Michael Bojkowski

My time at Grafik

2025-01-03T05:41:15.080Z

As I write, in 2021, it has been a decade since graphic design magazine Grafik ceased publishing a print edition. It’s with a tinge of melancholy that I look back on my association with the magazine—a title that meant so much to so many that it was resurrected multiple times (due to popular demand) before the driving forces behind the title—editors, Caroline Roberts and Angharad Lewis—decided to call time.

Over the course of 80+ issues and 8+ years (not including their time at Graphics International before hand), Caroline Roberts and Angharad Lewis, were unerring champions of graphic design and the many designers, image makers, suppliers, educators and critics this industry fostered, in the U.K. and all over the world.

Graphic designers may be an integral part of the publishing industry but there have only ever been a small, select group of periodicals that catered exclusively to the sector. As a designer in the early 2000s, Grafik quickly rose to prominence as one of the more aspirational titles to have appeared over the years. I began avidly collecting each issue from it’s initial relaunch as ‘Grafik’ (post Graphics International), pouring over page after page of profiles, articles and luscious pictorials.

During this time my practice would start to bounce backwards and forwards between London, Melbourne and Amsterdam. Wherever I was based though, if I couldn’t subscribe, I made sure I knew where the nearest newsagents or supplier was so I could get hold of a copy as soon as it was released.

Trolling, pre-trolling

As I shifted around from place to place I also started blogging, often about magazines. My first direct interaction with Grafik was after a bit of—what would probably now be termed—trolling. I wrote a rather unkind review of their redesigned editorial design special issue back in 2006 [︎︎︎you can read the whole shameful thing here]. You often write these things assuming you’re shouting into the void. In this case, at some point, editor Caroline Roberts very generously sent me a reply.

I’m not sure how or when perceptions shifted—but I’m very glad they did—as we kept talking after that and much later was asked to contribute to Grafik’s Letterform series [︎︎︎you can read my contribution here]. Later still, I was invited to write a monthly magazine review column for the magazine which, to my quiet delight, became the sign off to each issue of the magazine, just before the colophon.

Writing a regular column for Grafik was an honour and initiated a sea change in how I conducted myself as a designer—embedding writing firmly within my design practice. It also helped bridge an awkward time in my personal life which had initiated a shift from London, back to Melbourne and I was thankful for a continuing connection to the city I’d spent so much time in.

From writing to designing

After writing regularly for the title over the course of a year, editors Caroline Roberts and Angharad Lewis invited me to take on the role of lead designer for the title. Ready to shift back to London again, I jumped at this chance.

By now it was 2009 and Grafik had weathered many of the storms that sank a vast array of well-established print titles during the past decade. I arrived in London and set to work on issue 187—the issue that never was. Soon after sending the issue off to print, Grafik had its funding pulled by a key investor and after the many strategies the editors had enacted to keep the magazine afloat failed, they were forced to cease publishing... for a time. Meanwhile my first as designer for the magazine was completed but never printed. The cover for this issue is shown here (there were four colourways planned with a pattern design supplied by Eley Kishimoto). The issue would later be released as a free download for subscribers and a Print-on-Demand version was also produced.

A comeback of sorts

Battle weary, but undaunted, the editors soon chose a new publisher, after a raft of suitors came to the rescue. The magazine was to be relaunched as a bi-monthly. The structure of the magazine would be assessed and reassembled into a robust new format with a new editorial organisation in place—the editors forming a separate company, Woodbridge & Rees, to act as producers.

Together, we worked to establish new editorial design and branding standards. We decided there were still recognisable elements we wanted to keep including certain typefaces (although with some customisations) and the unique physical size of the magazine (originally decided upon by MadeThought back in 2003). Branding, promotional material and on screen design work would also be required.

I would go on to work on the title for a year, over the course of 6 issues (now it was bi-monthly). At the end of their first year together, after rebuilding the original Grafik team rebuilt the title’s core readership from the ground up, the publisher decided to close the title. This appeared to be a desperate attempt to shift Grafik’s hard won readership over to another, less well known graphic design title in their stable—stealing from one magazine to feed the other. A strategy that did little to enhance the other title’s international appeal, which seemed to be the reason for adopting Grafik in the first place.

Undead

Now recognised as a well established title, seen to be able to adapt to dire circumstances, Grafik would be courted, once again, by a new set of publishers before shifting over to forecasting company, Protein—who had started producing a well put together print magazine title of their own. A new website for Grafik was released but a promised print title never materialised. The title has now remained in the hands of yet another new publisher who was passed the baton from Protein some years ago, with former editors drawing a line under any further involvement.

I have to admit being a graphic designer, designing a graphic design magazine for other graphic designers was not an easy task to approach—especially having been a reader (and a critic) of the title not so long ago. The core attraction though, was getting to work with a team (including staff writer, Anna Lisa Reynolds and previous designer and contributor, Dan Rolfe Johnson, amongst others) who not only cared deeply about the industry within which I had found a home, but were also a total joy to spend time with.

I have to admit being a graphic designer, designing a graphic design magazine for other graphic designers was not an easy task to approach—especially having been a reader (and a critic) of the title not so long ago. The core attraction though, was getting to work with a team (including staff writer, Anna Lisa Reynolds and previous designer and contributor, Dan Rolfe Johnson, amongst others) who, not only cared deeply about the industry within which I had found a home, but were also a total joy to spend time with.

The Archive

One of the projects I took on, as lead designer—but also as an avid fan—was the consolidation of Grafik’s digital archive. At the tail end of a secession of designers—including Nick Tweedie (who worked on the title as a member of MadeThought, Value & Service and Malone Design), Sea, Danni Calvi and Matilda Saxow—there was a mass of digital files, in various states, created through putting the magazine together to send to print.

This archive documents almost every issue of the title in easily reproducible formats. Unfortunately, it also tells the story of when deadlines and amends meant certain issues were not archived well or files were lost, so it’s incomplete... for now.

As a side project, which I dedicate time to when I can, I’ve started piecing together those missing parts with the aim of compiling a complete digital archive of the title from issue 107 to 193. This has involved the creation of updated templates for flowing content into. I call these ‘archive editions’, covers and spreads from which you can see here.

False Claim

2024-02-25T06:28:14.694Z

Author's note: This text was started on one side of 2023's Voice to Parliament vote to recognise Indigenous people in the colonial constitution, and completed on the other side once the results had been cast. Regardless of these results, the Country this text was written on remains Indigenous land. Always was, always will be.

The late 1980s was a potent time to be a high school student in the ~~Australian~~ education system. 1988, in particular, became a catalyst for a re-telling of the country’s colonial legacy. A re-telling that sought to paper over the devastation wreaked—on the land and its early inhabitants—by invading European settlers.

The government of the day instigated a cacophonous 'Bicentennial celebration’ that painted a trompe l’oeil of a nation 200-years young—papering over the 80,000+ years of habitation by the Country’s indigenous folk.[^1]

This Bicentennial project was vast, and the build up to it was insidious in its planting of dubious narrative tenets into the day-to-day lives of ~~Australian's~~ citizens. Any cultural touchstone had the potential to be weaponised by the state in support of terra nullius (i.e. the legal nomination for a land over which sovereignty had not been claimed, a falsehood wielded by colonists that propelled ~~Australia~~ into Nationhood).[^2]

Figure 1. Artwork for 'White ~~Australia~~ has a Black History. Don’t Celebrate 1988' badge.
Designer uncredited. As seen at protests, c.1988.
Image from Museums ~~Victoria~~ Collections.

Australian Studies

In education, the late 1980s saw the installation of ‘~~Australian~~ Studies’ as a compulsory subject into high schools. Academic and author, Alan Barcan observed in 2003—on the introduction of this new subject—that, “This relativist, socially-critical (subject) opened the door for generalisations and speculations which were probably beyond the comprehension of many students and some teachers.”[^3]

I can vividly recall the anguish and dismay our own ~~Australian~~ Studies teacher built up over the course of a semester as they tried to guide us through the many ad-hoc twists, turns and tinkering various government ministers had baked into the programme. The resulting subject presented a picture of a country whose national identity was cobbled together into a scrapbook of often obscure geo-political alliances and omitted the uncomfortable colonial legacies that haunted the syllabus with their glaring absence.

The goal was for ~~Australian~~ Studies to be placed at the heart of a new ~~Australian~~ Curriculum that was installed in 1988—the ‘Bicentennial’ year. In truth, the subject would prove to be too much of a political football to survive the various kickings it received from many sides of the political spectrum. Soon after it was installed, it would be dropped as a compulsory requirement and eventually become the appropriately obscure field it is today.

Trinkets and Distractions

There would be a cavalcade of distractions from past (and continuing) atrocities released in support of the Bicentennial, with design playing a significant part in the pursuit of false narratives. The most tangible would be a commemorative “historical medallion” handed out, free-of-charge to school-age children around the country.

Figure 2. Bicentennial “Historical Medallion”.
‘EDUCATION’ side designed by Michael Meszaros, c.1988.
Image from Museums Victoria Collections.

I remember the Medallion was very similar to the 20 and 50 cent pieces in circulation at the time, only one side featured a group of clone-like figures climbing a set of stairs in unison towards a depiction of the Southern Cross (a constellation also known as ‘Crux’) and the word ‘EDUCATION’ written in all caps underneath. The reverse featured the Bicentenary logo—an abstract rendering of the coastal outline of the continent vaguely resembling a folded ribbon—with the words ‘~~Australian~~ Bicentenary 1788–1988’ encircling it, interrupted by a laurel of wattle as punctuation.[^4]

The medallion was distributed encased in a blister pack which was set into a colourfully designed, die-cut cardboard folder. Text on the back of the folder read: “During 1988 we commemorate 200 years of ~~Australia~~’s history in the modern world and will be celebrating our Bicentenary in many different ways. But one thing that we should all be doing is thinking about what it is to be an ~~Australian~~. We should be learning about our past, trying better to understand the present, and thinking of the part we can play in the ~~Australia~~ of the future. You are ~~Australia~~’s future. Keep this medallion as a reminder of this important year in our history.”

Figure 3. Back and front cover of the Bicentennial “Historical Medallion” folder.
Folder design attributed to Concept Studios Pty. Ltd., c.1988.

1988 would see another unique type of currency produced in time for the Bicentenary in the form of the world’s first polymer banknote. The illustrations on this $10 bill sought to bridge inhabitants of both pre- and post-settlement (or rather, invasion) by dedicating one side to each (with a portrait of Captain James Cook concealed in a translucent window with linked the two designs). According to the collector’s folder issued by the Reserve Bank of ~~Australia~~ at its time of its release the theme of the design was settlement.

The design team was led by Harry Williamson, himself an immigrant from the U.K. having established a design career in London before making a 'sea change' to come to ~~Australia~~. Design notes at time of release describes how one side depicted, “the ship Supply and a medley of people against a background of ~~Sydney Cove~~.” It goes on to explain that, “The Supply and its ten sister ships of the First Fleet left Portsmouth, England, for ~~Botany Bay~~ on 13 May 1787. All the fleet arrived at ~~Botany Bay~~ by 20 January 1788 but it was regarded as unsuitable for a settlement. Six days later a settlement was established at ~~Sydney Cove~~. The representation of ~~Sydney Cove~~ is based on an engraving of a sketch by John Hunter, an officer on the First Fleet's flagship Sirius and later Governor of ~~New South Wales~~.”

