom, b'dum, b'dum... Communication. It is an easy word. It slips off the tongue without a thought. It is with us all the time; the scr ibbled not e pinned on a door t o say 'back in S·, th e jerky pro se of th e t xt, or that blinking on-off banner adver tis ement on every websit e (but not www.limi ted language.org...). But what do es it take to slow us down ? Or look hard and think ca refully? In a world of fast communication, words and images seek us out . The y see m to be irrepressibl y alive. Writing about th e ability of a young office worker to sing the tin-pan alley hits of the d ay, Siegfried Kracauer observed, 'But it is not she who knows every hit, rather th e hits know her, ste al up beh ind her and gently lay her low." Th at was 1929; today our pop commoditi es are more aggressive . Do you recall the 'accident al' ex pos ure of a pu mped-up bre ast dur ing the 2004 Super Bowl inte r mission? Or t he 'sponta neo us' outpourings of emotion t r iggered by the death of Pope John Paul II the next year? Communication is now the business of shock and awe . But of course real affect ca nnot be pre-progammed . It acts by accident and with st ealt h. Think of th ose snapshots of Amer ican sold iers in Abu Ghraib wit h the instin ctive 't humbs up and smile' gest ure hovering over a corp se.' The awf ul pixilated blur hid ing a beaten face. The shock lay in the appa rent innocence of these products of the photo graph ic reflex. So in a world of visua l noise, where might we find a qu iet invita t ion to look and t o think? Might it be possible for graphi c de sign to operate as a system to slow down perception, to create silences in the noisy media world? Or perhaps even sti llness? This is simpl y just anot her tool, another te chnique. What is the alte rna t ive to the heady sti mulat ion of communic atio n? What happen s, asked Kracauer, if we allow ourselves to become truly and deeply bored : 'if one has th e pat ience, the sort

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Boredom to freedom The original essay ask if boredom l an be the refuge for reat ivity and, in the rcpli 'S, Lisa asks: ·...we are a bit bored .... but what are \Ie wuuing for?" But, for boredom to an as a catalyst it i important we do I 'OT know what we are waiting for. It i the anucipauon of inquiry whk h IS the root to the po sibilitil' of boredom ' l reauvc potential. Today, rna ' communication is awash with the 'next big thing' or what we should be doing with our 1iH'. ; fa hion, employment and recreation time. are all accounted for. The action of not doing, of not knowing what com s next, is liheraung for an individual but terrifying for a government, corporation or media empire. Boredom separate the indi vidual from the rna cs. In his essay on borcdom.f iegfned Kra auer worries that modern life has cornpartrnentaliscd [commodtfied] our lin'S to such an extent that every minute is accounted for. Life, in a sense, has become a conveyor belt of products and informat ion. We remain static whilst our consumer lifestyles continually revoke around u , taking on greater and greater signihcan e as we ink deeper into the hustle and bustle of the day-to-Jay until, Kracauer comments, '[we l no longer know where [our] h ad is'.' The modern world, according to Kracuue r, is configured to negate a tate of boredom. Even when we are alone we are worrying about what we hould be doing, what we are missing . The omnipotence of modernity is beautifully captured in the comment: 'Everywh re in the city, adverts on the tube, bu , hop window ... Walking lown the ireet, leallcters trying to hand you out all sort: of eye catching flyers'." On the Limited Language website, Bcrvas' post captures the 133

c senee of Krucuuer's observation that the city plu 'S our eyes and ears with tuff until, 'one

IS

hani .hed from one's own ernptines .. "

The sen orial i important here, as the lit)'

leaves 110 room for any of our en .es to roam

of p ati en ce specific to legitimat e b oredom, then one

free from the onic, aural, \ isual and olfactory

experiences a kind of bl iss that is almost un ear thly...in

output of urban living. Darkness. like boredom, i. bani . hed from the modern mctropoli . Waiting at a bu:

top might be the Ideal

ecst asy you na me wha t yo u have alway s lacked'P What is it that yo u have alway s lacked? H ave yo u eve r b e en b ored en ough to find out?

place to be bored, tanding . till but awaiting

a journey. Indeed expccrauon, for Walter Benjamin, is an active part ncr to boredom ,

See f urth er images here www.limitedlanguage.org/images

Rut the modern bus shelter i now a .hell mack of advertising hoardings (the bu itself is usually a moveable fca t of images promoting consumerist gluttony), Added to this the bench

IS

made narrow and uncomforrablc.

intended for the briefest re: pite and to cll courage the comfort of daydreaming or an

Refe rences 1 Siegfri ed Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distracti on in Weimar Germany (London: Verso, 1998), 70. 2 These were photos, t aken wit h t he soldiers' cam eras, of prisoners being abused at Iraq's Ab u Ghraib prison in 2003 and wh ich came t o public light in t he f ollowing year. 3 Siegfri ed Kr acauer, Op c it., 304.

idlcncs that might nurture boredom , The modern bu stop is designed to move us on . It provides an excellent example of how 'problem olvingdcsign leaves a product which i. not-ht-Ior-purpo e. These arc bu

hcher

de igned \\ nh the cmpha I on deterring vagrancy O'er gh 'ing shelter to commuter .

110\\ can design nurture the eman ipatory element that Kracauer cek in bore-dam: Ar hitecturc might prov Ide Spall'. that offer olace to the continuum of di. tractions of modern life . The airport IS

a .t r uct u re that is born out of modernity

but riven by a po . tmodern need to fill our time with a mix of architectural style and commerce: the fashion of Gucc io Cucci and

'star' archucc t Norman foster vie for our attention with the latest gla: soar hnccturc engineering housing the current fashion in outfits and interior ', But the airport can be a place that might allow the spirit to daydream. a: an anthropological 'non-place '.' It is ideal territory for us to b freed from the ty ranny of the day-to-day." Gardermoen Airport in the I Iorwcgian capital 0

10 is one uch place , Built in 1995,

the de -ign wa not a lone architect', in piration, but created by a collective of architect, 134

Limited Language I Tact ics I Boredom. b'dum, b'dum...

Fast communication? Bill board, Elephant and Castle, London.

Wayfinding system and ident ity f or Gardermoen A irport. Oslo, designed by Per Mollerup and DesignLab. (A irport completed 1995).

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Webcam images f rom t he terminal building at Oslo Gardermoen A irport, Norway, updated every 15 second s,

engineer and a

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government IIlsisting

on de ign planning which would rellcct the culture and economics of Norway. Thus the

ad vcrt i: in • for I Iorways wood and pulp indu. -

tr y I embedded in the building rather than in hri: ht light and logos: for in ranee. the building u es rna ' i\ > beams of nationally . ourced

\\( od.. upported n thirty cone rete columns, the lar te wood beam ' quietly stretch out above th e pa engers' head from entrance hall to departure 1001nge. The sen erial effect of ih . building. whi h is made of glas ', concrete, wood and aluminium, deliberately capture

the t.lltility of craft and, by extension, 'orway' craft industry. Per Mollcrup's Design-

l.ah de . igncd the wayfinding ystern w ithin the bu ilding [including the corporate iden tity). ~ lollerup believes in simple structures: '1\ comprehensible stru turc may depend on

. uch factor as pattern, sequence, grouping, and procedural flow." This system mean the . ignagc does not Interrupt the building but

earnle: sly appear in the eye-line when cckiru;

dire, u on , The Frutiger typeface dominate the ty pography u ed in the building and, although onginall ; de igned for Paris ' Chari 's De iaulle International Airport in the late 1960 , In It I

It

elf

haped hy the rnodcrni t concept of typog-

raphy ; to be a kind of 't rans parent ' ves el for imparting Information .' Thi notion of simplicity is central to the work of Ia 'pe r j Iorrison and

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'aoio Fukasawa

whose product design ha been called Super J

for mal. Their d sign aims for simplk ity, not

d istraction . Fuka:awa comments on their aims:

, uper I lorrnal is less concerned with designing beaut y than eerningly homely but memorable elements of ever yday life. Certainly noth ing

"lIa h" or "eye-ca tching"." Their work has an ethical nature too , Designing 'p rett y thing " Morri on ob crves, feed s Into the consumer cycle: 'The vrrus has already infe ted the everyday en vironment . Th n ed for bu sinesse s to attract attention provide. the perfect carrier for the disease.

uper j 'ormal work regi ter: on the (onurneris t p yche in its u e rather than any 138

Limited La nguage I Tact ic s / Boredom. b'du m, b'du rn,

Drinking and wine glasses, sketc hes by Jasper Mor r ison.

C~ A lessi, Op-La Tray Table sket ch by Jasper Mon ison (1998).

fashionable sen c of prettiness. It's the way that 'Iorrison and Fukasawa ' work moves away from the in-your-face product and provides equilibrium between the tactile and the visual that i . interesting. For in ranee. eating with super normal produc t. knife. fork. plate - the design i

In

the weight

of the cutlery and th pre ure of the bowl or of a ~la s in your hand, It is the 'at rno: phere of the table' to which the design b long: Product. like these are not merely L onfin d to the de . igner commodity; super normal product. can be found in shop like Muji and other commercial manufacturer ' Iik Rowenra. They help make the everyday of products and utilitarian objects a quieter place . 1\11 of these design products are not afraid to be ordinary. Ordinariness allows us to be whim , ical, to be bored, See full resp<1 5;:> + carryon hP CO versanon hpre h p: t'I"y.cc/chapter3_3

Read,,' "r~1 S I Lisa 16/oc,r2.OC£:!

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' ere P05 er tor some Microsoft Otflce ccnnec wily

packagE:that sa d, 'The "I'm ou of he 0

ce and

ou I f tI e looo" era IS over: The ore ure wa of a busu ess an In an airport lounge retaxu IJ WI h

a latte and a dinosaur's head really badly rho o·

snooped

0 .con er porary Itf". '5 .. se on ste 11f"J any last POS51bil, for 's'ow momen S hat we I ave .1think thiS tendanc, rs OOI~ nd w,l hopefully produce he OPPO'>I e reacnon and eleva e boredom to be seen as the new reedom,'

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This term can be explored in Marc Auge, Non -p laces: In tr oduction to an Ant hropo togy of Superm odern Jty

5 6

(London; New York: Verso, 1995). www .permolleru p.comjdesignlabj englishj design_ research.ht ml (acc essed 07j04j09). For inst ance, see Beat rice Ward, 'The Crysta l Goblet or Print ing Should Be Invisible' in Michael Beirut et al. (eds.), Looking Closer: Classic Wri tin gs on Graph ic Design (New York: Al lworth , 1999), 56.

7

Naolo Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison , Super Normal: Sensations of the Ordinary (Baden: Lars Muller

8

Starterarhcle

Publ ishers, 2008), 16. lbid., 16.

141

Limited Language

Part of the process The comment '...anyt hing that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish" com es from the Frenc h art c ritic and curator, N icolas Bourriaud. In his I gg8 co llection of essays, Relational A esthetics, he capt u res the mood of much visu al communicat ion today, whic h oscillates between the brand cons ultant 's we t dream and the critic's wor st nightmare . For Bourriaud, spont aneo us social relati ons are vanish ing in the informat ion age as communicat ion be comes restricted to particular areas of cons umpti on; coffee shops , pubs and bars, art galleries and so on . Relational A esthetics explores art that conce rn s it self with crea t ing more spontaneous encounters or moments of sociability within these 'communicat ion zones'. One of the artists Bourriaud invokes is Rirkrit Tiravanija who c reated two identic al versions of his New York apa rt ment in London's Serpentine Gallery in 2005 . Here, visito rs could make themselves at home ; put on the kettle, t ake a showe r. It was not the flat that was offered up for contemplat ion but the way people inhabit t he space . Th is process was made mor e noti ceable in the move from one apartment to its ide ntical, but unca nnily mir rored , t win . Scribbles and Post-it notes acc u mulated spontaneously on the walls like graffit i on a to ilet wall, one saying 'Not for me, sorry..:, and below it, an illegible repl y. Relat ion al refers to art that not only sit uat es it self wi t hin th e 'int er-human sphere ' but is 'a formal arra ngement that generates relationsh ips between people '." A unifyin g principle of relational aes t het ics is that they are op en -ended, negotiating relationships with their aud ience in a way that is not prepared beforehand. It is in t h is way t hat they resist socia l formatting, unlike the kind of script ed conversat ion that is de signed to end in a sale or the more d ida ctic form of a po ster. The term relational offers a more complex understand ing than the simple oppos itiona l binary of mu ch

Commun ity service To . tart from de I~n at all, when looking at

'0

ial relation hip [which include the

role of cornrnunk auon de ign ) i perhaps to tart from the \\ rong end. I 'ew area of conviviality and community are continually ernergmg: from 'e: pcnrnern ' in mobile h\'in~

from senior citizen.

In

Recreational Vehicle

(R\) communities in the I , ' to evolving

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languages, Where the . e organic communication networks differ from traditional systemic design /net work , i how previously unirnagina-

hie ornrnuruuc: haw emerged: undesigned. A pre-digital world, the world of (mass) communication, i ' predominantly rhetori cal - what Bourriaud all , looped information - and demand no response other than that you follow. It IS a y tern of communication of one to man); rather than today, \\ here the pos: ihility of many to man) net work can drive much communication and de ign (or at lea t provide the pos ibility for a rupture from the top-down approach of so much de ' i ~ n ~ ) . Going bar k to

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me " ' a~ i n ~ for a

moment, we can look to ee how this work in two communi tie . In Ea t Africa, a grassroot, alternative economy began to emerge after Vodafonc et up their pay-as-you-go mobile network , This "imply. tarred with users se nding cash to each other and romparing market prices by phone - fruit and vegetables for instance - from one market to another (in a en . e the technology wa utili .ed to provide a ornrnodiue: market). A technological network wa pu into place and the 10 al community intervened to create a network contingent to their need '. More broadly,

I

has bel orne a predonu-

nani form of mobile cornrnunicauon wh re teenagers, hr t in Japan, followed h Europe St rterartocle

143

and eventually the [ 'SA, took up S\IS, originally a by-product of mobile telephony; it is now the predominant form of communirat ion across a wide demographic of all ages. The example given above arc driven by a many-to-many network rather than communication de ign or marketing strategies (although it has now provided opportunities for both]. Processes like these have been welldocumented and informs much current thinking about design and the real world; like John Thackara who comments: 'we know what new technology can do but what is it for and how do we want to live?" The questions, What is it for: and How do we want to live? in a sense can be used as a cataly t to help focus the ideas put forward in relational aesthetics. Hourrtaud's key term, relational, open-ended, everyday micro-utopia, social interstices, communication zones, looped information, and micro-community, have been much discus. ed but for the sake of our argument here it boils down to the role of process and community: what and how do we create in a community sphere: ommunity itself can be problematic. Community separates out, 0 you arc defined by being in one and not the other. In simple terms, design community, art community but in more radical cases it can be situated out ide of systems, capitalism, religion, national boundaries etc . 'Community is posited as part i ular where capitalism is abstract. Posited as its other, its opposite, community is often presented as a complement to capitalism, balan ing and humanizing it, even, in fact, enabling it." D 'sign has a role in the 'balancing and humanizing' of the culture it acts within, but need to focus on the 'What is it for:', 'How do we want to live?' Before it can radically do thi . It requires an understanding of the minutiae of the subject-at-hand which provides assi ranee in answering these questions. In an analogue context, much research in community/urban development (where a 144

art and des ign as eit her socially active or not . So, are the processes at play in relational art practice, as Bourriaud sees them, also active in communication design? From 2002-7, a talking point of the UK'S Turner Prize at Tate Britain was the exit point. This was not the usual retail snare of postcards but a space for reflection; a room for visitors to linger in, debrief, pass comment and swap notes . Created by graphic designers A2/SW/HK, the room was walled by wooden panels with rows of loose-leaf A6 writing paper, hole-punched and hanging from what looked like piece s of dowel. These revealed them selves to be the pencils with which to write thoughts about the exhibition. The Turner Prize's raison d'etre has always been to generate debate, but the 'controversial' image attached to the prize quickly became jaded marketing rhetoric. This project aimed to reinvigorate a public discussion about art, but more intimately within the gallery rather than the tabloids and, crucially, with discussion directed by the visitor. A2 combined the structure of art debate with the traditional comments box and th is then became something else as people scribbled on oth er 's comments to reply, correct or agree. This was more than a simple method of feedback; more like meeting and creating a live community? Spaces of encounte r and the formation of microcommunities, even if only in te xt , are fund amental in giving value back to the unmediated consumer experience . In a sense, A2'S was a different exhibition; less curated and independent of the show. One note said, 'The comments are more interest ing to read than half th at bombastic [unreadable] that we've all paid to marvel at ." Th is kind of work not only involves the audience, but is also made real or mate rialises in and with the aud ience (however thi s is not to be confused with work that is 'interact ive;' This could also be seen in Cracked, a 24-hour show at La Vianda gallery in 2005, put on by students from the London College of Communication.

Lim ite d Language I Tac ti cs I Par t of t he proce ss

transform ati ve engagement wit h community

People were encouraged to come in with everyday problems from their work environment, by a team of sixteen graphic designers who provided them with solutions to walk away with, free of charge. The upstairs space provided a constantly updated display of these 'problems + solutions' for perusal, building up a while-u-wait portfolio/gallery. Downstairs, it was the client-designer relationship and the creat ive bustle of the working studio, always a process of dialogue both complex and fluid, th at was offered up for contemplation . What made this relational was that it was the actual event that curated the work, not the other way around. These examples provide moments or possibilities for social relationships that Bourriaud calls 'social interstices', a term borrowed from Karl Marx." In contrast to a traditional leftist position, Bourriaud insists that these interstices co-exist and live within the branded environment, rather than acting as 'culture jamming', which aims to disrupt capitalist activity. The world of mass communications, which Bourriaud calls 'looped information', is predominantly rhetorical. In many contexts thi s can be an alienating experience, compounded by a didactic signage system. A relational stance can work in this sphere, too. Kenya Hara's signage for the Umeda Maternity Clinic in Osaka, Japan uses the traditional visual language of information design - pictograms, symbols, typography, etc. - but the signs are printed onto white cotton cloth. These are detachable, allowing the signage to become part of the day-to-day running of the clinic; washed and recycled along with the laundry. Here, the conviviality of much relational aesthetics is not literal. It is the cyclical nature of the signage, which inhab its what Bourriaud calls the 'minut e spac e of daily gestures', th at is of interest. The signage makes the impersonal world of a large hospital more hum an or personal. Moreover, it is a more open-ended process in that the signage is perceived to come to life, not deteriorate, when washed. The signage has not been a target for graffiti, unlike the usual

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is called for) t he minu tiae can be a crit ical catalyst in informing the des ign process and t he event ua l material ou t orne. Jod i Polzin who reco unts her experience of working with design student. and t he local commu nity in inner city t. Louis eloquently aptures t he problem of a one- to-many approach to desig n in her paper

Reconsirlerinq the i\ !nrg in' Relm iollships 0/Dif [erence {l ilt! Transjornuuive Education:

'The disparity between how the students and the res idents experienced the same neighborhood was exempl ified by the eventua l selection of a site which the st ude nts descr ibed in a written presentation as "a trash- .t rewn vacant lot of no present value." The ite turned out to be an important base ball field whcr the neighborhood chi ldren played and which had significa nt mean ing to many in the commun ity, The children, with whom t he students did not consult, mamtaincd that they did not want it touch xl because it would attract the older youth and no longer be theirs, 'I his exasperated till' students who felt that the residents did not app reciate something better in t he ir neighborhood, a design which had been high ly lauded by design faculty d uri ng in-house reviews'. ' In a different context, up until recen tly, ocial networking and 'tweeti ng' on line has bee n derided precisely because its content is cons ide red 'minutiae'. l loweve r; this is to think from a privileged (one to many) position. For instance, the Baghdad B10gger was simply putt ing hi diary on line during t he war in Iraq hoping a frie nd in Turkey might log in. Instead , to the world's press, starved of inside r informati on, it became a mainframe for dissemi nati ng informatio n." At t he t ime of wr iti ng t he new 'paper' speak of t he Twitter revolutionary'. Co mmun ity can 't be presc ript ive or pre-defined; hut in any given contex t will see design as a starter-kit t hat can become some th ing else.1C'taphors still frame these spa cs on the \Veb, so the user 'knows where 145

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Sign age fo r th e Umeda Maternit y Cli nic, Osaka, Japan by Kenya Hara.

thl'\ are '; the hrow cr home page and lOIllPU u-r De ktop bookend .Ill\ computer me luued e pcrrcncc

modernist street signage which is prone to the taggers' aero sol wit . To graffiti Hara's signage, would th at be like ta gging th e back of sorneone's shirt as they sit in the emergency waiting room ? A more lite ral engagement wit h conviviality - creating and relying on human relat ions - are th e ex pe riments in traffic relat ions whic h were originally devised in Holland and are now seen around th e world . In some areas of Holland , traffic enginee r Hans Monderman oversaw th e removal of traffic lights, signage, speed-limit signs, spee d bumps, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view it 's when 'd rivers stop looking at signs and sta rt looking at other peopl e, that driving becomes safer ...all th ose signs are saying to cars, "t his is your space, and we have organised your behaviour so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you" ... Th at is th e wron g story." The primacy of th e traffic world is interrupted by repositioning th e relationship bet ween ca rs and pede strians, making th em aware of operati ng in a shared space. Dri vers ca n no longer merely act on signage or a gree n light automatically, but have to act and react as part of a momentar y mic ro-communi ty of pedest rians and other dr ivers at each road junctio n. Dubbed a Dutch 'naked road ' experiment by the medi a, th e Shared Space initiat ive in Wiltshire , England soon reduced accidents by 3S pe r ce nt on removing the white lines th at separate dri vers on one side of t he road from th e ot her," In London's Kensington High Stre et, there was a 69 per cent reduction in accidents in three years through the removal of railings, pedestrian guardrail s and signs.' In a telephone intervie w, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British arch itect and advisor for Shared Space, suggested this makes th e stree t 'legible', not th rough signage but as an elegant, live urban environment. 'Signage is, contrary to popular belief, a very poor way to influence behaviour. It may work in a caronly space like a motorway, but it 's the least subtle and effective form of communicat ion in the public realm. When we are talking about complex communication

51 ,lerartlCle

ln a en. e. De Ign ha lone been impotent in the networke lut, , who pin t ituuon t.' lihce - hu inc lentre, bank, aIrport , Ia room . - are l entially nodal point that organi e the P l han ze of information, cupitul and 1'0\\ cr In \\ hat lanucl Casiells l ails the . pale of 1101\ , Today' Web 2.0 tel hnology allow. the opportunity to focus upon interper. onal omrnunk at ion ; often the minutiae of 0 ial cornmumcauon and, a sue h, can provide a hift in emphasis when thinking about 'network building' in design more broadly. Following on from Castells, 'liquidity' is the dominant metaphor in a relational community orientated de ign environment, where in the realm of digital networks, 'Social structures are dissolving into "streams" of human beings, mformauon, goods and specific signs or cultural s -rnhol .' Rut is it the end of design as we know it... it will be for sorne!

147

The shared space concept. The impact of tra dit ional eng ineeri ng measur es on t he ur ban environment by Ben Hamil ton -Bailli e.

A post -9/11 comm unity in New York - but sti ll w it h a comm erc ial edge? (2005).

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between two people, everyone knows that th e more indirect communicat ion is, the more effect ive th e message. Women know th at . Musicians, artis ts and arc hitects know t hat .' In lectures, Hamilton-Baillie illus tra tes th is point by de scribin g a road accide nt where a car is wrap ped arou nd the cause: a st ree t sign saying 'Th ank you for d riving slowly'. Scenarios th at foster sponta neous human relations are what Bour riaud would call 'microtopias', For him, th is is t he core political significance of relational aesthetics and his most contes ted claim for t hem. In contrast to a classic, Utopian/M arxist sta nce th at st rives to change the world, Bourriaud argues that relational aest hetics create achievable micro -uto pian moments, embedded within t he everyday to make the now more pleasurab le. The examples here go beyond a simp le diagnosis of desig n as good or bad, socia lly responsible or not . They might not be socia lly active in the sense of a pro test poster, but can t hey st ill be see n to activate the socia l? The relational mod el of enquiry is bro aden ing in its remit as its approach exp ands beyond t he sphere of contemporary art. Muc h of t his is already going on in t he design sphere at the operative level, but t he core concepts are useful to provide a language for thinking about it . For design and visual commu nicatio n, how might they come into t heir own to develop t hese ideas beyond the aesthetics of the relat ional? See fu rt her images here www. lim ited language.orgf images

Ref erences Nicolas Bourr iaud, Relational Aestheti cs (Paris : Presses du Reel, Engli sh tr anslati on 2002), 9. 2 Ibid. 3 These cards immediat ely ca ught the imaginati on of t he public and press. We can see t his in th e way individual images of t he co mme nts card s were used in t he Br it ish press as if to speak, by proxy, fo r the public at large. See, f or inst ance, Nigel Mor r is, 'Conceptua l Bu ll: Cultu re M inist er and his Critiq ue of th e Best of Br iti sh Art' on the cover of The Independent, 31 Octo ber 2002.

150

Lim it ed Language I Tact ics I Part of t he proc ess

Farmers Markel. Lincoln Boulevard, Los Ang eles, California (2009).

4 5

6

7

152

The t erm 'interst ice' was used by Karl Marx t o describe trading comm unities t hat operated outsi de t he law of profit. Hans Monderman quoted in Sarah Lyall, 'A Path to Road Safety With No Signposts' in The New York Tim es, 22 January 2005, www . nyti mes.com/2005/01/22/internatio nal/europe/22monderman.html (acc essed 05/04/2009). These stat istic s come f rom a telephone inter view wit h Ben Hamilton-Ba illie (2006) . Updat ed information can be found here: www .hamilton-baillie.co.uk (accessed 5/4/2009)A summat ion of fi ndings can be f ound here; Urban Design Int ernational: Specia l Issue : An In tern ati onal Review of Liveable Str eet Thinking and Practice, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer 2008). Ibid.

Limited Language I Tactics I Part of the process

Limi ted Language

The slow fast

Slow times... Being modern has long been associated with speed. In the 1920S the leader of the Futurist art movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, asked his fellow Italians to stop eating pasta as it would slow them down.' Later, the architect Le Corbusier would comment that a modern city was a city built for speed. "

In the novel Dombey and 5011, the writer Charles Dicken give: a sen e of the great hope for the innovations of the Ind ust rial Revolut ion. De. cribing the railway being built out of London 's Camden in the

I

40s,

he writes: 'In short, the yet unfini hcd and unopened Railroad was 111 progres ; and, from t he very core of all thi s dire di: order, t railed

Latterly, the architect/theorist Paul Virilio has written about 'Dromology? which, rudimentarily, is the

. moothly away, upon its mighty cou rse of

study of speed. Part of his investigation is the differences

civilisation and improvement . Rut as yet , t h •

between the digital and analogue world . The digital is screen-centred whilst the analogue is more analogous to a human, or natural, 24-hour cycle. Virilio's distinction came to mind when someone, who was going away for a long weekend, said she had Googled 'cheap places to eat in Athens'. Google returned over one thousand sugges-

neighbour hood was shy to ow n the railroad."

tions in a second . 'But I am only going for the weekend,' she bemoaned. Thi s is a dilemma increasingly faced everyday. The instancy of digital, screen-based time changes the way we experience the world . Exacerbated by a lack of filtering or reflecti on, we lose the more fragile, day-today, bod ily experience that helps us make sen se of things. One reaction to this process of speeding up is slowing down . A slow food movement emerged over twenty years ago in Italy as a reaction against speed and the acco mpanying glob alisation which follows (Virilio sees that one effect of speed is geographical contraction). This movement has spread across Europe and influenced other areas. Now there is slow architecture too. How, if at all, does this manifest in design, a profession now synonymous with screen-based culture? Ironi cally, it 's surfing the net that throws up many po ssible examples of 'slow design'. PostSecret4 is a web site which asks you to reveal your sec ret s to be di splayed on th e sit e. The idea is not a new one as there are many confess ional sites with varying amounts of vitriol. The st riking factor is the way the site engage s

Train ' were, of cour e, not of com rnunitie '. In cont rast to the tagecoach (and t he way the horses had to be hanged at ea h Inn), the rate at which the new locomotives teamed aero ss

the coun tryside effe tively 'short ened' the di ranee between town '. Train, demo ratic and speedy, connected them . A marker of thi: n w logic was the way time had

to

become tandardised.s people

didn 't rnis their connection . Time, until then m -asurcd locally by th pas sing of the un through the sky, became 'railway time observed in cloc ks, a~ if the sun itself had given in'.? In the novel Hard Tillie, written much later, Dickens evoked a different sense when he wrote of t h light in the great Iactorie , 'which looked, when they were illumina ted, like Fairy palaces - or the travellers by expre: -t rain said so _ '. J These factorie . were of course the 'melancholy-mad ' engines of the Industr ial Re\'Glut ion, with th ir mon trous serpents of smoke and monotony of labour, W hat we :

I'

here is

how speed distances and di conner t . In our fast time, high- 'peed rail has largely been super eded by a high- peed Internet connection, opening up the whole world as a 'global village'.' And, for the global digerau, there is Internet lime : However, all the c new connection [friend

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153

On' has lalled the 'second encounter'; at one remove . It' immedincy that '

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Slow Times picked up on an iru

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commonplace thought that. to re-engage \\ ith the natural world, we might need to go :10\\ . Replies to the art icle drcv, attention to a differcncc in contemporary experiences of speed . As David suggested: 'Computers that operate at speeds unimaginable a few years ago are used to t y pe letters and

to

look at the Web. Jet plane

art' used for Journey' better suited to train 1110se who walk around rcmmd

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that the posstbiluy for speed is latent

within them'.' This latency become literal in the congested London at the time of writing, where a car that can travel

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the same speed as the carriage and hor

This excruciating experience, is hardly what we might call slow. Adnana points out how these two cultures of latent speedanalogue and digual

»

come together:

with its audience, the way it asks people to submit their secrets: rather than the immediacy of traditional digital blogs which lend themselves to a more instant outlet of emotion [xxx is a shit' etc .), you are asked to produce a card, 6"x 4", and to send it in. Only then is it scanned and uploaded to the site. Here we see a blending of temporal mode s, where the digital is counter-balanced with the analogue requirements of making the card. It is the act of 'de sign' which makes this a reflective, rather than a reactive or instant response (click here) . Is this an embryonic notion of slow design ? We would like to propose this as platform to create a manifesto of sorts... Proclamation one...

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slides b) on screens, we slide by billboards...'11

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Refe rences 1 2

of the system... These raptures don't lead

3

See, fo r inst ance, Paul Viri lio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York : Semiotex t(e), 1977),

4

htt p:// posts ec ret.blogspot.c om

to

productivity or poetry, but only to Irustra-

Charles A, Jenck s, and Le Cor busier. Le Corbus ier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture (New York , NY: Monacelli Press, 2000), 63.

he suggest. that although at times we might be, 'shaken from tillS monotony by failure

Fili ppo Tomm aso Mari netti , La Cucins Futurista (1932),

tion and negative processes'...1II For Adriana, the problem with latency is that when the body becomes disengaged, it becomes uninspired. Drawing on the philosophy of lauriee Merlcau-Ponty," she continues: 'For the body generates ideas not ani} \\ ith via and

111

Its

mind, but

relentless dialogue \\ ith

Its • en

'es

over the entire physical landscape... The body innately houses potential for crcauvc a, uon: but it is the engaged, active body that l reate.. We need to bring the whole hod) bac k Into the action if we want to spur on creative ac uvity," This interest in the natural metabolism means that much of the slow movement is focused on an active and human-centred engagement with the environment. For instance, Slow Doum London, a 'project to inspire Londoners to improve their lives by slowing down to do things well, rather than a ' 154

Lim ited Language ITac ti cs I Slow t imes ..

