⊞
Introduction
This document is a collection of fragments exploring belief systems about labour in the creative industries, in particular graphic design. Each fragment focuses on these beliefs from ethnographic lenses including culturally and politically, spiritually and religiously, and in the social relations they create and are created by. They record, celebrate and question the meaning that designers give to their actions and how those meanings affect the world they live in. And it's about how designers feel because, like me, they seem to feel a bit funny and I want to talk with them about it.
This thesis uses fragments in various modes of address and from different lenses to further fragment the definition of design. The origin of the word thesis is "to set" or "to put", but I am trying to show you something liquid that can't be placed but shimmers and disappears through the sand. The label "design" is a functional part of a belief system involving order, structure, and rationality and I want to break it. Removing the label is part of loosening the object.
To de-sign design, I will assign a sign: ⊞
This symbol represents design in this writing in an attempt to avoid the assumed meaning of the word and examine it as something unknown, to mystify and describe it, to break it apart and examine its structure, to remove and restore its power.
Another introduction
I document here some direct examinations of ⊞ activities, in my own work and the work of others who identify with the label of ⊞er. The fragments move between practices considered traditional such as historical beliefs from De Stijl, as well as those attempting to experimentally escape or overcome tradition such as contemporary practitioners working with FLOSS tools. The writing dissolves and reintegrates definitions of⊞ from different voices to show the multiplicity of beliefs from practitioners, and to explore what it means to acknowledge these beliefs beside eachother: the tensions and harmonies, some lineages and some breaks.
The text is about the discipline of graphic ⊞, highlighting some systemic and individual beliefs, reflecting on their origins, trajectories and their effects when put into practice. It is a collection of stories about living life with particular working conditions, located at a point or points in social, economic and cultural webs, and becoming aware of these locations. In my practice-based research I gather and tell these stories through (auto)ethnographic methods: documenting how ⊞er's work, conducting interviews, improvising communal performances and exploratory tool-making. This document collates and reflects on this research.
Chapter one introduction in case you didnt get enough introductions
What compartments and boundaries exist that define ⊞? Why are they there? What do they do, what do they prevent? The stories in this chapter are gathered through various modes of describing, examining and understanding. It is important that these are different from conventional ways to frame the discipline, as I think a shift in viewpoint is needed. So not "⊞er as Author" (Rock, 1996), "⊞er as salesperson" (Pater, 2021) but instead "⊞er sitting at the machine, thinking" (Brodine, 1990) or "⊞er without qualities" (Musil, 1930)(also Lorusso, 2023). The fragments in this chapter are situated and subjective rather than "objective", they are outside of categories because the categories are broken anyway.
⊞ involves a wide range of activities; typing, drawing grids, communicating with other specialists, quoting, drinking coffee, working out of office hours, having panic attacks, arguing, building myths, personal expression, keyboard shortcuts, dreaming, rubbing paper and exhaling, tilting your head and looking at the screen. The aim of this chapter is to examine when and how these actions happen, and more importantly, why they do, according to the ⊞ers carrying them out. Lastly, what perceived effects do the actions have? What is going on here in this thing we call ⊞?
Excerpt from an interview with the members of Distinctive Repetition on 01/12/2023.
Distinctive Repetition is an award-winning graphic design studio based in Dublin, Ireland. Principal designer and ICAD (Institute of Creative Advertising and Design) past-president, Rossi McAuley, is joined in this interview by designers Jenny Leahy and Ben Nagle. This interview was carried out around a table with the interviewer in the bottom right corner (◲) and the three members of the studio in the other three seats.
- ◲: whats your favourite colour?
- ◰: red.
- ◲: red.
- ◱: really? thats it? are you fucking kidding me?
- ◰: do i fill it in?
- ◳: they're warm up questions obviously they're to get you comfortable answering questions.
- ◳: yellow
- ◲: if the seat of your consciousness was in your hands, like all of your feelings and your thoughts and your desires and your emotions come through your hands, can you describe to me the day that you've had so far please?