Whereas the reverse of the note, “relates to ~~Australia~~’s original inhabitants” and, “brings together some elements of Aboriginal culture—ancient rock painting and hand stencils, a portrayal of an Aboriginal youth wearing body painting, and a Morning Star Pole.” The design of the Pole is credited to Aboriginal artist, (Terry) Yumbulul (who would later file an action against the RBA stating that he was misrepresented by an agent when the artwork was commissioned—the case was settled out of court)[^5] and was, “an example of poles used by the Aboriginal people of north-east Arnhem Land on certain ceremonial occasions.” The notes describe the background pattern as being based on “original works commissioned by the Bank” by unnamed Aboriginal artists.

Reserve Bank of ~~Australia~~ (RBA). '1988 Commemorative Bank Note' [Informercial], c.1988.

It wouldn’t be until 2018—some 3 decades after the note was released—that the central figure of “an Aboriginal youth” would be identified as a Lardil man from Mornington Island, after indigenous activists, Welcome to Country, took on the labour of locating the unnamed man who was the basis for the illustration. In an article of their site Welcome to Country noted that, “It’s disheartening that the settler history goes into great detail … but the information about the Indigenous side of the note is (mostly) absent. Efforts could have been made to note the name, tribe and location of the boy and (more about) the artworks featured, however it appears the efforts made were simply tokenistic.”

The Jingoistic Cacophony

Alongside the televisual extravaganzas, the over-hyped arts, fashion and sporting events, the ‘royal visits’, the merch and supermarket tie-ins that were flung into the public maul in 1988, there was also World Expo 88[^6]—an Olympics for international trade—which was charged with “bringing the world to ~~Australia~~”. Key tenets of national identity that used to legitimise geopolitical land grabs (such as those favoured by Micro-nations; of which ~~Australia~~ has quite a few) were hauled out in the form of Expo ’88 branded passports and dollar notes.

Amidst this jingoistic onslaught there was activism, protests and attempts at diverting attention away from this supposed “celebration of a nation” and towards an acknowledgement of past atrocities and truth-telling. The year started with one of the largest rallies of indigenous peoples in the (slim) history of the colony, with “White ~~Australia~~ has a Black History” emerging as a particularly potent slogan that sustains today (see Figures 1 & 4).

Figure 4. Chetser, Peter. The Anti-Bicentenary March poster, c.1988.
Design based on an image made by Chips Mackinolty as part of a Land Rights campaign, c.1977 used after designer sought permission from the original artist.
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/the-story-behind-the-image-the-bicentenary-protest-poster/ok1ys3sot

In response to the Bicentennial event Indigenous activist, Burnum Burnum, went as far as travelling to England to plant a flag on a beach in Dover “claiming sovereignty over the land for Indigenous people”. Distinct voices of indigenous resistance emerged from these protests too whose words and activism would resonate for decades to come such as Gary Foley & Linda Burnley, amongst many others. But these protests had little chance of permeating the chaos around the instigation of the ~~Australian~~ Curriculum project or the sensorial onslaught of the Bicentennial celebrations and only added to the colony’s burgeoning legacy of wilful ignorance and missed opportunities.

As an example, ~~Australian~~ Studies could have been the place to start sharing the true stories of the place many of us were born into with its botanic gardens emulating far away foreign vistas and fake snow at Christmas time amid increasing heatwaves. I wish the 1986 film, BabaKiueria had been part of the curriculum, and that there had been some sort of counter narrative to the colonial capitalistic structures we faced. It makes me think that most of our high school education was built on a facade of lies and that we were consistently fed false narratives for the nefarious purpose of supporting a (still) illegitimate colonial land-grab.

Babakiueria, c.1988.

The Australian Lettering Book

It was during this formative time, in the late 1980s, that Graphic Design was offered as an elective at my secondary school. I can’t remember a lot of what we were taught—or even who was teaching it—but I have a clear image of the green-grey metal cabinet at the back of the classroom and the stack of small, horizontal format books perched on top of it. The books were slim and elongated with sombre dark green covers and bright white text across the front reading, The ~~Australian~~ Lettering Book.

Figure 5. Last published cover design for The ~~Australian~~ Lettering Book.
This version published c.1984.

There were more glossy, colourful, photo-typeset lettering books around at the time—which went some way to explaining why these monotone editions had been relegated to a back cupboard—but I think I must have been drawn to the unpolished, hand-hewn nature of the letterforms within. These sets of letterforms didn’t belong to specific families but rather broad, curiously territorial canons such as Egyptian, Roman, Florid Roman, German, French, Old English etc. Towards the back more elaborate letterforms had less specific names—most falling under a generic banner of ‘Map Lettering’ before examples had titles completely stripped away.

In researching The ~~Australian~~ Lettering Book’s origins for this project, it turns out to have had a publishing legacy extending well back before the 1980s. It has also been adapted and its format changed to suit a variety of audiences over the years. In fact, it was still being published—in the face of the continuing evolution and democratisation of various typesetting services and technologies—up until 1989 (at last record).[^7] When it was initially released as The ~~Australian~~ Printing Copy Book, it’s format followed that of many other Copy Books at the time which were commonly issued by the state around the late 1800s/early 1900s.

Figure 6. The Lettering Book by Noelene Morris.
First published c.1982.

Copy Books were usually embedded within formal coursework, but could also be completed independently of schools and institutions. They typically featured sets of example letterforms (usually starting with a cursive script) that ran across the tops of pages followed by empty space for pupils to ‘copy’ the forms into with their hand writing implement of choice [See also Thy Hà’s discussion on cursive script in their Counter Forms piece, ‘Same, same but different’]. The key difference with The ~~Australian~~ Printing Copy Book was that it was given a wider remit than that of young students. It sought to engage with a professional class of “Lawyers, Architects, Surveyors, Engineers, Engravers, and Draughtsmen” who needed to brush up on their formal lettering skills.

As the book evolved, a formal link to cartography and the marking and dividing of territories was solidified. Drafting maps was a potent skill within the colony for securing land illegitimately stolen from its initial inhabitants. If an area could be drawn or mapped out and boundaries asserted, then it could be assigned a value, a name or title and then claimed, bought or sold.

Indeed, in lieu of the modernising effect of the printing press, hand-writing was utilised in the legitimising of many official documents in the country around the turn of the 19th century, acting as a type of ‘security feature’ where distinct formalised types of hand-writing were employed in order that documents could be traced back to their source. Travel documents, deeds and receipts were often produced by hand, or incorporated formal types of ‘hand-writing’. John Batman’s now infamous 1835 treaty which helped establish ~~Melbourne~~ as a legally recognised settlement and was alleged to have been signed by Wurundjeri Elders, is a highly contentious example of this.

Figure 7: evans, megan. 'Treaty', 2021. Including a facsimile of Batman treaty of 1835. Shown as part of the 'Colonial Confusion' exhibition at the City Gallery in Melbourne in 2024.

In this light, it makes sense that “The ~~Australian~~ Printing Copy Book” appears to make ‘Map Lettering’ a priority. Indeed, all editions/versions of the publication include examples of hand-lettering as applied to the inscribing territory onto land. Editions in the 1880s give an example of the land of ~~Australia~~ divided crudely into states, whereas later editions only feature the state of ~~Victoria~~ with an example of hand-lettering on an architectural plan of a building thrown in, fulfilling an early promise that “The ~~Australian~~ Lettering Book is specially designed for use in ~~Australian~~ Schools, and in the offices of Lawyers, Architects, Surveyors, Engineers, Engravers, and Draughtsmen generally.”

Showcard & Ticket Writing

Figure 8. "Vocational training, Ticket writing class".
Part of a series of 43 photographs published by the Commonwealth of ~~Australia~~'s Department of Repatriation portraying the experiences of returned ~~Australian~~ servicemen, c.1919. Image from The ~~Australian~~ War Memorial archives. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C40033

Post-war—as hand-lettering was replaced by more stable, mechanical and less easily accessible means for all types of reproduction—The ~~Australian~~ Lettering Book found a new purpose as a means to keep idle hands busy and provide an accessible livelihood via the labour of ‘Ticket and Showcard Writing’.

'Showcard and Ticket Writing' described the painting of letters onto windows and shelf display items (tickets) as an attractive way to communicate prices and sales information of products within retail environments. This appears to have been an easily transferable skill in high demand within the retail and services sector as evidenced—not by the number of positions wanted ads in ~~Australian~~ newspapers in the early to mid 1900s—but rather the vast array of courses advertised on the subject that were offered by a wide variety of sources.

Initially touted as a means for military folk returning from war to rejoin the workforce with minimal material costs. Interest soon passed from returning soldiers to unemployed youth, to women seeking income working in the home, to the development of practical skills for prisoners. A similar style and flair would be translated into painted lettering favoured by Butcher shops and the like. Some practitioners still exist today although you’d probably have to head out of the big cities to find them.

Figure 9. Cover of Desktop magazine, July 2012 edition.
Featuring 'Showcard' style lettering painted onto a window outside the Desktop office by Ted Hanna, commissioned by Brendan McKnight.

Blot the Copy Book

Nowadays, although students are still taught how to write by hand from an early age, it’s not long before these skills are obliterated in the digital realm where Arial rules supreme. Writing quickly becomes typing (or ‘setting type’ to use its original meaning).[^8] The potency of hand-rendered text is rapidly lost as our written skills develop, making it increasingly hard to recognise a time when formal styles of hand lettering were central to the colonial act of robbing of indigenous folk of their claims to sovereignty.

That's not to say hand-writing has completely disappeared from state-organised curriculum in Australia (and beyond). In 2022, Google Fonts released the 'Google for Education Australia' suite of fonts stating "~~Australian~~ teachers are required to use state-mandated handwriting styles to teach reading and writing to school children from ages four to nine... The regular weight of each font imitates the pencil thickness of handwriting, making the fonts easy for students to recognise as they learn how to write letter shapes".[^9]

This formalised the previously haphazard distribution of the 'Foundation Fonts for ~~Australian~~ Schools' that had been circulating amongst teachers (and few else) as a type of 'clip art' in years preceeding. With government involvement in colonial systems of education systems dictating that each state had their own version with slight changes to language support state-by-state.

Given the continuing proliferation of hand-writing in state sanctioned education, The ~~Australian~~ Lettering Book’s dubious legacy is worth of highlighting as a story of the potency of the hand-written letterform in early colonial practice, whose insidious uses we have the opportunity to further unravel today.

The hand written word is rarely completely indelible. The substrates that they inhabit can be redacted, damaged or partially erased [^10]—but the hand written word often connects untruths and devious actions thought to be concealed by the perpetrators in a way Arial and Times New Roman could never.

A note on False Claim, the typeface

Nat Pyper's 'A Queer Year of Love Letters'[^11] and Genderfail's Protest fonts[^12] are projects that have shown that good use can be made of font files as containers for distributing previously hidden or less heard stories, in their case, of Queer community and the associated struggles for rights and visibility.