Nike wi ndow display, Lillywhit es, London (2009).

fast as possible ' started with a sixty minute walk over Waterloo bridge - usually a fi\'c minute dash or an interminable traffic jam. When (slow) design does enter the frame, it role i. to fa ilitate lownes and to renew the phenomenological richnes of people, pia e and things. The fo us here is the enjoyment of the lived and developing moment . A point of reference for the low Dc. ign movement i. Bruce Goff, an American archiie t, who noted in the 1950S that: 'hi. tory is past and the future ha n't arrived hut that the 'continuou. present" is always with u

.'!"

The knowledge gained here annot be mentally deduced or visually accrued. It is tacit knowledge which on ly rnatcrialiscs in the act of doing. " As Kat y pu ts it : 'Tactile mer projecrile - always!" where projectile 'alludes to all these icon of peed; women descending staircases, sculptures of men ripping through 'pace by the futurist and [...] hurling paint at the anvas ... A cheap shot really, noihmg more ta tile than a Pollock painung... It i what you fixate on; the "ac tion" or the ihmg It reate ?'\ I It is therefore, not anion - . peed d up or . lowed down - per sc that ' important, but what it reates. And here i th crux: how do we stop lowness becoming like peed? \ h rc, a Paul D puts It: 'speed is one more produc t on the helv

of western excess'Y" For him what

is crucial is that: ' lowne

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temporal alone . ...The . low movern nt

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Emil Gutm an House, Gulf port, Mississippi - Bru ce Goff (Blueprint, 1958).

a \\ ay of thinking, of providing a platform for identity, nuance and invcsugauon'Y" For instance, we can see this 'way of thinking' in the collected works of Slowl.ab, a New York based design group, who offer six prin iples for low Design: to reveal, to expand, to relle i, to engage, to participate, to .cvolve.' To return to Paul D: 'Reflection is more than a slowing down, it is situating your elf in a

'Bruce Goff, an Ameri can architect, noted in the 1950s t hat: 'hist ory is past and th e f uture hasn't arrived but that th e "conti nuous present" is always wit h us.' Goff was intere sted in t he many languages of arch it ectu re design - creati ng project s fr om petr ol sta t ions to museums. His phrase "cont inuous present" has become a mantra f or t he slow design movement. htt p://bit.ly/slow_design

world of latent peed'.' Thi . situated position become the plat form for a po .itive engagement with a world of literal and latent speed and, crucially, without de troying our own temporal rhythm . 156

Limited Language I Tact ics I Slow time s...

In /.rxJkilllj Awl'\', the cultural c riuc S!aH)! Zliek makes a powerful analogy, draw ing attention to what happens when you look out the window of a moving car. When the wlllllO\\ is

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-paratcs you from a reality that c ,\11 ()nl~

lx- oh. ervcd. \Vith the \\ indow dO\\ n, the' rush of stimuli (the sound of the wind and the world flashing hy) is owrwlu-lrning. !' We can make a connection back to Dickens' observations - at a distance - through the (closed) train window, 1100\'('\'er, the added dimension here is psychological. Winding the

window back up from its state of immersion is also a consc ious way of 'taking stock', Physicalor temporal distance, in this psychological 'e n e, allow, for a depth of rclle tion unavailable when one is all-immersed, overwhelmed. In this ultcrnauvc reading, the window wound down gives a sense' of our experience III

the digital Coogle, Twitter and blogging

world of continual renewal. The digitnl world's fast connections make for a fairly fluid-feeling discursive space , For instance, it " no coincidence that the original Italian Slow Movement now proliferate, online, hut in a looser, more

experimental and generative sense. Howev -r,

when we click for too long through the infinite Ii t of Weh·link that Coogle generate: and lose till' thread of the search, we might download to reflect in peace , l lc rc , it's the

li ranee that allows us a welcome moment of rest, reflec tion and sym hesi: This is one way that the analogue and the digital co-exist : inter-dependent yet separate, Finally, the great invention of the Vic tor ian era was arguahl~ the tram station , Today it ' the airport and the screen mter-

ace wlu, h mediates between the last (of flying/searching] and slow (of waiting), I low might design mediate the relationship between the different intensities of the fast and the slow as the pace of consumption becomes C\'

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TopophUia Skyline and citysccpes / The bumps of flatness - the terrain of design Analogous cities I Capturing the imaginary Exposing the line in film and video I The curve of imagination Report from the Hawk-Eye camero / Soft form Kodak moments and Nokia digits I Used condoms and forgotten names ThiS chapter axptores the topogml'l1y 011h," city "S il is walked, mapped, drawn, slIrv",'I,,';, photographed and branded.

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SkyUne and cityscapes A while ago, the Sunday suppl ements had a holiday advertisement for Ontario, Canad a, wit h the by-line The Towering Beauty of Ontario. The accompanying photograph showed a ben ign public park with a t rellis of t rees supporti ng the skyline. The image is meant to portray an iconoclastic representatio n of the mode rn city. Wh at caught the eye was the way the skyline, alt hough augmented wit h t rees, clearly opened into a vist a of th e eN communicat ion tower. The 'Communicat ion Tower' became a ubiquitous symbol of te chnological virility in the 1960s and 1970s. C ities from Moscow to London erected the se modern day obelisks. East Berlin, in particular, gave th e West 't he finger ' when it erected its 365m tower in 1969 (its observation platform swivels to th is day). The architect ur al posturing tha t accompanied t he cold war years has ceased . The silhouette of archite ct ural figure s on the post modern visual landscape today relate more to commerce than ideology. Now, in thi s globalised environment, some of the traditional roles of architectural semiosis have changed : the Christi an church spire no longer has to reach out to its par ishioners and likewise t he skyscraper to its investors. The former has satellite TV and the latter is exp osed on market screens 24/7 . The Global city is, as Manuel Cas tells' point s out, 'a pro cess' rather th an a physical space . And here is the rub: th e city, so long th e hub of capitalist production, is now dorm ant , in th is guise at least . We live in a world of 'flows' both literal and metaphorical. Refugees (if the rabid tabloids are to be believed) and data stream from one capital to anoth er. In one promotional video Hong Kong branded its elf as a 'portal city'. O f cou rse, this city branding is not a new phenomena. In the 1970s, New York's tourism bureau turned casual references to the 'Big Apple? into a brand and Milt on Glaser 's [love New York became

Starter erticle

The bumps of flatness the terrain of design The original artic le stemmed from a perceived tension bet wee n the experience of a cit y imagined looking out of a hotel window when visiting abroad and t hat imagined at home, itting in an armchair reading the newspaper. In one reply on the Limited Language website, Trin des rtbed the effe t : 'A cities become plucked from an) sen e of the "real"; to become tick boxe in the glo. ) page of Wallpaper' and other magazines which document the tate of global flow ." Roth vantage points are influenced by the context of viewing, and we represented t he city kyline through this contextual framework , The es say wa tr ying to tr ace the relationship bet ween emotional mapping, geography and memor y. A photograph in a new paper udvert isemcnt provide . the doc urncntary evidence of the modernity of a given place, be it Ontario or elsewhere. The other framework, peering through a hotel window, provides a live Image, one which is almost cinematic. But, a. the sight pans the . kyline it conllatcs with the memories of moving image cen on TV new bulletin. and cinema : memory re-edit ,splicing the real with the mediated . Be it Tel AViV, I ew York, Beirut or the rural slopes of Tuscany...each image, like a rollover button, has a compo ite be neat h where the imaginat ion acts as the hypcr link to broader emotiona l and cu ltural maps. Although the original e say is about the topo logy of the city, the role of height or elevation, to be above, i not directly addre ed. Height , both metaphoncally and literally, i. u. ed to forge the modern experience: from 'towering beauty ' to 'communicat ion tower. ', The vantage of height i. u ed to impos and separa te urban experience. \Ve look down on 165

Giraffe , Portuga l (2005),

Manhatt an Portage shop! rent, New York (2004),

advert on t he side of a New Yor k building (2004),

DKNY

Hoarding s as the Sw iss Re building (t he Gherk in) is under const ruc tio n, London (2003),

people, the l amcra crane . woops to cap ture the close-up, we rise to the top, l\"t' bring

a design icon. Branding now increasingly uses the NY skyline; the profile has become both the 'synecdoche and the swoosh'3of the city. We ca n of course look at the biography of indi vidual buildings and see how 'cat hed rals to commerce' are commi ssioned, built and embedded with meanin g. However, the se individual architectural statements are merely silhouettes of commerce as the physical work of 'old' cities transfers to the new 'edge cities' of call centres and Internet bubbles. Thi s process of transference of work from branded city to periphery is a phenomenon well do cumented in the market of brands. The Pre sident of Landor Branding Agency quoted in Naomi Klein 's book No Logo states: 'products are made in a factory...but brands are made in the mind' ." Thi s dynamic is reflected in the use of the city skyline as logo or trademark. Cities produce aspirations, the soft bedding for brands. For instance, September r rth reminded people just how potent the city skyline has become and after the event , the space left, ached in the news foota ge and photojournalism flowing out of the mourning city. One passenger on the Staten Island Ferr y, looking up at th e skyline, spoke of the city losing its two front te eth. Th is reaction ca n only be dreamed of by a brand manager and it is a brand loyalt y exploited by both politician s and corporations. The medium for super br and s, tele vision , has been quick to exploit the branding potential of the city skyline. New York features heavily in sitcoms, not only as a narrative context but the skyline is used as an editing device . Friends, Sex and the City and Becker all used the NY skyline as a 'sting ' between edits. Sometimes, like the notorious subliminal advertising of the 196os,5 in a nanosecond. Sometimes a more leisurely pace allows an indulgent sweep of Manhattan holding up the New York skyline. There is one final strand of the skyline, the skyline th at is medi ated through news coverage. Gaza and , earlier, Beirut have all become fragments in a skyline spliced with conflict. Staring out from a hotel room in central

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people to their knees, and in an ironic homology, we raze things to the ground . The patial dynamics of cartography an' commented on b) Jess: map an cutout I uh out

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The iotalising effel t of a map is, in part, brought-about b) till privileged position of the viewer; above and detached . This i an elevated position allowing the flat, mapped, geography to become a place for the beholder's imagination to colonise , It is the very flatness of the map which, II'C' would argue, is instrumental in perce iving t he map as a benign structure , to which we can attach our imagination. Flat ness, like erasure, creates a visual realm ripe for su bjugation. Enlightenment Euclidean geometry, where perspectival .pace extends infinitely in three d imensions , demot ing Ilamcs: to a pre -modern anachron ism. We live in a world dominated by the architectonics of power and spcctac lc, Thi often materialise, in the buildings that punctur the k) line of major l ities worldwide: it elf, a phy: ical act of rupture from flatnc .. lap, only provide an idea of space, because 'our bod) is not in space like things: it inhabits or haunt space ...it is our cxpre ':ion in the world' . In one way t he map is t he mechanical ab ' t ract ion of what Mcrlcau-Ponty cal ls 't he platitudes [and flat ness] of " tcchnicized" th inking'.2 l Iere, our world becomes a series of one- dime nsional , mecha nised events: simple pins in a map, So, how does th is grap hic space trans late into the real world? The map is never the sphe re of the cartographer alone. Ar tists and designers have explored and exploited the tot alising language of mapping . The London Underground lap, which date from the early 1 930S and was almost avant-garde in it: representation of non-Euclidean . pall', exploits the flames of mapping to provide an abstracted icono 'raphy of place name, to 167

demarcate route s, Another iconic repre: entation of London, the A-Z map, i u cd in the work of the ani t Lars Arrhenius. I lis facsimile of the London map i 'animated' with vignette, of people going about their daily husine s on the street . Arrhenius provides the pos ibility for phenomenological interventions, simple narrarives, into the non-space of maps. I low might designer ', e. pccially in the digital phere, replicate the haptic? How might they conjoin lived experience with empirical information de sign? lnteractivity, in one sen

1',

allows the re-establismeru of the

en orial within flat screen-based vi ual cultures, whil t Coogle Earth allow for tagging

Tel Aviv, it 's hard not se e the skyline (like the colours in the Isr aeli flag; blue agai nst white) wit ho ut the sce ne confl at ing with the images from all the newsreel footage in rec ent times . The skyline, like a doppelganger, becomes a composite or double exposure depicting smoke risin g, pockmarks and sirens. Th is is the collateral da mage of too many visual-bites on CN N, CBS, BBC and Al

Jazeera. The skyline , like any logo or sign, becom es part of t he vis ua l mapping we use to (mis)un derstand the world . O ften , fatally, it can make th e world seem easily d igestible.

and annotating with your own images. If the above is a positive spin on the mapping of territory, then many of the comment. on the original e. say explore the darker id of -kyline and ityscapes. They hint at the role of memory in con tructing narrative and how vi .ual mapping can, mi takenly, make the world all-too easily dige tiblc . For instance, Toby Todd commented: 'Ctue compete on

See fur the r images here ww w.limitedlanguage.org/ images

Ref erences For insta nce, see Manuel Castells, 'The Rise of th e Net wor k Society' in The Inform ation Age: Economy, Soci ety and Cultu re Vol. I (Cambridge, MA ; Oxfo rd, UK : Blackwell, 1996). 2 This te rm is fi rst found in journa lism and lit erat ure of t he 1920s, 3

image production rather than industrial production. TIle city skyline or panorama arc th modern Jay" manic mills"!" And teven added: '

problem of vi ual

culture e. posed: image conllate and depict a

4 5

Synedoche is a fi gure of speech where a part is put f or t he whole. Here we are t hinkin g t hat t he skyline can bot h be convenient short hand for a liv ing, breath ing, dynam ic city or it can reduce t he complex to visual sound bite. Naomi Klein, No Logo (London: Flamingo, 2000), 195. See Vance Packa rd, The H idden Pers uaders (First published by Pocket Books in 1957 and re-issued by Mar k Cris pin M iller as a 50t h anniversary edit ion in 2(07).

total" world rather than the Dia pora, \ 'hich ix the real one. Th J lope lew York phrase logo arne out \\ hen the city wa e .pcncn mg high 11'\1'1 of crime and deprivation 111t.' que lion should have been "who love

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in conclusion, what happens when abstractions return as lived experience, in lc s' • 0,

words a : 'bodies to the graphic of territory'. What happen. when we bring together map, memory and th ' material world? Although the map i a symbol of the rationali ing proce " collecting empirical information to be transposed into visual form, it i alway ' en oded with cultural and ideological meaning, Th work of th Israeli de igner David Tartakover provides an e..arnple, For Jess, Tartakover repeatedly uses an imaee he calls The 168

Limited Language

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Slain by David Tar ta kover, Poster (2002).

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us cd earlier.

The flatness of the map and the toialising effect of the priv ilcgcd 'view from above has a literal translation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The metaphorical stitch (the Israeli term used for the green line which notionally

separates the two territories) is traversed by the Israeli army by air and on land. The invasion in Gaza in

2009

was, in part, retaliatory

for the mi. sile s fired by llamas. The map-less trajectory of the missiles mean they fall inside Israeli territory haphazardly, hut with monotonous regularity. The flatne. metaphor of the map and the literal power of lcvauon come together in the can. truction of the segregation wall and the

destruc tion of Pale tin ian towns . haron

Rotbard, in A Civilian OCCl/patiO/I: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, comments how the dividing wall illustrate ' that 't he actual object is more powerful than any image or metaphor '. Conversely, Palestinian towns are bulldozed and razed to the ground:' reduced to t he flat ness of a map. See tull res 11~~ - c",ryon 1 e conversatio h P://I,nj.cc/chapler4_

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Analogous cities 'With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.' (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972)1 Sometimes I feel that our physical experience of the city is less clear and comprehensible than the image or idea of the city. The complexity of cities makes them difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand. We prefer, instead, to understand their images. We favour a city constructed not from brick, stone and glass, but from memory, association and history. Nicholas Roeg's 1973 film Don 't Look Now is a favourite of mine, and I have seen it many times. I also love Venice , the city in which it is set and which I visit regularly. Each time I see this film I am intrigued by its fragmented juxtapositions of space and time. As the actors move through the city from location to location, there is no regard for geography or journey. They pass a palace on the Grand Canal and then seconds later they are outside the Biennale gardens. This fragmentation of location is, however, only evident if you are very familiar with Venice . Roeg has constructed a new Venice, an identified city, suited to his purpose. This type of collaged continuality is not uncommon in cinema. We have all seen films shot in cities that are well known to us, where the director is keen to emphasise the location of the action and has, therefore, staged a car chase that passes, in no logical order, every landmark building in the city. As we watch we realise that thi s is another London, Paris or New York. A perfect condensed city of images, a place in which everything is near. I love the opportunity these false

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Capturing the im aginary Rereading the essay, what is notably absent from David Phillips' original article are people: a populace. It's in the responses to the article that we find them . In a sense he provides the miseon-scene and the comments enter stage-right... Where-upon we arc immedia tely snapped out of the imaginat ive sphere of film and its concomitant; memory, to t he external world: 'What I like about my adopted ity [Toronto] is that most of the memories get swept away with the grime of the streets, on a cyclical basis, or built mer and upon'. ' And other commentators join the que st to populate the imagined space created by t he author, Adria na: 'the tour guides point out spots in the city, directing the gaze' ." Ilomeira Nekkui: 'I.o al people are wearing traditional dresses, men and women working shoulder to shoulder...'11i Wei-Ch un Kao: 'In reality I'm most comfortable m the crowded concrete ity,'" and so it goes on. And it i in this realm, bet ween the imaginary and the real, t hat design and visua l communicatio n operate. Policing and mining its creative potential, t he rcative proces s both erases and redraw ' how the city is configu red : billboards, shopping malls, street furniture all serve to direct, collate and make t he city a visceral place. But it must be unders tood that the cit y, as it is exp lored in the original essay with its filmic and imaginative quarters, is a city of plenty, of excesses. James Souttar points out t hat the choice of Venice provide . the poten tial for metaphor and symbolism becau se: 'Venice ...[is] a cit) built not on earth, but on water [lluiduy? life"] - [which] has captured so many imaumauons'.' An alternat ive view might be that Venice is built on the flows of capital rather than the poet ic of its engineering alone.

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173

Oshiage, Tokyo, Photograph by David Phillip s,

cities gives us to separate the real and the analogous city. I sometimes feel these comprehensible cities are better, more identifiable, than actual places . In Aldo Rossi's seminal book, The Architecture of the City, he shows us a painting by Giovanni Canaletto seemingly of Venice, in which Palladio's unbuilt project for the Rialto Bridge, the Basilica of Vicenza, and the Palazzo Chiericati (also in Vicenza), are all arranged as if they were an actual part of a real city. It looks like Venice, but it is not . It is more than Venice; it is an analogous city, a city that expresses the idea of the city more perfectly, but less factually, than the actual city. Rossi says, 'Athens, Rome, Constantinople, and Paris represent ideas of the city that extend beyond their physical form, beyond their permanence; thus we can speak in this way of cities like Babylon which have all but physically disappeared.? Now we have another Venice within a hotel in Las Vegas. It is a city of paper-thin facades set around a crystal-clear canal. It is a strange, ugly copy that makes little attempt to replicate real places or forms. Unlike the other Venice the sky is always blue and very clean. It is banal, vapid and cliched. And yet, when I saw this Venice it surprised me how it caused me to recall in detail the charm and intricacy of the real city, by way of its inaccuracy. This got me thinking about other cities, the cities that I have never visited. When I imagine these cities I see all the great buildings gathered together along one street or around a single square. I know that when I do visit it will not be like that, but, for now, this will have to do. In the 1970S the station identity for the London's Thames Television featured all the major buildings: the Palace of Westminster, St Paul's Cathedral, Tower Bridge etc. They were all grouped together in an impossible silhouette. I always loved the fact that this perfect London, a London that does not exist, should be the image of London . To those who knew, it was a fabrication and to those who did not, it was perfection. Quoting again

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The architc t Rem Koolhaas is a useful contemporary figure when tracing the relationships bet ween architecture and eco nomics. In l unlcspace' Koolhaus' broad c rit ique of the post modern urba n experience, he comments: 'Junkspace t hr ives on design, but design dies in Junkspacc.' And later in the same essay, he criticises ou r digital, Photoshoppcd, step-and-repeat existenre when commenting: 'Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honor, cherish and embrace manipulation ...' But the ity is more than a sequence of manipu latio ns. It is made malleable - like t he Here &. There maps of Manhatt an, a project by Schulze & Webb exploring speculative projections of dense cities. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immed iate environment where close bu ildings are represented normally, and the viewer is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands. The projection connec ts the viewer 's local environment to remote dcstinat ions normally ou t of sight. Here &. There maps allow the city to uncoil in front of us; 'putting the view 'r simultaneously above t he city and in it where she sta nds, both looking down and looking forward'. ' And, t he city is a ser ies of narratives too, The notion of a city which unwraps in front of us is poignant ly obse rved by the actress/ direc tor of The Unloved (2009) di rected by Samantha Mort on. This film rent res on a young girl growing up in a children 's home and, as suc h, takes a look from achilds-eye view' at the l 'K care system, Morton talked abo ut her experience of being a chi ld in-care and how walking home from school was a rare moment of be ing alone which she would stre tch out by taking t he longest route home. Lover use t he same strategy, prolonging the piquancy of a first date. Equally, taxi drivers, cyclists or t hose looking for shelter from a sudden cloud bur i, look for the shortest route. In this way the city expands and contracts according to use or need. In the pragmatic territory of design, 175

HE/lEI TIllIE

Here & There maps of Manhattan by

Schulze &. Webb Ltd (2009) .

the cit y always exists in the haptic realm ,

J.J. Gibson comments: 'The haptic .ystem..,

from Calvino we can see that a city can be whatever you can imagine it to be, but only that. "From now on , I'll describe the cities to you," the Khan had said, "in your journeys you will see if they exist." But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor. "And yet I have constructed in my mind a model cit y from which all possible cities can be deduced," Kublai said. "It contains everything corresponding to the norm . Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, 1need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations." "1 have also thought of a model city from which r deduce all others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions . If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exist s. So I have only to subt ract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exists. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit : I would achieve cities too probable to be real. "'3 (Italo Cal vino, Invisible Cities, 1972) See fu rther images here ww w,limitedlanguage.org/images

Refe rences It alo Calvino, In visible Cities (First published in It aly by Giulio Einaudi Edit ore, 1972). 44, 2 Aldo Rossi, The Ar chitecture of the City (Camb ridge, MA : MIT, 1982), 128 (First published, 1966), 3

Italo Calvino, Op c it., 69.

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is an apparatus by which the individual gets information about both the environment and hi. body . He feels an object relative to the body and the body relative to an object. It i a perceptual y tern by which animal. and men (human) are literally in tou h with the environment ."

The haptic bridges the external and inter nal, the material (sub tancc] and perceptual [imaginative] . 0, the world comes alive in the touch of thing - our physical environment but al. 0 the movement of the body through space, of cognition and perception. The latter could be seen as analogous to the imaginary. This capturing of imaginary space and movement is seen in the work of Lia Ilalloran. Her photographs, in a sense, capture the immateriality of imagination (and movement): the erasure of the gesture. In her Dark kate series of photograph, she photograph. the non-space of skate culture; a light strapp -d to her wrist (or head"]. The lam -ra apture traicctorie: rather than material pre .ence. This out. ide/i nside i the place design need , to mediate. Paul Rodaway, in SensuOilS Geographies, explains how it provides a conduit between the three elements of environmental experience:" imple contact; the juxtaposition of two urfaces against each other.,., exploratory activity; an agent actively investigates the environment.' and finally, 'Communication; the contact is actively intended by one party or both, but each party reoponds spe ifically to the other's tactile timulat ion and messages are exchanged." Our experience of urban living is a combination of these elements and design, from architecture to visual communication, provide the coefficients for these experiences - walkway, billboard, bu. stops or the city , quare. People are needed in de ign - not as audience alone but as user/con umer. Communication, for halo Calvi no, i the ability to open up the interiority of city living: '[In] a great ity, the people who move 177

Dark Skate / LA River Bridge by Lia Halloran (2007).

48 x 48 inches . The art ist Lia Halloran ca ptu res both geographic place, and imaginary spaces . in her phot ographs of Los Ange les. In her Dark Skate series of phot ographs she capt ures the non -spaces of skat e cult ure; a light st rapped to her wrist (her head?), t he ca mera ca pt ures t rajecto r ies rather than mate rial presence. (Lia Halloran is represent ed by DCK T Contemporary New Yor k.)

through the street are all s t range rs. At each encounter, they imagine a thou. and things about one another; meetings "hi h could take place between them, convert at ions, surprises, cares. l' , bites'.' hould design look to l apture the imagination of the encounter: Shouldn't it look to foster that which ould take place, and insti gate a cnialys t for . uch opportunities,' That is, design a. synapse bet ween the space of motion and the place of tou h. In Space and Place Yi-Fu Tuan writ s; Touch articulates another kind of complex world ',' It i a world that is in tension with, if not opposition to, the post modern city of 'strange new feelings of an absence of inside outside, the bewilderment and loss of spatial orientuuon'. " This world described by Fredric

Jame: on is one dominated by the visual. It is a world of br icolage and fragmentation, a place obse: cd with image . Why docs design han' to belong to this monoculturc, this one dimensional, touch less,

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Ad am Kossoff

The curve of im agination

Exposing the line in film and video The original arti I by Adam Kos 'off, in om' There's a nice moment in W im Wenders' film Wings of Desire (1987) when Peter Falk, previously an angel and now an ordinary mortal and an actor who spends his

. cnse, plots a hi, tory of the ambivalent relation-

spare moments drawing, is standing at a mobile food stall drawing in the Berlin cold. Falk, feeling an angel's invisible presence (Bruno Ganz), says that it 's good to be mortal, '... just to touch somet hing, feel the cold, to smoke, have coffee, and if you do it together it's just fan-

used above others - in film e .pccial ly.

tastic. Or draw - you know you take the pencil and you make a dark line, then you make a light line, together it 's a good line ..: At the centre of the mainstream moving image lies a technological desire for transparency, a need to obliterate a consciousness of the 'line' in order to veil the viewer's awareness of the technology that allows the two spaces, that of the cinema and that of the spectator, to merge into one; removing actual physical presence in order to promote the more illusionary presence of the moving image. By contrast, one can see that modern art rooted much of its practice in revealing the line or the edge, of exposing its duplicity in the production of presence. The force of modernist art - Sergei Eisen stein's Battl eship Potemkin (1925) - serves as a filmic example. It made lines and edges apparent, boundaries were put under st ress, where the line split and gathered together images, engaging with its production of meaning. How doe s the moving image deal with the line? Although David Lynch uses the familiar elements of popular narrative cinema, one could summarise Lynch's oeuvre as an attempt to overcome the obvious linearity of mainstream cinema. The title sequence and first shot of Lost Highway (1996): car headlights illuminate a yellow dashed line along the middle of a motorway. With the forward movement of a car, the low angled shot picks up the dashed line in the middle of the motorway. Thi s dashed line reappears at crucial points in the story.

hip bet ween the . en. es and more pc ih ally, the ten ions brought about wh -n .ight i prioriThe article eventual ly comes to rest b} placing the problematic relation hip at the centre of his own work via a cinematic history of Ru sian Realism, German 1 lew Wave and American 1 leo Art Il ou e, all peerlcssly attached to their philosophical underpinning: t ruct uralism to De le uze, spectutorship to

art. The r spon cs themselves took issue with the notion of 'meanings', bluntly a king: 'I'm inclined to wonder where all thi talk of line ' leaves us ." Another re ponse simply dissolved the article into a literal sequence of lines. " nd in a sense, you do need to be 'in the moment ' if not 'in the know ' to follow the trajectory of articles like Kossoff which try to e: .cavate meaning beyond the common sensible and readily authenticated (the whole Limited Language web ite is party to this).

It is like the language of technology manuals - you need to know what an '01 'button i. , otherwise a nvn player become a box covered in hieroglyphics, a paper weight maybe . W hat i. impor tant in abstracting t he notion of t he 'line' for instance, is how it allows a se rendipi to us jo urney of how t he mar k or inscript ion, bot h literal and as metaphor, intersects and influe nces day-to-day practice . For many, t he line - drawn, animated, digiti. ed or mathematical equation is the bedrock of practice, Before Modern ism' 'technological desire for transparency' (which Kos "off speak ' of), the mathematical line as represented in per spective drawinc wa important in elevating

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Train Lines by Adam Kossoff (2008).