- ◳: jelly that's not quite solid
- ◳: not quite solidified in the fridge yet
- ◳: and its just oozing through my fingers
- (redacted sentence)
- ◳: that's what today has been like but its my brain thats oozing out of me
- ◲: yes. that's a good answer. ok will we keep going in a circle?
- ◱: whatever you like bro.
- ◲: do you ever dream about work?
- ◱: all the time.
- ◲: would you care to share one of those dreams?
- ◱: they're always angst-ridden, never, they're never eh, they're never positive solution-solved things, we've always like lists and lists and lists of things to do they're never resolved they're always like shit we've, its, its always problematic, and its all the time.
- ◳: weren't you taking grids out of drawers in a dream recently?
- ◱: yeah yeah.
- (obscured)
- ◲: why were you taking grids out of drawers?
- ◱: emm recently I had a dream where I was giving out to ◳ about not having things done, this ◳, participant two, about not having things done, and i was opening up drawers in my office and I was like, just use this grid and the drawers were full of grids and I was giving them to her and saying just fucking use those grids for fucks sake why don't we use those grids.
- (section redacted by request of interviewees)
- "404 years ago on the night of the 10th November 1619, three dreams were dreamt. A 23-year old man is "filled with enthusiasm" and enters a feverish sleep in Ulm, Germany. In this process of enthusiasm and dreamwork, he discovers the foundations of a wonderful science. The Method of Properly Guiding the Reason in the Search of Truth in the Sciences will be suppressed by the churches, both Calvinist and Catholic. They are a threat to the world view, and a threat to religion. The cartesian grid uses measurements to estabish relationships. Cartesian geometry has let us fly spaceships and zone and divide land. Some things have happened. Some good things, some bad things. The link is broken or breaking or should be broken. It's rotting. Maybe there's a better way we can interpret these dreams now."
- ◳: jelly that's not quite solid, not quite solidified in the fridge yet and its just oozing through my fingers
- ◱: they're always angst-ridden, never, they're never eh, they're never positive solution-solved things, we've always like lists and lists and lists of things to do they're never resolved they're always like shit we've, its, its always problematic, and its all the time.
- ◱: just fucking use those grids
Groma
The Roman grid was a land measurement method used in the Roman colonies of the Po Valley. With a surveying tool called the groma, the colonisers would divide the land from north to south and east to west, resulting in a square grid of roads and land. Dividing the land in this geometric way helped the colonisers to privatise the land, mostly to allocate it to roman veterans. The name groma, as well as referring to the surveying tool, describes the central point of the grid, the origin. Is making grids just a way to control and colonise? Do all grids have origins? In Descartes' use of the grid there was also an attempt to order and structure chaos:
- "the grid allowed an embrace of complexity: curved lines that could be described by mathematical formulas, and thereby were not a sign of chaos but an expression of the divine mathematical order assumed to be underlying nature."
- Descartes was Here, Clemens Driessen, 2020
- ◱: for fucks sake why don't we use those grids
Modernism
- "A cause becomes unmodern at the moment when our feelings revolt, and as soon as we feel ourselves becoming ridiculous"
- Adolf Loos, On Thrift (1924)
But also Loos was found guilty of pedophelia and it feels kind of aggressive to include his voice here at all. This is part of the point of what I'm getting at: there's this tradition of ⊞ and so many parts of it make me uncomfortable or really disgusted and I don't know what to do with all that. I just wanted to go to art school and draw circles and maybe thats the problem and sure simple materials are pretty, but yeah jelly is exactly what it feels like, you're right.
I think there are some overly positive preconceptions about the "creative industry" and what it does. ⊞ is less functional than it seems. People in creative jobs are stressed and this is reflected in their dreams. Workers have rights and those rights are systemically undermined. Being self employed or running (or working in) an independent studio brings anxiety and challenges. Im still uncomfortable with this because lots of ⊞ers are rich and powerful and who cares if they struggle. Some ⊞ers try to structure the world around them and like things to be neat and tidy.
Follow up questions for ◳
Hey ◳, hope youre good!