'False Claim' has been produced in a similar spirit of utilising the font file format to not only contain letterforms but to also attach stories and urgent legacies to it. The stories that False Claim seeks to maintain and distribute, through this essay and in the font's name, is one of the damage colonial untruths wreak, how the tools of the colony are potent and nefarious and embedded within state-organised education systems before flowing out into the mass media. It is a story of how slight-of-hand through the repetitious drawing of specific letterforms can rob whole communities of the land they had occupied and cared for for tens of thousands of years prior.

Mostly though, it's an uncovering (through design research) and re-telling of stories that were already known. As Tony Birch points out in an essay published by Common Room Editions, "We tend to think that what we're trying to do is uncover history that no one knows about. But this is a fallacy."[^13]

Always check the metadata.

⚫ 🟡 🔴

Notes:

[On geopolitical terminologies used throughout]: James Taylor and Matt Chun’s UnMonumental Style Guide has been applied—in part—to this text in order to better describe relationships to names and descriptions imposed on (the) Country where this text was written. Where referring to them name ‘~~Australia~~’ is unavoidable—for clarity or to illuminate the colonial project—this name appears striked-out (as with similar colonial impositions). This is to de-legitimise colonial claims to the land which had to be named before its ownership could be falsely claimed and as a mark of respect to indigenous persons for whom the work may be associated with the legacy of trauma it also connotes. For more detail, see https://unmonumental.substack.com/p/the-unmonumental-style-guide

[^1]: Davidson, Helen & Wahlquist, Calla. ‘~~Australian~~ dig finds evidence of Aboriginal habitation up to 80,000 years ago.’ The Guardian, 20 July 2017, http://theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/19/

[^2]: Gary Foley notes, “In 1788 the imposition of British sovereignty on ~~Australia~~ was justified by the notion of terra nullius, which was a convenient means to avoid the problem of just reparations for the indigenous inhabitants who, in the process of being dispossessed, were thereby deemed sub-human.” See Foley, Gary. ‘Assimilating the Natives in the U.S. and ~~Australia~~’, Gary Foley’s Koori History Website, c.2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20010430103242/http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_11.htmlSee also: The National Library of ~~Australia~~’s ‘Challenging Terra Nullius’ digital classroom provides some good insight via http://nla.gov.au/digital-classroom/senior-secondary/cook-and-pacific/cook-legend-and-legacy/challenging-terra

[^3]: Barcan, Alan. 'The Struggle for Curriculum Reform in ~~Australia~~ 1987-1993'. Education and Research Perspectives, Vol.30, No.2, 2003.

[^4]: Museums Victoria Collections notes that Michael Meszaros was responsible for the ‘EDUCATION’ image while Michael Tracey provided the design for the reverse side. By 1988, Michael Meszaros had established a studio specialising in designs for medals, http://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/75825

[^5]: This case was documented as ‘Re Terry Yumbulul v Reserve Bank of ~~Australia~~; Aboriginal Artists Agency Limited and Anthony Wallis’, (25 July 1991). Full details and partial transcript can be found via http://austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/FCA/1991/332.html

[^6]: Peter Spearritt gives a comprehensive account of the decisions made in the build up to 1988’s Bicentennial event and the subsequent reaction to it in his text, 'Celebration of a nation, The triumph of spectacle', published in ~~Australian~~ Historical Studies in 2008.

[^7]: Although each iteration of The ~~Australian~~ Lettering Book has appeared sans author (as per the expected formats of copy books) the title has been connected to Herbert Newell who produced The Key Lettering Book for the same publisher.

[^8]: "It wasn’t handwriting that drove forward the technology of writing into the modern era, but type."—Simon Browne discusses how mechanical means of writing that meant letterforms cast in metal were manipulated into forming words and texts moved from presses to the type writer in his thesis, Tasks of the Contingent Librarian. Texts could still be hand-written but with an mechanical intervention of the type writer (and later the personal computer), turning everyone into 'type setters'. https://project.xpub.nl/the-bootleg-library/pdf/thesis.pdf

[^9]: 'The handwriting fonts that help ~~Australian~~ students learn how to read and write are now available in Google Workspace'. Google Fonts blog, August 4, 2022. https://fonts.googleblog.com/2022/08/the-handwriting-fonts-that-help.html

[^10]: It seems as though consecutive conservative ~~Australian~~ governments have found it more convenient to defund state archives rather than allow access to the many uncomfortable truths contained within. See: Visontay, Elias. '‘Inconceivable’: why has ~~Australia~~’s history been left to rot?'. The Guardian [newspaper], 23 May 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/may/23/inconceivable-why-has-australias-history-been-left-to-rot

[^11]: Pyper, Nat. 'A Queer Year of Love Letters' [typeface collection]. 2018–ongoing. https://www.librarystack.org/a-queer-year-of-love-letters/

[^12]: Oakley, Be (aka Genderfail). 'Protest Fonts' [typeface collection]. 2018–ongoing. https://genderfailpress.info/PROTEST-FONTS

[^13]: Birch, Tony. 'A Brief History of ~~Victoria~~'. [essay] from ~~Melbourne~~ School for Discontent (Tony Birch, Jacqui Katona and Gary Foley). 'Native Title is Not Land Rights!'. Common Room editions, c.2023.

Research pool:

https://www.are.na/michael-bojkowski/false-claim

Letterform: Albertus lowercase 'a'

2022-11-02T18:47:12.476Z

May 2009: This text was published in the May 2009 issue of Grafik magazine as part of their Letterform series where graphic designers were invited to present and discuss a favourite letterform.

“As a fully paid-up member of the type geek squad, as you can imagine, having to choose just one letterform to talk about is kind of mindboggling. Letterforms comprising graphic glue that sticks much of the world together—typography becomes endlessly fascinating and the variety of letterforms seemingly infinite.

This, in part, led to the initiation of a personal typographic survey of the City of London (I was living in the City at the time) and the making of a dorky little video about this which you can see now on Vimeo (and on this page).

Wandering through the City, it soon becomes apparent that Albertus (or Old King as a certain Russian foundry decided to rename it at one stage) rules here. Designed by Berthold Wolpe around 1936, it is the mortar that cements the City together. It also helps comprise, what has to be, one of the most expansive examples of typographic brandwork you’ll find.

Following World War II, the City became the focus of a flurry of regeneration projects (including construction of the Barbican Estate) and signage became a key element during this period. A decision was made to use this one typeface and it has been adhered to ever since.

You can’t talk about Albertus without mentioning The Prisoner—a, frankly bizarre, TV show first broadcast in 1967. Albertus is used within the TV show in much the same way the City uses it for real, drawing parallels between the closed world of The Prisoner and the utopian ideas of urban planners at that time.

If you want a snapshot of why this ‘quiet achiever’ has survived, reasonably unchanged, throughout the decades, have a look at the lowercase ‘a’. This letterform typifies Albertus’s unique blend of the staunchly geometric and the handmade. The slope and chop of its lines imbuing it with both authority and craft. While researching this piece, I came across a calligrapher who had rendered a whole alphabet in Albertus—by hand—without losing any of its formality or presence.”

A Typographic Survey of the City of London: Part One

Geek Note: The example shown here is actually a slight redraw I produced, based on the lettering that sits above the garbage disposal chutes in Great Arthur House on the Golden Lane Estate.

Falling in and out of love with the Newsagent

2022-11-02T18:41:47.004Z

August 2010: Published online via the Linefeed blog and in issue 3 of LineRead available via print-on-demand. LineRead was exhibited as part of the Walker Art Centre exhibition, ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’.

Postcard from the early 1970s showing the Boronia Village Newsagency in the bottom left corner as it looked only a few years after opening.

This is a big deal for me. Ever since I was a kid—regularly mooching up and down the luxuriously wide aisles of the Boronia Village Newsagency—the humble newsagent has always been my first stop when heading out. It’s the first place I seek out whenever travelling. Friends will tell you I have a hard time going past one without stopping by. I’m particularly embarrassed to recall a Christmas walk one year through an atmospherically empty London town—with my partner at the time—that included a brief diversion when I spotted a newsagency that looked like it was open, only to discover the staff were just utilising a quiet day to shuffle some stock around. See, embarrassing, huh. But then the local newsagency has always been my compass and my guide. This is no longer the case.

I want to say the iPhone has replaced the local newsagency as my first port-of-call for that familiar rush of information, but that’s not entirely true. I think I have just become tired of the newsagent's lack of ambition. Newsagencies don’t change. A whole industry in flux swirls around them and they stubbornly stay the same—only with less and less titles to stock on their shelves. Our unambitious local newsagents are only partly to blame though. The crux of the problem with the waning appeal of the magazine stockist lies in distribution.

The most common method of magazine distribution is over complicated and severely outmoded. And it has been for a while now. The past few years have seen this interdependence—between the newsagent and distributors—eroded even further. You see, when the newsagent was the sole high street purveyor of printed periodicals distributors could hog-tie magazine publishers into highfalutin deals in exchange for stuff like eye level shelf positions, numbers of stores they could be stocked in etc. Not that publishers could be guaranteed that their chosen ‘sweet spot’ would be where their magazines would land, or even if they would reach the stores they were hoping they would. You could say it was an inexact science. Doing convoluted deals with big distributors was, is and, it seems, will always be a false economy.

Browsing is a key selling point for magazines. If you go into a newsagent and they try to stop you browsing just say ‘I ain’t buyin’ nuffing without looking at it first.’ There aren’t a lot of newsagents with no browsing policies because their magazines simply wouldn’t sell. What’s happened in recent times, in the U.K., is that the magazine industry lost pretty much all of the big stores that had room to lavish on comfortably wide aisles and ample shelf space, along which visitors could browse in relative comfort. Places like Borders and Virgin Megastores etc allowed customers to flick through a variety of magazines without the pressure of the store owner constantly watching you out of the corner of their eye. This was important in giving potential readers the freedom to explore a range of titles.

The lack of interest and innovation smaller newsagents have, and the competition for the sweetest shelf space caused by over complicated distribution deals, have promoted a sort of ‘gulp and go’ culture, i.e. magazines are often treated like the chocolates bars and crisps that seek to engulf them. Quantity over quality is the natural theme in this environment. Still, bland repetitive mainstream mags like Heat and Nuts etc continue to struggle for relevance against a backdrop of falling advertising revenue. Mainstream publishers, together with your commonherd newsagent, have thrown their core product up against all manner of cheap and easy consumer conveniences and—in the process—started to cancel each other out.

So that’s a whole world of problems for the far-too-humble newsagent to resolve… or die trying. It’s also the reason I’ve lost hope any sort of recovery—but that’s enough negativity… There are people with answers and a whole realm of possibilities for new forms of distribution already accessible to publishers and readers alike. More excitedly, they mostly favour the independent publisher over the corporate behemoths.