Chalk Lines by Adam Kossoff (2009).

the artisan to the classically defined artist. It literally separated the artist from the mechanical processes of doing to the cognitive world of mathema tics . "111e Renaissance follow -d the Classical precedent where mathematically informed di ciplines from astrono my to music were seen as the apex of liberal arts. Leonardo da Vinci's Vitnll/iall figure, ' as well as being linked to symbolic measures and signilicanCl" quite literally transforms man into a series of intersecting lines. Th is binary is still with us today; its embers enllame arguments bet ween craft and art, science and culture. It i: Modernism that translates the line into the spaces of modular furniture and interiors where the physi al linc dernatcrialises into plains of colour or glas . 111e interior designs of De Stijl architecture in the 1920S show this well, Gerrit Rietveld's Schroder I louse is a cia si De tijl example of how surface and colour are used to reate domestic spaces. Designed for Truus chroder-Schradcr in 192 4 , it is an example of a functiona lism used to erase the more doctrinaire - physically demarcatedspace making of architc ture. The bui lding, similar to the met hodology of ergci Eisen rein's film Battleship Potemkin a ' discus sed by Kossoff, makes explicit it production. Through a series of archite rural edit ' - jump cuts - a str uctu re is formed that both cmphasi: e and erases the ort hogonal. T he line 1 perce ived in the tension bet ween .t ructurc, colour and light. In the example above, we see arch itecture opening up a. part of a narrative. Rat her than simply reading books, texts and other linear forms of information-gathering about a building (or any other designed nrtefa i) , the build ing become ' known to us by walking through it. This is, if you will, a phenomenological twist to the Renaissance belief in the relationship between body, architecture and proportio n. Arch itecture gives us a clear methodology with which to explore the working of the line. From childhood 184

Lynch's film, the story of a man accused of murdering his wife, who is then jailed, only to morph into someone else, follows this immanent trail of fragmented and rhythmic linearity, one which tempts but, simultaneously denies, meaning. At the beginning of Lost Highway, the main character, Fred, hears the front doorbell ring. We see him look at the intercom. Cut to the intercom in big close-up. Fred is mysteriously informed that someone called 'Dick Laurent is dead' . He looks out the windows of his house to try and see the deliverer of this strange message. They obscure his view directly downwards. From the outside we see him staring out the windows, trapped behind the glass of his modernist house (a potent reminder of another non-linear film, Maya Deren's Meshes in the Afternoon (1943)) . Via composition, framing and the sequencing of the shots, a straight line is drawn between Fred and the intercom, but that line is then interrupted by the obtuseness of the narrative and the shots of him trying to see onto the street below. A line is also drawn between the beginning and the ending of the film. Once Peter Dayton has morphed back into Fred, and the Mystery Man and Fred have disposed of Dick Laurent, Fred returns to his house and announces in the intercom at the front door, 'Dick Laurent is dead'. The narrative line follows the inside-out line of the Mobius Strip, where identities are switched imperceptibly. How much is the line in the moving image drawn, how much is it given? The shot-countershot, the eyes of one character meeting another within the film, entrapping the spectator in their identificatory looking, is premised on an orientable 'straight-line' vision. Within Althusserian ideological terms, apparatus theory sought to condemn Hollywood, because it supposedly used the linear Renaissance perspective system of centralising the spectator, causing them to watch the film in an enraptured state of forgotten consciousness and unshackled desire. In Lynch's cinema, in contrast to say Yasijuro Ozu's films for example, the 180 degree line is

Limite d Language I Topophilia I Exposing t he line in fil m and video

drawings of a house wit h smo king chimney to sophisticated C,\1l drawings, \\'C understand

never crossed; shot and counter-shot sustain a normative consistency that serves to sust ain the audience's spatial orientation. Through careful continuity, su staining the body's orientable asymmetry, characters will always remain on the same side of the screen. On the other hand, the narrative line in Lost Highway is assured where male hysteria, based on the desire and complete control of 'woman', causes the psyche to circle round and round itself, and the line, broken as it is, is both drawn, by the narrative, and given by the deranged subject. Christian Metz;' one of the prime movers behind post-structural film theory, investigated the nature of film as a symbolic medium and a language . But theorising film as a language had its problems, namely whether there is a minimal unit or not on the level of the signifier. Perhaps another way of approaching the question of cinema as language would be to spe culate about the role of the line in the cinema, sometimes a given, somet imes possibly even actively drawn. The line occupies a space between the imaginary and the symbolic. It is that boundary that divides them and, at the same time, makes them possible; image making /writing at its beginning . The line brings the image into play, is the image itself and connects images together. The line in cinema exi sts on two levels. There is the mimetic level, that is what is seen on th e screen, the lines of represented reality, the lines inferred by camera movement, the lines designed to guide our vision of the unfolding drama or vision . And then there are the lines inherent to the technology; I'm thinking of the line that su r round s the celluloid frame, the lines, the black bars, that divide one still frame from another, to many - the life of film it self. There is a body of cinematic thinking that has focused in on what Dziga Vertov? termed the 'interval'. It 's a term that revolves around the gaps between the shots, an inherent measure of the cut, which allows one to edit in the manner of musical phrasing. The interval, the facilitator of cinematic movement itself, also occurs, if one follows Vertov's thinking, within the shot, in terms

the relationsh ip bet ween line and form . However, the origina l text by Kossoff develops b yond natural associations be tween line and form and, in doing so, presses a new '0 " bu tton - words and associations and how they influe nce our creative thin king. T hink of the desktop metaphor/symbol and how it tra nsformed the way we relate to our computer? It's the essence of the office desktop tra nsferred to a digi tal environment. This is an example of how visual symbolism ca n translate, or conceal, technology and become a genera tive model for creative ou tput. Semiotics descri bes how words and as .ociatcd meanings are arbitrary: dog = furry four legged friend (and not a cat), for inst ance, is a cult urally defined assoc iat ion . T his arbitrariness leads to an uns tab le language. Mean ing might be fixed to time as much as anyt hing. Thus symbols, whether a red rose or a revolutionary Cuban hero, are in flux - meaning det ach and reform as time passes - so a revolu tio nary figu re like Ernesto " he" Guevara can come to represen t anti-authorita rianism in general, or equally, a decorative element on a T-shirt which appeals to the fashion-conscious. This to-ing and [ro-ing of meaning is at the centre of our se miological consctousncss.' Design (and desig n thin king) appropriates and remi xes the visua l world unti l 'all this noise begins to mean some thi ng'.' I ew meaningls] become visible in t his mixing process. In this way, design funct ions to fulfi l Mau r ice Mcrlcau-Ponty's comment abo ut 'meaning ar ising at the edge of signs'.' T his creative clement of meaning-making is capt ured in Roland Barrhes' essay The

lmaqinati on of the S iqn, where he delineates upon t he c reat ive possibility of the imagination in c reati ng the sign: 111e...irnagination no longer ee. the sign in its perspective, it foresees it in its extension : its antecedent or con equent links, the brid ges

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it extends to other signs...hence the dynamics of the image here is that of an arrangement of mobile, substitutive part. , whose combination produces meaning, or more generally a new object; it is, then, a strict ly [abricative or even functional imagination.'; The original article picks up the dynamic. of the scratch as an extension of the line; as Kossoff puts it, t he most ignored event in the hi. tory of cinema. The . crutch c xi: ts, but is dormant, in t he phenomenological cxpe ricnce of cinema . A cinematic experience described by iegfricd Kracauer in the 1 9 2 0 S as 'fra zmcntcd sequence of splendid sen. c impression .., where 'The stimula tions of the sense -succeed each ot her with such rapidity that t here is no room for even t he slightest contemplation to squeeze in between them ." He invokesa spectator weaned on narrative and, more pe if ally, the spectacle. The scratch, as such, was tech nological, aberra nt and invisible. With analogue technology, such invisibility is cu ltura lly conditio ned (the line and t he scratch are there, we are simply schooled not to see t hem). For instance, the pi turc plane 'is requ ired to he read a mute and empty of cha racteristics, over and above tha t requ ired to allow line cent re stage as the apparent site of all meaning'." Today, in a digita l world of CIlS, \ tI' 3 S , Il \ IlS and Blue-ray, technological production is literally invisible. Thi. provides a dcscnsiused sonic or vi ual experience where mechanics are largely replaced by algori thms. t\. I.ucy Kimbell, in New Medi« A rc comment : 'Computers arc "chameleons" capable of combining media, sampling, morphing appea rance, and working in invi: iblc ways'.' The in teasing invisibility of technological produc tion creates a need for a visible ontology of product ion, in such a scenario t he scratch becomes a trace of authenticity. The scratch has become t he pixellatcd image in the digital world. And finally, the cratch emulates a patina of use and authentication; it provides t he provenance of its techno logical herit age.

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of a change in emphasis in the camera movement, for example. The idea of the interval was important amongst st ru ct ur al filmmakers, for example Tony Conrad, whereby cinema stressed its materiality and its rhythms via the idea of the flicker film . In Hollis Frampton's (Nostalgia) (1971) one is forced to contemplate the lines in the image and the edges of the images, amidst the self-containing temporality of the interior spaces of memor y. The horizontal lines in video usually reveal themselves when the image is re-filmed or re-photographed. I'm not qualified to pass comment on High Definition video, albeit to say that it's higher in its definition because it uses many more lines per image. Mobile phone videos are of such low quality that they have an aesthetic of their own, one of blocked out space s, jumpy and pixelated; images with a peculiar lining. But the most obvious point of contact with th e line, when watching a film, is th e edges of the frame . Thi s line that demarcates the image is supposed to remain invisible, demarcating the space of the screen, allowing the flat plane of the image to be transcribed into a three-dimensional space . Which brings me to the most ignored event in the history of cinema: th e scratch on the film. The scratch, usually vertical but sometimes horizontal depending on how the dam age is done, is largely invisible, apart from the odd experimental film that has drawn attention to this 'material inscription'. Unfortunately, digiti sing and transferring to DVD mark th e natural end to this celluloid enemy th at has, in its time, served to 'authenticate' many a documentary film or archive footage . This is the line, sometimes even drawn before our eyes by a poorly maintained projector, that marks the limits of the image, th e materiality of film, that leaves scars and mementos of the passage of time on an object that is primarily mimetic and archival. Sadly, as cinema dies, so does the scratch (and other miscellaneous marks), Recent thinking has misspent a lot of energy on refuting the straight line and linearity; the straight line represents a form of incarceration. Gilles Deleu ze in

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Riet veld balcony. The Scbroder House by Gerrit Riet veld (1924).

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his Cin ema rand 2 (r986 and 1989)3celebrates the time-image of post-war realism and Eur opean art hou se cinema, arguing that it utilised the non-linearity of the Bergsonian concept of t ime. There are many issues th at one could take up with the Deleuzian theory of the cinema and time, where the line, perhaps a spat ialising term, undeservedly suffers. The line in the cinema, the scratch, a drawn line in an animation film or early abstract cinema, cau ses the surface of the screen to become apparent and so disturbing the assumed depth of the moving image. The line br ings to th e fore cinema as a technics - th e line t hat emerges from the surface of the screen foregrounds the pro cess of viewing itself and reveals the spat ial materiality of th e medium. Walt er Benjamin wrote th at the graphic line is 'determined by its opposition to the su rface'.' Thi s lead s towards an understanding of my own work, Train Lines (2008) and Chalk Lines (2009) for example, where the line provides the sat isfact ion of bringing together a recogn ised absence in the present; a melancholi c pleasure that the line is in a po sit ion to acknowledge as well as a mapp ing of immanence, whereby th e viewing experience is one of sensory accumulation made visible, where the line draws on the int er val between th e surface and th e dee p space of the moving image, See furt her image s her e w w w.lim itedl anqua qe.orq / imaqes

Reference s See for instance, Chr isti an Met z, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New Yor k: Oxford Universit y Press, 1974), 2

The idea of the interval appears across a range ofVer tov 's writin g. See Dziga Vertov, 'We:Variant of a Man ifesto' in Anne tte M ichelson (ed.),

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Kino-Eye; The Writings of Dziga Vertov (Berkeley: Pluto: 1984), 9. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema /: The Movement-Image (London: At hlone Press, 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-lmeqe (London: At hlone Press,

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Walte r Benjam in, Painting, or Signs and MarKS, Selected Writings

1989), t ranslate d by H. Toml inson and B, Habberjarn. (Cambr idge, MA: Harvard Universit y Press, 1996),83,

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Limi ted Language I Topophil ia I Expos ing the line in fi lm and video

Tom McCart hy

Soft form

Report from the Hawk-Eye camera I

Some months ago, it was suggested by the Corporation of London that the best way of de alin g with t he pigeons

Iuhiple camt:ras. montaged . creen • manifold

per. pectivc ': the most ubiquitous example

of t hi. is ccrv , where record ings are collated

fou ling the high-r ise on the twelfth floor of which t he Int ernat ional Necronautical Society ( INS) has its HQ was to drape netting over the whole buildin g, cap-a-pied . Having spent a year researching th e hist ory of ca rtog-

by police to con truer how a cr ime unfolds.

raphy with a view to mapping death, researching this

frame to ta ke in the way a surveil lan e opera-

hist ory in all its details, from the var iations bet ween M ercator, Petersen and Polar Gnom oni c map pro jections to t he question of graticule to inst ances of blank and one-to-one sca le map s (Lewis Carrol's oe uv re is awash with these) -INS staff were int rigued by the pro sp ect of having a grid sq ua re superi mposed over their splendi d view of the world's great est city. Th ey were, however, even more appa lled by the thou ght of working in what would effective ly become a cage, and lobb ied the Co rpo rat ion t o opt for an alte rn ative method of pigeon cont rol. The INS has agents everywhere, and always gets its way. Arms were t w isted , favou rs were called in, and as a resu lt t he building now enjoys t wice-weekly visits from two hawks . Ar riving in a Van Vynck van and launched from t he leat her-gloved fore arm s of th eir keepers, t hese aus te re birds patrol t he skies above Golden Lane Estat e, strangely anac hronist ic among the mod ernist fibre-glass and concrete as they sweep and turn in arcs and semicircles, Yeatsian gyres . Perh aps th ey're copyi ng the markings on t he tennis cou rts , across whose su rface netball game-space codes are also t aped , t he overlay producing end less ta ngents, radii and incomplet e circumferences, as on the tax i-ways of airpor ts . The st ude nts on t he four floors of the Italia Conti Danc e school d irectl y oppos ite HQ (an INS staff job has it s perk s) seem to be copying th e hawks as th ey spin and pirouette. So, too, do the small aero planes th at bank above G olden Lane to begin their descent into C ity A irp ort. O ccasionally the hawks will break t heir pattern t o plummet, thunderbolt-like, on a

Wit hin t he Treen, moving images emphasi c the development of e\'ents - narrative - O\'er time . 'ow, imagine panning back out from t he to r pre ide over a ba nk of screens. T his offer ' several perspectives on t he same moment. In anot her exa mple, picture someone chec king their mobile phone, its screen a grid of tra fficcam views streamed live from t he requested route they're about to travel. In the original article, 'Ibm McC art hy map out many more such encounter ', In all these oc urrences, the exper ience of space is transformed. Any old ideas about singular experience and continuou

pace

become untenable: the self divides and space become. discontinuous. I low to reopond' One respon c is tc hnophilia, a f t i shisation of technology for it own sake - Sat av galore . Another response i. a en. e of loss. In a rep ly to the article, Hele n Walker asks: 'Double vi ion, all vision, is life only complete when acce: ed from all angle '; \Vh) the thrill

wh n life moves from one creen into our own

screen of \ i Ion: What happens in bet ween ...:'1 Walker is inte rested in what t ime has elapsed, what events go un-record ed . Alt hough she's right to draw attention to the gap, what 's missing i irrelevant. The t hing that affects us is the rupture it elf. In another mediation, that Simon (a lotorola owne r) draws attention to on the Limited Language webs ite, i Danny Baker discu ing the 'C u r 'e of the Phone Cameras'! in The Times: 'lootball ground are getting quieter and the rea on

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One feedback loop we all partici pate in is govern ment survei llance : CCTv. A m ixture of street violence, post 9/11 parano ia and regu lat ing car tr affi c, means many cou ntries have seen an expans ion of survei llance in urban areas. It has produc ed an indust ry of resista nce online and on the street. Banksy, London (2008).

nil 1\ it fan in Br ituin now me to capture even

flock of pigeons, one of whom the y'll off pour encourager les aut res . It is an awesome specta cle. No sooner had the INS installed it s hawks th an parli ament followed suit . Since Janu ary Van Vynck birds have been keeping the exteri or of the deb at ing chambe rs and Big Ben pigeon-dirt fre e. During mu ch of th is period hawks have been out gu nning doves inside th e building also as th e govern me nt prep ared the approach-route to war against Iraq . Parli ament is clea rly visible from INS HQ, its left tow er cut int o t angents by th e giant Briti sh Airways wheel known as The London Eye. The whole city is visible from INS HQ. During the huge ant i-war demonstration in February it was suggest ed that the INStrack and document the movement of police and news helicopters over London's airspace, but thi s proved impracticable as our own machinations had depri ved us of a window grid-square within which to do so. Nonetheless, matching helicopters visible to the naked eye's hor izontal plane with the overhead images that alternated wit h the worm's-eye ones on the TV set inst alled below the racked INSfiles turned out to be interestin g. When the wa r proper star ted, the st unning visuals transmitted to the same set by camer as attached t o bomb s inspi red us to sta rt lobbying th e Corporation once again. Th is t ime we were demanding hawk-cams on the birds, wit h images relayed via a server t o the laptop scree ns of subscribers in G olden Lane Esta te , or, for th at matter, worldw ide . Nature do cumentari es provide this facility already; viewers can exp er ience vica riously the pleasure of an Andean eagle's swoop and snatching of a rabb it or an African lion's ru sh and savaging of a gazelle. What neither nature documentaries nor CNN war footage yet provide is the reverse-angle shot , th e victim's point of view - but this is perfectly feasible. Nick a gazelle's thigh muscle or slightly dope a rabbit so as to render it odds-on to fall prey to it s pursuer, strap a small Sony to it s flank and, hey-presto! - gazelle-cam. Give a sp y coordinates for you r next target and you could recoup exp enditure on bombs by selling bunker or

the mo. t routine inc idcnt during a mate h on their rotten mobile phon cameras. r\ for penaliu-s.just ake a look at the toward-goal angle of a pc t ki k th next time one I tel I l j Behind the net, behold the ohd \ all of lokra nuuornpoops. Thou and of rude I lunauc ,not e peri ncme the real world 111 front of them, but collecung It preciou I, \ ia a murky I in 1111 l reen. I ha c a Iru-n I who actuallv rne: not to zct too c arncd ,1\ .l when a goal go" 111 because he dl e n't I .mt to 10 l the Irammg on lu hot ." Within the stadium . the loss of the crowd's roar is ana logous to a 10 " of authenticity. There's no irony for Baker that he asks his readership to wit ness suc h inauthent icity via the 'toward -goal' shot on T V; the cur c of their ca meras long absorbed ... T hese mult iplicat ions and the e xperience of division, of splitting, are not the preserve of t he technological age. In M ell ill Space? Tom M arthy's second novel, Anton Markov, a refugee, sits in a Prague cafe watching events before him rendered in triplicate by wall-mounted mirror '. 'Looking at the mul tiplying ·ce ne. Anton recalls his [football] refereeing day in Bulgaria: the trick wa: to see all the near -identical shirt " repeated runs, sudden departures. witches and loopbacks a: one . ingle movement, part ' of a modulating sy. tern which you had to watch as though from outside. or abov " or somewhere else.' Mu h ipli at ions. loops. replay - these rupt u res are n't a problem for Anton; they are the substa nce of the world.' T he d iscontin uity of space is add ressed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production 0/Space. l ie suggests we might think of 'layers of spa ce" like flaky pastry, rather t han the uni fied space we might more u ually talk about. First printed in 1974, this provided a philo soph i al challenge, now visibly compounded by bank ' of creens, to the unifying logic of Cartesian per .pect ive with it centred eye whi h ha provided the dominant way of conceptual» in ' pace and . ubjcc tivity in the

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Make'n 'Shoot! WiFi Camera Obscura workshop by Sengt Sjolen and A dam Somlai Fischer w it h Usman Haque (2006 ~ ongoing).

Radiography print s can be crea ted to reveal the various net wor ks visible wit hin a space as you move by.

West, from the Rcnai sance through Le Corbu ier. t\ line can he drawn from Leonardo da Vinci's \li/rlwiml Mall" to the Corhusian conception of the body as a hosp-cam pies to the world's media. We wanted pig-cam: hawk-cam, pig-cam, and the ability to switch between the two at will. Our moles within the Corporation tell us that the proposition is unlikely to succeed so we are currently approaching the Arts Council of Great Britain, who tend to go more for this kind of thing. Parliament sits to the left side of INS HQ'S ungridded window. To the right is Lord's Cricket Ground. I mention this fact not because during the five-day long Test Matches played there you can also match blimps and helicopters with the TV images they transmit (which you can), but rather because media coverage of cricket is one step ahead of everything else. While Formula One racing has embedded cameras in drivers' helmets, cricket's tech-boys have managed to worm these into the very stumps at which the bowler aims . It's hard to avoid flinching when, each time a batsman is clean-bowled, the tragedy is replayed through the stump-cam. Stump-cams have been in operation ever since Channel Four took over television coverage of cricket from the more sedate sse . Along with these came the snickometer, a device which uses a visually-rendered sound-line to determine whether or not a passing ball has touched the bat before being caught by the wicket-keeper (if it has the batsman's out). Best of all cricket's new visual plug-ins, though, is the system known as 'hawk-eye'. Available both on TV and over the Internet either in real-time or as an archive, hawk-eye allows you to sort deliveries by pitch, speed, movement off the ground and consequence, and to view results in a variety of display modes, from 'normalised past stumps' to 'wagon-wheel'. Hanging beside this data on the webpage, as beside parliament, is the station's logo; a large eye made of spokes . Perhaps it's no coincidence that Channel Four also hosts Big Brother. Cartographers of event-space tend to be continental thinkers: Virilio, Lyotard, Blanchot, Badiou - essentially sub-Heideggerian phenomenologists. It never ceases to amaze me that these people (not being British Commonwealth subjects) have never been exposed to

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module that spa e should wrap arou nd.... and it. resulting ar hire tu rc which would/should hapc, even rat ionalise, experien e. Many pra titioners have challenged this logic. In Far From Equilibrium, Sanford Kwinter hi hlight architects like Rem Koolhaa and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro for whom: The logic that determines our routine of inhab iting the world [are] seen to exis t at the level of bu ildings on ly in the mo. t secondary of ways." for t hem, one of t he pri mary influen e. on our behaviou r are these tec hnologies of vi 'ion - from t he eye to the s recn . T he pcr for mat lve effects of ca meras can be seen in TV 's /lig Brother , where people living in a hou e are filmed 24/ 7 for a national audience and, with each series, t heir behaviour ha become increasingly biza rre . Perforrnativity becomes a point of e..ploration for Rem Koolhaas in his use of ubiquitous recn - in the Prada Epicentre store.' In t he hanging room pla rna screen are built into mirror so cu .tomers can capture and playback images of thcmselve trying lethe on. RIIIJ taAAing provide ' a darabased inventory of clothes and . 0 the experience an be extended to their website where cus tomers can access a 'history' of all the clothes ever tried on . Back in t he hanging room, t he doors are made of gla s with a liq uid crystal film which becomes opaque to the tou ch . Like a t wo-way mirror, you can . ee ou t, but do you t rust t he technology th at t hey ca n't see you? Total cnte rrain mcnr/toral survci llan e?" Eithe r way, it' a paradigmatic examp le of how 'humans are invariably the prey caug ht in an ecstasy of self watch ing'." And it ce rtainly compounds Koolhaas' insight, 't hat it i oft form, not hard, that bear ' the maximum of active tru ture'." , oft form ' incorporate net worked onne uon s between creens, . atellites,. ervcrs, websncs, databases, d istribution sy. terns 193

etc. It al ' 0 includes their articulated connections : to advcrt i: ing, branding, merchandise, ad infinitum. We might more readily think of this as infrastructure. Of course Modernists always understood infrastructure to be important: subways, rnotorways, sewage systems, distribution hubs etc. Today, it's not only the extent of the soft form that 's different but its relative instability: fluctuations, interferences... Taken as a whole, advertising and branding have inserted themselves more consciously into thi realm. The problem with advertising is that it seek: to loop the effects back to its own ends - Love Prada, Love Big Brother... For instance, although it was mooted on the Limited Language website that camera's 'worms-eye view' has the potential to subvert a dominant view, once integrated into the infrastructure such potential is equally easily lost, with multiple views compounding, not subverting, each other. When design ends up glorifying the technology and reproducing the zeitgeist, Kwimcr calls .t his thillfmstruc/lIre. ' 2 A more robust approach, he suggests, is for architects and designers to engage with infrastructure as research . That is, not just fcushisc. but understand it: its brute materiality, the effects and how we might account for irs consequences. Can 't this ethos be seen in the work of the burgeoning new 'research labs: Just two examples are the affiliated Kitchen Bud,lpl.'st 11 and Aetlu-r l\ rchitl.'l.tun-!' who explore the effects of converged communication and urban spar . For instance, in one project by Kitchen Budapest, walking by a wall projection, makes hanging dolls, dressed in designer clothes, mimic your movements. In another, Acihcr Architecture use !ViF; Cameras - hand-made. using familiar materials - to capture the Wi-Fi networks and radio signals to play them back as live images. But it remains to ask what or how this acts a research. Invariably 'research' - or simple experimentation - becomes literalis cd, for commercial ends. What's interesting is the

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cricket. The game is the most precise mise-en-scene their thought could ever hope for. It's about repetition, information, geometry, history, stylised violence. How can Badiou understand Beckett without realising how indebted the latter's plays and novels are to cricket, from the stones that Molloy circulates between his pockets (the trick umpires use to keep track of the number of balls bowled in an over) to Hamm's insistence that he be placed in exactly the right position, shifting first a little right and then a little left (the scene is modelled on a batsman taking his mark) to Clov's slow intuition that, even though not much action ever seems to happen, nonetheless 'something is taking its course? On the top of Lords, ninety degrees round from the new media stand, is a weathercock depicting Father Time, a crook-backed old man with a scythe. It gently turns beneath the curved vapour trails that light up when the sun descends towards the horizontal axis as each day progresses, reminding the more astute spectators what the philosophers already know; that all space -based events (and what other type is there?) play themselves out beneath the sign of death. Two summers ago I was sitting in IIQ transcribing for the INS archive an interview with the post-Situationist artist Stewart Home about the nature of the spectacle while simultaneously watching the Test Match on TV and glancing out of my window to see if any rain clouds were nearing the stadium. From behind the London Eye, two massive brown Chinook helicopters rose and started heading north. George Bush was visiting the Queen that day. 'It's him,' I thought. I tracked them as they swept hawk-like above the city, then, when they passed the blimp above Lords, looked back at the TV There they were on the screen, being tracked from the ground camera. 'President George Bush,' the scrolling text announced. Moments later, a rain cloud loomed above the stadium and play stopped. To fill the air-time, Channel Four showed a previous match - one I myself had attended.

Lim ited Language / Topophilia / Report f rom the Haw k-Eye c amera

I'd started out in the cheap seats but had eventually managed to make phone cont act wit h an INS associate who I knew was being entertained by the Lords Treasurer. The associate invited me to join him in the Treasurer's box , where liveried waiters served cu cumber sandwiches, cakes and champagne, Towards the end of playa Pakistani bat sman hooked a rising ball that started heading straight for ou r box. It cont inued rising, hitting the apex of its curve as it passed high above the boundary rope, and as it did I realised th at it was head ing not only st raight toward s th e box but, more pre cisely, directl y for me. I stood up to catch it. Now, back in HQ, as Home rep eat ed electronically the phrase 'the spectacle is the order of power', I watched on the TV what I had already experienced from the reverse angle: myself flinching and closing my eyes and the ball kinking at the final insta nt, missing me and smashing int o the neatl y-ordered t rays and glasses, cakes and sandw iches. Collateral damage, I suppose . While well-groomed lad ies and gentle men all dived for cover; cream came showering down onto th eir upturned legs, like so much pigeon crap.

way that the development of these tcchnologies - thi. infrastructure - i~ usc-led. This differ ' from police or retail operations which tend to loop their effects back to a particular end. Whil t Aether Architecture wish 'to expose the invi ihle "information landscape" of today's urban and pub lic environment ' , ')< when they release details of how to make their WiFi cameras 1I. ing old pea-e ms on t heir website, a new opportunity to ask 'what for?' opens up for each new usc, Sef-· ,.j Ile ~ r)l)1 se... • ("d rr . 't n: ' n, .': c C.h"O:N4_~

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Limited Language J Topopbilia

I Report from the Hawk- Eye cam era

Lim ited Language

Kodak moments and Nokia digits

Used condoms and forgotten names 'l found a used condom under the bed' reads

The photograph, t he journey and the travelogue are the tr ad itional tr iumvirate of the holiday experience. But how do we evaluate the memory today. How do we capture it? The Gree ks first listed the Seven Wond ers of the World. ' These were icons which celebrat ed religion, power, art and science and served to dem arcat e the Mediterranean landsc ape from the uncivilised world beyond . Now, th e Seven Wonders include the Taj Mahal and The Pyramids. A recent add it ion to one version of the list is the Eurotunnel. This wonder, wh ich cannot be seen, is phenomenological. That's to say, the experience is the travelling through. Indeed, the way the Eurotunnel only be com es 'visible' for us once it fails, acts as a metaphor for contemporary travel. For tourist travel to be successfu l, the speed and comfort of th e trip is paramount. Inconvenience must be minimised . The bump and grind of t he jou rney is skipped over in travel-brochure tourism, in favou r of the attract ions at the other end . In luxu ry travel, it is smoothed by the attract ions on board : Internet access, full wait ress-service and the rest . With bargain-bucket air travel, one might say th at th e idea a journey's worth anything has d isappeared . And yet, doesn't easy travel feed nostalgia for the days when 't he passage' used to be, in someway, special? Tod ay, travel is made up from units of consumpt ion, from the t ourist 's Duty Free shop to the way off-thebeaten-track traveller s say they have 'done' a count ry, as if ticking it off a shopping list. Th is collapse of A to B, is a modem phenomenon. In par t it is explained by the 'con stant now' of today's living and the speed of distance t ravelled. In part by the way identity, ritual and artefact have all become mobile, often spliced with whichever economic environ they find

a review of a hotel in the West

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England; one of twenty review. for the hotel on an Internet di count-booking site whose by-line is, 'Happy exploring!' This is one site amongst hundreds, one review among thousands. This i a rather graphi example of how trave l is e..perienccd today. \Ve arrive at our destination with the experience already part indexed: travel a. archive. The cybcr traveller, or virtually enhanced touri: t [vrr}' increasingly replaces the 'armchair tourist ': the cognitive reader has been usurped by a corporeal, but pre-packaged experience . John Urry in a seminal text, The Tourist Gaze? idenufie the multifarious nature of the touri. t and comment. on the impossibility of identifying a unified notion of the travellet Thi i. particularly true as the idea of travelling ha: become another product of our globalised commodity culture. The photographer Michael Hughes unites the commodity with the gaze in his work. Ill' reates photographs, usually of kits h tourist artefacts: a model of the Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel Tower et . Ill' photographs these souvenirs in front of the real building or object conllating the real and the artefact . Thi is a proces that undermines (or underlines"] the process of rcremembering: the role of the tourist artefact. In one image, Hughe hold up the en .ase of The B atles' Abbey Road! album, so

t hemselves in. Arguably, it is now impossible to experience 'anew'

that the infamou cover image of the four

the places we visit . The anthropologist James Clifford, in

in Au ust 1969, animates the contemporary

triding over the Abbey Road eros ing, taken treet cape. Today this zebra eros : ing is a touri t de . tination in it. elf, and you can 'visit ' the spot your elf 24/7, from anywhere in the world, via the

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Souvenirs Little mementos from big tourist attractions around the W'orld. . Photoeraphy by Nith... HII..... DeUcned and published by ,..,.. Printed by o.n....,io" .-r. ...

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Loreley cl iffs on t he Rhine near Mainz in Germa ny (1999). Souvenir proj ect Concept and photo graphs by Michael Hughes. Present at ion booklet design by fi vefo ots ix.

