The Theory of Nevolution

Remembering those lost to Y2K

Remember Y2K? Do you remember the daily trembling and fear that coursed through your veins knowing that by the end of the year the whole world would be dead? That everything would collapse all because of a few stray date stamps. Some people prepared for it: buying up cases and cases of canned food, going to a cabin in the woods and waiting out the panic and chaos that was to ensue. They were the lucky ones. We all thought it was a bit of a joke. We were scared that something could happen, but trusted that those in charge would make sure that all of the code would be fixed. 

How wrong we were. The next few years of scavenging food and hiding from the hordes of gangs still echo in my mind. I lost a few friends in the initial mayhem and I still hear their voices at night. Losing most of the old USSR to America's stray nukes was horrible, made only worse by the fact that it took some weeks before the news trickled down. Thankfully, their weapons system shut off completely at the stroke of midnight and weren't able to strike back. To call it a bug would be a dangerous under estimation of the damage it caused. Only now are we beginning to rub our eyes and get back on with this thing called civilisation. 

Welcome to my bedroom, approximately ten years ago. Sorry, I'll open a window. Teenagers tend to sweat somewhat; which says nothing of their general hygiene. But check out the near wall to wall posters. I was so fascinated by the idea of futurity at that point in my life. Looking back, I tend to cycle between being fascinated by the future and the past. When I started this blog, I was definitely fascinated with the past. Go back to the first posts and you'll notice a love of all things 19th century. But I don't think I've posted about that aesthetic for quite some time. I seem to be swinging back to the future; I feel like I've been there for a while now that I think about it. It could be a desire to look forward as an individual or as a society, but I definitely feel that we're in a forward looking trend. The end of Post Modernism seems to be a minor consensus, we just haven't decided on what we're in right now (better than playing with the ashes of the old guard). 

But back to my room. I was so proud of what I deemed to be the coolest room ever. Covered in old rave flyers, Matrix posters, robots, video game characters, Mind Grenades, future loving magazine spreads and any other post eighties cyberpunk paraphernalia I could get my hands on. I still have the stack of posters that I carefully pulled down hiding in a box somewhere. Everywhere you looked in those days was a heady mix of technofear and utopianism. Hell, I think somewhere in that mess was some spreads from a Herald Sun (don't hate me) pull-out that looked at the way we were going to live. I was so very much prepared to live in this world of towering skyscrapers, household robotics, GE foods, and computer chipped body modification and constantly being jacked into the internet. Wait, I guess we're there, kinda. 

Kinda. Ten years ago and things haven't really changed that much. Kinda. Things haven't changed in the way we expected them to. The imagined post Y2K aesthetic never really happened in the time frame it was supposed to. It happened alright, but in the nineties, not in the naughties. Rave clothes, with all their forward looking reflector strips and plastic fabrics pretty much died out into obscurity; they look pretty laughable now. We all rejected the idea of slickness and reverted to more handmade methods of creating imagery. Hell, who saw beards as being a trend? Nothing says dismissal of the future like scruffy unshaven facial hair. 

Remember the stroke of midnight? It came and went and nothing much happened. Nothing really changed considering it's nearing the end of the naughties already. 

Evidence that I did clean my room up now and again.

Future sampling

This years State of Design festival is shaping up to an absolutely brilliant one. With the theme of Sampling the Future the organisers seem to have hit every note right in curating all the talks and exhibitions. I haven't been this excited for the Design Festival since, well, ever. What's more, I'll be involved in two aspects of the festival this year. I'll be at the MMOP stall for This is Not a Design Market doing the same thing as the last market. Printing up thousands of cards for the Museum and charming my way through questions about letterpress of which I have no answer for.

Second, the good folks at Chase and Galley are organising a free newspaper - Design Reporter - looking at current design writing and yours truly is contributing an article for it (yes, big w00t). Considering I have no idea what I'll be writing about & have only two weeks to get something ready, I'll be looking at the festival's theme on this blog leading up to the festival. Hopefully it will give me the ammunition I need to turn it into something worthy of print. As the festival starts, I'll be changing gear into reporting mode and going to as many events as possible and posting it here. So from now until the 25th I'll be devoting this thing to the festival wholesale. Stay tuned.

Taking the train to Chocolate Town

As the weather has been getting colder and colder thoughts turn to dessert after dinner. The inevitable realisation that once again we made a detour around the chocolate aisle thinking we won't want anything. Yet night after night thoughts turn to chocolate. We've resorted to this, and all things considered it's not bad.