Niche distributors

So, the models of distribution that have kept magazine publishers going for so long are now broken. It’s the time to move on. The recent digital explosion may have diverted readers attention away from printed matter but it has also opened up multiple avenues of distribution previously unimaginable. Take Stack for instance. The premise behind Stack is that, once you’ve subscribed, you get a series of carefully curated independent mags delivered to your door. Every delivery is a surprise. It’s a unique proposition that opens up a whole new realm of magazines to adventurous readers. Since Stack launched only two years ago a number of other independent online distributors have been popping up. It’s a safe bet that we’ll see more indie distributors appearing online in the coming years, supplying all manner of ace publications direct to readers and opening up more channels for niche distribution.

Print on Demand

I’ve been banging on about print-on-demand for a few years now, as have a number of other emergent publishing evangelists. Truth told, growth in the popularity of Print-on-Demand has been slow and there’s is still a long way to go in terms of mainstream recognition. The problem of cost is one that has yet to be solved. MagCloud is edging closer to a viable proposition for publishers and their recent focus on distribution can only further the cause, with their new iPad app allowing readers to browse whole issues and then purchase printed copies at the tap of a button. More print-on-demand services keep popping up too, such as ubyu who offer a wide range of bespoke options for book and magazine designers. I’ve even heard traditional print houses flinging the term around and beginning to utilise digital printing technology to offer publishers shorter print runs. Then there are also the tiny specialist printers such as Ditto Press using Risographic techniques to offer bespoke print runs. It will be the point when print-on-demand services combine distribution with their core offer that will be key here though, and all eyes should be on MagCloud at the moment, to see how their recent bold experiments work out.

New Places to Browse

All this online activity is fine but nothing beats being able to physically pick up a magazine and have a flick through. Browsing minus your browser is still an important way to lure and excite potential devotees. So what to do if newsagents aren’t providing comfortable, attractive spaces in which to browse? NZ and Australian based retailer MagNation understood the importance of browsing to magazine retailers and seemed to have the answer for a while but fell into the trap of diluting their offer with gimmicky enticements and garish decoration that only confused visitors who came for the magazines, not the frippery. Berlin is a rare place where, it seems, anyone can afford to experiment with retail formats. Hence the city has hosted, and continues to host, a number of interesting magazine outlets such as Do You Read Me? and Motto Distribution’s store. The recently opened Michelberger Hotel includes a huge magazine library in its foyer which could easily be seen as a homage to the act of browsing. In London, specialist bookstores such as Magma and Artwords fill this gap to a certain extent, but there’s a massive chunk missing in London’s retail scape for a place dedicated to magazines and independent publications. A place where readers can go to graze amidst a carefully curated crop of current magazines.

Contract titles

One—often over looked—form of distribution, that’s been with us for some time now, inhabits the realm of contract titles. Magazines produced for very specific audiences—contract titles utilise targeted distribution, such as inflight magazines produced for airlines or in store magazines produced for specific clothing brands. Contract titles have the advantage of not having to rely on being stocked on shelves in your local newsagent, thereby negating reliance on overly complex distribution deals. Their main disadvantage is that a good contract title can be hard to get hold of if you’re not in the right place at the right time. Contract titles are hard to follow too as subscriptions almost unheard of.

The health of our magazine publishing industry and it’s distribution outlets is inseparable. With publishers running about, flapping their hands in the air, stressing out about failing readerships, methinks the problem of distribution is something they’ve been over looking for sometime now.

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A brief history of Linefeed

2022-11-02T18:32:42.456Z

June 2013. This article was originally published as a blog on the Linefeed blog.

I started writing about stuff online just shy of 20 years ago now so I’d thought I’d throw myself down the rabbit hole to bring the history of this here blogsite (or whatever you want to call it) bang up-to-date. Here goes nuthin’…

1995-ish

This is the year I graduated from University. I enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts (Graphic Design) and finished with a Bachelor of Design. It was a pretty weird time to be studying graphic design. Design education was racing to keep up with technology, whilst questioning whether or not these emerging technologies (such as Desktop Publishing and Website Design) were actually going to help or hinder designers in the future.

Truth told I was oblivious to the online world whilst studying. What I had embraced, along with a select group of friends, was a digital, rather than manual, way of working. Sounds weird now, but they were still teaching us how to make photographic plates for printing at the time—although I don’t think that would have been the case shortly after I left. Things were moving that rapidly.

1996-1997

It took me a few months to land my first proper design agency job. I’ve never been a much of a networker… at least, not in person… so I was determined to find a place on my own merits. There were only two of us designers at Artvaak (spelt wrong when they registered the business) but I witnessed the business grow in many other ways during those couple of years.

Being the new guy, and a recent grad, I was assigned the task of working out how to build a website. Along the way I developed a kind of free wheeling experimental site for Artvaak called ‘Vaak’. I joined online communities to pick other designers brains and developed bonds with fellow internet newbies via fledgling social media networks such as Firefly and, later Geocities.

Vaak, c.1996

Geocities is where I kind of started ‘blogging’, I guess. Although the term blogging hadn’t really been invented yet (‘Geocity-ing’ wasn’t super catchy). Mostly it was a place to experiment with early HTML design—getting tables to work and finding fonts that were legible in photoshop at tiny, pixel-based dimensions. I had a site called, appropriately enough ‘TheLab’ (no space) at geocities.com/SoHo/Lofts/4744. There was a lot of gibberish on there, much of it transferred over from the Vaak site which had grown to become too wacky and idiosyncratic to be associated with Artvaak’s main site.

1998

I stayed at Artvaak for a couple of years (maybe less) before going freelance for a while. With this new found independence I also wanted to be a bit more ‘grown up’ with my personal site, so it was goodbye ‘theLab’ and Geocities and hello, Filler. Filler (byline: No Obvious Killer) was the self-depreciating title I gave to a kind of scrapbook of layout experiments, scrappy bytes of writing and lucid image-based ideas. In other words, looking back, it was a bit of a mess.

1998 was also the year I first visited London as a sort of adult-type creature. It was a spur of the moment, two week getaway type of thing. It was also completely rad. A year later I moved over there for good…

The Lab, c.1998

1999

Getting a foot hold in London was tough. I soon realised how easy it is to go from sleeping on someone’s floor with no money, the worst case of flu you’ve ever had and the only relief being trips to Easy Everything on the nightbus just to keep your family and friends up-to-date, to having a reasonably comfy job, a room of yer own and London as yer oyster, and in a relatively short space of time.

Before leaving for the U.K. I shifted Filler along with all my online shambolic ramblings over to Apple’s free hosting service. Filler became my online journal as well as a self promotional tool and HTML design sandbox.

Filler: No Obvious Killer, c.1999

2000—2003

Filler took various guises from 2000 to 2004, each version hand-coded, as was the way back then. I enjoyed having a place to mess about online and the stats were okay… people were visiting it. It did take a lot of time to maintain properly though. I also started a ’Logo Archive’ at one point which ran for a couple of years. Eventually I got a bit board of all this coding and setting up a decent foliosite became more of a challenge. My online writing was put on hold until brandnew in 2004…

2004

Brandnew didn’t last long, and had its UI roots planted firmly in the realm of print (complete with faux crop marks), but while it was around I tried to stuff it full of the best content I could find. I wanted brandnew to be just that and unlike any site that had gone before. There were real live interviews with creatives such as Michael Gillette and Tatty Devine plus profiles on records lables like Teenbeat, all designed to a carefully considered template. Which I think is what killed it in the end. Having to build the majority of the site in Photoshop and then cut it up was both laborious and yet felt weirdly lazy. It also took me away from writing which wasn’t working for me either.

Brandnew, c.2003

What did live on was a spin-off ‘hobbysite’ originally created to run alongside brandnew, but soon took on a life of its own. NMCA took the logo archive idea from a few years back and replaced logos with magazine covers. There are a number of places you can go now to see curated collections of magazine covers, back in 2004 there was really only NMCA. Other similar hobbysites tended to focus on very specific titles or the celebrities that graced them. NMCA was unique in coming from a design perspective first.

2006

Between 2004 and 2006 it was enough to keep adding to and evolving my personal foliosite and maintaining the NMCA. Offline I had spent most of my time and energy in manoeuvring my career in to a place where I could investigate a key area of interest, ie editorial design. It wasn’t until late 2006 that my online ambition shifted gears in a serious way. It was whilst working at John Brown publishing that Jeremy Leslie introduced me to WordPress and suggested that I make posting online ‘a habit’. I took his advice literally and, with this new blogging platform able to streamline a lot of the functions I was used to performing manually, dove in with a spanky, new site I nicknamed boicozine.

The blog you are reading now, 7 years later (in 2013), is pretty much a mutant of the original boicozine blogsite.

Boicozine, as it appearred in March 2007

2007

A year later I was lucky enough to have a amassed a neat little crew of contributors. Namely, Mr Luis Mendo, Mr Simon Whybray and Mr Joe Bland. 2007 was also the advent of Press Publish, a kind of online publishing imprint which became the house for a range of ‘print-on-demand’ projects starting with Zine! (later renamed ‘archive’) which took the first three months of posts on boicozine and put them into printed form. The idea was to invert the process a lot of traditional publishers were having to consider and go from blog to print rather than the other way around.

2008

Looking back, you could say 2008 was the year creative community blogs blew up. It’s Nice That and Kitsune Noir (ie The Fox is Black) had launched the year before, snowballing into 2008, whilst previously popular creative forums such as Computerlove and Newstoday were struggling to keep current. It was around this time that Boicozine was mentioned in Print magazine as a design blog to visit. Stats were going through the roof.

This encouraged me to try and expand boicozine beyond the confines of a WordPress template. I investigated many different ways to publish content online such as via Flickr photostreams.

The most successful format though turned out to be video. Video would become increasingly important to Boicozine and later Linefeed, as a way of reaching out to creative communities from all corners of the globe.

2009—2010

…or rather 31st December 2008. That was the date boicozine switched to Linefeed. I started the year afresh with a new name and a considered identity for, what I was increasingly seeing as an online brand rather than a stand alone blogsite.

Shown opposite: Linefeed launch ‘stamp’ and custom typeface design, c.2010

LineRead #1 was published early this same year. Taking the idea behind 2007’s print-on-demand project (ie turning blog posts into printed pages) LineRead utilised a relatively new (at the time) online publishing platform called MagCloud. This larger, more lightweight and brightly coloured format seemed to really click with the blog… and with readers.

LineRead, issue 1. c.2007

The magazine review videos I started posting last year were blowing up at this time too. As the videos kept getting longer, they were picking up more and more viewers from all over the world, which made no sense to me at all. A video review of the decade in magazines clocked in at almost an hour and was viewed over 2,300 times. Crikey!

Playlist of magazine review videos now posted to YouTube

2010

In 2010 Linefeed got it’s own special URL, ie the one you see here, linefeed.me. A second issue of LineRead was also produced based on a fascination with the occult and turned out to be the most successful issue to date (people are still buying copies now). This focus on expanding the site beyond a mere blog and it’s the realms of print and video was only starving off the inevitable though…

LineRead, issue 2. c.2010

As Twitter and Facebook hit their stride, conversation previously had via blog comments—thereby helping make a blog a living, breathing thing—bled over into 140 character or less bytes of chatter or reactionary/incomprehensible Facebook comment streams. I’d always valued having a blog as a way to reach out to and talk about specific topics with like-minded people. With the social aspect seriously diminished I began to question the what Linefeed was and whether or not it was interesting and relevant to anyone any more. I didn’t want to be talking to myself all the time. Where was the fun in that?