For Il ugh 'S , hi - work is a way of saying; "Look at this t hing in front of you, it used to

The Predicament a/Culture, writes: 'An older topography and experience of travel is exploded. One no longer leaves home confident of finding something radically new, another time or space.'2 Previously he had pointed out that the 'exot ic' is uncannily close . So, the European eye which once unpicked the fabric of foreign lands such as India, Africa or The Middle East, can now experience the 'authentic' at home. Local market stalls, grocery aisles and the Discovery Channel all provide the contemporary exotic... That the aesthetic of travelling is now pre-experienced is also due to the legacy of cinema, advertising and early zoth century photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson. Bresson's black and white photographs made icons of Mexico, New York, London and Paris. We might say that these were all delineated into simple tones and shapes. Later photographers, advertising and film have added local colour to form the composite now transferred to anything we look at on our travels. Travelling is always about looking. And whilst this provides a constant train window of change, with the tourist brochure photograph or the snap-shot, the temporal nature of change that is the crux of travel is frozen. It is replaced by a series of representations of 'I am here'. Clock towers, feats of engineering, historic relics all become stereotypical representations which confirm and sustain understanding of any given place. Photography, from social index [travel broadens the mind) to confirmation of ritual [can we have the bride and groom here please?') to captioning experience Cit's a Kodak moment), lost its claims to objectivity long ago. If we accept this prepackaged summation of the photograph, both politically and aesthetically, what now? Increasingly we see people with a camera-phone that, on taking a picture, gives the option [send?] before [save?]. This conflates the digital realm of email (data flow) with the more temporal (and analogue) photo album. And so a woman, being pulled along by a crowd, holds the camera phone high to capture for herself what she is missing. This provides a new perspective of the

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have a function, it was part of a town and used to have a purpose but it's now just a sign that everyone look at and plays around with ." It has no meaning other than the fact it's visually important." However, he is wary of cliti m, whi h h also spies in the original ar ti I .' For Hughes, it's a conllation of the critical po: ition with a respect for 'the way people put meaning in their lives by associating the mselves with t hing they know ot her people have .ec n,' where, 'everyone has a right to feel that their lives have been meaningful'," O ne cr itici .rn of John Urry (and contemporary t heory in gene ral) is it s priv ileging of th e vis ual. T his csse nualising of the visual is quest ioned by Ge mma O we n in a reply to the original article: ' '0, I '0, it is not Just about the seeing, it 's about the smelling, the touch ing, the lu-armg...the feeling . And be sides, ever y travelling cxp r icncc is different. ' Thi more ensory element of t he trav eller is part of what ha b 'en called the 'immers ive' typology of the touri. t . Andre Jansson, in the article '/\ Sen e of Tourism ', look. at the changing role of the Western tourist in a II Ired world and identifies four typologies: imrner: ill', adventurous, traditional and performauvc . The adventurer has a te nuo us link to real adventure, following instead t he route of packaged 'ad ve nt u re holiday . ' and often relying upon the photograph to au thenticate the adve nture, t he encounte r wi th t he exotic. In a Europea n context the 'adven turous spirit' would seem to emu late t he Victorian not ion of the ex plorer as adventure hero. A pos t-colon ial critique has ident ified one effect as t he co lonisation and cro t icisau on of di [fcrcnce. In contra t , the immersive trave ller is more prone to look for in lusivit y, want ing to ernhra c difference. Connecting II ith the . urrounding: of hi / he r travel s and to be ccn a the .ame and equal , The irnmcr ivc travel ler is le: s likely to document the experience

199

with the photogra ph or other d igital media but rather, rely on the ora l t rad itions of story telling and anecdote. This might simply be keeping a journal, which beco mes a 'p riceless ouven ir on the return home. However, in doing this they st ill can't help bu t place t he exper ience of t he enco unte r in t he framework of 'one's own society'. The tradit ional to urist will literally make t he transference of normal socia l patterns of home, to a holiday resort. Here, personal photographs of friends and family enjoying themselves document the holiday. The traditional holidaymaker will make usc of the place where, already : 'the countries or holiday destinations have pinpointed a specific place for the best photo, lor] "photo opportunities...." The emphasis in thi s comment from j lathalie Francis is not on new experience and the encountering of difference, but on relaxation. TIle performative tourist is an extension of the traditional typology but the variant is the need to engage with a more pub lic narrative of 'being on holiday'. This will include the usc of technology to document the experience such as mobile phones with text and picture me saging often uploaded onto video and social networking : ites. It is a narrative that is relayed 'live' via phone or Internet. This presents a 'co-ordination of ocial activities within the tourist setting, and the desire to immediately narrate and share memorable moments and bodily performances with family, friends, and potentially a wider audience'." The more sexualised version of t he performative tourist is the 18-30 holiday. The Club ,8 -3° website comme nts: 'Club 18-30 is what the summe r is all about. Best mates. All in one place. No ties. No responsibilities. 0 work for a couple of weeks. Warm waters. I\ot sun. Cool tunes . G reat clubs. TIle ult imate holiday experience..: It continues: There comes a time in life when you need to do it for yourse lf. A time to break free, break rules and break the mould. To exp lore, leave the map at home and find 200

scene to be assimilated into the individual's experience. The mobile phone has become an extension of ourselves, a sixth digit between thumb and index finger. Is this the closest we have come to media theorist Marshall Mcl.uhan's 1960s prophecy of technology becoming a natural extension to the body?" The camera has always been hailed as a mechanical eye, yet you might hand it to a passer-by to t ake your picture in front of the Taj Mahal. With a camera phone , would you do that? The low-pixels hardly lend themselves to the iconic photo, but it also feels as if there is also something else going on. It's the personal relation ship we have with the mobile phone which, when coupled with a camera and an Internet connection, requires a very different unde rst anding of the per sonal photograph . Intimate and transient, it is as lacking in fidelity as memory. The fact that the mobile phone photograph is completely different from a traditional photograph is important because this ep istemological split is mirrored in how travel is often per ceived; as if we were moving from photograph to photograph... See f urt her images here www. lim itedla nguage.orgj images

References The Seven Wonders of th e A ncient World was based on guidebooks popular among Hellenic (Greek) t ourist s and only incl udes works located around the Medit erranean rim, construct ions of cla ssical ant iquity. 2 James Clifford, The Predicam ent of Culture (Cambridge. MA : Har vard Un iversity Press, 1988). 3 See Marshall McLuhan, Und erst and ing Media: The Extens ions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hili, 1964).

Limited Language

I Topophilia I Kodak moment s and Nokia digit s...

yourself. To find that one moment and make it lu t a lifetime . That time is now. unrisc to sunset. unset to sunri .e. This i the time of your life. l.ove every .inglc .econd of it. '1ll The emphasis i. on hedonism rather than place . Digital technology extends the .ocial networks of home to the new/same place . of touri m: lhiza, Koh arnui or Blackpool . The pcrforrnatlvc tourist is born out of a digit-

ally mediated world. t\ narrative i produced, not of travel but instant experience without refle tion .

0

ial networking site. enable a

continuous . tream of communication whit h is placeles: , if not timeless. The tourist gaze ha. become a refugee, exiled by narcissism ," reverie and digital ornmunication. The pcrformative tourist thus described counters the premise put forward by Urry in The Tourist Gaze that 'When we "go away" we look at the environment with interest and curiosity...we gaze at what we encounter,'! ' The \ 1.1 arrives without curiosity, but rather, a bag full of expectations (...of condom ?). This is informed by the narrative which mix . ocial net working sites like Facebook with Lonely Planet travel guides. '? Consumption with The ultimate holiday experience... See full responses ~ carryon

e can ersa Ion here

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Reader credits Gemma Owen 13/12/2005 - Gernn a precedes he POint With trus: 'I'm gOing 0 have to say I d saqree on he fact that t~e aestbetic of travelling is pre sxpenenced due to tI e legacy of cinema and tI

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Nathalie Francis 16/12/2005

III Gemma Owen 13/12/2005- For instance: ·.. .only today I had a picture sent to me by a "end asking my thoughts 0 her new haucut. which got me thinklng ...does this new age of communicat ion too ls promote narcrss ist tc values?' Referen

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The sacred and the holy In the modern metropolis, arch itecture is oft en employed to mask death. This happens either through its formal language, metaphor or simple physical opacity. It leaves only an anthropological vestige - a ghost - of ritual and performance in the 'absolut e space' of cemetery landscapes. The visceral burial pits of earl ier times (and diseases) are, if still present at all, now formal neo-classical gardens! or part of an analogue database of 'parish records: burial registers, vestry minutes, and churchwardens' accounts'." The increasing forces of secularisation have transfigured the urban environment. The r zth century outbreak of the Plague in London is an example of the t emporal clash between modernity and tradition, secular government and religion. Here, the 'popular attachment to traditional practices: the indi vidu al funeral and interment, in which the family played an important role' were in conflict with the 'Plague Orders...which aimed t o restrict public assemblies and processions'.' This collision bet ween the new Plague Orders, which advocated immed iate burial, and society's need for 'commemoration' represents a process where Governments began to exert power over societ ies through legislation and administrat ion. Th is was a practice th at was particularly effective in the realm of health and the Polis." Historical place is equally susceptible to change. Richard Sennett in The Cons cience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities? eloquently explores how the grid is used in American urban de sign to erase past histories and sacred spaces; a clean sheet, literally. In European cities new burial sites are bani shed from the centre to the periphery of modern life. In part, th e Romantic Movement is a correct ion to the rationalising force s of modernity (Enlightenment thinking). In the r Sth century one witnesses a transference of the sublime, the infin ite and a sense of awe from

Transient urban spaces Modernity ha kraaled ac red pace II1to par ti .ular : aru tinned place like the cemetery. In contra t, in the original piece, Ground Zero in I 'ell York after 9

I I

became a paradigm

for the temporary . acred space. Del eloping on from rhis idea, here we look at the way contemporary urban culture has reintroduced the idea of a transient holy or , acrcd space into everyday experience. In part, this is inspired by white bikes - literally old hikes, painted white - which hale . tartcd to appear by the sides of roads where cyclists haw died. Called 'ghost hikes', the} form part of a coordinated anion from Au. tria to i 'cw Zealand, Thi. piece explore ' h011 sacred spaces are being created which both intervene in the urban landscape and provid an interstice for political action. In this in .tance it's bike afety, but this can also be een in the markings used to reaffirm idcntit} in the ca . e of gang-a..sociated violence. Writing from the

I K,

over the last year

it 's hard to ignore the media attention given

to

knife' crime in inner citie -, London especially. Thi has accompanied the increasing visibility of locations of fatal car crashes, hit-and-run accident and gang violence. As happens elsewhere, ea h place is demarcated with tributes to the VIctim whereby flowers, notes, mementos and articles of clothing are tied to lampposts and road railings. There were twenty-fin' stabbing fatalities in London in

2008 . '

The victim. of stahbing

fatalities are, more often than not, young male teenager. who have either belonged

to

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biography of the victim . patially, the ite are often in area like 51 'era' ocle

207

high streets around niuhtcluhs and late night eatene \\ here natural surveillance is minimal,

If not ah cnt , thus 'est aping informal social control'. In a ccnsus ol urban street g,lIlgs in the 1920 , 0 iologists lrom the Chicago School found g,mgs were prevalent in the 'interstitial' itc: of the city. This is a spatial observation

1I1i relevant today. lur thcrmorc, neighbourhood that ufter gang \ iolcnce are linked to areas of 'social disoruanizat ion.' It these boundaries that t rime

IS

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n hin

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part of a perforrnativc relationship bet \\een authority and peer group, \\ here the 'cxcncment , even ccstasv (the ubandonrncm of rca on and rationale J.

the goal of the performance'

I

andv t iu-rncnt Is dircc t" related to the breakIllgof boundaries. of contronung parameters an I plm mg at the rnargm of ocial lifc', lollov, iru; Ill' tfJged~ of eac h siabbtng. a u-rnporarv Olt upation of the murder ccne L \\ it ne

ed, The houndar les, onarnall, marked

h\ the polite t rime cene tape, are replaced h\ the portable and

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not th tran por true k and air balloon of \rdllgram'. I 970S concepuon , hut a r -laronal, interpersonal ton strut uon ol Jloll C' The ite i policed and hounded through .1 equence of tran gre ion, oc ial svnuouc and occupation: gr.lfhtl; c hool ue hung up on railing. and lamppo: t ; Ilowcr-, and, hnallv. peer of the \ I urn who polite tilt Itt. The uc become dcmurcatcd pat ru] 1\ \ la in t r iption: , tags and general gr.lfhll In honour of the decca l'd. In the c site there an mver ion of uxhrnquc (wluch corrcponds to the 1mersion of t entre pcr iphcrv at Ground Zero in Ie" York, as addre eel 111 the or iuinal ar ticle]. rhus a 'remembrance hook 1 l reate I through the use of pavement slab , m c ribcd \\ it h tag. and per onal tatemerit of 10. s or cclebrauon. Graffiti is an important t lcmcnt of boundarv. It 'challenge the dominant du. hotorny bet \\ ecn public and private space, It interrupts the Iamilinr

God to Nature. In the urban environs of the z rst century an equal process, or correction and transference, can be seen to take place as people construct or claim space as sanctuary, an extra-home: a transient sacred space. Sacred space allows (momentary) ownership for the dispossessed: the teenager or the grieving for instance. Religion, for the purposes of this essay, is a 'collective experience' and the definition of the Sacred comes from Durkheim, where : 'Ind ivid uals...experience the sacred as an integral aspect of their innermost being and as a source of joy, peace, and strength: And furthermore, 'The circle of sacred objects...cannot be fixed once and for all; its scope varies endlessly from one religion to another'," Modernity has kraaled the notion of sacred space into a sanctioned topography, and now we see how contemporary urban cultures are providing resistance to these structures by reintroducing the idea of holy/ sacred space into the everyday experience. Namely, a transient urban sacred space; providing spaces in opposition to 'the sacred precincts of the last global religion - capitalist consumerism'." The immediate response to 9/1 1 can be seen as a paradigm for the creation of the temporary Sacred in the non-places of late capitalism. This historical moment realigned the idea of 'centre' and 'periphery' both spatially and ideologically. The ideological dimension is articulated by the following observation: ·...the attacks in New York and Washington provisionally, but dramatically, reversed the dominant space-time" of the "centre" (that of safe viewing) and the "periphery" (the space-time of dangerous living). On I I September 2001, the "centre" and only contemporary superpower entered the space-time of dangerous living [periphery] . It became the sufferer," Its spatial ramifications are witnessed in the transference of the centre of Capital as symbolised by the World Trade Center Complex (WTC), where the Twin Towers stood supreme to the peripheral - the spectator! mourner/New Yorker. This reverse of the centre/

boundaries of the public and the prrvate h} 208

Lim ite d Language I Sensib il it ies I The sacr ed and th e holy

The corne r of Nort h Road & York Way in Isli ngton, Nort h London, where peop le have paid t ribute t o mur dere d teenager Ben Ki nsella (2008). Phot ograph by Rhodr i Jones. htt p:// bit.l y/Rodr ico htt p://ww w.benkinsella.org.uk/

declaring the public private and the private public :" Here, public spar separates into private/ .ac red space, The site compose ' a .t ratcgy of 'inver. ion and hybridization '. That 's to say that the socio -political position of the murdered and bereaved is reversed in the temporary acred space through what David Chidester and Edward T. l.inernhal de cribe as 'mixing, fusing, or transgressing conventional spatial relations' ,' Chidester and l.inenthal' broader work identifies three typologies of acred space: inversion and hybridi. at ion arc part of this triumvirate together with the strategy of exclusion discussed in the original article, This process is akin to Ilomi Bhabha's ob ervation that hybridisation 'terrorizes authority with the ru e of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery'." The ruse in the spaces thus described is the very temporality of the event; the interruption of the flows of city experience and making vi. ible the irony that 'a space or place is perhaps revealed at it most sacred when people are willing to fight, kill, or die over its ownership and control'. " If the 'acred spaces related to gang killings are transgressive, .ceking to provide 'r sistance to domination' and an alternative to the traditionally state cndor cd memorial space. then the Ghost Bike movement provides more traditional networks of memorial and sacred space, The movement 's website inform the vi sitor: ' The Street Memorial Project honors cycli ts and pede . tr ian: that have been killed on I ew York City's streets, We .eek to cultivate a cornpa: sionate and supportive community for urvivors and friends of those 10 t and to initiate a hange in ulture that fo ners mutual re .pcct among all people who hare the street : 11 The movement has developed, ince it artistic inception in 2005. into a global campaign for change in road safety, The tructure and ideology of the pre sure group belongs to a modernist sphere of demo ratic protest. It doe not call upon the carnevale que and 210

periphery is based upon what David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, in American Sacred Space", call a 'strategy of exclusion', where sacred space is defined by its boundaries and its relationship with outside forces/ peoples/dialogues, The site of the Twin Towers, an enclave for the upper echelons of us corporate culture, is transformed post g/ I I, The boundaries that might have been policed by a particular hierarchy (of banks and corporate lawyers against anti-capitalist campaigners for instance or, equally, the separation of profe ssionals from the cleaners and minimum-wage security guards who worked in the building) are reversed. The site became estranged from the sanctity of capital production and reconstituted as a place of mourning/memory/rebirth: sacred. This overturning and re-centering of space, as sacred space, is captured by the curator and writer Jon Bird, who describes the days following g/ll : 'The next few days now seem like a disarticulation in the normal temporal flow: a transitory period between the before and after of a world-historical event during which all the familiar points of reference transformed into their opposites.., And, wherever a wall or other surface presented itself, the messages, photographs, drawings and improvised memorials, a bricolaged anthem of tenderness and 10SS.. .'11 In the immediate post-attack, this 'disarticulation' of space, the WTC and its doppelganger, Ground Zero, form a dialectical relationship in the creation of sacred space. What happens in this process is are-imagining of the site. More generally, James Donald" describes how cities are articulated through the imagination. In creating the 'living city' he proposes a 'poetics of imagination': a mixture of politics, psychoanalysis and the phenomenological. The jarring of the imagination as the planes hit the buildings, created, in its aftermath, a dilemma of ownership; a conflict over organisation and control, but also imagination. In simple terms, the conflict between economics and an individual/collective

Lim ite d Language I Sensib ilit ies I The sacred and the holy

pcrformutivc, nor a . tratcgy of hybridi 'at ion a already di: u -d hut, rather, a trutegyof inver ion; ' rev -r ing a prevailing spatial orien tation ', It provide a framework for y rnbolk need to create a narrati ve. In a st rategy of exclusion , C hides t er and Linenthal comment that sac red place is contes te d and maint ained through advoc ating th e 'special inte res ts of power and purity'.' ? In the aftermath of gh I this dynam ic of 'special inte rests' informs th e communit ies putting forwa rd proposals for t he W TC: art, bu siness and blu ecollar workers. Each propo ses th e site be redrawn to t he blu eprint of th eir imaginat ions (eac h group provid ing a clai m for th e purity of the site) . Th e D irector of th e Met rop olitan Mu seum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, comment ing a matter of d ays after the attack captures th e ten sions of ownership: 'From many in the business community has come a plea to summon our most defi ant optimism and ere ct a new skyscraper... At th e ot her end of the spec trum, Pet e Hamill, t he N ew York Daily N ews columnis t, has urged th at a park be encouraged to blossom the re . From ot hers we hear an equa lly compelling proposal: Dedicat e th is now sacred gro und to a work of art memorializing the th ou sands of victi ms of th is month's horrors. Some have alrea dy begun spea king of commissioning such a work. '!" Montebello capt ur es the ongoing battle to lay claim to a small area of downtown New York. What we see in the followin g months after gh I is anot her disarticul at ion . This tim e it is th e intervention t o clai m back or re-zone th e area, to return it to t he profane and t he sec ular. Like t he plague burial pit s 400 years earlier, you see the conflicting temporal/sp at ial regimes of govern mentality and individual agenc y. Th e bri ef sepa rat ion of ce ntre and pe riphery contracts and reasserts itself, like a cultu ral for m of muscle memory. Within weeks of the disaster, the footprint of the WTC was cordoned off. Walkways and one-ways, circumvented the area providing a homogenous, choreographed, experience to the visit or. The chain-link fenc ing had signs forbidding the 'messages, photo graph s, drawings' that had expresse d the collective trauma of New Yorkers. The Port Authoritie s and Federal Government slowly but firml y

51 rter arncie k

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g' turc rath -r than the pat ial intervention seen at Ground Zero or the bolt-on relational space commemorating the \ icurns of knife crime. The movement relies upon the symbolism and aesthcticisat ion of the object: a decommissioned hicy Ie painted white . The problem of m aning - ernie I - and any slippage in connotation is countered by it' presence on the World Wide Weh: the Web coordinate: meaning. Rather than a tool of radical comrnunitit ive rupture to social action, the Inte rnet provides a mapping tool. The memorial project does not create a physical architectural space as in t he other I' .amples discus ed in the original article, but ill read provide a erniot i inte rvent ion.

It allow death and it. l ultural associations with ritual and . ac red space to be brought II1tO urban living a a phenomenological cxpericncc . This force the organization of these experiences into cau al relations'," (;/10," /lik" is part of a broader series of art practices, which have created a range of critica l intervent ions in the everyday of urban living: the globally active Reclai m tireStree ts ,\ /ollemellt 13 for in. tance, or the in rallat ion work of Corn ford and ro .. In one project, the latter created a temporary peace garden over the entran e to a Cold War nuclear bunker in London 's. outhwark. !' The Ghost Bike Movement makes a coordinated, con .cious intervention into the city/urban centre and, as uch, draws upon a more traditional methodology - i.e. Religion and art practice - in creating an urban sacred 'pace. I it the one example whi h its most comfortably in an organi ed, moderni .t typology of the sacred? And finally... Thi isn't a po .t modern account of the sacred, living between the Mall and cw Ageism. Nor is it to overturn the structure: of modern ity. If anyt hin " the sacred is not 211

A ghost bike chained to a t raffic light just nort h of Dupont Circ le at the intersecti on of Connect ic ut Avenue and R St reet NW in Washingt on, DC, USA . It was in memory of cycl ist Al ice Swanson, who died on 8 July 2008. The bike was removed by the Depart ment of Public Work s in August 2009and a protest 'memorial' immediately t ook its plac e. In September 2009, a local art ist st ruck back by putting up 22 bikes at the intersect ion, one for each year of Ali ce's life. Photograph: John Curran. http://b it.ly/Al ice_Swanson http://b it .ly/wa shingt on_post A visit t o the fl ickr pool f or Ghost Bikes makes sobering viewi ng: http://b it.ly/ghostbik epool

de-sanctified the are a. In this mix of signifiers - sacred! commercial, public/private - coale sces what Michel Foucault called a Heterotopia. That's to say, an environ 'capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible'. IS The World Trade Centre, now reconfigured in the imagination, has re-entered the topography of New York.

auac hed to a rrand-narrauvc, hut rather, a acrcd pa e whic h i 'rich.vomple , open'. It is one that I uuated in a public phcre which i st ill u. cepuble to per onal .demo ' raq '. In The acred . The Profane, Minea Eliade capture the pirit of how al red [church] and profane experience co-habitat in the city: ·...the threshold that separated the two . pale: al a indicates the di ranee between two mode . of bCIl1~ [ ac red and

'In the most int imate and personal sen se, in the sense of an ache that cannot be salved, ground zero is not really downtown'," The experience of g/r I and its effect, however ephemeral, on urban experience in the West...is this

boundary, the frontier that dt tingur: he and oppose two world . At the same time, It is the paradoxical place where those world .ornrnu-

a paradigm for how the sacred, as a secu lar event, can be

nicatc, where th pa 'ag ' from the profane

reintroduced into urban culture as a point of re sistance?

the sal red world h comes possible.'

See f ur th er images here

and architecture prov ide thi bridge . I lot one betw een the fi .ed an, huecturc of l hurl he

profane) . The thre hold

IS

the limit, the

to

The transient nature of the . acred space ' www.limited languag e.org /images

and memorial, but a relational infra tructure Refe ren ces B roadgate, in th e financia l d istr ict of London . is one example of the gentrifi cat ion of an orig inal plague bur ial site. 2

whic h can, bneflv, embody the non-place: of

hOPPIl1 • area , road" a) and l at-park

Vanessa Hard ing, 'Burial of t he Plag ue Dead in Ear ly Modern London,' Epidemic Disease in London : Worki ng Papers seri es/

Cent re for Metr opoli tan H istory; no. 1, J. Cha mpion (ed.), (London : 3

Cent re for Met ropo lit an H ist ory, 1993), 88, Ibid.

4

See M iche l Fouc ault, The His tory of Sexuali ty (London: A llen Lane,

5

Rich ard Sennet, The Conscie nce of the Eye: The Design and Social

Carr y on the C )v"r~ ron t : I II) .cc cnap er5_

-, e

1988) ,

6

8

Life of Cities (New York: A lf red A . Knopf. 1991). Em ile D ur kheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Ca rol Cosman (t ra ns.) and Ma rk S. Cla dis (ed .) (Oxf ord : Oxf ord Un ivers it y Pre ss. 2(01), 358. Fredr ic Jame son , 'Futu re Cit y' in New Left Review (May-June, 2003).21.

.. . spac e and t ime m ust be considere d relat ive co nc ept s, i.e.• t hey are determi ned by t he nat ure and behaviou r of t he ent it ies th at 'i nhabit' t hem (the co nc ept of 'rela tiv e spac e') . This is t he inver se of t he situa t ion w here spac e and t ime t hemselves f or m a ri g id fr ame work w hic h has an existence independent of th e

i .r .'

enti ti es (t he concept of 'absolut e space'). Jonathan Rape r and David Livingstone, 'Develop ment of a Geomo r pholog ica l Spa tia l Model Using Object-oriented Desig n' in Interna tional Journ al of Geogr aphical Information Systems,Vol. 9 (1995): 359--B3.

9

Lilie Chou liaraki, 'Wat ch ing September 11th: The Polit ic s of Pit y' in Discours e and Society ,Vol. 15. No. 2·3 (2004), 185-98,

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10 The st rat egy of excl usion is one of three t ypologies of sacred spa ce put forward by Ch idest er and Linen thal ; the ot hers being inversion and hybr idisali on. See David Ch idester and Edwar d

1. Linent hal, American Sacred Space: Religion in North Am erica (Bloomi ngt on: Indiana Univ ersit y Press, 1995). 11 Jon Bird, 'The Mote in God 's Eye: 9/11, Then and Now' in The

N

Journa l of Visual Cult ure, Vol. 2, NO. 1 (2003): 83·97. 12 Jam es Donald , Imagin ing th e Modern City (London : At hlone Press, 1999). 13 David Ch idest er and Edward Tabor Linenth al. Amer ican Sacred Space, Reli gion in North America (B loom ingt on : Indiana Un iversity Press, 1995). 14 P.D. Montebello, 'The Iconic Power of an A rtefact' in The New York

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Times, 25 Septe mber 2001 . 15 M ichel Foucault, 'Of Ot her Spaces ' in Diacr itics, Vol. 16, No.1 (1986): 22·27. 16 D.W. Dunlap, 'Renovat ing a Sac red Place, W here the 9/11 Remains Wait' in The New York Times , 29 Augu st 2006.

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The sacred and t he holy

The parasit ical and the para-critical

Joanna Zyl ins ka

The extra ear of the other. on listening to Stelarc The ear, as Jacques Derrida' poignantly observes, is uncanny: it is double in more than one sense. First of all, it is always that of the other (ear). The ear can also be open and closed at the same time. The only organ that cannot voluntarily shut it self, it always remains ready to hear, to receive, even if its 'owner' is not actively listening. The very possibility of speaking and writing and thus of communicating, exchanging and, more generally, of being with others come s from the ear. But what happens when the ear wanders down from the side of one's head to one's arm (as it doe s in the Australian artist Stela rc's 2006-07 art project, Extra Ear: Ear on Arm) and when it mutates from a receiving to a transm itting organ ? Stelarc's Extra Ear mimics the actual ear in shape and external structure but, rather than merely hearing, it will wirelessly transmit sounds to the Internet, thus becoming a remote listening device . Th e Extra Ear inevitably dr aws in the observer's eye; it attracts a curious gaze while also encouraging a cro ss-sensual exchange between bod ies and organs which goes beyond the fun ctionalism of information exchange. But what is Stelarc tr ying to say with this Extra Ear? And what would it mean to really h-ear him , and respond to him? Stelarc's recent visual and aural performances shift bodily arch itecture into the hybrid t errain of walkin g head s, hearing arms and fluid flesh (Walking Head Robot (2006) and Blender (2005), with Nina Sellar s). Stelarc's invitation, extended to his audience, to open up to his reconstructive and often invasive bodily projects, at times seems to fall on deaf ears, which is why some responses to his work end up in a solipsist ic, and often moralistic, position of not hearin g him at all, and of deciding in adv ance what he is trying t o say and why it is wrong . The artist's provo cative st at ement s th at 't he body is obsolete' and that we need to dev ise alternate anatomical architectures which are not available in

Who's met a Cyborg? Cyborgs are hybrid life forms . The) exist on the human-machine! physical-virtual due. hold and, as such, they challenge traditional ideas of the body; even life itself.' Walking through any city centre, taxi drivers can be seen talking to the ether, via a Bl uetooih connection tucked behind their ear. Walk into any new "agent , and exce ssively beautiful women can be seen on covers of men' magazines - N uts, Are lla, Z(J(J- wi th their Silicone-breasts, Collagen-lips and Botox-youthfulncss, tight skin - and should we imagine tight vaginas? In Bioethics ill the Age of I eto Media, Joanna Zylinska proposes these women as 't wenty-first-cent u ry nco-cyborgs bearing the mar ks of technology on their bodies'." Fashion ha. used technology to sculpt the body, covertly and not, from the 19t h century corset to the late zot h century hosiery of Jea n-Paul Gaultier. I lis infamous COile li m (as worn by Madonna] both extends the body as a serie of impossible shapes and provides 'armou r for a late 20th century cyber-woman out of a sctcnce-ficuon cartoon'.' Naturalised, internal ised or fragmented, disembodied: all are disci plined and pivot around certain positio ns of power and it 's in this way t hat the body materialise. in the work of Zylinska . In her work, ext reme rnakeover for insta nce is unde rstood , 'as part of the global biopolitics of life management': Power, of course, is <1150 intrinsically to do with et hics. Bioet hics typically aims 'to maximise the general socia l welfa re and to minimise harm'.' An example might be stem cell research for improving mobility after spinal cord injuries. Zylinska argues that, whilst bioerh ics emerged in the 20th century as a form of

Starter arncte R

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Ear on Arm by Ste larc. London, Los Ange les,

Me lbourne (2006). Photography by N ina Sellars.