I'm thinking of putting this section of the interview we did back in december in my thesis. Is that ok with you?
https://stephenkerrdesign.com/jelly/
I want to include it because I think it really captures some emotions that ⊞ers feel quite often, some stress or anxiety or an attempt to grab onto something more stable. But I also find it really interesting that you were talking about jelly slipping through your hands, any idea why you didn't say sand or mud or gold but jelly? To me it seems like a fun and cute material to pick, even though its a bit lumpy and maybe even kinda gross sometimes.
I've been really interested in foods made of gelatin recently and theres something so mesmerising about them even though they're never the most appetising, and for sure unnatural or over-processed. Maybe you just said it off hand, but it makes sense to me as well about being a designer in some way? Something enjoyable and lovable about the jelly despite its weird unnatural wiggliness. Really interested to know if you have any thoughts or maybe you meant something completely different.
And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im totally fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.
Thanks,
Stephen
Follow up questions for ◱
Yo ◱, hope all's good with you these days?
I've been piecing together the interviews from December and I'd love to include this section about your dream if that's alright with you?
https://stephenkerrdesign.com/jelly/
It seems to get at something I feel as well: this system that we've built up and these drawers full of grids, sometimes there's an angst or unresolved feeling that they're not going to work, they dont fit as an answer to the problem.
For me I think it might be something to do with order and chaos if that doesn't seem too much of a stretch, I've this need to structure things and fit them in a form, and the dream seems to get at that fear that it's not going to work. The grid is solid but reality turns out to be jelly at best, but very often custard and little bits of tinned strawberry and soggy sponge.
I assumed the dream is about the pressure or anxiety of running a studio? I wonder for you, do you see it more relating to the work itself or the management around that, or are these things that you consider separate from eachother? I'm curious to know if you think of it the same way, or maybe it's something else to you and I'm projecting :)
And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im totally fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.
Thanks,
Stephen
What is a ⊞er?
A ⊞er is a person who wakes up at 5am but refuses to open their eyes. There are birds talking outside, it's probably getting bright already. Something is wrong, not sure what. They finally open their eyes and there's the ceiling again. When the light comes in sideways over the curtains this early you can see all the little ripples and imperfections in it. Nothing. Ribcage. Stomach. The front of the ⊞er's legs ache. It would be better to sleep again. Have to pay taxes again next week. A ⊞er is someone who wonders if that invoice will come through I need to follow up on it. The birds are so loud.
The role of the ⊞er is to count back from five to two and realise that was only three hours same as yesterday. They use ⊞ thinking to never get back to sleep. They need excellent time management skills to make this short moment feel like an eternity, several times a week. ⊞ers have an acute spatial awareness and an eye for detail: although the ceiling seems miles away they focus on each tiny ripple for hours. A ⊞er is someone who will work the whole waking day today, but it's better than last week when there was no work. ⊞ers look at their phone and see their alarm is going to go off in ten minutes, so they switch it off and get up.
The precarity of working in the creative industries, in particular as a freelancer or within a small studio, induces anxiety. There is a belief that the ⊞er as freelancer is empowered by their autonomy, but in fact the ⊞er as worker is trapped by it. ⊞ is work and this work is believed to be inherently good. Work in our society is understood as "an individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation" which shapes the worker's identity in positive ways (Weeks, 2011). The ⊞er believes they are a skilled or talented worker, someone who possesses spatial awareness, time management skills, and the capacity to carry out work effectively and efficiently.
⊞ers are entangled in the Protestant religious underpinnings of the European work ethic (Pater, 2022). ⊞ is seen as a vocation which expresses and creates the ⊞er's identity, and the process or its results make a valuable contribution to society. People understand the world and interact with it smoothly, thanks to the work of ⊞ers. Designers pick the right materials to save the planet and increase efficiency and whatever else it is people find important. But the designer becomes anxious despite meeting these goals and becoming this person. In reality, the ⊞er is a bot, the ⊞er is software. Value is extracted from their time, creativity and expertise which makes them stressed. ⊞ers are a creative cloud, a service to be tapped into, a cpu being run too hot. There is something to be learnt from the revelation that being replaced by machines proves we were being treated as machines all along.