2011-2012

A third edition of LineRead was released in 2011, summing up the decade from 2000–2009. Roughly a year later, all 3 issues of LineRead would appear in the travelling exhibition ’Graphic Design: Now in Production’, looking at designer-makers and self-publishers.

At one point I found myself being invited (along with fellow exhibitors) to present at the Smithonian in New York. I couldn’t get over to New York at the time (and am acutely shy when speaking in person anyway) but I did accept an invitation to do a live version of my magazine review videos at the Facing Pages event in Arnhem in 2012, partly because it meant getting to hang out with my good friend Luis Mendo and doing some work in Amsterdam once again.

Indeed, I found myself travelling loads and splitting my time between many different clients including Grafik (for whom I designed issues 187 through to 193), Wallpaper*, Wired and various titles for Ink, one of the world’s largest publishers of onboard magazines.

Needless to say, after all the accolades and amazingly useful things Linefeed had achieved for me personally of these years, the site fell into neglect…

2013

And so were now bang-up-to-date (unless you’re reading this several years later). At the beginning of 2013 I became convinced that blogging, as I first knew it, was over. ‘Blogging’ as an activity, had had a pretty amazing run considering the attention span most internet based endeavours have had to put up with from users.

The encouraging thing for me, that has happened over the last couple of years, is the emergence of independents as the future of publishing. After years of doom and gloom from the mainstream press there is a tangible way forward, in part, driven by the desire of readers and producers alike to re-engage with long form editorial content.

It’s an easy reaction to the whittling down and commodification of thought and conversation online and Linefeed responded by remodelling itself into a text-based archive at the start of 2013. Comments were removed and a simple drop down menu was installed. Et viola.

Except, the more things change the more they stay the same, and Linefeed has evolved once again. Still with the focus of being a text-based archive although with a more (hopefully) assessable interface. I’ve been busy stripping out a lot of the content in order to buff it up a bit and extend features where I can. Most of what’s happening on the site is about slowing down. Getting things straight in my head before casting them out into the world.

Most importantly, it’s become about properly respecting the intelligence of readers—as much of our communication online becomes more tightly controlled by governments acting as cartels for their own business interests, or as over-valued digital businesses gasping desperately at the old-fashioned advertising dollar for a life line—becoming exclusively reader focus makes so much more sense.

So expect less posts but more well considered. Expect a well stocked archive that will continue to grow… And expect all this to change when the next seismic shift is the public consciousness comes along… or not.

Either way thanks for dropping by. Keep yourselves nice.

Michael Bojkowski, 2013

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Expanding The Making of Modern Art

2022-11-02T18:27:48.670Z

April 2018: Produced in response to the Van Abbe exhibition titled ‘The Making of Modern Art’ at vanabbemuseum.nl. / Submitted as part of the Design Curation & Writing MA at Design Academy Eindhoven / Tutors: Steven ten Thije (Van Abbe) & Alice Twemlow.

A very recent history of versioning

One of Google’s earliest ventures into capturing physical objects for a digital realm came in the form of their Google Books Library project. It wasn’t huge leap of imagination for the company to move from capturing the written word in digital form via blogs and online media, to transposing whole books of written text in a similar manner. In fact, the blurb on the current Google Books site suggests that digitalising whole libraries was the goal of a ‘web crawler’ nicknamed BackRub [1] that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page built as far back 1996. In wasn’t until 2002 though that Google would turn their attention back to where they reportedly started, pulling together a small team tasked with the goal of working out ‘How long would it take to digitally scan every book in the world?’ [2]

There were already similar projects underway such as Project Gutenberg (which exists today [3]) and the Internet Archive’s Universal Library Project [4] but being an independent commercial entity, Google would approach the collection of written works in a broader, more aggressive and expansive manner than their institutional and open source-based peers. For the next three years ‘Googlers’ would happily ignore issues around copyright and ownership in a fever of scanning and capturing. That was until in 2005 when The Author’s Guild, a US-based advocacy service for book authors, issued a legal notice asking Google to put a stop to the Google Books project citing ‘a plain and brazen violation of copyright law’. [5] This legal case would drag on for another 10 years until 2015 when it was ruled that Google’s creation of digital ‘versions’ of existing books was considered ‘fair use’ and therefore, legal. [6]

Over the course of ten years of legal wrangling, a number of case studies were presented that seemed to cause a sea change in people’s attitudes towards Google’s rabid digitisation of whatever written material they could get their hands on. To many minds the inherent usefulness of the Google Books project, helped by it’s visibility, was enough to validate its continuance. Aside from the preservation aspect, it was pointed out that digitalising so many titles and maintaining them in one place opened up a whole new library for those with poor eyesight who rely on electronic readers to reinterpret books for them.

For some the question shifted to concerns away from copyright and ownership. Artists Andrew Norman Wilson became concerned with the labour involved in the process. For his ScanOps project [2012-ongoing] he sifted through Google Book’s burgeoning archive to find photographic evidence of the little-talked about labour force responsible for the scanning. In his images you can clearly see the hands of the workers accidentally captured whilst positioning pages and archived as pages in the books. [7]

The digitisation of objects

The Google Cultural Institute project took a very similar concept to the Google Books Project but appears to have had a much smoother ride. Google learnt from their book scanning project that to negate concerns over ownership they had to bring copyright holders along with them from the start. With this in mind they set up the Google Art Project in 2012, [8] under the auspices of the recently launched Google Cultural Institute, having enlisted a number of well known and respected cultural bodies from around the world such as the Tate in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Uffizi in Florence. [9]

The goal, this time, would be to digitise entire museum and gallery collections, starting with high resolution images of two dimensional works and works on canvas before graduating to the scanning of sculptures and larger works to create three-dimensional models that could be ‘picked up’ and spun around via virtual space enabled web browsers.

Part of their offer to cultural institutions was to also create ‘street view’ enabled viewings of their spaces, untethering museums and galleries from their physical locations. This works in a similar way to the paper maps you can get when entering a museum or gallery, only instead of locating the viewer within a space, the space unfolds around the viewer. This also creates yet another ‘version’ of the works on display, now set in aspic, frozen at the moment in time when this virtual tour was first recorded by Google’s harness mounted ‘Street Trekker’ camera. [10]

Changing vantage points

When Rachel Whiteread chose to exhibit her casting of Aldous Huxley’s old workspace at the BBC (the original ‘Room 101’) within the Cast Courts at the V&A Museum [11] the ‘newness’ of this work highlighted the paradoxical nature of these galleries, homes to copies of original sculptures and architectural pieces such as Trajan’s Column (cut into two pieces) and Michelangelo’s David, since the late 1800s. [12] The institutional value of these copies was bought to the fore. It was a chance to recognise the artistry and history of copy making. The V&A’s cast of Trajan’s Column now had equal billing with piece of ‘original’ work as contemporary as Whiteread’s ‘Untitled (Room 101)’.

In the 5th room of the new semi-permanent exhibition, The Making of Modern Art at the Van Abbe Museum [13] there is a great deal of evidence of this idea of versioning within musatorial fields. Co-curators The Museum of American Art, Berlin, [14] have no qualms about reproducing any kind of artwork, often in paint or pencil, even when these different versions are placed in close proximity to each other. And there is a placid acceptance of their relationship by most visitors. Whether or not it’s assumed these are original artworks is rarely commented on.

Mapping and model

Versioning as a means for expanding on stories of art already occurs within The Making of Modern Art exhibition at the Van Abbe but this could be pushed even further with the incorporation of some of the recent technologies mentioned above.

A street view style map could give visitors an almost forensic viewing platform from which to interrogate the works and ideas contained within. An accompanying printed diagrammatic map could highlight vantage points where the Street Trekker's camera took these recordings for visitors to review later online as a type of continuous souvenir.

Three dimensional models of works within the exhibition could be added to the Google Arts & Culture database and exhibited in physical spaces. Allowing visitor to ‘handle’ artworks without the potential to damage original works also on show.

When considering these recent digitised formats suddenly the versioning that is already occurring within radical exhibitions such as The Making of Modern Art is expanded into new realms and dimensions that can only aid and attract visitors eager to interrogate ideas that have seemed so static up until now.

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Towards a Contemporary Publishing Lexicon

2022-11-02T18:20:27.393Z

First published in 2018.
Submitted as part of the Design Curation & Writing MA at Design Academy Eindhoven. Tutors: Shiloh Phillips & Loes Bogers.

Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff from Life magazine

Acceleration

The force which has propelled the act of publishing through time, altering associated formats exponentially whilst inventing new formats along the way. ¶ Similar to the way in which the mechanical printing press effected the manuscript, digital means of production has increased the speed at which the process of acceleration occurs. ¶ This can be linked to the shift in focus within capitalist structures from value being based on the accumulation of objects to time-based measurements, exemplified by the invention of the ‘Futures Market’ and described in Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis... “Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours.” (See also: ‘accelerationism’) ¶ Within publishing, value often becomes linked to volume and distribution (or reach). The expedited trajectory digital means has facilitated, in turn nudged forward by time-based economics, can be seen as producing emergent publishing formats such as the digital meme, video streaming and the hybridisation of new and existing formats such as online print-on-demand services like Blurb and Lulu as well as independent experimental projects such as Jasmine Raznahan’s ‘The Metapress’ and Copyshop to name but a small sample.

Archiving

The storing of material for referencing at a later date, away from the demands of the publishing schedule. The act of publishing automagically creates an archive. Publishing relies on the releasing of material (be it a book, a magazine, a YouTube video, a tweet, a meme, an event etc.) tied to a point in time. This is where a record starts. The record then becomes a body that could include authors, content, cataloguing codes, schedules, constellations and more. ¶ The internet being anchored by a web of physical servers, with these servers acting as data storage devices, has created the ideal platform for housing published data. This transference has been so frictionless that an assumption grew any content pushed online would create a capsule, accessible at any time, that would live forever. ¶ This great amassing, reliant on usually invisible but ultimately physical means (i.e. cloud-based servers), could prove to be un-undoing of sorts. The sheer volume of material being archived currently out-weighting the capacity to store all of it. This has resulted in questions around the value of ‘big data’ and institutional crises where material it was assumed was kept ‘safe’ has started to dematerialise. ¶ Fresh questions have arisen around what should be kept if the capacity and willingness to store—and, equally importantly, retrieve—archived material has diminished and who should be the custodians of these immense collections.

Body

Body used here is derivative of the term ‘body copy’—as used within text-based editorial procedures when producing print publications, as an example—to describe the main bulk of a feature or written article. ¶ It is linked to the description of the ‘content’ of a publication. The body becomes a way to more accurately describe the ‘guts’ of a feature or written article as opposed to content. ¶ Use of the word ‘body’ also lends corporeal form to the author generated component of a piece of published material. ¶ Bodies, both as a publishing term and as a physiological entity, are also altered by external forces that can alter their function and form, much like the way memetic dispersion changes the thing that is being dispersed.

