Temporary Reminders: Writing

03 Nov, 2020

• future_speak

  I've been thinking a lot about the future recently, how the work i'm making ages, how the people I want to see it should interact with it. How it should be documented/preserved, the space it takes up, what the work expects itself to scale up to.

  It's made me want to delete my website, or at least, stop thinking about the web as where my work comes to rest (storage). What is the use of a collection of files anyway? I'm fine w/ the sentimentality of it, but does anyone else need to know? Why is it not kept in my bedroom on the shelf of small trinkets that I can't force myself to throw out.

  ⁂

  After graduating college I was excited at the idea of working on longer timelines, i would no longer have to spend < 3 months per project and could invest time and space to ideas, however for the past 4 years my longest collaboration hasn't lasted > 1 year. Everything's been cramped and I can't breath. I've made ~ 50 websites in the 4 years and I feel like i'm littering, or just creating a big pile. I want to generate a methodology for work that is in-line w/ time. That considers time, that appreciates scale, that us in harmony w/ certain ways of viewing reality: I'm not an individual, i'm the byproduct of millions of year, a chance arrangement that should be regarded as significant.

  ⁂

  fuck 5 year plans, I want a 300 year plan, or a 3000 year plan: i feel like, building a city is a 300 year plan. It's a dream anyone should be allowed to have. people like Elon Musk aren't the only ones that want to go to space or dig tunnels under the earth, and just cus I'll never be down to exploit the labor of others doesn't mean that I should be averse to the creation of more monolithic ruins. Earth will reform itself as it sees fit, and the energy that i'm transferring through the duration of my life is eternal, a constant that I will not be alive to see dissipate/disappear.

  With that said I am working towards building a monument, holding the energy I have been gifted that must eventually escape, it will stand for as long as it is used, for as long as the space it takes up is not needed for anything else. It will be made of bespoke parts, it will be capable of splintering, like slime mold, able to take on disparate lives as it is entangled in the monuments of others.

  With these thoughts out of my head I want to propose a preliminary set of rules to dictate 'projects' that I will work on after I clean up my current TODOs:

  • It will be physical first, if it takes energy it will require space, and I will no longer neglect that.
  • Distribution will be the second to last step, and must be explicitly considered, every 'bespoke part' will take on a distribution mechanism of it's own
  • The last step is preservation. This step should consider two aspects:
    
    - The preservation should enable redistribution if necessary
    
    - The preservation should be 'project' specific and have the ability to be stored in some sort of centralized system (a computer/hardrive is g enough probably)

  ⁂

  Some additional notes

  • I value the ideas and opinions of people that I have tried to stay in contact with. I need to share my work more directly, i think pdfs/zip files would be the lightest weight/best to use cross platform, i think a contact list would be good to start, no automation tho, mailing ists are dehumanizing.
  • keeping things human scale is p infinite if ur not a rube

29 Aug, 2020

• projectname-new_project

  First some preliminary ideas abt what the platform does/the content it contains:I like the idea of each iteration being a feature of some sort of individual or collective practice. Putting an emphasis on attempting to reveal the full scope of what informs an individuals practice, the work they make, maybe even their daily rituals.

  Some projects that I think embody this idea well:https://special.fish/https://www.gofundme.com/etc. (can be expanded later)

  I'm currently in conversation w/ An from CAS abt a project they are working to receive funding for. Essentially the project will provide a platform for more 'mundane' documentation of life as it has been changed due to the pandemic, increased aggression/tension between black/minority communities and the police/govt, the upcoming elections etc.

  Something interesting that occurred to me through this discussion was the persistent fear that i think most minority producers have (minority can refer to ethnicity, class, any sort of disenfranchisement). There is an ability for images to easily be co-opted, misused, or simply abstracted beyond the photos actual content. The photograph seems to be a site of conflict given its integration into mass media. The news/culture industry (CNN, FOX, New York Times, Hollywood, Instagram, Facebook) has the ability and resources (bandwith) to frequently distribute photos (both static and moving) to extract attention from its viewers. Attention has been commodified to the point that the content seems secondary and as a byproduct has also obscured what i find to the most compelling part of production, the fact that it is connected to individuals. These individuals are networked entities, embodying not only their own concerns but through osmosis the values and expectations of those they depend on/are in conversation with. I want to abandon the word 'community' for the time being. It feels a bit tenuous to try and deal w/ the baggage it has accumulated.

  I don't think a platform we produce should be in service of a group, but can aide a groups understanding of one of its participants through a full illumination of the manifestations of their labor. Think of it as a preservation of energy that has been spent. Capturing a moment of potential rather than kinesis.

  Lastly, I had some questions:

  Part 1: what are the benefits of showing work online, which of these benefits are specifically due to the current quarantine, and which of these benefits will persist after?