Excerpt from an interview with Conor Clarke, 01/12/2023.
Conor Clarke is a Director of ⊞ Factory, an award-winning ⊞ studio based in Dublin. He has served as a board member of the Institute of Creative Advertising and ⊞, and the Institute of ⊞ers in Ireland. His work has featured in international publications such as Who’s Who in Graphic ⊞, Graphis, Novum Gebrauchsgrafik, and the New York Art Directors Club Annual. He was the recipient of the Catherine Donnelly Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to ⊞ in Ireland and is the Course Director of ⊞ West, an international summer ⊞ school located in the beautiful village of Letterfrack on the West Coast of Ireland. (designwest.eu, 2023)
- SK: What do you think is the best shape?
- CC: Oh yeah, good god. square.
- SK: Square? how come?
- CC: Dunno, it just, it just seems resolved. I don't like spheres. Circles I sometimes like.
- SK: Yeah, squares, do you use grids?
- CC: Sometimes.
- SK: Not always?
- CC: Not always.
- SK: Once you have grids squares make sense. But you like squares maybe because you like logos?
- CC: If I'm in an art gallery and I see, you know Joseph Albers or something I just kind of feel, I just like, or Malevich i just like that stuff. If I see a Kandinsky and all those squiggles and circles it just, that just kind of upsets me a little bit.
- SK: That's a bit chaotic?
- CC: Yeah. And even if I'm looking at Vermeer I can see some kind of square structure and logic, for some reason that always appeals to me.
- SK: Things are a bit organised when there's squares around?
- CC: Yeah. And really great artists who don't work that way I look at their stuff and think well that's just beyond me.
- SK: Its something else?
- CC: Yeah. so yeah.
- SK: At least you didn't say triangle.
- CC: Oh good god. Good god no.
Follow up questions for Conor
Hey Conor, hope you're keeping well these days? I've been going through the interview from back in December and was wondering if you would mind me including this piece in my thesis:
https://stephenkerrdesign.com/squares/
I guess the thesis has become a lot about designers and the beliefs they have about their work, and its effect on the world around them. I was really interested in your answer to this question because I think it shows something a lot of other designers including me feel too; some desire to structure the world around us, to have things be resolved, organised, fitting together. And not just a desire but maybe even a belief that this is really what our job is for? Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but to me this maybe hints at part of the reason we're am drawn to a field like graphic design? Curious to know what you think.
And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im totally fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.
Thanks,
Stephen
An annotation of my practices as a graphic ⊞er on a typical working day, 23rd October 2023:
- I read an email
- and
- I type
- Alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab ctrl c ctrl v ctrl c ctrl v ctrl c ctrl v ctrl c ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v
I think it is important to show that ⊞ers are workers with tools, their repetitive tasks are a form of labour as are their "creative processes". In the annotation above my aim is to mystify the manual (or even digital) labour, rather than demystify the creative ideation part. Following this annotation I made a digital tool to record all keystrokes on my computer. Then I printed them out with a pen plotter to celebrate the labour that had taken place. It took several hours to plot the keylogging data from just a few minutes of the ⊞er's labour.
Mystically assigning or finding meanings in ⊞
This autoethnographic annotation, in comparison with the previous overly technical or analytical one, attempts to really miss as many cultural and technical cues as possible. It's watching the ⊞er, me, and being totally mystified by their behaviour.
- A rhythm exists and I wonder why. There is music and there are voices, and my fingers press the keys and the colours of the screen flicker and morph. There appears to be a life or energy flowing somewhere between these things and I am curious about it.
- The screen shimmers between different symbols, letters, images. The colours are symbolic. White means the ground, although sometimes it switches to white symbols on a dark ground. They are full of meaning and relationship. I press two buttons to the left of the keyboard and the screen answers with a flicker.
- I count out loud to 40. It symbolises both the number of pages to be made and the enormity of the task. It represents a period in the desert, long but with an end in sight. What is the relationship of the desert to the stars? If the screen can flicker from a dark to a light ground, is it possible for the sky to also switch from day to night?