( l>lflregulation on scient ific and medical d -vcloprnent , her alternative et hic work io« ard - a 'non-normat ive ethical re ponsibilit) . Put .imply, thi refu -es to take a moral evolution but which become pos sible through engineering, are often interpreted as simply meaning that the body is both inadequate and unnecessar y, that it is only an obstacle in our technological age. The French philosopher Paul Virilio even went so far as t o accu se Stelarc of enacting a new version of 'clinical voyeurism '." A dangerous st rat egy aimed at imp roving the human but, ultimately signalling, for Virilio, both the end of art and th e end of hum anity. So what doe s it mean to really hear Stelarc and respond to him? How can, or should , we engage with his Stomach Sculpture (1993), Partial H ead (2006), or Extra Ear? On what grounds can Stela rc's projects themselves be described as responsible (or not)? What values does his reworking of the architecture of the body challenge, and does this challenge imply any broader epistemic tr ansformat ion? Stelarc repeatedly tells us that he has no ambitio ns to be a philosopher or a political the orist. He refuses to be pre scriptive in his work and so will not instruct us as to how we should tr eat our bodies, or how we should coexist with technology. However, I believe listening to Stelarc will allow us to envisage a more effe ctive politics and et hics. Th is will be a te chnopolitics of di stributed agency and su spended command, informed by an ethics of infinite - and at t imes crazy, shocking and ex cessive - hospitality towards the alterity of te chnolog y (t hat is always already part of us). Th is is not t o say th at 'we are mach ines' or th at 'we are all Stelarcs now', as A rt hur and Marilou ise Kroker put it. 3 As hum ans and mach ines are collapsed (as the y tend to be in some current accounts of 't he network society ) into a fluid epist emology in which difference is overcome for th e sake of hori zontal affective politics, it is not clear any more who enco unt er s, responds to, and is responsible for whom in an ethical encounter. Or; what is more import ant , why it should matter at all. Thi s is why I want to suggest that we need t o retain, even if while placin g it in sus pension, t his idea of th e hum an (and that of the body). The narr at ive of seamless coevolut ion between d ifferent

po ition (like the tabloid headlines) and al. 0 to engage in singular et hical posiuon \\ 11Ich re pond to partuular real-world rcnario (. hould the) remove hereditary genes from the

baby-to-be"]. It dol' . not tell us what to think , hut ask: us to question how we think - and \\h) . It" In this coruc t that she invite u to c .plore the 'prorni: In' ethic al ambivalence... of the ' \\ an ' (and 'u 'I) due kling ') of makeover l ulturc. '10 look at telarc Ear 011 , l n ll, .l introduced In the original urtu le, i to fate a more recognisable grote que than the grotesqueries of everyday life. The urtk lc uses the device of the ear, not a a phy: iological or technolom tal entity, hut a a conduit for thinking about Ii tcning, \\ ith Zylin ka a king: \\ hat would it mean to reall) hear him, and re .pon I to him" Thi depend on who li: telling ... it ' worth noting th at till. que tion i po cd \\ uhin a parucular philo . ophu al Framework. lu: t a. Stelarc's work provide : a paruc ular wa) of looking at the body . Sielarc 's ear IS Internet connected : to Ii uen to him is to turn around ideas of the bod y a a clo ed, impenetrable , kin-tight container, " "or ielarc : Alte ring the archuec ture of the bod) rc uh in adju ung and e. tending It awarene of the world', Ill' eem : to bc u king u. li ten to tel hnolo ' y a counter -part . This resonate \\ ith Z) lin ka s biocihic: , \\ h« h ask u to fate difference [alterity], sa) of icchnology, as we fate others: hospitably, as equals. Earlier, Judith Butler had Introduced the bod y as a moral dilemma : There i always a rt k of anthropocentri rn 1 ...1if one as. urncs that the distin ·tI) human life I valuable... or I the only way to think of the probl em of value . But perhap to ounter that tendency to

it i nece .sary to a k both the que tion of life and the que tion of the human, and not to let them fully collapse together.' I Zylinska 's work follows Butler ' tr ajectory for the bod ) , 51 rter arncie k

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but introduce: n into a tel hnologised and phcre, With thi .vorne: the need

economic to

rethink cthu al pos iuon . It brinas in the>

econorrur: of the hioindu: try. Whd t Z) linska i crit ical of the di c iplming nature of makeover culture, a already noted, he I: also committed to exploring it. 'promising ethical ambivalence', This seems to be part of the bigger que .uon: how can we embrace future forms if w are till using preconceived idea ? The way that we name the (future) body world i. important he au . e it determine how we u. e It. The body hear: the environment 10

a different' 'ay than th eye . ces it, and

:0

it \\"III make .1 different .cnsc of it. Tran .latthis to design and names/brands such a

109

Thmkl'ad' and 'Laptop' are terms designed to rnak people comfortable with the computer a an extension of the hod) hut they also frame the way we will think about it. There is a difference though, in naming, between art and de ign: wherea naming in design tend to minimi se cognitive disruption for a new user, naming in art and philosophy enjoy . it. Herein lie. a lassical : plit bet ween art and design . Art may invoke old ideas, but to ask new que tions. Art asks questions to tc st new boundarie '. Design concrcuscs. It makes thing. under, tandable. It makes things utilitarian . It often makes them .puriou '. The wa) that d 'ign concreti

- make .

literal - coul i he een at the 'tart , where de ign ha already brought telarc' idea into the world un remarked upon . However, whilst Ear

011

Arlll is absurd, a B1uetooth connection

fitted around the ear i. not. De ign can also be a kind of pedagogy. In one e . ample, bioengineer have worked with de igner. to bring ti ue-cngmecrin a.

biological and cultural entities that depicts the whole world as 'connect ed', it seems to me, threatens to overlook too many points of temporary stabilisation that have a st rategic political significance . It is via these 'points of temporary stabilisation' that partial decisions are being made, connections between bodies are being established, aesthetic and political transformation is being achieved and power is taking effect over different parts of 't he network' in a differential manner. And yet at the same t ime, 't he human' should not be seen as an essential value or a fixed identity but rather as a st rategi c quasi-transcendental point of entry into debates on agency, human-technology, environment, politics and ethics, Ethical thinking in terms of 'originary technicity' (which brings forth the very concept of the human) allows us to affirm the significance of the question of responsibility, without needing to rely on the prior value

syst em that legislates it or re sort to unreconstructed moral convictions. This re sponsible re sponse to the difference of technology (which is not all that different) is one non-didactic lesson we can learn from Stelarc. This is an edite d excer pt fr om The Extra Ear of the Othe r: On Being- in D ifference, an essay in a ca t alogue ac co mpanying th e exhibition of Stelarc's work (1,30 June 2007) at t he Exper imental A rt Foundat ion in

A delaide, Aust ralia.

See f urt her images here www.limi ted languag e.org{images

Ref erences Jacq ues Derri da, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography. Transference. Translati on (New York: Schocken Books. 1985), 32-3. See also Nicholas Royle, The Unca nny (Manc hest er: Manchester Un iversity Press, 2003), 64.

2 3

Paul Vir ilio, Art and Fear (London and New York : Cont inuum, 2003),

43.93 . Arthur and Maril ouise Krak er, 'We are Al l Stel arc s Now ' in Mar quard Sm ith (ec .), Stelarc: The M onograph (Cambr idge, MA : London: MIT, 2005), 63,86.

a debate to the public realm. Biojewellery: became th conduit; asking ix oupl s in to donate bone marrow, which could then be

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Lim it ed Language

I Sens ibilit ies I The extra ear of the othe r: on list ening to Stelarc

'N ipple' f rom Body M odifi cati on for Love by M ich iko N itt a (2005),

gro« n together around a ring-cast, sized for the couple. lien', an invasive medical proceJure is made 'sensible' through ;1 rl'l ognisable socral custom. The roll' of prototypes/projects

like these is 'to help imagine what the social dimcn ions might be, even though the eventu<11 applications of the science aren't yet clear'. "

The e social/psychological dimensions were central to Desiqn and the Elastic Mind, " an exhibition looking at collaborations bet ween (hio )scienn~ and (bio )desi~n where Hioiewcllcry featured. Another piece, the Body

,\lodificatirJllfor Love project by Michiko lina, used in-vitro cultured meat production technologu-« to grow selected extra body parts on the skin to emotional ends. Would you want an extra [ex-airlfr icnd's] nipple for instance,' Or your mother's hair - which of (Curse will grow' Will memories, embedded in the body like this, remind us that they need care and attention like the rest of us,' Also on show at Desiqn and the Elastic ,\lilld, wa 'Iyposperma by the Israeli typographer Oded Ezer. Thi. is a spoof project, where supposedly cloned sperm hypothetically have t) pographic information implanted into their D:>;,\

to create new transgenic creatures, half-

[hurnanjspcrm/half-lcttcr. .. Rut, what for: Is this a potent reminder of the power invested in both 'dentists and designers: Finally, this brings us bad to why ethics are irnportan . Design, art or science - literal, ut ilitarian or spurious - at worst, any of these projects can have a parasitical role in relation to biotechnology, That is, they can unquestioningly fetishise it. The design historian David Crowley makes a useful distinction here where, at best, the parasit i al could be transformed into the para-cr itical. I; Ry this he means they deliberately feed off biodevelopments, in order to call them into question. If we look back to the kind of beauty body modification discussed at the start, we can -ee that this is called up for debate in the surgical 'art' work performed on the body of artist Orlan I. who ha worked to, 'reveal the damaging impact of the perva ive images of 220

Limited Language I Sensibi lities I The ext ra ear of the oth er; on listen ing to St elarc

Typosperma by Oded Ezer (2007).

......--..-- , Site by Itama r Lerner ; 3D rendered by Am ir l.ip sicas. Photographed by Ruth ie Ezer. Scientific consulta t ion by Hagit Guet a. A ssisted by Ifat Yairi . http;//www.odedezer.com/t yposperma.html

female beauty in \Vestern culture',' Surgery, a art, might he open to jlifIercncc', but when it's invariably offered a~ the 'late, t look', sold at reduced prices on the high -street and squeezed into the lunch break, it gal' one step further to creating a world without difference, So, \\ hat's wrong with a corset: I lathing of course, but it 's a useful device to see how technology be ames csscnt ialiscd: where a

19th century object designed to 'discipline' a woman's waist becomes a surgical procedure today. Carry or he converse ron here Ill ' [yiltmy.ctIchapler5_2

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The extra ea r of t he other: on listening to Stela rc

Angu s Carlyle

Eartids and brainlids: on thoughts and sounds "Can one think without speaking?" - And what is thinking? Well , don 't you ever think? C an't you obser ve you rself and see what is going on? It should b e simple. You don't have t o wa it for it as for an astronomical event and then perh aps make you r obser vations in a hurry.' (Ludwig Wittgen stein, Philosophical Investigations, First published 1953). \ 'Well these are the simple facts of the case - There were at least two pa rasites one sexual the other cerebral working the way that parasites will - And why has no one asked "What is the Word?" - Why do you talk to yourself all the t ime?' (William S. Burroughs, Th e Ticket That Exploded, First published 1962).2 A pale light eases its way through the white curtains, a brittle mixture of the nearby st re et lamp and the slowly bri ghtening sky. I run my palm ac ross the fr iction of four d ays of st ubble and the image of a mat ch being st ruck, su rfaces th en di sappears like an ornamenta l fish. I hook my arm under the bed to retrieve the red bike lamp that is always there. Resting it , unl it , on my chest I grope for the travel alarm clock I bought in Berlin . Its luminou s dial points to four o'cloc k. Replacing th e clock on the wooden floorbo ard s, I switch on t he lamp . The alarm clock now seems to have taken on a more st rident tone, as if it , too, has been woken from a more dormant state. In the red glow of the bike lamp, the ticking mechanism see ms irre gular, shift ing from fast er to slower, as I move my head on the pillow. Intri gued, I attempt to manipulat e th is effect only to discover that with intensified concentrat ion, the clock lapses into a stable tempo and then falls ba ck into a more subdued participation in the bedroom's atmosphere. In its place come other sounds. My wife's breathing st ruggles through the cold that she's not been able to shake; her inhalat ion the te xture of pipe s and drains, her exh alation like air from a balloon neck. A softe r

Sound Polaroid In hi ' beautifully emotive t:'~ .IY, Angu Carlyle apturc a. ound PolaroilP of a waking family. Rut it i a orne landscape bristling with the \ i. ua l, where 'a match being struck surface:

then d. appear like an ornamental fish'; or 'Iuminou. clocks' and 't he red glow of the hike lamp' illuminate, metaphorical ly and literally, the scene. Carlyle hnngs into foc us the clash of two enso ry cult ures: sonic and visua l. l.ong b for' t he 'visual turn' of Structu ralist th lnk ing.! t here has bee n a sensory order. Th is inclu des t he bina ry of inside/ ou tsi de , bet ween t he thoug ht and the spectacle. I lere , inside means the psycho logical wit h the outside being the phenomena l world , Film has explored t hi relation hip [e pedally in the genre. of horro r and su pen e) where t he three-dimen ionali ty of sound is used to good effect, for instance approac hing foot reps from behind a clo. ed door or wind rubbing again st a Windowpane. The opening paragraph of Carlyle'

I'

sa) read like a Foley

ani t's storyboard, connecting the visual experience to it. onic Other. The former i. exposed in the light whilst the latter remain ' perceived - ou t of . hot' David Toop' rcspons to the original artide makes t he outer/i nner con ne t ion explici t when he ornrne rus on listening to the, 'elk-king of our cat ' lal\ on he wooden floor" and how th is ignites his later evocation of Edgar Allan Poe, who he read a a chi ld, I lis comment cncap ulate how the aural outer world ignite. our psy hologica l inner space, Wh en did creaking floorboard. shift (a t hey did for Toop) from simple inde xical link to pre encc and to a more, 'fearful I. tening':' " Toop' comment pecifically mention . The Fall of the l louse of Usher, t he Edgar Allan Poe tale, which open, 'Du rmg the whole of

51 r er ar ocle

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a dull, dark, and . oundlcss da) ..." The short tory ' protagom-t i. Ro lenck Usher, who lives \\ ulun the confine of a delaying goth« lOUlItr) hou e, which bear his family name.'] he

hou l' i de l nbcd a being in a groie que tate of del a), whu h I mirrored in the physical

and p . cholozrcal demeanor of Usher him df. Among t other ailment. ,he uffer [n m of acou neophobia where It

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form

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ound ,and the . e from tringcd whu h did not

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trumcnts,

pire him with horror'.'

In man) way . Usher's 'morb id acuteness of the Sen

"c a n be :een as an indu trnent

of mo lernuy. It is a story of the rational and irrauonal: II here the latter, the ancien regime, IS

iran formed by Enlightenment thinking. The sociologist Fran '(on kiss in a lOI1-

temporary context captures this relationship bet ween . ound and modern urban IiI mg:

'C it ie: , after all, insist on the sen cs at the level of ound . It is easier and more effel1I1e to shut your eyes than it is to (over your ear . Ear. cannot discriminate in the way eyes l an - a with smell, hearing put us in a ub rru sl e,

n. uou relation II ith the

City'.

Wherca for the Poe character the . Ol11l clutter of encroaching modern life

I.

a . cnten e of morbid horror, today we have developed trategi s to perform in the . onic realm. Tonki

call , one . uc h trateg)

deafne

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. This

octal

where p oplc develop irate-

gil" to filter out ound and create personal aural .pace: - it '

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psychological Spall' II here

' no one is Ii tcning' creating an individual rather than a communal space. Think of someone ' pe a k ing loudly into their mobile phone in an otherw ise silent train carriage or coffee . hop - oblivious to tho. e around them! Thi: indiv iduation

IS

further fine-tuned

with the technology of the lI'od and Blucioorh head ets. We cocx i: t in a . trauficd Ol11l territor), where th • mncr and outer, earlier de cribcd.

I.

echo emerges from my young daughter's sleeping body, less troubled and more steadily rhythm ic. From my son, sprawled nearest to me on top of the du vet , arm flung across his sister, hardly a sound escapes. No more th an the ru stles that accompany his shift s and turns and the occasional glutinous thumb-sucking th at no promise of toys or adventures is incentive enough for him to relinqu ish. Out in th e st reet beyond the curtains, seagulls mark th eir temp orary territory. The flying gulls offer th eir charact er ist ic cry, rising and recedin g as th ey move between th e te rraced hou ses. Once sett led on a rooftop, another call. Th is time an insistent 'ugg, ugg, uggl' signals th eir presence. Rubbing the beginnings of my beard again for comfort, without, thi s tim e, eliciting the image of a match, ] switch the bike lamp off and place it on top of th e small pile of autobiographies I keep on my side of th e bed; guilty primers for a lived life. A gentle rain has begun to fall, ru stli ng t hrough the early Summer leaves of th e tree outside ou r window and tapping on the car roofs below. Another, smaller, but un ident ifiable bird can be heard , a br ighter refrain. Per haps a starling? A blackbird? The bird song almost, but not quite, repeate d, melod ic variation wit hheld and th en une xpe ctedly given. The window frames rattle percu ssively in response to the growing bre eze. Behind th e sleeping family and th e gulls and t he birds and the gentle rain, t raffic noise is now d iscernible. Not yet in th e focused form of a vehicle in our st reet, but st ill there as an ambient backdrop of ty res on wet tarmac and ill-defined engine murmur. I am consciou s now of my own breath, a shar p release through my nostrils. Conscious too , suddenly, of the sounds of my body's movement in th e bed, of legs dr awn up th en extended against th e sheets , of my hair brushing against th e pillow and my nails scratc hing the skin of my upp er arms, of the cart ilage in my finger joints as I snap them through a nervou s routine. Listen ing below thos e surface sounds, a persist ent hum

p vchologu al and can prov ide a

t n Ion between mdrvrdual and community . In Topophilia, Yi-Fu Tuan' magi tcnal inve ti ration of th 224

material world, he oh ervcs

how in mall cale socicue ,a with fore t

Limited La nguage

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Earlids and brain lids : on thoughts and sounds

You Are Ear. A rt Directi on by Angus Carly le (2009). Phot ographs by Matt hew Hawkins.

.,..

Mot orsounds, BM W M Mode lle, Haus der Baur eihe.

BM W Mu seum, spati al cho reog raphy by A RT+COM (reopened June 2008).

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dwellers, sound become: important in, 'a pcrvasivc environm nt undistingui .hcd hy landmarks'

and people will 'att ribute pet ial importance to the unfocu ed sound" - of singing, chanting emerges at the threshold of audib ility. It seems t o come

or rnu .ical instrument for in tance. '[Slound ...

from somewhere inside . Maybe it is nothing more than the fridge down stairs or mayb e it's an acous t ic illu sion born of exc essive attentiveness combined with that spe cial fatigue that is th e privilege of those who should be asleep. Whatever its source, I t ry t o gra sp it and discern

serve ' to draw the attention'; this provides a mapping of the forest . Thi: form of c holoca-

mor e of it s shape and colou r. Before I can capt ure th e elus ive drone, I become aware of another noise - this t ime one that is un amb iguous ly int ern al - the noise of my thought s. Thi s is not ju st the sound of nouns and verbs shadowing in di stinct, then indi stinct, ways what might have been spoken aloud; that is what happens when we are thinkin g as W ittgenstein might have said. My thoughts now, with the bike lamp back on and my wife 's snor ing much gentler. My thoughts, as I write

to another, a if being drawn into the canopy

th en pau se, writ e then pause. My thoughts also consist of fu zzy renditions of assoc iate d ideas; forms of what has once been heard , but as might emerge from a turnt able whose sty lus has acc umu lat ed a little coat of fluff. The start of the match sc rape ; th e wet ripple above th e fish and a ch ild's voice to the left ; th e thump of a snowball against my t ax i in Berlin; the ru sh of water beneath a manhole cover and reverberation through a guttering pipe . My brain is too active to let me lie any longer. I swi tch off th e bike lamp and return it to the floo r. I swing my legs out from under th e du vet and ri se, unstead ily, t o my feet. One hand holds the pencil and paper, the ot her probes the be ginn ing of a spot at the corner of my mouth. I cree p out of the bedroom, like the worst actor portraying the worst burglar, As Mar shall Mcl.uhan' once obser ved, th ere are no earlid s. For th e vast majority of human beings, there is no escaping the external sound world, even when asleep. Yet although complete escape is not an option, retreat remains a po ssibility, a pos sibility that seems ever ywhere to be read ily gras ped . The enduring de rogati on of sou nd in stubbornly visua l cult ures can be t raced ac ross a number of indices, to o many to be capt ured in this

tion i. reminiscent of the use of musi in the large and femurclc s department stores where the escalator moves you from one sonic sphere of a , trauhcd world of modern consumption. 1ming from the ja/./ of the coffee shop to the post-punk of a Die ellD franchise, sound can hx you in the non-spaces of modern con umeri m. A 'temporary territory' in the words of the original article. Inevitably, it i often consumption (as the simple pul e of the everyday) that acts as a conduit between design and sound culturcs. The . en e: [inc ludmg sound) are carriers of socral values and not simply rncchani 'tic receptor of information . Thi documented

111 \

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well

isual cultures, in relation to

cultural SPl' ihdt} of colour for lI1 ranee, hut the contin cncy of sound is less evolved in sensual discour e . The psychologist -lark F. Zander, among other, has inve: ugated how musical tom position can influence our con .urnpt ion patterns and, pccific ally, how musi al tempo and rhy thrn tan alter our perception of urne: tudie looking at adverti erncnt and

audience perception of their length found temporal awareness wa: influenced by the accompanying music al style when vicv, ing. In a broader context, The roll- musk play. must he considered carefully bccau 'e it attract - attention, transport: implicit and c .plicit me ' 'age , generate emotion ' and help one retain information . To Imbricate ound (with music heing its dominant language) into the design-world Is important in situating de ign into a broader immersive environment. ound can he used as a vchi lc for sense of self, place and imagination.

51 rter arncie k

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Interactive design is a natural home t

I

227

'..music

In

the large and f eat ureless depart ment sto res where the escalat or

moves you fr om one sonic sphere to anothe r, as if being dra wn into th e canopy of a stra ti fie d worl d of modern consumption.' The Self ridges depart ment store, Birmin gham UK : A rch itect s: Futur e Systems (comple t ion 2003). 'The inte rior is planned around a dramat ic roof lit atri um cri ss-cr ossed by a whit e eat's c radle of sculpted esca lato rs and a smaller but equa lly powerfu l at rium' . htt p://bi t.ly/dept_sto re

short article. As one brief measure of sound's marginalisation, it is worth conducting a concentrated listening experiment like the one described above, if only to compare your discoveries to the soundscapes conventionally represented in film and to hear what was once rich , dynamic and engaging, rendered banal. Another dimension that emerges from such experiments is the extent to which a significant proportion of the soundworld we inhab it cannot be located externally. Sound-proofed window s and walls, ear-plugs and active noise reduction systems can muffle the sounds from 'outside'. Cranked-up headphones or stereo speakers may replace certain exterior sounds with others that have the values of having been chosen and being predictable. None of these systems, however, can drown out the sounds from within. The sounds of metaphor and association played through that dirty turntable I mentioned; the match scrape, the fish plop, the Berlin snowball, the gurgling pipe s. That inner voice articulated by Wittgenstein and Burroughs at the st art is also, I believe, a consistent cont ributor to our personal soundtrack. And finally, in this clamour, there are those mysterious hums and whines of obscure origin that emerge, paradoxically, both in moments of relaxation and of enervation . Just as there are no earlids, nor are there brainlids . Nada Brahma: all the world is sound."

for this ynthe: is and design groups like RT+ M, an as ociat ion of designer ', scicnust ,artists and technicians have a twenty year history in thi: area . The H\I\\ Ius .um in Muni h is an example of an ecology of digital means and .ensual needs where:' patial choreographies of projections, light and sound create a dynamic backdrop for the seven "exhihit ion houses ". I The currency of zeros and ones, which is the in piration for collective like ART+COM, mean all creativ practice from typography to film, itlu. tration to soni arts i. part of a n w digital e onorny, Just as de .ktop puhli . hing made people aware of typography (to a lc .ser or gr rater extent) or, likcwis ,editing soft ware makes photo-manipulation second nature for the most amateur photographer; incrca ' ing ace. s to ound .ofrwarc, from Simple arnpling to more sophisticated notation programme, inevitably leads to .ound gaming greater and greater prevalence in our creative lives, ound has become one more digital tool for the creative impulse .

See f urt her images here www .limitedlanguage.org/ images

Referenc es Ludwig Witt genstein, Philosophical Inves ti gatio ns (Oxfo rd : Bla ckwell, 2(0 1), 327(First published, 1953). 2 William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (London: Flamingo, 2001), 144 (First published 1962). 3

4

rt

T

Marshall McL uhan and Quent in Fiore, The M edium is th e Massage: An In vento ry 01 Effec ts (New York: Hardwired, 1996), 142 (First published, 1967). Joachim-Ernst Berendt, The World Is Sound: N ada Brahm a: M usic and the Landscape of Cons ciousness (RochesterV T: Inner Tradit ions, 1987).

51 Iter arncie k

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r t

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229

Re rences 1 Interview with Scanner In CMJ New MusIc Monthly 2

Octo r 1999. S ructurahsrn developed the Idea that human culture ISto be understood as a system of Signs and was heavily mfluencec by the work in linguistIcs led by

3

Ferdinand de Saussure. The Foley ar 1St creates many of the natural. everyday sound effects in a film.

4

Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher (New York: American Book Company, 1907),

5

Ibid

6

Fran Tonkrss In MIchael Bull and Les Back. The Audl/ory Culture Reader. Sensory Formations series

(Oxford: Berg. 20(3). 510. Y,·Fu Tuan. 1990).

8

toooonin» (Columbia Unoversl y Press.

ark F. Zander. 'Musical Jnfluences on Advertising : How MusIc Modifies First Irnpress.ons of Product Endorsers and Brands' In Psychology of MUSIc. Vol.

34. No.4 (2006): 465·80. 9

230

ART -t-COM: www.shrmktfy.comjtsk

Limi ted Language I Sensibil ities I Earlids and brainlids: on thoug hts and sounds

Monica Biagiol i

White cube noise Sound has an amorphous quality about it that, when coupled with the word 'art', presents a very real and immediate problem in terms of presentation in a gallery space. In its pure, unfiltered form, sound has no tangible boundaries. It just is. Means used to create, capture, and transmit it often become the unwitting focus in presentations of sound-based works. Installation art approaches can engage audiences in active participation with the listening elements of the work. Yet, often, in the journey from sound to sound art, visual representations become more of the focus . How can we take attention away from the vehicles, trappings or visual representations of sound and place it back where it belongs? Steven Connor has addressed this problematic headon, in a talk at the Audio Forensics Symposium at the Image-Music-Text gallery (IMT) in London in 2008. His talk, entitled Ear Room, explored language as a container and argued for a more forthright approach to sound aesthetics through semantics. Why talk about sound and space? Why not give body and shape to these formless terms and refer to them as ear and room? He argues that this focus, this pinning-down, would provide sound art with a solidity it now seemingly can only find via its vehicles, trappings and visual representations. However, this assumes that fitting into a container is what sound art wants to do, and yet many of the manifestations of sound art avoid receptacles altogether via ambient strategies (radio and Internet transmission being two examples). But this does not solve the problem of the white cube. How to put focus on the sound in sound art within the gallery space? If the amorphous and ambient elements of sound art are to be featured, any physical representation, be it object-based or installation, can draw attention away from the sound. A way of addressing this problem is to embrace sound's invisibility and place focus on its more

Between the gallery and the street 'W hat are days for? Days are whe re we live. They co me , they wake us T ime nne! time ove r. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?' (Phili p l.a rkin, Days 1953)' In l.arkin's poem, the open nne! close of days prov ides more than the rhythm again st

whic hour lives arc set. Day 'wake us '. They frame and inform human experience. It's in this way that the temporal mate ria liscs in the curation of Monica Biagioli, author of the original article, which proposes that art ists and visitors think about time in the gallery, and not the spatial exper ience alone. Biagioli worries that the visual trappings of sonic presentation detrac t from the experience of sound itself. She suggests that u: ing les: abstract, more visce ral languag« i needed

to

provide un alternative to the visual conception of the gallery. Not sound, he suggests, but ear; not space but room . It is also useful to think about time in terms of days, Biagioli remarks 'On any day that yo u walk into a gallery, at t hat moment you will experience the space slightly d ifIcrcm ly - to t he people that came in before you, or the last t ime you came in. Yo u will only capture t hat mome nt' ,' The gal lery, here, is e xplored as a tra nsient place - a series of mo ments - making the connection back to the outside world? We can see t his in Sound Proof' a series of yearly sound e xhibitions Biagioli is curating over a five yea r per iod which focus on th e transformation of t he

[ 'K

O lympics si te in

East London's Lower Lea Valley in the lead up to Starter arncte R

u

20 12 .

In one installatio n, Jern Finer' 231

record ings cre ate an audio cartography of the transformations, l apturing t he sonic chang's of t he conversion From waterways and mar .hland to building Sill' to global lourist attraction . Just as sounds come and go,

some will inevitably disappear. In

20 0


Eivent Gallery. the ex hibi tio n co mprised si x one-hour sou nd reco rdings, a co mfortable seating area and a set of visua l maps of the soundscapes. . onic, as opposed to visua l mapp ing, make. a different sense of th ings, exp and-

ing our experie nce . In Ecology of Sound: The

Sonic Ordn of Urb{1/I Space, Rowland Atkinson explains, . ound. i.provides a mea ns of exploring the more ephemera l and shift ing elements of urbanism that often slip through our lingers when we try to give concrete assessme nt of its character. .. Appa rent ly quiet urban oases and nOIsYspace. t hemse lves often c hange according to other cycles, such as street fes t ivals, nocturnal house part ies or t he d aily flows and route ' of co mmu t ing worke rs... T his rela-

uvc "st ickiness" of sound in place, to take the example of urban comm uti ng flows in cars, gives sound its ecology, o r a relat ive fixity,

even as its complexi ty and relatively unbounded nat ure need to be ack nowledged'.' Like Larki n's bound ed Days, Hiagioli and

salient qualities . One of these is its existence in a timeframe . Working with time, instead of space, in curation allows for sound's visual absence of boundaries to be expressed and, at the same time, provides a means for packaging the work within the gallery. It also places special emphasis on the sound properties of the piece, even with visuals present in the space. This does not mean that a sound art exhibit ion would not have object or installation elements. David Toop speaking at the same symposium at IMT, explored the idea of using objects as a way of focu sing on sound. Taking this approach would deal with our gallery-going expect at ions directly. So, by pinning down the visual language of sound (and getting that expectation out of the way) it fre es us up to engage with the sound more purely. Still, the focus needs to come back to sound and a good vehicle for doing this is t ime . Considering the gallery in terms of opening hours rather than cubic metres can help bring audiences to the sound element of the work. And, through the activity of listening, this can link up the gallery experience to a process-b ased approach that has body and form beyond the white cube. See f ur t her images here www.lirnitedlanquaqe.oro/ imaqes

Atkin. on cap tu re the text u re of li me: t ime and time O\ 'N. In replies to t he article on the Limited La nguage website, Rachel G ray re mind s us of ot her temporalities; .... he "opening" hours for pirnuality haw traditionally been marked by sound -the l hurch bell, which call Chri.-

uans

to

prayer and which also mark out ever)

hour of the day, and the Adhan, the Islamic call to

prayer, Iivc limes a day, This i both imma-

terial (the ambient ound of pirituality] and he marking of lime as it mater ialises In culture as hour of the day '. 1 In t he city, church bell and the Adhan ynchroni e (or asynchronise] wit h the daily flow of commute rs etc. It is th is ord erin g and layering (rather than a simple seq uencing) of the urban oundsc ape which draws attention 232

Lim ite d Language

I Sen s ibil ities I W hite c ube noise

Jem Finer's aud ioca rtog raphy records tra nsforma tion of th e Olymp ics site in East London's Lower Lea Valley in t he lead up t o th e London Olymp ics 2012,

-

Sound Proof at the E:vent Gallery, cu rate d by Monica Biagioli (2008),

ants six i-hour sound re(or d'~s a5sembled intoa6.hou • rprogramme. wi

Close-up of Sound Proof.

to the so ial and political dimensions of everyday life,

_0

that '[tjhe ity is not then simply

an open . en ory experience...but one which impacts on u in ways that perhaps we are only beginning to understand'." The visual, of ourse, is integral to the en ory e..perience of the city too, and many of the arne anxietie ari e. De ign, and most recently grapht de ign, are enjoying increasing visibility in the gallery and mu cum. However, here, the visual ordering and layering of the urban land cape - its ecology - is easily lost. the hi tor ian and philosopher Tony Fry warns, '...to reify design...which i to pre 'e nt it in an objectified form removed from it dynamic proce. ,is to mi con tru th very nature of de . ign'.' Part of the problem for design is that th gallery or museum cxperien e so often cmphaises its visual aspe ts over thi temporal dimension . Take the t rrn 'impact': c n idered visually,

it

throws up di . cu

ion of aesthet-

ic ; form and colour or, in ad- peak, the wow factor,

onsidering how de ign impact upon

us in a temporal sense can tart to take into account effect that can only be under uood over time. Recent example of thi temporal ernphacan tentatively be seen... For in lance, when the Graphi Design Museum opened in Breda,

Holland, Here, LUST created Poster Wall for the

21

t century, which autornati ally gener-

ated six hundred posters daily, using content gathered from various Internet our es . Visually powerful, the LUST installation

The Journal of Popular Noise is a per iodica l which comprises three seven-inch vinyl singles with in a fo lded sleeve w it h accompa nying context ual material. The journal edito r Byron Kalet observes 'recorded sound seems to have tran scended its former physical manif est at ion and returned to its orig inal fo rmless presence, vibrat ing air' ,The journal conscious ly attaches th e sonic world wit h the artef act: a beaut ifu lly designed, lett erpress sleeve.

abstra ts news feeds from any narrative context, providing a graphic interface, a moving wallpaper of information. Hut, when considered temporally, po ter by poster, moment by moment, day by day, the project might, even if fleetingly, rcfrarne the contents of the museum

The journal websit e commen t s: 'Dedicated t o mainta ining the highest qualit y in the physical manifestat ion of music and sound, all releases are issued in packaging and forma t s designed to maximize the listeners pleasure' _http: //bit.ly/pop.noise.book Image credit: Jeremy Balderson, Design: Byron Kale!.

in relation to a larger dynarni pro e s. out there. And yet, in ord r to apture and interrogate the way in which de .ign exist within thi larger dynamic proces 234

much work to b don ?

r

i n't there till

0 Limited La nguage

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Sens ibilit ies

I

Wh ite cube noise

A Poster Wall for th e 21st cent ury fo r t he Graphic Des ign Museum, Breda, Holland. Concept, Design and Programm ing: LUST 2008.