  Part 2: do we have to frame this in terms of the type of value the platform will produce for our peers? I'm more interested in generating methods of collaboration, novel means of distribution, novel collections of content, building relationships with people. we've both found a way to practice 'commercial art', i think this is an option accessible to everyone in our immediate peer group, I have friends in very precarious financial situations that still feel capable of contributing labor w/out the expectation of compensation or a 'return'. I think it might set a bad precedent going into it to require ourselves to have a transaction entangled with the process. I think ultimately if there is some base inequity from the contributor that we are working w/. I'd rather just remedy that ourselves, a private venmo, maybe some dinners/meals provided etc.

23 Jul, 2020

• man leaves monastery adjacent to city-state being absorbed by empire. archival document is produced through an entry from a chronicle

  The chronicle format is used to provide detailed descriptions of monastic life, the encroachment of empire, loss of agency, frustration of the man, and his eventual departure.

  Structure:

  - What is the origin of the monastery, where is it located, what is the written doctrine that is followed/studies.

  • origin should deal with need for community
  • inability to survive in isolation so the monastery is setup
  • something funny about inability to adapt to natural conditions would be funny, need to survive through seasonal flooding in the forests
  • macedonia winters, mountain climate, -5 deg
  • some aspect of greek mythos studied?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#Antiquity

  what is a word that might change during this transition?

  what is the purpose of meditation on doctrine, one that is perhaps centuries old

  - how is it at the beginning?
  - monastary is formed from an inability to survive through hermitic practice, the need of communal support structures brought the monks together
  - establishment of rules that dictate community life

  ... to divide space and time

  ⁂ asterism can be used to denote subchapters or highlight certain parts of text

23 Jul, 2020

• broadcast loop
  ⁃ 2 videos at a time
  ⁃ inaccessible archive for videos

  blog up today,
  videos, will be up this week

  plans for the week
  ⁃ weekly living
  ⁃ new typeface for archive
  ⁃ .archive

  monastic living
  - reading in bed before getting up
  - bike rides 3 times (including saturday)
  - workouts after work 3 days a week
  - stretch
  - work till dinner
  - sleeping earlier, 10-10:30pm

23 Jul, 2020

• lukas gave a talk a while ago referring to himself as a ‘dependent’ designer, articulating the many ways in which his professional practice is supported through repeated collaboration with a small network of designers/clients.

  in discussing the short professional paths lukas and i have taken we often repeat our admiration for a (suspiciously) large number of ‘independent’ designers that graduated from Yale’s masters program in the 2000s — 2010s. Their practices didn’t have many historical counterparts to be modeled after given that a large number of these individuals were either immigrants, or, weren’t initially trained as designers.

  It was only recently that I was able to fully articulate the different contexts that we (designers leaving undergrad in the late 2010s-2020s) occupy compared to those that we modeled our practices after.

  There is a shift in monoliths that has been rapidly accelerating as we (designers leaving undergrad in the late 2010s-2020s) have begun our transition into adulthood. The economic monolith of the global market has been slowly overshadowed by our concerns for planet, climate change, mass migration, food shortages etc. (All things that graphic design won’t ever address). I think an initial interest that kept us practicing and in our respective degree programs was the initial promise of working adjacent to existing economies and diverse fields of professional practice that we could temporarily insert ourselves into and assist. At the time (2016) it felt like there was something productive about living through a mechanism such as the gig economy. But that ultimately is just a culmination of the just-in-time economy with us as the products being manufactured and delivered.

  I started this note on dependence because i think at the core of my current insecurity is an inability to fully describe what i am dependent on and whether or not that fits within the ethics that ultimately pushed me towards a path of ‘independent’ design.

  Not to speak for anyone else that occupies this same position, but for me, I feel shocked at my own ignorance, my inability to acknowledge the dependence created through the pursuit of professional independence, the idea that you are even moreso beholden to the ideologies of the superstructure that supports you. My initial aversion to studios/agencies/corporations was their inability to accommodate critiques or represent the mass of workers that it is comprised of, it’s not a democracy after all, it’s a machine with a single directive. Yet in their absence I am floating, objectively alone and surviving as a parasite on the luxury economies from which the majority of my work comes from (art, real estate, ‘cultural institutions’ with funding from oil and pharmaceutical companies, etc.)

  My frustration now is that the path that I am currently taking is one that simply reaffirms the deeply rooted neoliberal identity that captured the American people under Reagan/Thatcher and has pushed this country into a state of economic isolation, the effects of which will most likely be fully experienced at the peak of the corona virus pandemic.