- I have taken three of the forty steps.
- I have taken seven of the forty steps.
- ⊞ is a series of movements and reconfigurations. It is a creative act and one of elision. I use the keyboard to communicate my will to the machine with commands such as "Ctrl + C" and "Ctrl + V". I firstly inform the computer that I wish to control it. Each letter has a deep and layered meaning. CVCVCVCVCVCVCVCVCVCVCV. "Alt + Tab" asks the screen to flicker. The computer must match my multithreading. It must be prepared to follow my changing demands in our shared focus. FAVCV. F is to seek, but it is optimistically labelled to find. I enter the incorrect combination of symbols ("samle") the incantation is useless and I will not dfind what I seek. I try again "sample" and the computer gives me what I desire. Why does the machine demand perfection? Why does it value perfection in me, what is it trying to teach me? Why wont it leave me alone?
- I have taken eleven of the forty steps. I will rest.
Mystically assigning or finding meanings in ⊞
What does ⊞ do? What is the ⊞er trying to do by pressing all these buttons and making the screen vibrate?
- "⊞ only generates longing"
- (Van Der Velden, 2006)
- "I found myself way over my head with, believe it or not, a catalogue and price list for bathroom equipment. Nothing I’ve done since has seemed as difficult."
- (Michael Bierut, 2018)
- "attempts to undo the privileged position of the agentive subject can help us understand the strange status of repetitive and quasi-robotic labour in today's digital age"
- (Hu, 2022)
Using LibreOffice to create a document for print from a desire to use open source software, but giving up and using Adobe anyway
As part of my own workflow I try to use open source software, but sometimes it causes little hassles because I was trained as a ⊞er to only use Adobe products. I try to use OSS because I believe in using tools made by a community rather than a private company, and as a worker being in control of my software. In this annotation I describe an attempt to ⊞ and export a single page document in LibreOffice Writer, an open source desktop publishing software, and print it out.
- I have no idea what any of this structuring does. And I don't care. But I would like to remove the page title from the export. It is in another tab called User Interface. I also select only page 1 to save to PDF. Now I run into a software issue in this workflow: the best software for the next part of the job is Adobe Acrobat Pro. How aggressively do I want to remove this software from the workflow? Not aggressively enough I guess because here I am still using it. I don't know any other software that really gives me details of how a document will print, and lets me edit PDFs on a more useful level than any other program.
- For example the title still exported (it always does, LibreOffice bug or just I don't know what to do with the new software yet?). It takes two seconds to remove in edit mode in Acrobat. I also delete the page number, I don't even know how to turn that off from LibreOffice. The print dialogue in Acrobat is also so powerful, its so easy to print actual size which is important to me. It is structured and reliable.
Whats wrong with proprietary software? Whats the point of open source? Why am I moaning about it then if its so great? But fonts, really?
There are a few problems with proprietary software from big tech corporations. They are based on a model of society and economy where a few people own things and everybody else has a hard time. I dont really want to pay money to tech giants so their owners can become even richer, they're already too rich and they're really mean. I believe the internet gives an opportunity for knowledge (including software code) to be shared and that's great and let's do it. I also like the idea of modifying my tools and this is easier technically and legally with open source software. Open source promotes communities that develop their own tools and I would prefer my tools to be developed by me and my peers than the lizard people. These are some of my beliefs as a ⊞er about my work and my tools. They're a bit idealistic I think but also optimistic in a good way.
Unfortunately open source software in a lot of ways sucks. Its unreliable and unstandardised. It takes ages to do things and then the program crashes and I've lost all my work. By unstandardised, I mean that the standards of open source software have not been widely embraced by the ⊞ community. To fit into a workflow with peers in many areas of print ⊞, it is essential to use Adobe products. Even web ⊞ers, who engage with open standards a lot, can find the need to work with proprietary software like Adobe Illustrator and XD and their file formats, because these tools are deeply integrated into the workflows of their peers. Can you send me that in a normal file format I cant open it. Transitioning to Open Source software especially sucks. I spent years learning other tools and in some ways its like starting from zero all over again. There is a dual commitment in my beliefs about how my tools should be built and my desire to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. My action of fumbling with open source programs reflects my belief that they are worthwhile, and my action of still using Acrobat Pro reflects my belief that there are better things to do with my time than restarting software when it crashes again.