Commune

Over time, the term ‘commune’ has proved useful in proving coherence within community-based organisational structures in a wide variety of ways—such as in uniting socialists, revolutionaries and radicals in forming a government body known as the ‘Paris Commune’ at the time of the French Revolution, and in giving form to countercultural communities such as Drop City in the 1960s and 70s. It is also the jurisdictional designation that allows The City of London to operate it’s own unique structure of local government from within the Greater London Authority where citizens from wards are represented by ‘Aldermen’ and meet to discuss issues via ‘Wardmotes’. ¶ Often, communes are initiated in opposition to a previously established jurisdiction allowing the community formed within the ‘commune’ to operate with it’s own distinct regulations, systems of infrastructure and ideological boundaries. Diagrammatically, this commune manifests as a bubble situated within a broader community or territory. It is not on the fringes, but situated closer to a ‘heart’ or a core. Communes are also associated with non-traditional thinking and can be seen as incubators for radical ideas that eventually filter out to a wider community. ¶ In recent times, digital means has allowed for ‘communes’ to further detach from physical locations. Where previously communes formed organically around sites where communities gathered, now similar groups can organise themselves online and meet whenever necessary at any agreed juncture. This has helped small scale and independent publishers, in particular, to take root and even flourish, although often operating within imagined ‘walled villages’.

Creators

A label previously used to describe a cache of interdisciplinary designers identified by design-led magazine titles (such as GasBook, Relax, Studio Voice as well as online platforms such as Shift) that came out of Japan in the late 1990s–2000s that has seen a reemergence today. ¶ At the time, this label was applied to ‘creators’ such as Geoff McFetridge and Mike Mills for whom established job titles such as—illustrator, graphic designer, film maker failed to describe the variety of formats, materials and outcomes they produced. ¶ The derision that often greeted the term by those labelled with it, lay in its lack of specificity and therefore lineage or professional qualification. ‘Creator’ was too easily adoptable by those seen as amateur in comparison to the aforementioned cache. ¶ Use of the term within design-led media subsided for a time but has been resurrected recently to describe a nimble, self-sufficient breed of publishers and online practitioners utilising platforms such as YouTube, Patreon and Kickstarter (particularly Kickstarter’s new platform ‘Drip’). ¶ For example, when you post a video onto YouTube, it gets “published” and when you publish a video on YouTube you are considered a ‘creator’. You then get access to your own ‘Creator Studio’ and the ‘YouTube Creators’ community. Kickstarter launched their new venture, ‘Drip’, with the opening text “A new tool for creators.” and Patreon currently declares on it’s homepage “Creators, come get paid.”

Distribution

Publishing and distribution are concepts that are interwoven. There is a common assumption that distribution provides a type of aequitas amongst formats (i.e. In ancient Rome aequitas was used to refer to either the concept of fairness between individuals)—“the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed” to quote William Gibson—but this is a desire often imposed on the term. At its essence, distribution can be seen a ‘dispersion’ or a ‘dissemination’. ¶ Systems have been developed over the years to address the scatter-shot nature of this integral tool but are now regularly shown to be imperfect and slow to adapt to change. As much as there are well established networks of distribution, supported by specialists and circulation measurement tools, distribution is often shown to be an inexact science. ¶ This is particularly evident when it comes to physical product and distribution to the newsstand or newsagent. In the years leading up to the advent of the internet, magazine publishers had become enmeshed in a complex web of clauses and deals with distribution houses who had created bottlenecks between publishers and sellers—wielding influence over both. ¶ Digital means shifted emphasis away from large scale publishers, to be spread amongst a range of emergent magazine producers (helped by the development of a commune around said publishers). ¶ A raft of experiments in magazine distribution have also emerged. Print-on-demand services such as Lulu, Blurb and MagCloud embedded themselves online. The Stack magazine subscription service was launched in 2009 with the express purpose of tackling distribution issues within the area of independent and small scale publishing, opening up new networks and audiences for a range of titles previously ignored by ‘high street’ stockists. Peter Biľak’s ‘Works that Work’ magazine launched with a ‘Social Distribution’ model in which readers were encouraged to order extra copies at a discounted price to resell to friends and stockists. ¶ The recent wave of disruptive distribution, encouraged by the advent of online services, is not exclusive to print publishing. Netflix and The Pirate Bay have forged new routes from producer to public changing the way video entertainment is delivered. Apps and social media have dramatically altered both the way photos are shared and news media is perceived.

Hybridisation

The process by which one publishing format is combined with another, often mixing a pre-existing format with an emergent form. Since the advent of the internet this has been a field of investigation for both commercial entities and independent artists and designers alike. ¶ Hybridisation operates within a widely expanded field of formats. Aspen magazine, for example—produced in the late 1960s—used magazine as an umbrella term to describe the container for an ever-changing combination of film and vinyl recordings with printed material of various sizes and shapes alongside artist’s editions and more. ¶ The use of compact discs adhered to the covers of magazines in the 1990s is an early (and literal) example of commercial publishers combining audio and video content with a printed publication. Moving magazines online often resulted in a similar hybridisation of formats that would contain the same articles and features but presented in HTML. The iPad’s brief dalliance with mainstream publishing proved a test for many established publications attempting to create hybridised titles. ¶ Today hybridisation continues on a highly experimental level with institutions supporting endeavours such as Publishing Lab and experimental publishing workshops and programmes who work with both established and emergent formats to find new routes that put hybridisation at the centre of their multiplicitous processes.

Magazine

Before The Gentlemen’s Magazine came to solidify current definitions around the term ‘magazine’, it was used to describe a type of storing house, usually for munitions. ¶ Many of the built magazine structures that are in existence today exhibit a unique style of architecture that was required to protect surrounding areas from the potential detonation of the goods stored within. Jack’s Magazine on the banks of the Maribyrnong River, in Melbourne, is a prime example of this—the site consists of two pairs of elongated, fortified buildings with thick curved ceilings and shielded, obscured windows reminiscent of ‘arrowslits’. These horizontal buildings are then surrounded by smooth, artificially made hills sloped at an angle so any explosion emitted from inside the magazine, would be directed into the sky above to dissipate. ¶ This link to the heritage of the term ‘magazine’ is useful when thinking about the changes the digital realm has enacted on publishing terminologies. If a magazine can be seen as a metaphysical storing house then it’s form becomes infinitely malleable. Gone is an over reliance on paper and ink to define it—a magazine can also be a building, an archive, a storing house. ¶ This malleability has also allowed publishers to separate content from format. The ‘magazine’ becomes an overarching term for a place to store said content. This renewed definition also brings back into focus the function of the ‘magazine’ as a type of archive that—like the physical buildings—has kept the act of publishing secure and (relatively) intact despite being situated within an industry heavily buffeted by often volatile economic circumstance.

Versioning

The practice of reproducing a divergent work, based on a previously produced work, using various tactics—both intended and incidental—in reframing it. Versioning, within curation, is often an incidental outcome of the need to display works without being able to reproduce their original ‘aura’. Versioning does not produce copies but new versions of works. ¶ By negating the perception of the copy, the version breaks the binary preoccupation of the ‘original’ and the ‘copy’, instead enriching a work through a prismatic effect that allows for a multiplicity of readings. ¶ As Silvio Lorusso explains—the move away from copying to versioning, “produces an uncertainty about the original, because every reframing adds a certain ‘charge’ to the work and therefore makes something new out of it.” ¶ Oliver Laric goes further in framing versioning as a curatorial tactic in his work ‘Versions [2010]’ in which he gives the example, “Five people interpret an action and each interpretation in different because in the telling and the re-telling, the people reveal not the actions but themselves.” ¶ Within publishing, it can be argued that the act of creating multiples will always generate versions, therefore all published material uses versioning as a tool that masks or diffuses any allusion to the source material. ¶ Indeed, using the print publication as an example, sub editors create versions by ‘correcting’ raw text; editorial designers create versions by type-setting said text and printers create versions by transmogrifying digital files into ink.

Wardmote

The name ‘Wardmote’ refers to a meeting of community members, from within a distinct field or designated area, initiated to provide support and information to said members. The traditional use of the term follows jurisdictional guidelines, as used within The City of London today, to describe an arena where citizens and their representatives can meet to share news and discuss issues directly relating to the area in which they all reside. ¶ The term ‘Wardmote’ becomes useful within publishing (or any similar entity) when it is used to describe a point in time when members within a distinct field break from their day-to-day activities to meet and commune with one another around their chosen field of interest. ¶ The advent of digital means of production has not only provided increasingly malleable tools for independent and small scale publishers, but has also encouraged said publishers to develop a type of commune around this shared activity—forging links through a range of events which can be grouped under the banner of ‘Wardmotes’. The main difference being that unlike location based ‘Wardmotes’ (such as those held within The City of London), formats and agendas for Wardmotes that are set within specific fields of interest can vary from meeting to meeting. ¶ Through the lens of the independent publishing ‘commune’ these events come in the form of wayzgooses (Printer’s Fairs), meet ups, publishing fairs, speaking events, exhibitions, swaps, workshops, markets, pub quizzes, ceremonies (awards) and more. The variety of formats for these Wardmotes limited only by engagement.

⚫

Annet Dekker interview for Open Set

2022-11-02T17:58:12.661Z

This text was produced for the 2017 edition of the OpenSet Reader as part of the Design Curation & Writing MA at Design Academy Eindhoven.
Tutors: Irina Shapiro, Alice Twemlow. Also available to read via openset.nl/reader

Archiving as a practice has battled to keep pace with digital technologies since the proliferation of the internet in the 1990s. This inherently methodical activity requires time that digital economies rarely allow for. As Samantha Morton’s character in Cosmopolis says, ‘The future becomes insistent’. [^1]

For decades now, many archivists have simply amassed as much content as possible and put aside worrying about the quality of it until a later date, under the assumption that emergent technology will provide solutions. Instead, the opposite has happened with the advent of Snapchat and the realisation that online technologies erode. It is only in very recent times that those working in the field of archiving have begun to accept ideas around forgetting, not keeping and letting go.

These are topics on the mind of Annet Dekker. From a background in the collection and preservation of ‘net art’ she does not describe herself as an archivist, but has become an authority on the preservation of digital content, producing collaborative projects on the subject such as the New Archive Interpretations series for Het Nieuwe Instituut. She is also training a new generation of archivists as Assistant Professor, Media Studies: Archival and Information Studies at the University of Amsterdam. We sat down in the cafeteria at AKV|StJoost Institute in ‘s-Hertogenbosch at the end of a full day working with Open Set Lab 2017 participants.