  I want to contribute to meaningful production, i only want to be a producer if the products are necessary. I want to belong, i want to have community. These desires make me feel delusional at times because these ‘should’ be achievable (or i have been told that there are ways to remedy my concerns and that I just haven’t done my part to fix them, [i’m just a lazy millennial after all]). I’m left wondering if there is really anything to be discovered in the coming turmoil of COVID-19 and the amount of times I’ve seen the word ‘unprecedented’ in corporate newsletters seems to affirm this.

  To avoid ending on a cynical note I just want to quickly mention some ideas I had about working in isolation and online work. Since undergrad there has always been a collaborative network that I’ve worked within, usually online. The shift to working remotely recently has in many ways made my online work/personal relationships feel more emblematic of the ‘wholeness’ that I hope to feel in the presence of peers/community members. The ‘realness’ of working remotely something that i never really experienced my first two years freelancing. That is to say, when I was previously freelancing, none of the digital relationships I had felt real, there was no permanence because (from where I observed behind my computer screen) the world seemed like it was engaged in a system physically larger than what i had the ability (or interest) to traverse. Now that we (designers leaving undergrad in the late 2010s-2020s / our clients) are confined to our/their homes, i can see the borders of the village that we occupy, the isolation that we are experiencing together.

23 Jul, 2020

• ambition (2019)

  when bailey and i first moved to philly he would talk to me about what i understood as a connection between metaphor and ambition. ambition being a construction rooted in false ideals, false equivocations, and ultimately worthless at producing anything. from that point forward i was convinced that my ‘goals’ needed to be divided into two sections, those that were pragmatic and revolved around money, and those that were more closely tied to whatever impulse i had to produce ‘work’.

  an aside, i’m only capable of producing duplicities. in undergrad my thesis similarly divided practice into two parts, the per formative laborer (idealistically subversive) and the hermetic designer, leeching off other artists to spur production. this conceptualization of my practice continued to evolve as i moved to philadelphia, even keeping my practice under the name ‘Expressions of Doubt’. Ultimately i began full time employment at GrayBits after freelancing for a year. This fulfilled one half of my concept, leaving the other to be filled with projects that would require new collaborators. ultimately i fell back into doing freelance work out of habit. at first i horribly under priced projects to make them feel more ‘collaborative’ but then eventually built up prices to a point where it felt like i the compensation was fair (after all i was simply acting the part of a web designer/developer).

  in the last couple months i realized this was simply a manifestation of the former, an insecurity i had about my financial stability if i left GrayBits, and an insecurity about whether i could find work with my current technical skill set. my only ambition currently to prove i won’t be broke.

  it seems strange to think of this as metaphor but that’s all it really is. i’ve never experienced poverty so i’m afraid of the shame my mother associates with it. it also makes my question the integrity of any motivations i had to somehow produce a duplicitous model of practice as

  both sides were ultimately just a reaction to a singular fear.

  i’ve been holding onto this feeling for some time, but it feels like i need to articulate something to move my mind forward onto something else. 2020 feels like it holds something new, and i’m excited to see how things continue to change.

23 Jul, 2020

• websites @ home

  i arrived home two days ago. i always forget how much leisure time i allow myself until i see how hectic my parents lives are. caroline and i landed on tuesday evening and on the way back from the airport we were roped in to running errands. the following day we spent 6 hours in a car driving to michigan to pick up my sister. each day dinner would happen somewhere close to 10, bedtime would be between 12-1 and then id hear my mother up at 5am the next morning.

  almost everyone fell asleep during the car ride to pick up my sister (myself included at one point) but it gave me time to let my thoughts wander and eventually they landed back on this website. i guess it’s been about 6-8 months, since the last redesign so of course i’m finding it a bit stale/it’s motivating factors contrived and maybe not representative of me/my work.

  this past iteration took the form of a blog, a reference to tumblrs plain theme and a half hearted attempt to create a ‘social media’ page that felt ‘personal’.

  i think the database is finally getting to a point where there will be far fewer additions as time passes. i think what’s still weighing on my mind is the purpose of occupying a solitary corner of the internet, and what the design a reflection of. at this point the primary purpose of the site seems to be storage and a resource for myself when opportunities present themselves, requiring me to build a pdf portfolio. eventually this should be automated, but i think getting to a point where the aesthetic stops changing so frequently or has programmable constraints will mark the beginning of that addition.

  i can’t ignore the fact that this platform is public facing, and that makes the construction, aesthetic, and presentation of content performative. the empty audience gives me great pause, i hesitate because it feels as if this platform exists to prove something, in its most earnest form it is a presentation of a body of work that i’m very proud of.

  in moments i cannot escape the former. i’m constantly overthinking the optics of listing projects, at times wanting to delete any public facing acknowledgment of my work, hoarding the artifacts left as they are completed. i’m more confused now than i have ever been about the ‘point’. i’m drawn to the celebratory aspects of the medium of personal websites, and to the costuming and performance associated. perhaps what has bothered me is the isolation in which this activity has been performed. i know it is not completely solitary but at the same time it has not led to any concrete interaction. what comes to mind is to add comment sections, but that seems antiquated and reactionary.

  if u have any thoughts on this please feel free to write to me, id love to hear any thoughts u might have about your digital presence, and what it does for u.