It is de sign's uses and effects, year in, year out, which are pertinent for thinking about its future. Almost 40 years ago, Victor Papanek in Desifn for the Real World, was one of the first to advocate 'design thinking'. He called for ·...a greater understa nding of the people by those who practice design '." Ecology is finally becoming a dominant conceptual framework in design . In the 1 970 s, as now, this was prompted by an anxiety over t he increasing power of de sign to hape tool ,environments and by ex ten sion human experience: how we live. W here call we live bur days? Larkin reflected: 'Ah, olving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Runni ng over t he fie lds.'!" When designers quest ion the cycle of consumpt ion...who will come runn ing! S.. tutt iesp nse

• Carr on tne con

rsanon lerE-

hI p:/lu y.cc/o:hapter5_A

RE-~dp.

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Rach I Gray 27/ul/'lf.m

References 1

Philip Larkm and Andy Thw ai e (ed .) Philip Larkm:

Collected Poems (London: Marvell Press: Faber and Faber, 1998).67 2

B ,ag,o" draws on Steven Connor's ta lk 'Ear Room ' at he Audio Forensics Symposium, lmaqe- Mustc- Text Gallery, London. 30 Novem ber 2008

3

Telephone conversauon With Monica Bia lo ll (2009).

4

Sound Proot (2008), htt p :// bil .lyl soundproof2008

5

Rowland A tk inson, 'Ec olog y 01Sound : The Some Order of Urban Space' In Urban Studies. Vol. 44. No. 10 (2007), 1905·6.

6 7

Ibid Tony Fry. A New Design Philosophy: An introduction

to Deluiunru; (Sydne . umvers.tv of New South Wales Pre

8

s. 1999).

See http://www.graphlcdeSlnmuseum.nl/ Victor Papanek . Design lor the Real World: Human

Ecology and SOCIal Change (New York ' Van Nostrand

o 236

Reinhold Co.. 1984), Phil ip Lark in. Oo CI

,,·x.

Limi ted Language

Images of images: photographs of pain in war Regarding the Pain of Others, 1 was an extended essay by Susan Sontag written in 2003 . It looked at how we experience photographs of war in the speedy digital age of 'shock and awe'. Th is included re-addressing two widespread ideas on the impact of photography: firstly, that the media direct our experience of war and, secondly, that people have become complacent or numbed by the sheer quantity of images of horror. For instance, revisiting the infamous 1968 photo of a Vietcong (National Liberation Front) suspect and his executioner at the moment when the bullet has been fired and the prisoner is grimacing but not yet fallen ." Sontag comments: 'As for the viewer, this viewer, even many years after the picture was taken...well, one can gaze at these faces for a long time and not come to the end of the mystery, and the indecency, of such co-spectatorship ." Regarding the Pain of Others marks a departure from the postmodern theorists of continental philosophy, particularly Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida who had drawn attention to a de-centred universe made up of multiple meanings and manipulations to the point where reality recedes." This is what Baudrillard called the simulacrum. Thus a postmodern reading of the Vietcong execution mentioned above might be that it's no longer an image of pain, the degradation of man or even moral outrage but, instead, becomes part of a discussion of the 'aut hentic'. For Sontag, this postmodern denial of the notion of truth beyond a relative term in constructing the world is a bogus position. 'To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalises the viewing habits of a small educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment'." This is to the detriment of the many for whom there is real pain . Regarding the Pain of Others, then, is a reclaiming of

Starter article R

u

The slow look Susan ontag's, He{}llrdillg the Paill of Others' was written after gh I , an event for which the 'image' was multip lied to infinity, via rolling news and global computer networks. The book's importance lay in t he way it focused on how w experie nce photographs of pain in a paradoxical manner, where news from afar is brought to us as if at close proximity (which demands t hat we care) and equally, as info-tainment (which doesn't). It's t his near ing and distancing of pain, both geographical and cu ltural t hat informs the cu ltura l imagination of war; Via t he media, we enter into symmet rica l and asymmet ri al relat ions wit h th e pain of othe rs. We can ernpat hise wit h the hild made homeless by bomb ing whilst maintain ing a cri t ical dist ance from th e muti lated body of a 'terrorist'. A moral position (wit h us or against u ) allows the spe tate r a split personality when reacting to news foot age. Th is split per onality became appa rent in th e 2009 war in .aza, th e conte xt in which th is reoponse ha been written. The o riginal art icle was never post ed as an article on the Limited Language website , but the conte xt of rewrit ing has provided t he opport unity to exp lore ideas which the original art icle o uld n't a count for. I laving argued in t he o riginal article t hat 'Western med ia out lets reduce pain to an edi to rial, rathe r t han pict ori al d isplay', in January 2009, even if br iefly, there was a shift in experience for the \"'est ern viewer as newspapers ran close-up images of t he dead and dyi ng. No foreign reporte rs were being adm itted into Gaza and coverage of event. relied on jou rna lists already there, at the epicent re of th e violence. Anglo-American sensi bilities of t he image collided wit h those from the Arab commun ity. 237

For a 'IIVe ·t rn press, an event like this remove the possibility of framing a risi \\ ithin the irnag in the way explored in the original article . In tead, it has to be 'managed' out ide of It; most obviously thi s is done in image election, apt ions and lengt h of edi torial. Th ese are fa tor always found in medi a frami ng. We can .ee one d i tancin g mechanism rnp loycd in irnag aptionin g from t he Ne w York Times; 'Men ca rried th ' bodies of Gazan childre n they said were killed in an Israel airtrike'.z (The italics are ours.) T he ambiguity

of guilt in t he apt ion ou nte r t he documentary eviden I.' of the image. In th e wider world , beyo nd Gaza , satel lite te levision, Intern et acces and th e s -archability of t he World Wide Web , ha created an expanded media sphe re. ews overage once exclu sive to predetermined geographi boundaries . is now readily available to an un bound - global audiences. T hi mean. t hat a 'liVe tern viewer is increasingly eeing death, war and uffering, filte red not t hrough his or her share d codification and moral framework but rather, a myriad

of social odes and ideological perspec tives . T hu s t he visce ral depict ions of war casualties on atellite chan ne ls based in th e Middl e Ea. i , for inst an 1.', ca n be in direc t opposition to the I.' tabli hed 'norm' of showi ng t he pain of others in th \\1 t .3 In Reqardinq tire Pain of Cnhers, usa n ontag dis us e. how phot ograph s invoke a shared ex pe rien e. Wh il t t hi might ope n up di alogue between th e photo graph er and d ifferent view ing ommu nit ies, from the sta rt she rem inds th e reade r:'

0

"we" hou ld b

ta ken for granted when t he sub] t is looking at other people's pain'.' By th e end of the book, she notes t hat image of pain are haracteri cd by a fundamental diffi ulty in ommunication; t hat thi 'w ' (which mayor

pain and reality. This is a 'modern ' view in response to her own experience of war in Sarajevo and gii 1 in New York. Thi s modern view is forged out of the traumas of the First and Second World Wars and the development of documentary war photography into th e langu age, the syntax , of war zones . For Sontag, phot ograph s do have meaning and people don 't become anae sthetised by th e quantity of violent images, but by pa ssivit y. Where this essay departs from Regarding the Pain of Others is in looking at how both the photograph and the response have become part of a culture of lifestyle consump t ion. A con sequence of this is th at, alt hou gh context allows you to separate Diesel ad verts from war do cuments, say, it is no longer pos sible to totally separate the language and textual framew ork used to look at them. Two examples immediat ely come to mind, although these aren't formally related . One is the se ries of D iesel clothing ad verts which cemented t he ir reputation as an 'edgy brand' in th e Iggos wit h the tongue in cheek by-line, 'For Successful Living', Bruce Grierson, writing in Adbusters magazine, call ed them 'crypt ic ads- w it hin-ads '; '...set in North Korea, [th ey] feature images of, for example, skinny model s on the side of a bus packed with (presumably) starving, suffer ing locals. "There's no limit to how thin you can get ," says the ad on the bu s'," Another image which troubles is from The Times newspaper. This one shows a Palestinian man carryi ng a wounded child moments afte r an Isra eli st rike on the Rafah refu gee camp in the Ga za st rip in 2004 , with the caption underneath worded to this effect . 7 Viewing the image, it 's hard not to notice the man's T shirt, emblazoned as it is with the legend 'Urba n Wear'. C an we stop this from providing an alternative ca pt ion? Some time in the late aoth century, somewhere between th e art exhibitions which endorsed the view of the extraordinary war photograph as 'beaut iful' and the Hollywood war film s which embe llished and Am ericanised this aest hetic , a globa l brand scape of war has eme rged ." Th is is a cu ltu re where the 'rea d ing' of images

may not include the photographe r) have not experienced the pai n on view. W hen t he phot ograph er re moves the urge ncy of th e here-and -now of suffering , it 238

Lim ited Languag e I Sensib iliti es I Images of image s: phot ograph s of pain in war

MARCH 30. 2003 · THE SUNDAY TlMa

Feeding the Arab furies The Ir oeen •

war haS

II to Slates k:w a reason 10

againstth"" commot1 Wf

enemieS.

les Colin Smith

'Feeding t he A rab Furi es', TheSunday Times, 30 Marc h 2003. Phot ograph by Vahid Salemi.

open s up what Lilie Chouliaraki refers to as, 'a space of analytical temporality'.' This is one in which event . an be debated and reflected on and he refers particularly to the long shot. On the one hand, we can ee thi in images of a city- ape of smoke or the night- pc tacle of bombings over Baghdad . The se latter images, of cour e, are part of the rhetoric that allows death to b dispassionately rethought of as 'collate ral damage '. On the other hand, we can also see it in photographs taken 'in place ', but after the eve nt has occurred. Thi s allows both empathy and indignation to be suspended for deliberation . With Gaza, although much of the daily and lead reporting used the close-up, the temporal/analytic space was often employed in photograph hosen for the inside (analysis) page of the daily newspapers and in the weeklie s whose role it is to su rnrna rise and reflect back on the last seven days' new . For instance, an essay in The Economist a king, 'W here Will it End?" set the tone with a header image of the back of a man's head in silhouett e looking out of a [glassless"] window and over the scene of a bomb-hit building. In thi s photograph, the expo ed infra structure of room s and concrete stairways twist and hang off their steel innards. 0 longer con nected, the scene served to remind us of the daily lives similarly Fra tured and dispossessed which were yet another casualty of thi s (any) war. In an image apuoned, Too hard a lesson ',' the viewer looks, through the eyes of the photographer, at a woman sitt ing on step at the other end of an alleyway and she is facing back to the photographer/viewer. Between lie several charred pairs of shoe s and soiled lethes. Other photos showed people picking through more strewn per onal effects; books, papers and other remnants of once dail y life. The viewer, photographer and the person in the photo cannot conn ect through the pain of such loss. However, in implying, rather than depicting the human condition, Q the se photographs demand a slower 100k. The se are the same minutiae that give nar 240

has, over half a century, be come so common place that the ability to analyse imagery is second nature for many in contemporary Western cult ure. Increasingly, this has become a culture where images are supplied to us with the analysis ready-inscribed. This phenomenon could be seen in the media analysis of the 2003 war in Iraq, which was raging as Sontag's book hit the shelves. Here, response to images didn't follow their reproduction in the media but came pre-packaged. For instance, the image of George W. Bush in full combat gear jumping off his fighter jet which had 'Commander in Chief' painted on the side to the backdrop of the u.s.s. Abraham Lincoln and a building-sized banner st ating 'Mission Accompli shed '." Here the language of films like Mission Impossible and Top Gun and the historical document are all rolled into one . Another piece of pre-packaged commentary was the British Guardian newspaper's G2 coverage which showed an Iraqi boy, looking out from the page and into the viewer 's eyes. The pull-quote read: 'Thi s is Sufian . He is I I. One evening, American soldiers hooded and hand cuffed him, then took him to prison. For three weeks his parents had no idea where he was. Is th is the way to police Iraq?'!" This tale made the boy news worthy but what made it media friendly was his attire: an American Simpsons cartoon T-shirt, with Bart saying: 'I didn't do it . Nobody saw me do it. You ca n't prove anything'. The image was not simply reportage. One can recogni se the horror of the situation but can more readily empathise with the knowing nod to the ideology of empire (of occupation and media empires and the ir homogenising effect) which is symbolised in the child's T-shirt. Shot to commission, the photo agency Troika told us that the image was in no way orchestrated by the photographer. However, its context is a liberal broadsheet where journalists and editors are aware of the self-knowingness of a modern day audience. Could th ey be accused of providing editorial and images already aligned to th ese tastes? Doesn't the child's image read

Limited Language

I Sensibili ties I Images of images: photographs of pain in war

rative to our own live. Might t here be some shared experience in the a t of looking at the e traces? like a Kellogg's packet advertising its free gift; th e bonus of an ironic sta te ment for the audie nce's appre ciation? Th is 'relationship' is clearly illus trated by Anne Higonnet in Pictures ofInno cence: The H istory and Cri sis of Ideal Childhood. Higonn et, an art hist ori an , comment s: 'The Knowing idea belongs to our particular histor ical moment . Photography's fidelity is to the values of th at particular moment, not to some "real" tr uth about child ren '.II In t his mediated relatio nship, t he photograph ente rs into a dialog ue with the viewer which is more abo ut a share d langu age between photographer and viewer and less about the pain of th e child. Th is cultural knowingness or relationship between news and audience is int rinsic to what we see and what we don 't see. For insta nce, the Q at ari television sta t ion A l Jazeera underst and s pain to be legitimate, viscera l viewing. In cont rast, Western med ia outlets reduce pain to an editor ial, rather th an pictorial display. Early on in the coverage of the war in Iraq, America n Time magazine commentate d on a 'ec -rated war'12 in terms of images. It made a call for more 'real' images of devasta t ion and death to wake us up from the st upor th at led th e West to war. A stasis, not induced by repeated exposure to pain and violence, but by its aestheti cisatio n. One photograph from Time, th at was t aken during th e fall of Sadd am Hu ssein Internation al Airport , shows t wo sold iers directed (as is th e viewer) by th e signage for Arriva ls.P 'This image is a version of advertising's 'Big Idea'; t he visual equivalent of th e verbal soundbite. And yet th ere is also another war aest het ic on view: one of images of images, as much of place as of people. For instance, afte r the Amer icans had taken Baghdad, Simon Norfolk photographe d the bombarded Min istry of Defence, where a poster of Saddam Hu ssein hangs unscathed on t he wall." In t he absence of t he man himself, to capture any of Saddam's icons on film was a potent press image in its elf. And t he doc umentary mode disc ussed here soon becomes a visual trope when translate d into new contexts. For instance, in a camp aign by

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Eye-witne s photographs in close-up can on ly pre ent people as victims. In t he more analytical, tempo ral mode, photograph do more tha n wit ness. Cho uliaraki suggests they can ask us to conte mplate the ex per ience of t hose who wit ness events in reality, and also our own experience of witnessing th rough the image. The ufferer • as well as being victim, become: 'humanized and histo rica l beings; as people who feel, relle t and act on their fate '. 10 In t his way c.Io they, momentar ily at least , be orne peopl like 'us' who happen to live far away? Cerr on tt,P conversation tlf're tp rny.cc ch, p N _4

Referer.ces ntaq, R gardmg the Pein of 0 hers (L noon Harml n 'J(X)3).

Susan Harm 2

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F r In ance Gaza Und r F"e. lslarmc Channel. Sky 813.1 February 2009. Here. phrases such i\ 'genoCide' shd across he screen as the camera pann d In and out of pictures of cbitdren, ,nJured and dead . he" i arruhes 010 'Olng and buildmqs being bulldozed,

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Economist 10 January 2OO'l. 23

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the G er man charity, Misereor, a mural of a family of workers in the fields which has been riddled wit h bull ets in some unspecified conflict, is accompanied by the byline, 'War Leaves Many Traces: War O rphans Need Your Help to Live in Peace'," In both of the se, a move can be seen from direct repr esentat ion or experience to the traces of the everyday. It's an aest hetic which Sontag's book can't account for as it so often precludes pain. But even when it doesn't , it's somet hing she doesn't (encourage us to) look for. The capturi ng of tr aces keeps war at a distance, but it doesn't present us wit h a simulacra of t he war like a movie might do. The tr ace, in a sense, becomes the indexical link to reality . The t race can also present us with a more complex serie s of images which can't be redu ced to soundbites for the next day's news. Instead, th ese need time to penet rate th e depth of th eir possible meanings. Consider the following image, presented when th e war was over: it shows Iraqi men eat ing outside a cafe in Baghdad wit h American sold iers patrolling in the background. On th e cafe ta ble stands a collection of fizzy drink cans. Look a little longer and one drink can, which at first glance seem s to bear the Seven Up logo, on closer inspection reads, 'C heer Up'.16 The layering of images and narratives (including th e fragment ati on and unremarkable nature of th e images discu ssed at t he end) is not to reinforce th e post mod ern, Euro pean posit ion whose dislocation of truth and the value of experience has t aken away from engagement wit h th e image. Instead: Is the trace now the same as the modernist idea of experience? Images not only have meaning but, in an over-saturated visual world, is it often the traces which give meaning? Images cannot compete with the SFX of movies, but trac es are real and not just simulations. See furth er images here www.limitedl anguage.org/ image s

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Baghdad Mini str y of Defen ce. © Simon Norf olk (2003).

War Orpha ns Nee d You r Help t o Live in Peace ,

fo r th e charity M isereor. By Kolle Rebbe (2007). http: //bit.ly/Mi sereor

Ref erences 1

Susan Sontag , Regard ing the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2(03). This wa s a revisiting of some of t he ideas she had orig inally developed in On Photography (New York : Far rar, St raus, Giroux, 1977).

2

Phot ograph of an exec uti on in Saigon, Sout h Vietnam, 1 Febr uary 1968by Eddie A dams, USA , fo r The A ssoc iated Press. The photogra ph won t he World Press Photo of the Year: 1968.

3

www.wo r ldpress photo.org Susan Sontag, Op c it., 53·4.

4

Thi s work is more part ic ular ly part of post -structura list th inking. Two of it s main prot agonist s we re Jean Baudril lard and Jacqu es Derrid a. Baud ri llard proposed t he 'simulacrum' , whe re human experience is of a simulat ion of realit y, med iated by signs, rather t han rea lity it self. Roland Bart hes' later work was also post structu ra list in t hinking and, in Came ra Lucida : Reflections on Photog raphy (1982), he sugge sted th at th e relat ive innocen ce whi ch prompte d his earli er str uct uralist essays, such as Mythologies (1957, Engl ish tr anslation 1970), had passed . Here, he cou ld ma ke f airl y sta ble associa tions between 'stea k and ch ips' and 'Frenchness' for instance. Lat er, mean ing s and sig ns we re seen t o be muc h more unst able.

5

Susan Sontag, Oo cit ., 98.

6

Bruce Gr ierson, 'Sho ck 's Next Wave: Ad ver t isers Sc ramble for New Ways t o Shock an Un shockable Generat ion ', in Adbuste rs magazine (Winter 1998). The advert s we re designed by Swedish

7 8

design agency Trakt or. Ian Mac K inno n, '10 die as Israeli t ank shells crowd' in The Tim es, 20 May 2004, 34. Photograph by Kah il Ham ra/A ssoc iat ed Press. See Phili p Gr iffit hs, Vietnam Inc. (London: Phaidon, 2(01). A lso, The Br it ish new spaper, The Guardian, off ered Iraq photo s fo r sale on its we bsit e even as t hey st ill appeared in t he guise of reportage in th e news paper. One cou ld 'click and own ' th e photog raphs.

9

www.guard ian.co.uk/iraq These images were distributed t o newsroom s world -wid e on 1 May 2003. The orche stra ti on of t he event. co mmentary included, wa s so obvio us that report s of its PR man oeu vr ing accompan ied

the broadca st of th e image . 10 Sufian Abd af-Ghani phot ographed by Michael Walte r on t he cover of The Guardian G2 cover, 15 August 2003. 11 An ne Higonnet, PIctures of Innocence: TheH is/ory and Cris is of Ideal Childhood (London : Thames and Hudson, 1998). 12 Joe Kle in, 'The PG-rat ed War' in Time, 7 Apr il 2003, 67. 13 New A r r ivals: The US Army's 3rd Inf ant ry Di vision looking f or resist ance f rom Iraqi fi ghter s under airp or t signs point ing to passport co ntrol and baggag e clai m fro m 'D est inat ion Bag hdad ' , Tim e, 14 Apr il 2003. 14 Baghdad Min istry of Defen ce by Simon Norf olk. Pr inted in 'Afterburn', The Guardian Weekend, 24 May 2003, 21. Norf olk also showed work in 'The Subl ime Image of Destr uct ion ' fo r 2008

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Br ight on Photo Biennial curated by Julian Stallabrass. 15 Campa ign by M isereor, the overseas development agency of the Cat holic Church in German y. 16 'A t.atte - A nd a Rifl e To Go' , The Observ er Review cover, 8 June 2003. Photograph by Al exander Zemilia nichenko.

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Mediations After digitaL .. / Sense making? Olgital glass / Digital behaviours Speech, writing, print... / Serifs and conduits New reading spaces / Print vs. screen This page is no longer on this server... / The influence of neighbours Thts chapter ai'::plores how to inr or prJ~ atoP i.llqd~ll !lll·!:!,a Inl0 design practice and wri~ i Il~r if 0111 :.h~J I:.: I : 0(11 s lUll Lil rllIHj: community to

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Limited Language

After dlqttul., The Information Super highway is now more than twenty years old and is beginning to show some wear and tear. Like early Modernist architecture, the Internet has been built on the metaphor of speed, creating a landscape of strip cities made up of Internet servers. Yet, whereas architecture creates a powerful topography - the skyline - digital servers remain anonymous, their presence almost unnoticed, mostly underground, bunkered and sealed from the day to day. And now... Speaking to a colleague the other day, he asked, 'What happens when digital technology becomes middleaged?' And this is the point: in a speeded up digital world the technology has already reached its 'mid dle-age' crisis. So many of its dreams, offspring and partnerships have either failed, died or taken up lives of their own . What we are seeing (and Limited Language is part of this phenomenon) is a moment of reflection, a wistful interlude where we see a proliferation of blogs which , like Victorian journal entries, try to make sense of the times. Then it was the Industrial revolution, now a more 'velvet' technologi cal one where digital de sign materialises, as once the Arts and Crafts ' movement did, in the handmade and the organic, the tactile, the sensual and the interactive. In the 21St century this is not an attempt to reject, but to humanise, the digital. We are awaiting the outcomes... See f urt her images here www .limitedlangu age.org/ images

References The A rt s & Crafts Movement emerged towards the end of the 19th cent ury into the early years of the 20th centu ry, celebrat ing craft and qualit y in an era of mass and cheap reproduct ion.

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After digital ... presupposed that digital ulture is a culture of peed, invi ibility and euphoria at techni al innovation. The article pied a moment of refl tion, a desire to make it visible and 'real', in order to under rand it. effe t . A ' Ad riana ornrnents in replies to t he art i le on t h Limited Language web. ite: ·...(finally) [It) st arts becomin g mtere ting. Maybe the time of invi: ibility is over, now that mistakes and fri t ions ' tart to reveal th em selves',' T he original ar t icle made a pres ient refe re nce to a velvet revolut ion in the digi tal realm. Web 2.0 i. the re ult of th is revolution . It docs not have a single author; it i not a sof tware upgrade, a piece of ha rdwa re or a qua ntifiable commodity. It is a colle t ion of te hnological e ologie from which ultu ral developments in digi tal tool making multiply. Facebook, My pace and Twitter are exampl ' of thi organ ic develop rn nt: a oeial netwo rking e osy tern. 'After', which suggests a passing, is somewhat of a misnomer but it inte nds to infer a t ime (now reached ) where digital tec hnology i fu lly embedded in our bod ies and in our everyday and, as suc h, has become 'seco nd nature' to many in a con nected world where its networks - from banking to telecommunications - affect everyone. It' in t his sense that digital culture has visibly mate rialised; as a way of think ing, react ing and behaving in t he world. Digit al technology has ex te nded our tools of communicatio n and (maybe more radically), how we on ume and what we conume. The introdu tion of the \l r3 format for instance, gave rise to the evolution of 'downloading' net work.. I apster was the most (in) famou of the Internet ites which introduced th idea of' harin "mu i aero s net works and 249

Image: Sandrine by GamonGirls . htt p:f{bit. ly{sandri ne

Poladroid is an App whic h allows the user to crea te a digit al vers ion of t he t radit ional Polaroid photogr aph. The websit e proc laims: 'Welcome to the POLADRO ID worl d!' The Ap p has an accompanyi ng gr oup po ol on fl ickr to share and compare users. creat ive outpu t. htt p:{{bit. ly{polar_group http:{{bit.l y{polardroid

it has radically transfor med how we consume music, with iTunes, for instance , be ing its legitimate, corporate off spring. An important outcome of this use of t he World Wide Web is how it ha severely questioned t he econom i model of music co nsu mp tion: Do you pay? How much do you pay? Do you buy t he music outright or pay for a ce s, and simply lease month by month? This shift - from ownership to a ce

- i mo t radical in a on . umer ul-

ture and the eff c ts remain to b en. Over all, this e xa mp le m ight see m to reject Joel's origi na l lament: 'Like all thing. the Web will reach it "sell by" dat ,hecau. c l

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become legit imat e busi nc s models a nd , as a result of th is, lose popula ri ty and the cache of being agai ns t th e co rpo ra te rna hin e: alte rnative . W hat is d iffe rent from th e u: ual fashion cycle is th at it has tran sfor m d o ur way of th ink ing about music: not s imply th e re hnology of

it S

consumption but what mu . i is

worth and how we co n ume from t he pi k 'n' mix of digi tal down loads. \ e now have th op po rtuni ty to make up (and purcha e) playlists rather t ha n album. allowi ng t he po ibili ty of a creative a t in how we consume musi . T hi can become a perforrnauve ritical a tion whe n mediated t hrou gh si tes like Last .fm (now ow ned by 115) wh i h allows u ers to upload musi a nd

rea te

rad io sta t ions. T he e a re e se nt ially playlists th at other. can a c s (with th e opt ion to purc hase tracks). Th e site promotes itse lf thus: ·...as you use l.ast .Irn, you make it better for you and ev -ryone else . W he n you recommend some mus ic to a fr iend , or you tag it, or you write about it - even just listening to it - you sh ift the song 's importance on the site. It'll be re ommended to different people, he au e you 've Ii tened to it. It'll move up our mu ic hart and maybe more people will hear it he ause you thought it wa go d .' Isn't it the c eff cts that we need to make vi ible and real - to under rand? Starter artete

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The original article asked whether the effects of digital could appear in the handmade and the organic, the tactile, the sensual and the interactive. Today we would argue that many of these qualities can be found in the patchwork of personal sites created in My pace and Fucebook . The social networking sites which are popular at the moment aren't the glossy, filmic site designed by the latest add-ens in Flash, or similar software, but more a cut and past organic interface - a bro age of the sound, vision and interface formats. This sense of the organic is captured in the comment by Mark Zuckerberg the founder/designer of Facebook: 'At Harvard, a few of my friends saw me developing Facebook and they sent it out to a couple of their friends and within two weeks, two thirds of Harvard were using it. Then we started getting ernails from people at other schools asking "I low do we get Facebook? ould you license us the code so we could run a version of Facebook for our s hool?" But when I started it, there was no concept of having Facebook across schools', ' Based on the idea of a chool yearbook, Facebook quickly b 'came a dominant social networking platform because it was facilitated by the 'embedded' nature of Web

2 .0;

that which scamlessly

interact with our lives. The Application Programming Interfaces

(AI'I) which allow the introdu tion of third party applications, or Apps, have nurtured Facebook's development. First introduced in

2005

by Facebook, the effect of Apps

was immediate; 'The Faccbook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Inte rn et industry.... Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platforru.! Apps have become the dominant development in Web culture - from Firefox to the iPhone - the App or add-on allows us to personalise the user experience. In just one of the untold number of examples, Colour Expert allows you to iden252

tify the nearest colour match reference in any

Lim ited Language I Mediat ions I Aft er digit al.

ph oto yo u have taken in order to u sc it el sewhere (in a de sign?). Although this particular example is released through Apple's App 't o re (which control what you can download), rival develop ers' are allowing Apps to be d eveloped and di stributed hy anyone in the original sharing/cornrnunity mode innovated by Weh

2.0.

This is part of a broader shift in digitally mediated de .ign , and information design in particular, in which we see a transformation of the traditional model where we imply read and follow instruction s. Now we see a more reflective, 'relational' development where a person

anintera t' or engage in dia logue:

both as a user and d eveloper; Instead of, 'data-basing human se nses'" ' (as one reply cautioned in responses on the website), it's this 'making se n 'I." that becomes the imperative 'a ft e r' digital. As we wrote in our own rep ly to the original article: 'This is, perhaps, an attempt to help people navigate the

2 f st

century - in the same way the road

and motorway ignage system designed by Jock Kinneir and f

largaret Calvert did in the

950S and 60S, or the way Harry Heck's 1933

map of the London Underground made real th

temporal and invisible realm of travelling.