Michael Bojkowski
How do you see your position in relation to archiving and archivists? Would you say it’s as more of an ‘educator’?
Annet Dekker
Yeah. It’s educator and researcher… and a ‘mediator’, I think.
MB
‘Mediator’ is interesting.
AD
With my curatorial work, I’ve always seen myself much more as a mediator between various parties—between the public, the artist and the space, as an example. And someone who can make things possible. I see that in the way I relate to the archive where I have a certain knowledge and I combine that with different things, and other people. That’s also my way of teaching. It’s not straight-forward lecturing. It’s much more about connecting people and encouraging them to start formulating questions and answers.
MB
So that’s why the New Archive Interpretations project [^2] you undertook at Het Nieuwe Instituut is very collaborative? It seemed like you managed to find a collaborator to express an aspect of everything you were doing.
AD
Yeah. They asked me initially to do this project on my own. Their approach was ‘We need advice on our digital archive. How should we set up our digital archive?’ I replied ‘I’m not very interested in answering that question. I’m more interested in seeing what other people think about it and how existing archives can be taken into the future’. What would the practice of archiving mean five years from then? Especially when focussing on digital and online archives. And so, this is what I proposed to them—I wanted to commission several other people to answer these questions for me. Or at least explore and experiment with them.
MB
You didn’t ask technologists as such but asked designers, photographers and artists.
AD
There were combinations: they were technologists, programmers and artists.
MB
And how did you land on this group of people? Did you have criteria for selecting your collaborators?
AD
I didn’t really have very strict criteria. I was interested in people who were interested in certain aspects of the archive and the systematic nature of the archive. That’s how it all started. I wanted to see—and this was the first commission for the project in a way—how this old database they were using at Het Nieuwe Instituut functioned and how it could be thought about differently. How you can explore and circumvent ‘standardisation’?

So, we approached Richard Vijgen and he made a new interface and that was fine. But I was also, like, ‘I’m not interested in a hundred more interfaces’ [^3].

Another question became, ‘Okay, if we have a different interface, how do you use the online environment, from the point of view of an institution?’. Then we noticed Het Nieuwe Instituut was using Flickr. I was talking to people at the time who were also working on projects using Flickr as well as Google SketchUp. They had undertaken a whole lot of research into SketchUp and I thought they might be interested in exploring how the Flickr Commons works here. That’s how we came to that project with Template, Lasse van den Bosch Christensen and Marlon Harder [^4].

I jumped from one project to the other. New questions arose and then I looked for people to answer them. From this exploration of Google Earth and then Flickr Commons we came to the question, ‘Okay, this is an institution. What would an individual do?’. Individuals start creating their own online archives. So, then I approached someone I knew was working within the kinds of mechanisms and methods around automatic video editing etc. I thought it could be interesting to have Erica Scourti look at this problem [^5].
MB
It seems like when you get to the point where people are self-archiving, disposable media becomes more of an issue.
AD
Exactly. That’s a really nice comment. Katrina Sluis’s article is based on an older article she’d written a couple of years ago. I knew Katrina because I worked with her before at The Photographer’s Gallery in London. Her article was also about digital photography in online environments and how online structures and systems can create a new sort of image culture where it’s not necessarily about the representation of the image but much more about the network and how that functions—or doesn’t function.

I approached her and was like, ‘You know, how there’s this app called Snapchat? I would love it if you go back to that article you wrote and include and explore Snapchat in there to see if we get any new insights out of this’. It was really funny because as soon as she had finished the article, Snapchat announced that they were actually going to add all these new functions so that you could save your snaps. I was like, ‘Oh no!’ [laughs] This beautiful mechanism for forgetting was gone.

MB
Do you think that institutional archives need to be able to forget, too?
AD
Yeah, in a way, I do. [laughing]

It’s really important for institutions to be aware that it’s okay to get rid of some things, to change things and to make versions because this is the way it’s always been. It’s not new.

The way we now look at a Rembrandt or a Picasso or whatever is not the same as when it was first seen. Rembrandt is an interesting example because there was a recent case in Holland where it turned out that, after cleaning one of his paintings, the colours were much brighter than they had been. All the accumulated dirt had made the painting look much darker. So, when they cleaned it properly it became a whole different painting. People were really shocked by the effect and many didn’t like it.

I think that’s a beautiful example of the changes that have always happened. It’s not that the essence of the work has vanished. The work has been slightly ‘versioned’. Look at the Bible, for example. That’s gone through quite a few iterations and there’s still many people who continue to believe in it.

In that sense, I’m really interested in how, in oral cultures, memory is preserved by creating little hooks that connect to create stories. If you talk about the preservation of digital archives then this becomes key.

MB
Do you think there need to be systems for showing what hasn’t been kept in order to maintain those hooks?
AD
No, not necessarily, because then you do the reverse. You still stick to the idea that ‘something is lost’. What I what I like—as a nice example—is the Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive [^6]. It’s very simply built. The way it works is, they crawl a website, starting at the home page, and scroll through all the links to find connected pages and other information. But they crawl the backend—the code. That’s not how you’re used to seeing a website. Also, if they crawl a really large website, by the time they get to the end of it, the beginning might have changed. In this way, the Wayback Machine creates new works. You think it’s preserving something but, really, it’s creating something new.

That really reflects how we navigate the web. I don’t see the same thing as you do because we’ve got different settings and different computers.

MB
I have a question about ‘post truth’. In your introduction, as editor, to Lost and Living (in) Archives (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2017) [^7] you mention factual versus fictional modes of archiving and I wondered if your viewpoint might have changed with this idea of ‘post truth’. Now we have ‘fictional archiving’ but in a massive (and disturbing) way.
AD
I have a real problem with the binary between truth and fiction. As soon as you say something is fiction you presume there is a truth. There are multiple truths, but there’s not one truth. When the discussion about ‘true or fake’ came up within the whole Trump thing, these distinctions were completely useless because the news was never truthful. There has always been a translation taking place. And with that translation, an assumption. So, I don’t believe that binary is productive. What I’m getting at here, I hope, is that the archive has never been a place of truth. It has always been assumed that the archive is a place for evidence. Yes, there is evidence, but it’s always contextualised evidence. You make evidence out of it. That’s something that stays in my mind—there is no truth within the archive, necessarily.
MB
So, it’s okay if you end up with an archive with lots of news articles about things that might not have occurred?
AD
Yeah! I mean the work of a researcher, in that sense, is to find out, through exploration and through comparison, where the boundary is. It’s not up to the archivist to decide ‘is this reliable or authentic’? It’s up to those conducting their research within the archive. So, even if something is not true, I want to have it in the archive because otherwise we wouldn’t know about it.
MB
Do you feel like there needs to be more work done to put archives in public places or create more projects around them to sustain them?
AD
Of course. I’m interested in how you can create sustainable communities around different types of archives, and what the effect of this would be on more traditional archives. I’m very interested in small communities that are already undertaking their own archival activities and how these groups form around specific issues, topics, works, records or whatever.
MB
And separate from the ideas of ‘citizen archivists’. Like ‘organically formed’ groups rather than programmed ones?
AD
Yeah, but citizen’s archives too. Those archives are also really interesting to look at and to see how people are making decisions about what to keep.
MB
That’s where people are going now, isn’t it? They’re like, ‘That’s great! We can keep everything! Wait, why would we do that?’
AD
That’s where you can see, all of a sudden, ‘Okay, that says something about society or a culture or an institution. Why did they decide to do this and not that?’
MB
Based on your New Archive Interpretations project, is there an evolution of the archive you’d most like to see made manifest? Is there something in all the work done around that area that you think ‘that’s actually something I would really like to have, or to have in the world’?
AD
It’s more about collaboration between people because—and I think this is now changing—but, for a long time, museums and their archives have been really isolated and have only been doing the things that they thought were necessary to do. And they were obstructing people from entering into their dialogues and bringing new knowledge and ideas.

That is changing, but it could change more. And institutions and individuals could benefit from each other a lot more. This is a necessity, particularly with digital, because things change so rapidly. Talking to programmers is really interesting. When you ask them about something that is two, three, four years ago, they often can’t remember because development is a process that continues all the time. You don’t look back and fix something that’s dead. You keep building.

MB
That’s how code builds and builds. Code doesn’t stop and go backwards, it keeps going.
AD
And that’s the system. That process is really interesting.
MB
Do you think institutions need to be quicker in addressing issues around the archive. Is it the bureaucracy that slows things down?
AD
That’s one obstacle but I don’t think it’s necessarily the bureaucracy. I think it’s also… ‘Try to experiment’.
MB
Take the risk?
AD
Take the risk, yeah. Risk doesn’t mean that anything will be lost, not necessarily. That’s what we’ve learned from the digital realm—that copies, or versions are easy to make so you can experiment a lot. So, take that advantage of that and start experimenting. That’s what’s behind the whole idea with versioning and it’s a method that should fit well within institutions. It would be nice to see how this would work.
MB
Why do you think this hasn’t happened yet?
AD
There’s many different reasons. One of them economic interest, especially within the museum world. In the archival world, it’s about legislation. You have to abide by the law. Another reason centres around the anxiety of letting go of what you’re used to. People like to do what they do and this is a new approach. I get that. We need to discuss this more and do more.

I do see these things happening more easily in smaller institutions that don’t have lots of highly specialised people working there. If you’re in a small institution, you are used to doing multiple things at the same time. You are the curator, and the producer, and the person that applies for the funding. You can make decisions quicker and are used to taking on more roles. In a large institution, there might be people saying, ‘I’m only doing the restoration of the paint’, for example. They may not be used to working and collaborating with other people. There’s a different mentality.

MB
Hopefully as more people interested in archiving and archives come through the system who are considered ‘digital natives’, things will start to speed up a bit.
AD
I think they will. Smaller organisations will get a bigger voice as well. They just have to build more confidence in themselves. It’s a hierarchical world. Smaller institutions need to be more confident and speak up.
MB
Are you going to have to ‘mediate’ another round of projects?
AD
There’s no one commissioning me for it yet but I would love to!
MB
Do you feel like you’re in a position to predict how archives are going to evolve?
AD
No, I’m not. It’s really difficult. Change is happening, but it’s a very slow process.
MB
Too slow?
AD
Always. I’m very impatient so that doesn’t help.
MB
I think the medium is impatient as well.
AD
That’s true. Change is happening. If you look back 20 years ago and see what the museums did then and what they do now, it’s a huge leap. So, change is still doable. It’s all fine. But it happens in chunks, not overnight.
MB
In your work at the University of Amsterdam, are you able to push people in that direction?
AD
Yeah, absolutely. That’s what I’m trying to do, at least.
MB
Would the majority of your students have already been working as archivists? Do some of your students find it challenging?
AD
Half of them have already worked in archives for years and they’ve come back to school to find this ‘new way’ of looking at archiving. I don’t challenge them as much now as I used to, especially when I was teaching at the Piet Zwart Institute. Students would arrive in September and one of the things I would say was ‘You’re going to completely change your own mind here. You’ll be seeing and reading things that will make you think, “Why am I doing this?” and at a certain moment hopefully it will make sense to you. The purpose is to confuse you’. Students would come to me in tears, saying ‘Why am I here? What am I doing here? I want to quit.’ And then half-a-year later they were saying ‘thank you’. It worked well.
MB
I have a lot of optimism about the younger generations who are making their YouTube videos and the doing their Snapchats. Hopefully by the time they’re coming through the system it’ll be natural to work in a fluid way.
AD
You see it already with younger people here today [at Open Set Lab 2017] as well. [^8] They’re not afraid of ‘the machine’. They’re not afraid to say, ‘I can code’. It’s okay to do these things now.
MB
Yeah. And not seeing the difference between digital and physical media.
AD
It’s just material.