- "I think it's fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created. They're tools of communication, they're tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user."
- Bill Gates
Fonts
The documentation also records my attempts to switch from traditionally licenced fonts to open source fonts, such as Open Font Licence. I'm not really sure if this is important to me. I do like the idea of being able to modify a font when needed, and have done so regardless of whether the font licence allows it. I am more comfortable ethically with a font being open source, for similar reasons to those described above. Open Source fonts are more commonly free of charge, although many ⊞ers pirate fonts rather than buy them. In this document I use Work Sans instead of what I would have used in In⊞, Helvetica Now. For my work, fonts are also a tool, one that I need to practice with and one that needs to be suitable for the job. I have used Helvetica Now or some other version of Helvetica for over a decade at this stage, for probably over a hundred projects. I have used Work Sans for about five years at this point, and roughly twenty to thirty projects. I would consider myself capable with both tools, and consider both tools capable. There are of course differences between them for example Helvetica has a more neutral (standardised, familiar) appearance and can therefore be used in more situations. Work Sans is a little more interesting visually which also makes it more useful in certain situations. Work Sans is better for online use because Google Fonts serves it as a web font for free. This is kind of ironic and reminds me again that my values are silly and inconsistent.
This is specifically to do with the tools ⊞ers use for their work. The use of fonts as tools is full of tensions from ⊞ers' belief systems. Like many ⊞ers, I want to use open source fonts. I also want to use fonts that will load quickly from a content delivery network for web projects. I also want fonts to be cheap and well made and I am especially interested in fonts that are free. The internet is full of illegal and pirated copies of fonts that are not supposed to be free of charge. I sometimes receive or am asked to send font files outside of their licence. I dont have a huge amount of respect for some of these licences. What does a ⊞er's actual use of fonts say about their beliefs around copyright? Do ⊞ers believe in intellectual property? What value do ⊞ers specifically typographers see in their work and that of their close peers, the font ⊞ers, and how does copyright relate to these values?
An analysis of a joke about ⊞ in the early 21st century
When reviewing the AIGA Next conference in Denver Colorado, 2008, ⊞ critic Adrian Shaughnessy tells a joke:
- "The venue was shared with a beer festival, but it was easy to tell the ⊞ers from the beer fans. The beer fans were more serious."
The spiritual origins of ⊞ as functional and rational
There was a belief that ⊞ could be a crystal goblet (Beatrice Ward, 1913), something unbiased, clear and, in more recent versions of the theory, serving the context it fits within. But the foundations of this belief in functionality and rationality dont seem to come themselves from something functional or rational.
De Stijl members, such as Piet Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg, in their 1918 manifesto described a "new consciousness of the age … directed towards the universal". There was a drive towards universal standardisation or pureness of culture from the rich white men. Purity is a concept that turns up a lot in Mondriaan's writings, eg Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art (in De Stijl, 1917). They claimed a shared spirit was driving this universalisation. A later paragraph of the manifesto is sometimes translated into english as:
- "The artists of to-day have been driven the whole world over by the same consciousness and therefore have taken part from an intellectual point of view in this war against the domination of individual despotism. They therefore sympathize with all who work for the formation of an international unity in Life, Art, Culture, either intellectually or materially."
"Intellectual", or "geestelijk" in the original Dutch, can also be translated as "spiritual, mental, ecclesiastical, clerical, sacred, ghostly, pneumatic". The choice to translate as "intellectual" seems to be the most "rational" interpretation of this sentence, an effort to make the theories of De Stijl appear more materialist without the spiritual element. Compare with this translation:
- "The artists of today, all over the world, impelled by one and the same consciousness, have taken part on the spiritual plane in the world war against the domination of individualism, of arbitrariness. They therefore sympathise with all who are fighting spiritually or materially for the formation of an international unity in life, art and culture."