In the digital realm of today, people can both reate and experience narrative making in many forms..."v How designers will engage with these changes is till to he fully reali sed. S

,> tull responses + c
Reader credits

Adriana :?2 OS/200 J081 16 ~ 2C(~J Anonyrnoos tt> at"0')5 this cemn ent acl~allj comes ul/t of 'I r1 saqreemer t With the or tll1al ar de Ht out wi ether velve' :!!ch, 010\1, had the capaci • ior nar i HIVt or sense makll1Q. 'I er d tc lJ1S80fPe with JOUl lid"" nca Ion of] velv, ' e ,,0 C1" wllh the AI Sand (.r r s movement. TnITpie a I"e prr ducts 0 tI f Iq tal "[IE ' <' m r ar ab .donrnen of numarusn r) h r han p '" e ~I II Who ' ddt",!!) at s humar fron m.rnals In m, (pinion, 'th>abhlyl ella" r nar lit ~ An r I what lacks In ,-'Ivet te rmc ( JJ I n " \'\rl r1 r Starter artocle

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Jon Wozencroft

Digital glass In reference to an earlier post on Limited Langu age, Af ter Digital [th is volume p. 249] . After Digital points t o the assumption, which in some resp ects is fairly ent renched already, th at we have th e hang of d igit al med ia: we ca n sit down , put our feet up in front of the widescreen, it s FreeView box and broadband access , and work out what our options are. And yet , if we ca n agree that for most of th e design community, d igital soft ware became a modus ope rand i at the end of the 1980s , then the digital sphere is not 'middle-aged' and st ill very much in it s youth. D igital imp acted ver y quickly on graphic de sign and print med ia but, for the rest of th e world, it was t he age of the Internet and mobile t elephony, rather th an the graphic design softw are of the PC and Mac, th at had th e grea te r effec t , almost a decade lat er. I am completely sympat het ic wi t h th e noti on that d igital is middle-aged. There is a sense of fati gue , maybe, and th e sus picion th at the early and quite cr it ica l years of 1990-95 have been supers eded by a radical conformity. At th e outset, th ere were voices in opposit ion t o th e prevailing currents. The climate ch anged . To get personal for a moment, Neville Brod y and I took the opp ortunity to end the seco nd book we d id in 1994 ( The Graphi c Language of N eville Brody 2),1 on a not e of caution rather than th e false opti mism cha racteristic of the early 1990S. However, it was 'out of time' - even when the sur face of it was readil y taken up as a template for a digital aesthetic. The FUSE project, a platform for experimental de sign and typography launched in 1991, was both misunderstood (po ssibly our mistake) and wide ly adopted way beyond it s print-run. The Internet was be ing spoken of as a superhighway but there were no cars on it . The 'End of Print? rhetoric that followed was one take on the 'slacker ' aest hetic but there is no moveme nt in the decision to repl ace text with Zapf

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The fa ilit y...operates seven da y a week from 9 a. m. to 9 p.m ., has e ight re earch room. de orated as living room s or home office s, with hardwood floor., soft lighting and comfortable furn iture. Th ere is al 0 a theatre that allow a dozen people to participate in a simuhaneou experiment. ... The room ' are built around a ce nt ral command post, where re earchers : rutinize part i ipant via video monitor - one room has 20 cameras - and through one-way mirrors'.1

Is the facilit y an Orwellian scenario from Nin eteen Eighty-Pour? r Brave N ew World? Maybe even the back -story for the late st Terry Gilliam movie? .. A tually it is a Walt Disney facilit y for research into how we re pond to what we . ee on the \Veb - more preci ely, Web based advertising. A rcsear h lab where 'in addi tio n to tra king eye movemerit, [aj r a-member team u heart-rate monitor s, kin temperature reading and fa ial expre ion (probe are attached to fa ial mu Ie.) to reach conclusions'J Th i-f connotat ions de scribed above are appo: ite a the title to Wozen rofr ' original po t DigitalGlass, which wa a nod to the Russian noveli t, Yevgeny Zarnyaun, 1920 dystopian nov I H0.3 The novel depicts a so icty, 500 years hence, who live in a glass cityOneState - cut off from nature by a green wall. The main protagoni st, 1}-305 (people's names being replaced by numbers with a letter prefix, vowels for women. con onant for men), a scientist and math ematician, is coerced (seduced) by 1-330,a vampish, liberated woman who at one point chide the mathemat ician by asking him to name the final number - he object s that number are infinite and he replies that ' 0 is the number of revolution ... The infinitesimal conundrum is part of 255

the phenomenorn of t he Worlt! Wide Weh when will the last page be posted:' For us, when thi nking of the World Wid Web today, t he cha llenges arc t racing its histor) (and the notion of time) and equally, in WO/, enaoft ' wort! ', 'The work nc 'ding to be done (phy iologi ally) on the effects of d igit al on the mind, body ant! pirit...' All of t h se elern nt mform the onginal article and t he respon e it solicited. You ould argue Wozencroft ' , c ' 'ay is no .ialgic for a non-digita l world: of shopping queue ,young p ople ant! Des ican t iii a Gel . It is a writ! who 'e relati onship wit h the digital I till in flux , Hu t nostalgia helps iden tify the very changes digita l te hnology ha ' wro ught... shopping q ueue, d isappear in the on line shopping c .pcr icncc CLI.:.T U' DO '1l lE WAI.K G' one home Internet service proclaims), young people are avatars, .urfcrs or YouTubc actor/wri ter / direc tor . und D " 'k ant ilica G I is r 'dundant b cau c t he digiti ed net works provid ing war -hou ' , Iogi tic, inv ntory rnanagcrn nt, delivery, cou rier, and torage dis trib ution ervi es means commodi tie no longer wait In damp warehou e : welcome to the flows of the digital world (or so th tor . goes). Hut no talgia is only one way of demarcating histor '; the ca talys t for t he origina l e say was t rying to map the time-zones and hi. to ries of digi tal cultu res. In an essay, Cri tiq ue of the Instant an d the CO llti lll ll llll, t he Italian ph ilo. opher G iorgio Agamben, makes ex plicit the importance of histo ry/t ime in cons titu t ing cultu res (bot h es tablis hed and emerg ing): 'Every conception is invariab ly accom panied by a certain experience of time whi h is implicit in it, conditions it , and t hereby has to he elu idated . imilarly, every cult ure is first and for mo t a particular expcri n of time, and no new culture is possihl without an alteration in thi experren e. The original ta k of a genuine revolution. therefore, is IW\ 'r merely to 'change th world ', hut also - and above all - to change 't ime'. I 256

Dingbats, only knowing illiteracy and more hero-d esigner boredom . Th is is what we always t ried to resist. Desktop publishing gives way to desktop mu sic, photography and film making, whic h race towards new compressio n cod es th at wish to deliver everyt hing to a screen th e size of a credi t card . Ce lebr ity and cor po rate cu ltu re looks th e same at any size or resolution . It's easy to churn out because it is d igital, and copy ing is encouraged jus t as long as you don 't make copies. Wh at exac tly is 'd igita l? It is not as all-pervasive as Nicholas Negropont e's evangelist line of Being Digira14 proposed , nor, for t hose of an i-Podded perspective, as desperate on a daily basis as Paul Virili o'' would have it . The reality is split down the middle. A while ago, I sto od in the queue in a ca mera shop beh ind a man who had asked for a roll of film to go with his new d igital camer a. 'Act ually, sir, it's a digital camera, it doesn't need film .' After five minutes had elap sed as th is point was explained in front of a fru strated qu eue, he was sent packing wit h his new purchase, and a roll of 3smm film . The professions th at have the ir daily lives det ermined by d igit al med ia get very arrogant abo ut its ub iqu ity compared to the experience of many people, who are both sed uced and baffled by speedy tech nological change. I don't th ink we've even begun to see th e wider conseque nces, let alone underst and what digital means for th e human race. Is it th e domain of young people? Is it norm al to want your child to be computer lit erate as early as possible? Economically, yes; developmentally, heaven forbid . You ca n see young people are both fascin ated and terrori sed by the dem and s of the latest mobile phon es, the PlayStation s; and older people are intimidated by the complexi ty of choices and swift-fingered techniqu es. Old er people are physica lly excluded whilst younger children are made competitive over gadgets th at qu ite literally fry th eir br ains. The work need ing to be done (physiologically) on

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the effects of digital on the mind, body and spirit will be some t ime in coming. The mental effect s - these, hopefully, being the domain of the artist - seem to have been abandoned in favour of a market game of musical chairs. The Fine Art scene has yet to come to terms with 'digital'; it mirrors its 'immateriality' in other respects. I got very annoyed about Nicolas Bourriaud 's 2002 book Post Production because it promised a criti que of thi s tendency, whilst proceeding to proselytise a list of emerging and already successful artists. There was no critical position in relation to their marketing by galleries, the media and critics such as him . 'To make diverse work...that had a lack of desire to control what comes out of it'Sdepends on a degree of invisibility that is anathema to Bourriaud's position. To refer to another contention of the After Digital post - between the Velvet Revolution in the Czech Republic in 1989 and the notion that we are approaching some digital media-equivalent - I have to say that all would agree the human touch is the thing that's missing. The iPod...it 's like Hi-Fi never happened: a Shellac from the pre-stereo era has more pre sence and vita lity th an MP3 compression offers. The earlobe/headphones make their users (the y are NOT listen ers) look like a walking ECG, but countless millions are perfectly content with personal isolation and virt ual community. In predigital t ime, Dessicant Silica Gel (a cr ystalline powder the manufa cturers put in a whit e pouch) was included with packaging for stereos etc ., to remove moisture. Th is would seem to be the effect the digit al has on the brain . Until there's a revolution the likes of which we have little idea about, nothing is going to change. All the weblogs and interactive devices in the world will add to what's alre ady carved up in the computer fabric of those who have, and those who have not . We haven't got to zombie level yet but there is little to shine light on what the real qu estion s should be. It's obvious to all, I hope, that at this moment we

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The revolution in Internet/digital technology is with a small r, but no Ie s radical for that. The Wozencroft essay was responding to our original contention of a 'velvet revolution in digital use' and our omment on h w in a 'speeded up digital world the te hnology ha already rea hed it "middle-age" ri i ; so many of it dreams, off pring and partner. hip have either failed, died or taken up live of th ir own',' Ilere we were thinking of the dot.corn crash, the orporatisation of peer-topeer networking with the advent of iTunes, and the evolving use of . 0 ial networking ites - or as Evan Schwartz dramatically reports in his book Digital Darunnisnt: ·...even as life on the Web flourishes on the surface, danger lurks beneath. With the raw fear largely gone, with the primitive experimentation rna tly left behind, with the original novelty of Internet hopping and e-comrncrcc wearing off, with technology no long r appearing futuristic, the digital bu ine s environment has taken on an air of indispensability, of inevitability'.' His book learly define the corporate phere, '[a]s an environment that can u t ain economi life:" but there is another dist in t cultural sphere - the inter-per onal: we both con ume and communicate through the Internet: from musi downloads to blogging, and a n .twork of communi at ion through a range of VolP' proto 01 too. Design uniquely bridge both spheres; it advertises its ware on the 'Neb, alongside any other corporate, commercial concern whilst equally, it will need to reate and harness the creative possibilities digital technologies offer to the pra tice of design: often providing the interfa e for both corporate and interper onal ommunication too. The de ign critic, Ri k P ynor," has commented on the non-de ign of many of the inter-per onal . it > (My pace for instance) but in one way, thi . is missing the point as it i the ontent of these sites [not the corporate styl ) wh re we find the creative ynap ses 257

which will fire future reativity: the music, film, photography found on these sights often captu re the vi ual/ oni zeitgeist. These sites form parasiti relation hips to the 'professions' in musi ,or the more plastic art s like graphic de ign: all of who have a pre ence themselves on these sights. The ne are a meeting place between the professional and the vernacular/ novice/amateur. In the 1970 we had the I>TI' revolution which pia ed once specialised technology in the hands of the novice - you cou ld now produ e your own orporate literature but inevitably much of it was bad - template ba ed - design . What is noticeably different in the way the Web interacts with the amateur is how it allows a space for the exchange of idea - many to many communication - it is not olelya technica l phenomena like 1>'11' but a relational, informative and constructive s pace. YouTube, amongst all the juvenilia, will, in the future, produce filmmakers; likewise My pace - musicians ; blogs - authors, and 0 it goes... S"" tul responses + carryon he conv I 'at Ion

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have a surfeit of recording modes and delivery systems that give us an enormous freedom , but which are not currently being developed in a humanistic way...a rare set of extremes operate on automatic. It wouldn't be beyond the pale to imagine a universal compression code whose speed and 'quality' was stratified rather like the divisions between dial-up, broadband and the not-yet-on-the-market. You can see that at the Frieze Art Fair in London -like everyth ing, it goes punter/curator/owner baron . 'Digital' gives the impression that these three poles are interdependent and dynamic . Most of all they are susceptible to Crash, which makes their day-today manifestations ever more reactionary. Can 'digit al' ever enter the socialist stage? Thi s is a big question, and one that will possibly only ever be resolved when the system reaches meltdown . To think that because a few people in Africa have laptops and that in India the economy has been turned around to a command economy, everything is going to reach middleaged maturity is, I think, forgetting the internal schisms. It's also forgetting China and its analogue of corporate America; the need for short term supremacy. The meltdown hasn't happened yet... Its time-based nature is outside our comprehension and against our nature. There is petrol, there is gas and electr icity, there is essence. For the time being, middle age is like a blur from youth - history repeating itself in secret - except you come to appreciate such things and still take them for granted. Midd le age is a state of mind whose digital characteristic can be summarised by one being either 'on' or 'off' the case . It is very much linked to the body and one's ability to survive the immobility . The glassceiling that disadvantages women is doubleglazed when it comes to old people. Digital makes life triple glazing.' You, the one [the dot] and the zero. The surface is read by lasers. My eyes are hurting. I havea bit of a headache. The youthful urge is to say 'show me something new', anything to distract from the current condition. Today's digital technologies are never around for long enough for us

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Refere nces Jon Wozencroft, The Graphic Language of N eville Brody 2 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994). It had been preced ed by The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 1 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988). 2 www.research stu dios.com/ home/OO7·fuse/FUSE_aboul.p hp 3 This was picked up by Lew is Blackwell's collaborat ion with graphic designer David Carson in Lewis Blackw ell, The End of Pri nt : The Greft« Desig n of David Carso n (Chronic le Books, 1995) and David Carson: 2nd Sigh t: Greft« Design After th e End of Print (Laurence King, 2000). After t hese books, reference to t he 'end of pr int' and/o r a 'slacker' aest heti c, ofte n imp lies Carson who in one 1994 issue of Ray Gun set a Brya n Ferry inter view in t he t ypeface Zap! Dingbats because he t hought it was a bor ing intervie w .. . 4 N icholas Negropont e, Being D igi tal (New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 1995). 5

6

Paul Virilio . Poli ti cs of th e Very Worst (New Yor k: Semiotext[ e], 1999). Nicolas Bour riaud. Postproduction (New York: Lukas & Stern berg,

2002). The basis for the 'digita l glass' metaph or co mes from the novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1922), set within a glass·enclo sed cit y. This was th e fi rst in t he 't rilogy' wh ich incl uded A ldous Hu xley, Brave New World (1932) and George Or well , N in et een Eight y·Four (1949).

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Serifs and conduits

Michael Clarke

Speech, writing, print... Within the context of postmodern theoretical writi ng, (phonet ic) writing is a limiting medium . From Plato to Ferdinand de Saussure' and onwards to a bevy of structura list and post-structuralist writers, words are acknowledged to have only an insecure relationship to the objects or concepts they seek to represent . For Jacqu es Derr ida," the Western philosophical tradition has prioritised the spoken word over the writt en. This is a conditioning cultural factor he identifies as logocentricism. In the presence of a speaker, we hear not only the author but also the authority of a statement. Written and, even more so, printed texts are denied th is authority. For instance, handwritin g is so often seen as an authentic representation of the individual (think of the author ity invested in an autographic signature), and yet it has been claimed that writing does not possess the same degree of convict ion as the spoken word. The printed word is seen to be further removed from the authority of the speaker. Given th is logocentricism, it is not sur prising th at classical literary criticis m has focused attent ion on identifying the inte ntions of an auth or in order to ar rive at the aut hentic inte rpretation of a text . This has freq uently involved the use of extra-te xtual sources, most usually biographical or anecdotal mater ial. Difficulties arise when t here is little or nothin g known about the writer. But as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Derr ida and others have observed;" if language itself lacks any certain hold on what it seeks to repre sent , there can be no reliable investment of authority in an autho r. Any possible meanings reside not in the author's intentions but in the text and the interpretations of the readers. Quite clearly, we are all involved in thi s as writers, readers or both and there are forceful implicat ions for designers. Writers often seek ways of breaking out of th is linguistic st raightjacket . In the early zoth centu ry, a numb er of these sides te pped th e expe ct ed semantica l

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The linguisti straightjacket ha not gone away...warns lichael Clarke in hi ' es .ay exploring the un table relationship between language and type : th interiority of the former opposed to the exteriority of the latter. But should typography, and by extension de ign, be a. harned of its naked world-li-ness: it out-thereon ss? Typography i the vi. ible conduit to desig n meaning: a point made clear again, and again in de ign writing. Look at teven Heller on Design ing llate' or more latterly the doc umentary Ilelvetica where Rick Poynor comme nts, 'Type is saying things to us all the ti me. Typefaces exp ress a mood , an atrnosphere . They give words a cer tain colouri ng...·2 The above are investigations of ult ural sernio i rath -r than the art of typography itself: the ink that key to the page to make our thought readable, or the pixels we manipulate to bring text into flickering existence on the computer creen. The emiosis, or symboli. rn, of type is encountered - ofte n unconsciou ly - every day. The Ge rman Goth ic typefa e, for instan e, when used today - from WWII cinema poste rs to Goth T-shirts - u e the type style in su h a way that historici e , creating symbolic meaning. This pro ess ob cures the pivotal role played by German design culture in the development of the . ans serif (from which is born Hclvcti a): 'In Germany at the end of the 19th century, t he Grotesk (the Ge rman name for .ans ser if) gained popu larity fast . These Grotesks turned out to be the most influential face in the history of the sans erif, much more so than their Engli.h counterpart '.' Rut back to the question, how do we free our. elves from the linguistic strai htjacket of 261

decon . tructionist th inking (or any other ist or ism for that matt er ). The conundrum has b en eloquently addressed by Ellen Lupton when commenting on Deconstr uct ionism: 'Rat her t han viewing it as a style , I see it as a pro ess - an a t of ques t ioni ng'." And th is, in a nutshe ll, i. the relationship bet ween theory and pra t i e - theory provides an opport unity to inform process, it provides tools for asking and formulat ing que st ions rat her than a material end-in-i tself: it provides a methodology rather than style alone. Stephen Style ' opening response to larke's e.. ay immediately cir umvents t he original's trajectory to one about processes by a. king for a, 'reinvestigation of the phonocentri world' and by exte nsion, the hapt ic world too: with a '...need to rebalance het ween ear and eye'.' This rebalancing, in fact, is central to orne of the examples already ited by C larke. The Futuri st s, for example, were early protagonists in placing the sonic realm into ar tistic/ cultural d iscourse: from the use of a sou nd can non to visceral poetry read ings, they placed the experient ial alongside the purely visual.' The letterpress-produ ced poe try of Marinetti was an expression not of typography as an art form alone (if at all?), but rather the 'mult ilinear lyrici sm'" of indust rial processes, synethe ia and the onomato poe ic. To counter the Futur ist enthusiasm for change (b ut remaining on the trajectory of the sensorial) one can look at the typographer/ artist Eric G ill, who in 1931 wrote Essay 011 7Ypogmphy. Reading it today, what is prescient is his worr ies concerning the tact ile natu re of typography (and its perceived corros ion): ·...the histo ry of printing has been the history of the abolitio n of the impressio n. A prin t is properly a de nt made by pressing; the history of lette rpress print ing has been the abolitio n of th at dent.. . But t he very smooth paper and the mecha nica lly very perfec t presse requ ired for printing which shall show no "impression" can only be produced in a world which ca res for suc h thin gs, and such a 262

use of words and gave emphasis, instead, to the sounds themselves . Dadaists Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters recited and printed phonetic poems, for instance, Sonate of 1923. Ronald Firbank invented pataspeak to provide dialogue between marginal characters in his novel, Valmouth of 1919: 'Yahyal' 'Wazi jahm?' 'Ah didadididacti, didadidiacti.' 'Kataka mukha?' 'Ah mawardi, mawardi.' 'Jelly.' Flrbank's text, like most Dadaist texts, is a literary device. On other occasions, writers have gone beyond the issue of the literary alone to embrace the graphic and typographic too . This is spectacularly the case with the Italian Futurists such as Filippo Marinetti's 1919 ScABrrRrraaNNG Firbank's application of typographic nuance operated in a much less aggressive, but equally disruptive way. For instance, in The Flower Beneath The Foot from 1923, he represented the response of one of two characters in a short stretch of dialogue entirely by typographical and punctuational means. Whilst phonetic speech can be spoken, these examples by Firbank and Marinetti exist only on the printed page. Likewise with Stephane Mallarrne's 1897 Un Coup de Des' where the literary and typographic become inseparable. To hear someone speak this text is to severely limit the richness of the printed page. Mallarrne 's language is consistently indirect; it aims to suggest, not state. The speaker can give only one interpretation whilst the printed text's use of upper and lower case, italics, flexible spacing and the entire miseen-page, invite multiple readings. Mallarrne's poem is usually referred to in most discussion s of Derrrda's 1974 book Glas? In French, glas means a tolling or passing bell; 'to toll the knell'." However, Derrida's text is an open onslaught upon Western logocentricism and its phonetic bias. Its mise-en-page is

Lim it ed Language

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Cover of Rhinozer05, 1961, wh ich incl uded Wind Hand Caugh t in the Door by Willia m Burroughs (page spread). This is an example of visual poetry in t he t radit ion of Mallarme, Apollinai re and t he Dadaist s up t o t he concrete poet ry of th e 1960s. Phot ograph by Jed Birmingham Realit ySt udio.org l ang Tumb Tumb by Filippo Marinell i on th e wa ll in Leiden.

Photograph by Rienk Mebius (2003). http://bit. ly/Rienk_Mebius

world is of its nature inhuman. The industrial world of to-day is uch, and it has the printing it desires and deserves': Gill believes design aesthetic are a sham when ba ed olely upon the bottom-line of ommer ial interest and enterprise alone. What Eric Gill foretells is the erasure of the ta tile, the haptic dimension in typography and by extension a deskilling in design (brought about by a technological imperative fo u ed on commercial gain). Today, increasingly design ends up oncr en, on workstations and laptop desktops: a Web-based mediated world. Just as the MP3 format changed how we consume music, the advent of Amazon's Kindle and similar products will change our relationship with printed material (not the end of the book but an end to its exclusivity). This te hnological progress leads to people increasingly 10 ing touch with the tactile world. Many of these anxieties have grown in rernentally since the Futurist valediction to tradition, in favour of speed and technology. At the end of the 1940 ', a eries of talks on the ubj t of Graphi Form featuring leading de ign r of the day, in luding Paul Rand (who ana ked the taboo against the use of bla k in de ign), reiterated the concerns already heard in the Gill comment, namely a loss of the en ual and sen orial, one pre entation by Gyorgy Kepes" is both eloquent and contemporary in its tone when he observe: Today' obse sion for speed and quantity has profoundly influenced the ways in whi h we think and feel. Mass production and mass communication, with the characterlsti standardized thoughts and vision, have overworked idea, making of them exhau ted stereotypes.'... He ontinues, 'Vigilance is ne ded not only in the spheres where we [designers] are vaguely aware of the intentional misuse and manipulation of word and Ideas, as in political propaganda or the cheaper a peel. of advertising. It is needed al. 0 in the fi Id. where we as urne that we know what we are talking about, 111 our own profe sion . Here we 264

a continuous series of parallel, opposing commentarie s and inset paragraphs wit hout any hierarchy.' No single defin itive interpretation is possible. Th is br icolage of texts easily demonstrate s how pr inted writ ing can resist any claims to un iversal truth. POSt-1968 wr ite rs, graphic designers and typographers have frequentl y embraced the challenge of postmodern theoret ical writing. If David Carson and Neville Brod y" qu ickly became familiar in the 1980s, they are far from being alone . What now and beyond ? The linguistic st raightjacket has not gone away. Might an enterprising publisher commission a typograph ical re-setting of Virginia Woolf's 1931 novel, The Waves?9 To date, the reflections of the six characters, which are intercut with poeti c invocations, have been printed consecut ively rath er th en in parallel. More top ically, how might the political rhetoric of so much med ia print today be exposed? See fu rt her images here www.limitedlanguage.org/ images

References

2 3

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Lingu istics (English t ranslati on 1974). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Or iginal French 1967. English t rans latio n 1976). Roland Barthes, 'Deat h of The Aut hor' (English tr anslat ion in 'Irnaqe-M usic -Text ', 1977) and Michel Foucault, 'What is an Auth or'? (Or iginal French 1969, English t ranslat ion 1979).

4 5

Stephans Mallarrne, Un Coup de Des (English t ranslat ion, 1994). Jacques Derr ida, Glas (Original French 1974, English t ranslat ion 1986). Glas has spawned many offs pring and Ellen Lupt on and J. A bbot Mill er discuss several of th ese in th eir essay 'Deconst ruct ion and Graphic Design' in Design Writi ng Research (Kiosk Books, 1996).

6

The Conci se Oxford French Dictionary (Edit ion 1993). The pri nc ipal sources of these para llel text s are taken f rom t he writi ngs of Georg Friedrich Hegel (philosopher of absolute reason, the st ate, Chri stia nity and t he bourgeois fam il y) and Jean Genet (convicted criminal, write r, at heist and homosexual). See Lewis Blackwell, The End of Print: The Greii« Design of David Carson (Chronicle Books, 1995) and David Carso n: 2nd Sigh t: Grefl « Design Afte r the End of Prin t (London: Laurence King , 2(00) and also Jon Wozencrofl, The Graphic Language of N evill e Brody 1 2 (London: Thames and Hud son, 1988and 1994). Virg inia Woolf , The Waves (London: Hogart h Press, 1931).

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must b doubl y alert, for we la k the perspe ctive that distance offers'." ow, so year on, we have the benefit of that c rit ical per pect ive: peed has been redu ced to the in. tantaneous, typography to a "e rie - of Bezier curves, creen manipulations or emantic code . orne 'raphi de igner have att empted to addre thi s notion of era ur e, both hi tori cal and ultural. The typograph r Martin Majoor is conscious of working within the historical context of his art form . In 1993 he redesigned the telephone dire tory for the Dutch telecommunication ompan y KP. ·. In the existing directory he inhe rited the terile plains of a Univers landscape, barren of any fidelity to anything bar its me hanical di scipline. His an wer was to design a typeface, Telefom List and Telefont Text , which were created within the techni al parameters of the commission yet not reduced to a formulae but something more organic; reating a typeface with cul tural inflection, which build upon, rath r than era e, a visual cultural form . Majoor, when creaung the typeface, wa aware of the typeface in context of the design project as a whole, it allow a relationship between utili tarian u e (of the phonebook) and the overall design thinking: the typeface re ponded to how he de signed the page layout s. Majoor ha omrnernated on the pro es as a form of 'interact ive de ign'. Majoor 's typefaces build upon c tabli hed typographic precedent (hi torie ), layer upon layer, each layer always t ranslucent to the one be neath - not the ex hausted tereotypes feared by the genera tion of de signers before, going back to Gill and Goudy before him . One enriched with typographi knowledge : a synthesis of technol ogy, culture and craft. Se

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Max Bruinsma

New reading spaces In 1998 I addressed an audi ence of typographers at the ATypI conference in Lyon, France, with a qu est ion: why do type designers invest so little resea rch and creative energy in the computer screen as a medium and in designing fonts for it? The usual answer was that the screen is not worthy of their det ailed skills until it can match the high definition and resolut ion of printed matter - which won't happen in th eir lifet ime. While th at remains to be seen, it was in my view not the only or even th e most pressing problem. The problem was, and is, th at forms in ink on pape r are quite different beast s th an similar forms projected by electrons on the back of lightemitti ng screens. Ten years have passed, and although conte nt th at is meant for the screen th ese days often act ually looks like it's made for it rather th an for paper, the typefaces we are supposed to read in th is medium have not changed much . A case in point is Limited Language's scre en typeface, Monaco, a monospace font th at works pretty well in fairly large sizes in pr int but is literally an eyesore when used for reading on screen. J But t here's more : how th ese typefaces behave in th e versat ile and inte ractive environment t hey live in has hardly bee n add ressed in terms of t ypograph ic desig n. Yes, one can click on words and somet hing will happen , type is t wisting and turning in animated head lines, and you can change its size in Web texts for better reading. But t hat 's not exactl y what I meant , alt hough some of it helps. Designing typ efaces t hat are tailored to the peculiarities of the screen is a growing concern for de signers, and some are doing an excellent job making them work. But typographing te xts in a way th at addresses th e act ual potential of th e medium th ey are published in is somet hing else. There have emerged new 'read ing spaces' , that are incompara ble wit h th e t raditional paper ones, bu t still behave like the y were made by Gutenbe rg. New por t-

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lax Bruin. rna's article on typographi de .ign for n w reading pa e challeng typographer to make reading on creen rewarding in read of eye oaring. Thi goe beyond type and form to th tru ture of the reading expe rien itself: the relationship between reader and typography as they interact in the space of the ' C r en. The relationship between readi ng, text and space ha. been traced by Walter Ong in OmlitY {l/ul Literacy: 'W riting had re onsti tuted t he originally oral, poken word in visual spa e. Print embedde d the word in pace more definuively'.' The way print 'lays out' words for t he perusal of the eye, On g suggests, can b seen from lists to 'the use of abstract typographic pace to interact geometrically wit h printed word in a line of development that run from Rami m l to on rete po t ry...') Th ab tracttypographi spa e' of con rete poetry plays with typographi al arrangement to OO\'ey - extrapolate - th meaning and rhythm of word in a poem or prose. Alternatively, the experimen t of Vito Acconci (at the arne time as the I 960s concrete poets), were '...more in a rclati n between reader and page. I was interested in movement more than m aning, movem nt from left margin to right margin, movem nt from top of the page to bottom. I didn't want to transform/redu ce words to a visual thing: rather, I wanted words to contradict themselves and subvert meaning so that t here would be nothing left, only movement, movement over a pageand from pag to page'.' For Acconci, typography is a series of movements and the pag a per format ive space around which the reader navigates . In these works, 'Words ...[are] obstacles, lure s, str eet sign , prompt . In tead of describing t he action ' of a fictional character, the y provoked the action of a real one: the reader'. 269

Acconci 's 1969 poem nEAD THIS tarts; 'READ TI-IIS 'NORD THE READ Till WORD READ TI-IIS WORD EXT READ TH I WORD OW'." The perforrnative is evident in Bruinsma '