⚫

Saviour Mode Activated

2022-08-07T23:44:37.131Z

Annoying Jesus meme posted to Instagram via @research.catalogue

This year’s theme for Melbourne Design Week is “Design the world you want” [^1] which offers the slightest shift in gears from previous themes such as “How can design shape life?”, “How design can shape the future?”, “How design delivers change?” and “What does design value and how do we value design?” (For value see commodification, late stage capitalism, precarity etc etc). These themes are issued as incentives for participating in the programme and are posed with commercial design practitioners, and studios, in mind. This year’s theme makes a direct appeal to a designer or design studio’s stance as ‘creators’. It is an appeal harpooned directly into the designer godhead. It says you are part of a select cache with the privilege of designing the world you want.

For many, this ‘world shaping’ is simply not available. Sometimes we might get a sense of autonomy in shaping our surrounding environs through a form of extended collaboration, or self curation, occurring between us and designed material that collects around us. But mostly our worlds are shaped by tools that are jealously guarded by a coalition of councillors, consultants and their chosen suppliers.

General opinion is solicited—mostly off the back of white label applications such as The Hive’s suite of participatory tools [^2] which have been pitched to and adopted by councils such as the City of Melbourne. These tools have allowed constituents to exercise some influence over basic decisions (according to predefined guidance), but as a councils’ enthusiasm for these types of online tools wanes, so does the city’s urge to seek out advice from—what is seen as—an amorphic blob of ‘publics’ that often prove meddlesome to the ambitions of said councillors and the wealthy development industry they frequently favour.

The term also ignores design that has already occurred. It invites designers to ignore the past and keep creating, keep propelling the ‘economy of ideas’ forward. This fosters the attitude that ‘the churn’—the avid pursuit of ‘the new’— is all. Here is a vision of the past as perpetually disappointing. A litany of wrong turns, ill-made decisions, mistakes and damaged goods proliferating in it’s wake. Keep facing forward—don’t look behind. Take up the motto, ‘No time to look back’. The design rhetoric of the commodified world will support you. It’s okay—ignore the errors of the past… and their continuing repercussions. It’s okay to repeat the mistakes of the past by failing to properly acknowledge them. Focus on what’s next, what’s new.

“What Design Can Do!” [^3]—a conference series started in Amsterdam in 2011—has laboured under similar criticism since a number of commenters started suggesting ‘What design should do’ [^4] may be a better title. We like to proffer the title ‘What design has done”—with the follower of ‘And how can we un-do it’ as a prelude to any designer’s conference offering a similar ‘Saviour stance’ to its participants.

Design Emergency [^5] is an Instagram based project devised and propelled by Alice Rawsthorn and Paola Antonelli—both behemoths within the field of design writing and curation—and both easily ignored by design practitioners and design ‘industry event’[^6] attendees who may easily disregard design criticism as an attached field. Design Emergency professes its role to “explore design’s role in building a better future” although there are dalliances with a type of generalised criticism of design practices and their impacts most topics and posts fall back on expected tropes around avid solution-ism and problem solving as key to design and designers practices.

That ‘saviour mode’ and avid ‘solution-ism’ is key to design and design practice is simply untrue. We only need to run a cursory glance over the supermarket aisle to see that packaging designers continue to play a huge part in the production and proliferation of material waste. Look to the periphery of current narrowly defined depictions of what constitutes a ‘design practices’ and there are the ‘product designers’ within labs producing all manner of toxic substances for reproduction, there are designers of heavily gender-encoded tools and uniforms for the construction industry that uphold the kind of toxic masculinity that has lead to mental health issues on construction sites and the exclusion of those that no not adhere to gender ‘norms’ from participating in the construction economy. There are the hoards of ‘designers’ employed to produce memes and similar campaign material in support (and sometimes to distract) from political policy and adverse decision making. The lists of examples of the activities that build our human-designed realm, and are continually excluded from design events, runs and runs.

Even when commercially and/or state-supported design events managed to acknowledge that design comes from many sources outside of recognised caches, they will often ignore the fact that any design instigates a multitude of results and effects and that not all of them are positive. In fact, there are many repercussions to putting a design into the world are detrimental to humans, nonhumans and the planet in general.

They also continue to promote—in their pursuit of shaping a monocultural agenda for design—an echelon of studios and practitioners, those that may be anonymous and unable to afford the privilege of a platform through which to share stories of design that might be less conformable for cosy urbanised audiences to hear, but are no less valid for inclusion. If you are in the position to design the world you want (as a designer or as something else), please remember there are others also in it.

Notes:

[^1]: https://designweek.melbourne/about/

[^2]: https://the-hive.com.au/—Currently in use by City of Melbourne amongst others. See ‘Participate Melbourne’.

[^3]: See @whatdesigncando where a quote by Bruce Mau was recently posted ‘Design got us into this mess. Now it needs to get us out of it.’ which both acknowledges the designers role in issue of the over production of waste, while simultaneously exalting ‘design’ as the sole saviour to provide the solution-ism required in tackling these issues.

[^4]: A term originally uttered by Daisy Ginsberg and recorded by Elvia Wilk as part of her critical review of the 2011 conference for Uncube.

[^5]: See @design.emergency

[^6]: Design Weeks have coagulated into an industry in themselves in recent times with the formation of World Design Weeks as a cache of events scattered all over the world https://www.worlddesignweeks.org/

alt.designweek is a series of anonymised posts produced to coincide with #MelbourneDesignWeek. Contributions are open. If you’d like to contribute a critical and/or under represented perspective on design send us a DM.

Why my pronouns are your choice

2021-06-04T03:25:13.734Z

Not all pronouns are created equal. This much we know. Which explains why pronouns have become so important as a focal point in recent times—and rightly so. Instagram acknowledged the pronouns new status by adding a field for them in profile descriptions. Considering how closed and controlling systems Instagram employs are, this is really something. [^1]

The 'trend' for assigning oneself pronouns is also good and important in terms of furthering the acceptance and visibility of non-binary folk and the unpicking of established (often toxic) constructs, particularly around gender.

Likewise, the 'they/them' pronoun is essential. The case for defining gender based on a singular physiological binary melts away on examination of the thickly lacquered veneer of presentation and behaviour that is applied to male/female binaries. As Olympia Bukkakis exposed in an essay titled 'A Case for the Abolition of Men' [^2] gender binaries are as easily assigned via thoughts, deeds and actions, (i.e. you can identity as a woman/man but your deeds can define you as the other).

Here we pause and make space for 'the problem of individualism' as recently investigated by Adam Curtis in his series for BBC called 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' [^3]. At the centre of this series Curtis places—not only gender binaries, but also—the binary of the 'individual' versus the 'collective', essentially positioning 'she/him' in opposition to 'they/them'.

For Curtis this seems to be an area of conflict and contention but he also sets up a potent equation—'they/them' becomes potent in a position that opposes established binaries. 'Can't Get You Out of My Head' seems to posit an idea that individuals often end up suffering at the mercy of manipulative overlords, that individualism has a limited lifespan before being either destroyed or subsumed into the collective. In this case 'they/them' portrays a strength in numbers, albeit one that slavishly travels around hierarchical systems of power and dominance.

Away from Curtis' dramatic narrative of power and dominance, the potency and strength of 'they/them' remains. There is a currently assumption that the use of these pronouns, now considered acceptable by the likes of Instagram, will continue to proliferate. Consider though, what could happen if they/them didn't.

They/them is still a categorisation (another reason Instagram seemed happy to integrate pronouns into their system—it wasn't that hard to do), just as 'He/Him', 'She/Her', 'They/Her', 'He/Them' etc. Consider what could happen if this categorisation added fuel to the self-proclaimed designation of 'He/Him's instead. A category already dominant in many areas, often to the determent of all others. What if the only thing created by this embracing of pronouns is a 'tri-nary'.

Luckily we have our friend, the slash '\' to alleviate this issue, although it does serve mostly as a multiplication device, allowing for a splintering of the tri-nary. It is still operating within a system of categorisation though. Labelling still occurs.

Growing up queer, one becomes acutely aware of 'othering'. Ask any queer folk with experience growing up within state sanctioned systems of education. For decades I have chosen the 'Prefer not to say' option when asked to take a gendered position within the 'masculated' realms of forms and contracts. This is mostly because I've never considered my chosen individual identity to be anyone else's business. And when none of the presented options appeal what else is there to do.

My name and physical appearance elicits a style of performativity that is enough to assign my identity to a specific gender whether I am invested in this or not. He/him was assigned to me at birth, without question (or the seeking of permission)—as is so much more that we are laboured with when we emerge into the human world.

Perhaps an urge arises here to protect the individual—an urge that overrides all else. Individuals are assigned categories, often without choice—'individual' itself becoming a category, so maybe sanctioning and protecting this ideal is a battle fought to loose. In which case—in the struggle against suffocating capitalist structures—allegiances become more useful and worthy of pursuit, but only as subsets of individuals. In this way, complexities within the make-up of each individual (that categorical distinctions deny) can be maintained without being positioned in isolation to one another.

Just as forms of social capitalism minted binaries whilst allowing for gradients, so too pronouns become leverage. Like I said, pronouns ARE important. And it IS important that they proliferate... as long as they aren't neatly sorted into neat categorical descriptions or situated camps.

For this reason, my pronouns are your choice. I have chosen not to situate myself. Your direct relationship for me is enough. If it seems as though I am writing like a Man, you're welcome to refer to me as such. If I am presenting outside of the common gender binary, you are welcome to refer to me as 'they'. My personal privileging leans towards 'she' although I am loathe to assign this to myself... but if you chose to do so I would be flattered.

Maybe there is a further nuance that is helpful here as well. Consider the slash. Consider non-human classifications. Consider your own pronouns and how to make them fluid or malleable. Consider how your voice might change from day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute. Perhaps the best thing is to encourage our pronouns to continue to evolve, in an attempt to avoid categorisation. To evolve and generate new categories by ducking and weaving around existing ones. Who knows, but the inclusion of they/them is a very promising start.

This Is Exposed (lyrics by Of Montreal)

I'm macho I'm femme
Call me they, call me them
Bikini boys in the summer scum want nothing and you and scene
Thought rats scurry over hypnosis or what's left of the friend chat
The scents of killers the Eyes Of Mars the seven blood gangs of the parietal

I'm liminal I'm free
Call me he, call me she
I said I'm macho I'm femme
Call me they, call me them

In this place one way or another
You're gonna get radicalised
Oh but my lives they're unreal
Those things are only a spectacle

Thorns are cool thorns save lives
Thorns get me into trouble but I always survive
In a circle of one
Sounding a drum
To a bodysong
What can I say
It's gonna happen either way

Like a Burroughs to Capote curse
Written in a rabid free verse
If you fellate the crown's prick
You run afoul of the Syndicate
Smart kids say no
Disabusing crow drones
What could they possibly glean
Out of a liar's mind?

Thorns are cool, thorns save lives
Thorns get me into trouble but I always survive
Still it's not a lot of fun dealing with true scum
In a circle of one and a body song
What can I say
It's gonna happen either way

Now you got no brain how do you get fucked up? What?
Now you got no brain how do you get fucked up?
Now you got no brain how do you get fucked up? What?
Now you got no brain how do you get fucked up?