23 Jul, 2020

• i’ve been meaning to set up some sort of context to continue to push myself to write given that it’s has been a productive way to generate/solidify ideas. in many cases it has revealed ideas long before i have been able to concretely implement them.

  there are a couple concerns i have however, moving forward with such an ambiguos practice. one being the development of style. writing is so performative that i think it’s important to pay attention to voice. i think baileys success as a writer is a testament to that. i think it’s also important given the scale at which a piece of writing such as this is likely to be effective. it’s audience is limited (probably non-existent), which in a way allows its utility to remain abstractly defined.

  i often think back to a professor i had in college who once asked if i was simply performing aimless labor around my practice in order to generate needless complexity.

  i think i have been conditioned to work. i think it is a part of my personality. i think it is how i give myself purpose and direction. i think there is something to be said about the idealism of a hard worker independent of labors relation to capital.

  with that said, here is a series of independent ideas that i think are deserving of some written meditation.

  religious icons, primarily those found in eastern europe in the 13th/14th century
  children’s museums/exhibition design with the intention of education and audience engagement/participation
  functional object making and that objects realtionship to the living and non living entities it interacts with
  methods of autonomous self publishing

  i will most likely update this same list at some point but it feels like an adequate starting point. hopefully this one will disappear soon :)

23 Jul, 2020

• the addition you sent made me feel as if i was being too formal so i’m going to start writing this in my notes app. perhaps it will lead to more text that is a little less edited. it will probably also lead to me writing in shorter but more frequent bursts.

  i remember when i was in school after completing a certain project my advisor had said that it seemed like i was more concerned with the presentation of the project than the project itself. this made sense to me not only given the context (a purely hypothetical excercise, not a client project), but also the inherent nature of a design idea. it only really exists to qualify a visual system, to produce a logic, and only can be shared in a particular context (as a conceptual student project, or a solution for a client?).

  perhaps the one thing i still find interesting about design is the process of mining an abstraction to reveal some sort of shared visual experience a group of people (designer, client, stakeholders) can collectively agree on. Because the visual experience is tied to some sort of utility it is rendered graphic design.

  While the web is a commercial space, the specter left by its origins as a file sharing system leaves quite a bit to be experimented with in terms of defining its potential as a ‘tool’. There is an ambition to reach for something beyond the banality of advertising, or the deceptively cultural such as content (a trap i think i’ve been stuck in w/ all these portfolio sites) It’s not that content is bad, more that a portfolio site's only concern is with delivering content which is an inherent function of the web! (perhaps this means working on someone else's portfolio site is the ultimate hedonistic act for a designer). I think because this base form of utility exists we often forget that there are actual problems that the web can address by way of delivering content.

  Some interesting problems a website can solve that leverage and expand on the initial intent of the web as a platform:
  - how do i get to my friends house (digital maps/cartography)?
  - what events are going on at an architecture biennial (calendars)
  - displaying a limited collection of resources re: tax abatement in philly (curated libraries)

  Each issue above speaks to areas of communication design that have been around long before the web and seem to highlight the essential reason for communication design to continue as a practice. These problems, in specific contexts require bespoke solutions.

  It’s interesting that the general ideas that i’ve abstracted all appear in some form on the class site we developed together. Perhaps that carries some level of significance?

23 Jul, 2020

• http://projectname.net/

  Here is a list of projects that have been abandoned in the past:
  - expressions of doubt, a 'digital studio space'
  - everything i know, a 'video lecture series'
  -that bush is not burning, a 'newsletter publication'

  Perhaps this one eventually as well, but for now, loosely described as 'an ad-hoc, intercity coalition of hybrid designer/developers. project name participants engage in collaborations ranging from teaching, writing, and culturally/financially motivated design projects'

  I feel fortunate that projectname has yet to complete anything. The one project that could be attributed to it (a one week course taught at Parsons) seems like it is only being attributed after the fact which makes me feel confident that it has no real effect on the current state of projectname as a conceptual entity.

  At the point of this being released as a formal piece of writing, projectname will have most likely finished its first project, a website for a design publication. It will have checked off a desire we have had to work together in a 'professional' capacity. This is fine, i'm not worried about it. If anything it has become motivation to travel to each other, performing a more idealized version of design process we might have conceptualized in college. Going for walks, smoking weed, long discussions (usually not about the project itself)... eventually leading to short design sprints slowly crystalizing a shared attitude towards design rather than product. A designer

  This second (incomplete) list contains ambitions for projectname, what it might come to represent over time:
  - A formless praxis