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thinking too, In Deepsites, published in 20°3, he ob erved that in a digital era, 'user - are performer of the content ': However, he warns typographers they have to entice the reader into the perforrnanve pos ibilities of creen-ba ed typography. In Bruinsma's interactive experiment, Usetext, it's only when you click (and hold the mouse button down), on a line t hat more content is revealed on the screen. Like Acconci, Bruinsma' interest in typography is not its visua l str uctu re alone, bu t its relatio nship to access . In response to discussions on the website, Bruins ma set nEAD Ti llS WanD in Usetext ." In contrast to Acconci's setting of the text in print, on screen it become a temporal - moving - space. It i the perforrnauvc relationship between the lines of the text and their reading (not the patial relation hip alone), whi h draw attention to the act of reading . n th web itc, Ruth Ellery, provided ontext: 'Arua Rau" is interesting her ...she's a \I riter of hyper fiction and he remind u of th "activ reader"...[commenung that] ... 'Hype rtext (fictional or non-fictional) i . aid to a uvate the reader who has to realize the rex t in reading it."'· Rau ails t he new screen-based reader/ u: er a 'wrcader'. The a tive, in cont rol readerbecome-writer; t he wreader, is a welcome gue t of hypertex t..'!" Rau argues use activates a greater psychological engagement in read ing (the reen only mimics t he immersio n of the imagination and reading of a book). Could investigations today ask how to activate the reader differently: And, what different forms of ontrol doe the reader have: TheIn omrol ' 'wreade r' of hypertext culture (a on the Limited Language wehsite!) can l li k to 'read' and ' reply'. A phenomenological inve: tigation of 270

able 'e-readers' like Amazon's Kind le or th e iliad are state-of-t he-art gizmos th at still mimic a paper page's form at, albeit of a one-page-fits -all kind . The not ion t hat one can manipulate t he appearance and behaviour of te xt on screen sti ll has had no seri ou s conseque nces in any generally di stributed medium, including th e Web. The simple idea that text , not necessar ily t he conte nt it ca rries, but its form al st ruc t ure and th e way it is acce ssed, can be laid-out in variable ways to be triggered situatively by th e reader, has been only marginally worked out in mainstream on-screen medi a, in what we could call 'te mplate culture'. What we see as 'interact ive text' is mostly functional text, i.e. text that fun ctions in verbal wayfinding within websites and on-scree n form s and menu s. You click a word, and a list of subcategories appears. You mou se over a word or an image, and an explanatory line or paragraph pop s up . Such ubiquitous fun ctionality could be used for richer purposes than mere informational messages; it could be used as an integral part of a text, and of the reading ex perience it offers. The sta nda rd hierarchie s of text in pr int med ia (headline, chapeau, introduct ion, main text, footn otes, captions ) can funct ion in a totally d ifferent way in on-screen medi a. There, if need be, and if th e aut hor sees it as an interestin g way of commun icatin g, each letter could spawn an end less var iety of te xt form ats. A summary statement co uld give access to deeper layers of argumenta tion and reference wit hin the same 'page'. An image coul d morph into its own description, or vice-versa . A qu est ion or argument co uld become surrounded by answer s or counter arguments . A t ext could give more or less detail, depending on the reader's behaviour. There are, of course exp eriments that explore such new fun ction ality and new reading spaces. In 20°3, I initiated a few of them with designer and JavaScript maverick Joes Koppe rs. Usete xt (usete xt. com) was an attempt to make use of the specific potential of on-scree n text: A short text is read able as such, but each line also

Limited Languag e

I Med ia t ion s I New read in g spac es

We All Fly public art project, Sanjeev Shankar (2009). The steel wings are composed of alphabets which congregate at the top t o become the words we, all and fly. The concept was part of a design init iat ive with st udents and the com munity near Brisbane, Austra lia. www.san jeevsha nkar.co rn

traditional book reading reveal it is not totally without a performative action be ause, 't here i a con tarn dynami interplay bet ween pans and wholes and the way the y are interco nne ted and [...] the bound. of any of the se item emerge in the a ti vit y of read ing itself." D ign an inve tigat e and utili

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gap and indetermina ie that th hift of regi ter b tween creen ba cd and traditional reading create.. In the publi an proje t Hi? All Fly, one . hift is bet ween book reading and of an urban culpture, who's steel wing are om posed of letters which congregate at the top be oming the word ' of the title. As it is a ommunity d sign initiative, another reward might be returning reading (and writing'] to a communal a tivity. Beyond more and more typefa es, what will be the rewards of the typographic exp riments in these new interpretation pra ti e. - and these coalitions of reading pa settm • I I ., res

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functions as an inte rface into what's, literally, beh ind the lines. I used the applicat ion for inst ance to write my introduction to an onl ine story by Young-Hae Ch ang Heavy Indu stries', View Plan ofSeoul. The int roductio n, 'St arbucks wit h Victoria', is both an appetizer and a critique of sorts, as well as a past iche of Ch ang's signature st yle in a different medium. And in the Web version of my ed ito rial for Item s magazine no.l , 2009, I used another Koppers script to realize the movement of the qu ote s burst ing out of th e main text, which could only be suggest ed by th e layout of the printed magazine spread . While such exp eriments remain mod est in scope and de sign, the y do, in my view, give an indi cation of the potential of the screen as an interesting and engaging medium for reading. Readers, of course, will have t o do their part: actively 'feeling' a text for an interact ive response, rather than dul y clicking links . But readers won 't move a finger until de signers pre sent them wit h an invit ation : to explore a text's behaviour and expe ct it to answer in ways th at are unthinkable on paper. In other word s, designer s should explore the medium to find reasons for read er s t o not print out a t ext th ey find online. Read ing on sc ree n can be a rewarding ex perie nce inst ead of an eye soaring exercise. See fu rt her images here w w w.lim it ed langu age.org/im ages

h F IEor, 2A 03J2009 R f r nee Waller J. 0

. Orality and Literacy. The Technoloq/smgo/ Ih Word(London Routledge. 1001). 123. 16 h century heoroeson rbetonc, logiC and pedagogy.

Ref erence s Bruinsma 's alternati ves f or the Lim ited Language's sc reen t ypef ace:

Wal ler J. Ong, OP CII

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This page is no longer on this server... The theorist G eorge Landow, writing on digital hypertext, urges us to forget the usual conceptual elements which hold language toget her and, instead, use new substitutes 'such as multilinearity, nodes, links, or networks'.' Elements of syntax - and, when, so, or - are now converted to a range of physical manoeuvres ; mouse up, mouse over, mouse down etc. A click now links us t o ou r mediated world . In t his new world t he Int ern et is often de scribed as a virtual landscape without a horizon . However, with t he average lifes pan of a website measured in months rather t han year s, in practice it has surprisingly many broken links and dea d-ends . Although t he Web links us t o snapshots of 'h ist ory' in un limit ed supply, it has no memory, just a post saying 'this page is no longer on t h is server.,', When going 'back' is rea lly going sideways, we can only link , in endless configurations of synchronicity, to the pre sent. This change to narrative structures is not a new phenomenon. Technology has always influenced the way we visua lly navigate our world. The narratives of story telling, songs and pictogram s were gradually outmoded by the technological developments of the 19th century. Walter Benjam in, writing at the time, describes a moving away from the traditional links of language .' The narrat ives of storytelling, for inst ance, were being replaced by the mechanic ally reproduced image which, like 'mini explosions', were di splayed as photographs, cinema clips and so on . Perhaps th e link on th e webpage is today's mini explosion? Each click ta kes us into a new realm; a new page, image or sonic experie nce. Web ar tist Pet er Luining created a site, C lick Club .' which was without content except link buttons. Another Web artist produced a faux porn site where, upon entering, you were shown a provocative image of a naked body wit h the genit als

In the 1990Sthe American playwright John Guare popularised the theory of the Human Web of relationships in his play Six Degrees of Separation. Today, with the World Wide Web, this interrelated chain of relationship has become more literal, and not simply inter personal, but a network of comrnuni tie and user groups . A chain of no more than six acquai nta n es does not on ly connect individuals but communities too are only a few links away: a news article on t he 811 • ca n take you to a Wikipedia entry on the axis of Evil to rogue sta tes; to an Iranian portal page; to a specialist Asian pornography site. You click from community to community; The Right wing polit ics of John R. Bolton and The Continuinq Threat of H~apollS of Ma De trlletioll, to an escort agency hornepage declaring: Welcome to the BalTa e cort page in GREAll:R M C HESTER. The world i hrinking thanks to th 'gl bal village' we now inhabit and this notion of 'com-

munitie ' on the Web i further defined by ienti t Albcrt-Ln zhio Barabaas who explains, 't here are no sharp boundaries between variou ommunitie ...tndeed, the same Web ite can belong simultaneously to d ifferent group '. 1 Our or iginal article looked at how the Web was breaking down and reconfiguring th read ing experience. Th e uncan ny nature of u rfing t he Web - link to link - is an clement of this proce s. Today, a casual chit chat with a colleague on the war in Afghanistan, say, arises again as an anonymous image of a bloody hild, woman or oldier on a Web page inadvertently arrived at when urfing - likewise child pornography, clearly morally repugnant is only a click away on the office workstation, or laptop. The d sultory nature of the mou e eli k; eli king from anonyrnou link to anonymou. link mimic Freud 's uncanny cxperien e where:

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A poste r of President Obama as Heath Ledger's Joker from t he film The Dark Knight began to appear in inner c ity areas of t he USA in th e summer of 2009. The LA Times reported: '... t he image of President Obama in Heat h Ledger's Joker-f ace is especia lly dist urbing because it is com pletely devoid of context .. literary, polit ical or ot herw ise. The image seems to have emerged from nowhere and was created by no one. Deracin ate d f rom aut hor ial intent, Obarna-as-Joker becomes a fr ee-float inq cipher t hat can be appropria ted and re-appropriated by everyone' . LA Times 5 Augu st 2009,http://b it.ly/obamaJatimes The 'Joker' poster ca mpaign is an example of t he f action al and anonymous flip side of 'community' and t he WWW, and how vernacular language does not have the 'fi xity' of t ime, place or ideology that a modernist visual language might lay cla im to.

Design for Obama. This is a website which co llates Obama posters and rates th em. The f ounder s wr ite ; 'Many art ist s incl uding Shepard Fairey have alread y proven t hat post er art is not a dead med ium in the Unit ed States and have also shown how much of an impact a single poster can have... At such a t urbulent (yet excit ing) t ime in our nation 's hist ory, col laboration has never been more import ant: http://designf orobama.org/

The Obama post er by the art ist Shepard Fairey. He is most well known for his Obey Giant st reet poster ser ies. The Obey campaign has been descr ibed by Fairey as an 'exper iment in Phenomenology' which att empt s t o 'reawaken a sense of wonder about one's environmen t' . http ://obeygiant.com/about

'it is only this factor of involuntary repetition which urrounds u with an un anny atrno .phe r what would be oih rwi -e inno ent en ough , and force upon u the idea of something fateful and ine

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worlds of the WWW, but I am yet to find a di unct m ethodological tool to open it up, ~ a it for e. pcrim ntation and creativ experienc !'I One an wer, outside the more theoreti al rhetoric of Web cultures, is that of commu-

this site, the frustration was two-fold. It reminds us of how we con sume the visual image and how, like channel surfing, the link has become the feti sh itself... con stantly zapping to capture what we might be missing. The question is, in our broadband, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth linked world...is there anything left to mi ss?

nity. If there is a entral theme to th new writing on de ign it is t he role of community: the relationship of commun i ation and con sumption. Di cussions on de ign and community are not new, but have often been overlooked in favour of more fashionable rhetoric on the authentic, the auteur and the pra titioner.

Vic tor Papanek' De iqnfor the Real World,

See furth er images here www.lim it edlanguage.orgjim ages

Refere nces George P. Landow, Hypertext 3.0: Crit ical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globali zati on, 3rd ed. (Ba ltimore, MD ; London: Johns Hopkins Un iversit y Press, 2006). See Intr oduct ion. 2 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialec tics of Seeing: Walt er Benjam in and the Arcades Project (Cambr idge, MA. ; London: MIT Press, 1989),244. Walter Benjami n used t he tem 'now -t ime' (Jet zt zeit)

is a case in point. Wh n first publish d in '97 I it \ a not univer ally welcomed: an e ologyof de ign w ;

-ee n a an alternati ve rath r than a

main st ream onceptual framework . Today,

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t o descri be a revolut ionary break in t he co nt inuity of hist ory, a momen t when 't rut h is laden with t ime t o th e point of explosion'. Peter Luining's PC Click Club (1995-2000). See also www.luining.com This fau x porn site was created by Dutch group DEPT,who ceased operat ion in 2001.

og and ecosystem are dominant metaphors in criti al thinking on de ign. irnilarly, his call for a non ' e. .ed-up' de ign whi h focu ed upon proce

rath r than urface alone, wa a pre ur-

or to th sea-of-change in de ign writing today. In reasingly, design writing is moving away from simple interpretation and histori al tim line - it addresses a more holistic approach that calls upon an thropological, relat ional dialogue to interrogate meaning( ) and use value in de sign culture. Papanek r marks in his introduction : 'Design mu -t become an innovative, highly creative, cross-di s iplinary tool r sponsive to th e true needs of men lsi ]. It mu t be more re search o rient ated , and we mu st .top d filin g t he earth It elf with poorly de igned obje t s an d . tructure

'. 3

Tod ay we read th is as a ca ll for community - a desi gn community wher e idea 276

an be Lim it ed Language I Med iat ions I This page is no longer on t his ser ver. ..

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Garth Walker (Mis ter Walker Design, and founder of Orangejuic e Design Studios in Durb an South Af ric a) in 2004 was comm issioned t o create th e signage for the entran ce t o the new South Afr ican Constitut ional Court. The fi nal insta llat ion drew upon the vernacular signage already found in the area providing a 'new' t ypographic representati on of the local sty le. The project refl ect s his claim t hat his 'tr ue passion is vernacular design fr om South Af ric a's streets and t ownships' .

shared with not only the design world, but a wider non-specialist public [Papanek is critical of literature on design, which he bemoans is written for and by designers). The need for a broader design education informs Aaris Sherin's t hinking in her essay Escape From the Tyranny of Thillgs(this Volume p. 99), where an educated public might consume with greater awareness of good design allowing, in the words of Virginia Postrel, a 'dernocrnuzauon of design' which has been informed by t he WWW and an increasing access to design discourse. Postrei is indirectly addressing the 'literal and metaphorical' language of graphic design - good and bad - as mediated through Web de ign; allowing a greater public (and professional) awareness and appreciation of graphic design. The interface is often our first engagement with how graphic design works: hierarchies, colour and how they influence how we navigate the page. Rut we feci, by extension, sites like Design Boom, Design Observer, Core 77 and Limited Language in the main, address thosein-the-know, but also allow (consciously or not) a breaking down bet ween disciplines. They provide a day-to-day view of disciplinary thinking - rhetorically and visually. These websitcs are individual communities but because of the matrix structure of the \"leb, they also facilitate the crossdis iplinary thinking advocated by Papanek in a pre- Internet age. Today you are only six clicks away from another design discipline. But in conclusion, the communities thus described are in a globa l context, parochial at best; homogenising system at worst. Designers like Garth Walker, founder of the South African agency, Orangejuice Design; are vigilant to the nature of the Web and reaffirm the vernacular in their work whilst participating in the pragmatics of a global economic market: whether in the signage of public buildings or tobacco branding. The vernacular acts like a Coogle map in identifying where we are in a design, and designed, world. Our original article asked: is there 278

Limit ed Languag e I Mediat ions / T his page is no longer on t his serv er.

anything left to miss? .. And th is is an in reasing anx iety, not least bccau ' C , 'The speed and inte n .ity wit h which bot h materia l and ideological clements now circulate across nationa l bo unda ries have c reated a new order of uncerta inty in soc ial li fe',' As su h, we have never nee ded design, and design wri ting more to help make sense of our world . Spe' II r"'IXJn 5'" carr, or the conv r' tiel" her, h tp: tlny.crlrhap'€,IU_'

Reaoer rn drt

,

Dylan H p

19

2000

RE' er nee Albert Laszl 0 Barabaasi. Ltnk£'d' The New Science 01 N Iworks (Cal bndu ,MA PE'r eus Pub.. ?00'2), 111 ?

Fr ud quote d on Julie Rrvkrn and Michael Ryan L terer, Tti ory An Anlholofly (Revi ed d Maid n,

MA OX ord: Blackw II. 1998).421 j

Victr r J. Papanek, Deslfln lor (he Real World: Human

Ecology and SOCIalChange (2nd cornplet Iy rev. ed

4

New York Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1984).' . V" nrua I Po trel, It: Substance 01 Stvle: How trc RISf of Aestnet« vetuc Is Remaktng Commerce,

C.ittut» and Cons, /0, sness (Ns VOl York. N i HarperColllns, 2(00),55. '.>

Ar jun Appadural. Fearof Small Numbers. An Essay on tne Geogrdplry of Anger (Public Planet Books . Durham

NC: London: Duke Urn

Starter arloele

rs.tv Press. 2(03). 5.

279

Collaborators' biographies Monica Biagioli is an artist, wr iter and curator. She lect ures at the Univers ity of th e Arts London and rece nt projects include Sound Proof, a series of yearly sound ex hibitio ns focusing on th e Olymp ics site in London, host ed at E:vent Galler y (2008) and by V22 Presents (2009); Venus Rising, a series of events host ed by the Science Mu seum 's Dana C entre and th e Inst itute of Co ntemporary Art (2005); and participation in th e 50th Venice Biennale (2003). Ma x Bruinsma is Editor in Chief of Items design magazine, the Netherlands, and Editorial Director of ExperimentaDesign, Portugal. His publications include Deep Sites: Intelligent Innovation in Cont emporary Miib Design (2003). Angus Carlyle is a sound arti st, lecturer, writer and co-di rec tor of c nisxr, C reat ive Research into Sound Ar ts Practice. Mic hael Cl ark e is a write r and lecturer and was for more t han t wenty-five years the art and de sign critic for t he Times Educational Suppl ement in Brit ain . His most recent publicati on is Verbalising the Visua l: Translating A rt and Design into Words (2007). David Crowley is a writer, lecturer and curator based at the Royal Coll ege of Art in London . He has published widely on Polish cult u re and he was co-curator of C old War M odern: Design r945-r970 at th e Vict or ia and Alb ert Museum, London (2008).

282

Johnny Hardstaff is a moving graphic imagemaker repre sented inte rnationally by Ridley Scott Associates and Central Illustrat ion Agency. He writes and lectures in his field, and has sc ree ned works at Tate Modern (London ), Laforet Mu seum (Tokyo), Mu seum of Conte mporary Art (C hicago), MOMA (San Francisco) and Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco). Adam Kossoff is a filmmaker/artist and writer based in London. He is also Senior Lecturer in Video at the School of Art and Design, University of Wolverhampton. His book On Terra Firma; Space, Place and the Moving Image (2008) is published by Vdm Verlag. Esther Leslie is Professor of Polit ical Aesthetic s at Birkbec k, Universi ty of Lond on. Publicat ions include Hollywood Flatlands: A nimation, Cr itical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, A rt and the Ch emical Indu stry (2005) and Walter Benjam in (2007). Tom M cCarthy is a write r and artis t living in London. His books include M en in Spa ce (2007) , Tintin and the Secret of Literature (2006) and Remainder (2005), the last of which won the 2007 Believer Book Award and is currently be ing adapted for cinema by Filma. He is also Gene ral Secretary of th e Intern at ional Necronautical Society, a 'semifict it iou s avant-ga rde organisat ion'.

Julia Moszkowicz is a writer and Senior Lecturer in The History and Theory of Graphic Communication at Bath Spa University in the UK . She has published in Screen, Eye magazines and the Journal of Visual Arts Practice. Mario Moura is a design writer and lecturer at the Porto Academy of Art, Portugal. He trained as a graphic designer and is vibrant in the Portuguese design world, including the design blog Texto and his collaboration on the publication, Barbara Says (2006). He has published a selection of short texts on design, politics and ethics; Design em Tempos de Crise (Design in Times of Crisis) (2008). John Russell is an artist who exhibits Internationally. He is a founder member of the art group BANK (1990-2000) He is Reader in Contemporary Art & Theory and Director of Research at the University of Reading, England . Nicky Ryan lectures in visual culture and theory at the London College of Communication . Nicky has delivered conference papers and published widely in relation to art and business, corporate patronage, museums, and the role of culture in regeneration. She is a regular reviewer for the Museums Journal. David Phillips is an architect, designer and writer based in London. He teaches information design at the London College of Communication.

Aaris Sherin is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at St. John's University in Queens, New York. She writes and lectures on the history of women, design and social and environmental issues and is author of the book, SustainAble: A Handbook of Materials and Applications for Graphic Designers and their Clients (2008) and co-author of Forms, Folds and Sizes: and Edition (2009). Ezri Tarazi is an industrial designer and writer. He is Head of the Masters Program for Industrial Design at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In 2005, with Ellen Lupton, he co-curated New Design from Israel at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. He set up the Design Center of Israel. Jon Wozencroft is a writer, designer and photographer who set up the music publishing company Touch in 1982 . He wrote The Graphic Language ofNeville Brody I and 2 (1988 & 1994) and collaborated with Brody on the FUSE project (1991 onwards). Joanna Zylinska is a cultural theorist based at Goldsmiths, University of London and Reviews Editor for Culture Machine. Selected books include Bioethics in the Age of New Media (2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (2005) and The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age (2002).

283

Biographies Limited Language co-founders

Designers

Colin Davies writes and teaches about design history. He has three kids and a manic depressive dog.

Sofia Andersson assistant designer; Sofia works as a freelance illustrator/designer and has worked with the Swedish magazine SEX and Amelia magazine, among other clients. She studied Fine Art Foundation at Central Saint Martins/Byam Shaw School of Art in 200312004 and graduated from Forsbergs School of Graphic Design in 2007 .

Monika Parrinder is based in London and writes and teaches about design history. She has two kids and trained as a graphic designer.

Amalie Borq-Hansen assistant designer; Amalie recently graduated from BA Graphic and Media Design at the London College of Communication, specialising in Information Design . She will continue her studies in Switzerland, starting on the MA at the Basel School of Design . Amalie has worked as an editorial assistant and researcher at Eye magazine, and as a designer for Dorling Kindersley, ico Design and Misha Anikst Ltd . Oskar Karlin concept and design for the Limited Language website and book; Oskar is a graphic designer and cartographer who graduated from BA Graphic and Media Design at the London College of Communication in 2004 . As well as freelance designing, he works in the Human Geography department at Stockholm University as a research assistant and GIS teacher.

284

Sub-editors Emma Angus is currently studying for a PhD in image classificatio n at th e University of Wolverhampton afte r complet ing her first degree in Publi shing wit h English at Loughborough University. Mi chael Clarke is a writer and lecturer and was for more than twenty-five years th e art and de sign critic for the Times Educational Supplement in Britain. His most recent publication is Verbalising the Visual: Translating Art and Design into Words (2007) .

285

Index Adbusters

a2/sw /hk Abu Ghraib Agamben , Giorg io A lt ermodern anthropocent rism Apple Mac intosh Apps Archig ram A rchitectu ral space Aura Babbage, Char les Bachela rd , Gast on Baghdad Blogger Baines, Jess Bakhtin, M ikhail Barnbrook, Jonathan Battle of Orgreave Battlesh ip Pot em kin

41, 46, 77, 79 144 133 256 69, 70, 71,72 217 71, 109, 251 251 105,206 105, 211 125 69,71 105 145

xx 213, 214 82 77, 80 181, 184

Beck, Ulric h Blauvelt, Andrew Bl uetoot h

101 61, 74 109,215,218 ,224,275 133, 134,256 Boredom 69,7 0, 71, 143, 144, 145, 150, 257 Bourr iaud, Nicolas Bowman, Paul 77 31, 93, 96, 97 Bra idotti, Rosi Branding, brand 30,33 ,34,38,47,70,79,87 ,93,99, 109, 143,145,165,1 67,171,194,2 18,238, 278 Braungart, Mic hael 96 Breto n, Andre 117 Bro dy, Neville 82,255, 264 Bush, Anne 19 Butl er, Judith 217 Calvi no, It alo 173, 177 Capit alism, Capital 19, 25, 53, 60,79, 80, 95, 107, 144, 145, 147, 165, 173, 208,210 Cartograp hy 167, 193 Castells , Manuel 147, 165 Char leswor th , J.J. 77,80 Chew ing gum 87,91 Chomsky, Noam 95 Club 18-30 200 Communica t ion design 59,95 , 143, 144 Comm unity 20,23 ,30 ,33,34,41 , 47,54,60, 87,9 1, 101 , 105,143,144,145, 147, 211, 224, 237, 251, 255, 257, 273, 276 Constructi vism

286

80, 82, 96

Consumer cult ure, Consumerism 17,23 ,25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 34,54,56,77,80,93,96, 99, 101,99, 101, 102, 103, 109, 133, 134, 138,144, 177,208,227,250 Convergence 82 Cradle to Cradle ; see Braungart, Michae l 96 Craft 20,53 , 125,126, 129, 138, 184,249 Creative impulse 115, 119,229 Creativity 11,25, 41 ,89,115,117,119,120, 125,126,175,257 Cross , Nigel 17 Dada 34, 37, 80, 262 Dat abase 50, 89·91 , 193, 207 de Certeau, Michel 17, 105 De Stijl 80, 184 Derrida, Jacques 215, 237, 261, 262 DesignLab Dialogic Imaginati on Digit al cult ure

138 23 82,89 , 125, 249,256,269

Dromology Droog Design Duchamp, Marcel

153 19-20 34,37 ,38 ,77

231 181 , 184 Eisenstein, Sergei Environment 19,23,47, 49, 53, 87, 89, 93, 95, 96·97, 99, 101,103, 119,129, 138,145, 147, 154,165, 175, 177,185, 196,201, 207,2 18,22 7,25 7 35,95,213 Et hics, et hica l 119 Exqui site Corpse 44, 80, 275 Fai rey, Shepard FAT (Fashion, Ar ch itecture and Taste) 19·20 17 Fes ti val 0/ Bri tain 41,77 First Things Fir st Man ifest o 101, 173 Fluidit y Foster, Hal 37 26,29 Frankf urt School, The 19,115·119 Front Design Fruti ger t ypef ace 138 Fry,Tony 286 138 Fukasawa, Naoto Ear Room

Futurism, Futuri st Genius Genome Mapping Gesta lt Gilad , Ron Glaser, Milton Google, Google Maps, Google Earth

153,156,262,264 115, 126 89 125·132 49 165 89,153,158, 168,278

Graphic design

19,41,44,4 9,77 , 80, 82, 85,93, 115, 125-26, 133, 234, 255, 258, 264, 278 Great Exhibiti on 21 Greenberg, Clement 25, 29 Griffith, Saul 17, 99, 101 Guantanarno Bay 41 Haacke, Hans 37-38 Haff ner, Erlend Blakst ad 23 177 Halloran, lia Handmade, the 99, 125 Haptic 125,168,177,262 Hara, Kenya 145,1 47 Haraway, Donna 60-63 Haycock Makela, Laurie 74 105, 193 Heidegger, Marti n Hein, Pet 102 Heir loom consumpt ion 101 Heller, Steven 44, 261 Heskett , John 99, 102 Hypertext 71, 269, 273 Identi ty 29,30-31,8 7, 156, 175, 197,207,2 18,276 Information Landscapes 71 Instant City 105 Inst itutional Cr itique 37 Inter-discip linar y practice 126 Iraq 46, 101, 105, 145, 191, 200 Islam, Islamic 49, 234 Kalashnikov AK -47 49 Kepes, Gyorg y 132, 264 kit sch 29,30, 49, 197 Klein, Naomi 167 Koolhaas, Rem 33,34 , 37, 40, 175, 193 Kra cauer, Siegfr ied 133-34,1 86 Kr uger, Barbara 41 Landow, George 273 Le Corbusie r 26, 153, 193 Lefebvre, Henri 105, 107, 191 liquidit y 147 logocentri cism 261, 262 London College of Communi cat ion 144 Looped inform at ion 143, 144, 145 Lost Highway 181 Lovelace, Ad a 69, 71 Luining, Peter; Click Club 273 Lukacs, George 77 Lupton, Ellen 72, 261 Lynch, David 181, 184

M/M (Paris)

70,7 1,72 Majoor, Mart in 264-65 Manovich, Lev 59, 60, 61, 90 Margolin, Victor 56 Mar xist 89, 150 Massive Chang e see Mau, Br uce 101 101 Mau, Bruce McLuhan, Marshall 69, 71 ,200, 227 Mer leau-Pont y, Maurice 154, 167, 185 Micro-communities 144 Miller, John; Octobe r magazine 79 Modernism 2.0 69,72 Modernism, modernist, modernity 168,181,184,189,194, 197, 207, 208, 210, 211, 224, 227,238,240,242,249 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 132 Mollerup, Per 138 Monderman, Hans 147 Morri son, Jasper 138 Muir, Hamish; 8vo 80 Museumology 102 Narrat ive st ructure 79,90,273 Negri, An tonio 93 New Urbanist s 20 Niet zsche, Friedrich 77 Obama, Barack President 41,44,80,274,275 Orangeju ice Design 278 Or lan 220 Papanek,Victor 276, 278 Politi cal design 77,79 ,80 Postp roduct ion (see Bourr iaud) 70 Post-colonial criti que 199 Post modern, postm odern it y 20,26,30,53,6 1,69 ,7 1,72 99, 134, 165,171, 175, 179, 211, 237,242,261,264 147, 257,261 Poynor, Rick Prada Marfa 33,34,38 Prada, Prada Toilet 33·34,37-38 Problem solving 99, 101, 117,119, 120,100 Rams, Dieter 17 Readymade, the 34, 77 Reh, A lexander 53, 54 Relati onal Aes t het ics 71, 143, 144, 1<15, 150 Rit ual 107, 197, 199, 207, 211 Ross, And rew 30 Sachs, Tom 33, 34 Sacred space 107, 109,20 7,208,2 10-11,2 13 Said, Edward 95 Semionaut 69, 72

287

Semios is, Semiot ics

37,38,54 ,69,1 26, 127,132,185, 208, 211,2 32 Sennett, Richard 126, 127, 207 105 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005) Seymour, Jerszy 117, 119, 120 Shankar, Sanjeev 20 Shared Space Ini ti ative 89, 147 Shishehgaran, Kourosh 80 Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance 49, 133,237 Simpsons, The 77. 79, 240 Slow Movement, The 89, 154,156,158 SlowLab 156 Social network ing 90, 145, 200,201, 249, Sont ag, Susan 237, 238, 242 Sott sass, Etto re ,56 Sound Polaroid 223 Sta rck, Philippe 49, 53 State Britain 105-107 Ste larc 215-216, 218 Stockholm Syndrome 41 Sublime 207 Suck UK 53 Super Norm al 138, 140 Surrea l, surrealism , surrea list 34, 115, 117, 119 Surrealist Manifesto 11 7 Sustainability, Sustainable design 31,41,97,99, 103,119 Tarazi, Ezri 25,29,30 Tart akover, David 168, 171 Taylorism 26 Techniques of contro l 95 Thatcher, Margaret 80 Tourist Gaze 201 Traboulsi, Fawwaz 46 Transgressive 91, 107,110,210 Tuan, Yi-Fu 179, 224 Turner Prize 144 Twitt er 145, 158, 249 Typographic mind 70 Umeda Materni t y Clinic 145 Uni versally applicable blueprin t s 102 Ur ry, John 197, 199, 201 Vasari, Giorgio 25 Vietnam war 53, 105 53 Viktor & Rolf Violence 53, 120,194, 207, 208, 200 Virilio, Paul 153, 193, 217, 256 Visual communication 41,46,47,115, 117,143, 150, 173,177 Visual noise 133 Walker, Gart h 278 Wallinger, Mark 105

288

17, 165 Wallpaper' magazine 147,249, 251 Web 2.0 Wenders, Wim 181 Wilson, Ben 87-89 Woolf, Virginia 264 85,89, 90, 91, 211 , 238,251, 256, 273 World Wide Web 102 Zippo lighter 158 Zizek, Slavoj