Imagine I could trace this thought from Mondriaan all the way to myself, wow, cool thesis. Swiss style became corporate identity ⊞ and encouraged minimalism in ⊞. 21st century "flat ⊞" such as Metro ⊞ language (Microsoft, 2006) and Material ⊞ (Google, 2014) claims direct descendance from the International Typographic style and that pretty much brings us up to date. I wonder about the use of the word "Material" in Google's ⊞ strategy, I wonder about the ghostly absence of the "geestelijk" fight of De Stijl. Is Google's choice of name another example, as with the subtle change in the translation above, that the spiritual element is no longer as important a part of the ⊞er's worldview as it was a hundred years ago?
Steve McCaffrey, the ⊞ grid and the written word
Why do designers believe in using a grid to present the written word, and where did this belief come from and how did it develop? It can be materially traced back to Guthenberg and metal type but that's boring. Why did Steve McCaffrey include the manifesto of De Stijl with CARNIVAL (1973)? De Stijl is best known for its painters and architects, and theories from both of these fields affected later ⊞ theories. But they also were poets and had literary theories similar to the german expressionists. Man's attempt to find oneness with the whole of creation through a cosmic hybris. The developments of the written word and its relationship to form in the 20th century is very much a part of the history of ⊞. I care about this story because it affects contemporary practitioners. I believe there is something magical in graphic composition and the layout of typography, something that cant be grasped in the words alone. They're non-canonical for ⊞ers but how have people who put words on pages like Mallarme and McCaffrey influenced my beliefs about the written word? What makes one thing fit in the category of art, another ⊞ and yet another concrete poetry?
- "An artists’ book featuring a series of typewriter concrete poems printed on perforated pages meant to be torn out and arranged into a square of four. Complete with instructions, a reproduction of a de Stijl manifesto from 1920, an errata slip, and publisher’s promotional postcard. "
Maths and grids
Why not choose a spiral or a circle if you dream of ⊞ers as shamans? Why the grid of squares? There are strong links beween ⊞ and mathematics, Josef Muller Brockmann: Grid Systems for example or Karl Gerstner: ⊞ing Programmes. I read these ⊞ theorists as you might read a religious text, comparatively, what were or are the beliefs of the authors and their audiences? Karl Gerstner writes:
- "To describe the problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as prompted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more creative the work becomes."
- Gerstner, ⊞ing Programmes, 1964
- "This is the expression of a professional ethos: the ⊞er's work should have the clearly intelligible, objective, functional and aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking."
- Josef Muller Brockman, Grid Systems, 1981
I find it interesting that ⊞ claims this rational basis in the same historical period when science and mathematics, its supposed foundations, became much less rational and predictable, for example the same time period that gives us Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and quantum physics. It makes me think that the rationality serves some other purpose. The title of this document, ⊞, is borrowed from the mathematical theory of free probability, where it symbolises free additive convolution; a way of relating terms in a much more nuanced way than traditional ideas of "cause and effect".
Conclusion
Last night I dreamt I was standing on a hill in the Swiss Alps and you were there and all of our friends and the hill was covered in little fields of different shapes and sizes and we were all barefoot and the sky opened in two and a ring of light so bright it nearly blinded me came out of my chest and yours and they all merged into eachother and everyone opened their mouths to sing and the air was filled with chill lofi beats and one ⊞er in a white dress walked up to me and smiled and said "I dunno, I'm more confused than ever"
and then I was them and they were me and they said "a funny feeling its a bit weird Im just trying to touch it gently, acknowledge it" and then you said "live the gap between where you are and where you could be" and we laughed and fell over and the hill turned into a bright pink wobbly ocean and we all surfed the biggest wave on our surfboards and some people's surfboards were ⊞er brands and some they built themselves from a git repository the whole sky was this sort of green blue sunset but the sun was a walnut and it was definitely moving but I couldnt tell was it rising or setting but it didnt matter to us the surf was great and everything smells like magnolias.
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