Almost too thin

Continuing on with the dematerialisation of my collection is this little beauty. They're not messing about by calling them Extra Thin; the most delicate of strands crumbled every time I so much as looked at them. The whole design, while fairly busy, has a lightness to the touch that successfully conveys what was inside. Only now do I notice the thin white rules over the thicker bands of orange. It's a shame they forced the scrumptious lettering into the awkward shape on the side though. The inside was just as delicately thought through. Each bundle of noodles were tight together with a single loop of thin white thread. I made extra care to leave one bundle inside just as an excuse to leave it in the cupboard for just that little bit longer.

Display mechanisms

The cleaning fun didn't stop yesterday. Almost all of my waking hours was spent cleaning the walls, vacuuming, cleaning the bathroom from mould and of course attempting to spring clean. Apparently these piano mechanisms aren't aesthetically pleasing enough for our house, and I finally lost the argument (I'll let you all know that I haven't gotten rid of them, but the battle has indeed been lost). I'll admit that they're not the most pleasing of objects, but I love looking at the mechanism needed for each piano key.

I feel that by dematerialising them and putting them up here means they're not really gone in some sense. There's a whole essay on post materiality regarding this trend that I'd love to sink my teeth into but instead I'll get you to read Bruce Sterling's last Viridian note instead. Whenever you feel cluttered by too much stuff, read it. Hell, just read the last half. But read it. If reading isn't your thing, watch him discuss his closing talk at the recent Reboot conference. It's slow and only streaming, but well worth listening to him talk about recognising material objects as fossilised social relationships and how we are moving on to looking at our possessions as flows, not as finite materiality.

Whirlpool

I was hoping for something more substantial today but I ended up using all of my surplus energy rearranging the office. Before I got to the halfway point I decided to clean the blinds. The feather duster wasn't good enough. Neither was spraying it clean. 5 hours with sugar soap and I've completely lost the afternoon to these bloody blinds. I swear I wiped each slat five times and the bastard still isn't perfect. I had such high hopes for how I was going to spend the rest of the day. 

Meanwhile, this lovely oven was left on the nature strip across the road for a week or so. Would have been nice to have seen the dials intact.

The real 46.4

I mentioned the bushfire road trip yesterday and decided it would be worth putting up a what we came across. The amount of destruction is quite disturbing, as you can see. Marysville is gone; completely and utterly burnt down to the ground. The only business still standing was the bakery. Almost all of the homes have been lost, save a few that somehow escaped the random path of fire. Kingslake seemed at first to not have been so affected until you realise that the shopping strip was mildly unaffected; whole neighbourhoods surrounding the town are gone.

From a purely aesthetic viewpoint there were lots of nice contrasts between order and chaos: the still standing structures and the warped debris surrounding it. That somehow the raging fires only affected some buildings and left others standing for no foreseeable reason still surprises me. I'm tempted to discuss this charming juxtaposition further but question it's taste. Walking around and taking photographs gave me a strange sense of voyeurism - recording the loss of lives and history with a cool detachment - compounded by the urban playground I was frolicking in when it all happened.

Discover Toolangi

Wanting to see what havoc the bush fires had wrought, me and dad went for a somewhat lovely drive through the country. I spent the day of the fires when it reached 46.4 degrees in the city, if you remember cooled by the artificial water hole at ACCA. The idea of looking at a decimated countryside came up and we decided to try and spend our stimulus money in Kingslake and Marysville. Unfortunately, there wasn't much business left, but a pie and coffee sufficed our desire to help. 

Meanwhile, we came across this wonderful building in the unaffected part of the bush. Nestled between towering trees this structure seemed both at home in it's environment and totally out of place. But it caused an almost immediate U-turn to go and see what it was.

Inside was exactly as I'd hoped. Lots of little spaces devoted to the Toolangi forest and all it's wonders. One cabinet looked at all the different types of honey you could find in the area because of the breadth of bio-diversity. Others looked at the men and women - long gone - who lived in this part of town. The strong scent of eucalypt permeated throughout the building: I'm guessing as a result of both the trees outside and the building materials used throughout the place.

This deck was by far the most exhilarating space. Throughout the structure there were chance encounters to witness the forest - a sliver of a window here, a walkway with lovely vista - but this spot was magical. It gave unfettered access to the forest; hovering above the ground I experienced the idea of nature in a way I never had before. 

Oh, and some of the detailing on the welcome sign were pitch perfect. I just wish we'd had some time to walk along the sculpture trail - if only out of respect for the gorgeous lettering on the sign. 

Occupational Therapy

For those wondering where my field of vision was for the majority of yesterday, this is it. We put together a stall for the Design Market at Fed Square to try and raise a bit more cash for the Museum. We didn't sell much, but I did get the chance to print hundreds, if not thousands of cards advertising the museum. People couldn't get enough of seeing them printed in real time. The particular press we took was a small tabletop Adana press which came from a hospital. I could never figure out why a hospital would have a small letterpress machine until a nurse came up and spoke to me about it. As it turns out, it was used in the Occupational Therapy department for patients; it gave them some physical exercise and a sense of purpose, not to mention the charm that a simple bit of ink based cause and effect can have on someone. So letterpress is good for you it turns out.

Direct to Public

One of the problems I have with exhibition openings is that it's always tricky to get some good shots of the work. There are always people in the way, and any clean shots are always too blurry. This usually means having to make a return trip; I'm always grateful for this as it gives me the chance to think about the works in between. This is especially the case with Direct to Public by Elizabeth Smith. 

I initially wasn't sure how to approach this exhibition. The Landing at Ok Ok is a small space and seems to work perfectly for the exhibition. And herein lies the problem; I wanted more. Not out of some addiction to vernacular letterforms but because it didn't seem to be enough. I suppose after seeing the recent Tobias Frere-Jones exhibition at the Narrows this latest tribute to urban typography didn't seem to cut it. After being overwhelmed by wall to wall grids of glorious NY signage, I was looking at and evaluating this with having been in the presence of a god. His exhibition was a collection for the sake of documentation. The scale of the documentation proves that more is different, at the same time allowing us to view NY through his eyes.

Meanwhile, I'd only spent a few minutes there and didn't give it the chance it deserved. Thankfully, a quick reread of her blog and it suddenly made sense. In discussing the exhibition, the last little paragraph put it all in context:

Direct to Public is no dissertation; it's a small comment.

A huge sigh of relief as it gave me the permission I needed to go back there and look at it again.

What did Franco Cozzo say when he stepped in a can of paint?

Oh no, my foot is grey.

This would be funnier if the exhibition was about Footscray. But it's not, it's about Brunswick. And it has Brunswick in spades. And not the new Brunswick, but the old Brunswick. The unglamorous and ethnic Brunswick. Penny Modra in 3000 said it best: Brunswick, a suburb that knows how to write $2.99 on a kilo of bananas faster than you can write your name. 

It's here where the exhibition really shines. Not content for it to just be examples of signage, she has gone to the trouble of reproducing charming examples of hand-painted lettering found in Brunswick. Most of these are fairly faithful hand painted reproductions of the typographic landscape. An impressive feat by any account; she has managed to capture the essence of Brunswickness not only in the choice of businesses (and therefore in the choice of signage) but in the exactitude of the shapes. Her skill doesn't stop at brushstrokes either. Several hanging signs have been cut out and hang from the roof, an obvious reference and ode to the hanging signs found under the awnings of Sydney Rd. By leaving the cut out characters lying around the floor she really makes her case for the temporality of business and commerce and the changing typographic landscape. Self referentially, a few photographs had fallen off the wall and onto the ground.

On top of being a small comment on the nature of commerce, it's also about the joy of letterforms. She really loves type, and it shows. Not just in the name of her website I Heart Type, but in her work Imaginary Alphabets, which Direct to Public is an extension of. Her latest alphabet, Wholesale, is on display throughout. While House Industries have created what seems like thousands of faithful reproductions from the golden age of American sign writing, none have the awkwardness that Wholesale does. This works in its favour, capturing the spirit of a suburb that's able to write $2.99 on a kilo of bananas faster than you can sign your name. One critique is the use of stencil to render the font. Considering how intimate she must have been with the letters in creating the font, a little bit of freehand would have gone a long way. But I digress.

Having created the opportunity by way of this exhibition, she's printed up some rather lovely A3 posters of the rest of her Imaginary Alphabets, which I regret not buying. But I suppose it gives me the chance to head down there again, doesn't it. They're great little projects and I'm mildly jealous that she beat me to the punch with Marguerite; if you remember, I'm a big fan of sheet music. Jealousy aside, each project has it's own little quirks that are worth looking at. The same could be said of the whole exhibition.

Direct to Public runs until the 30th of June. The Landing @ Ok Ok - Shop 16 @ Sparta Place, Hardwick Building 459 Sydney Road