The Theory of Nevolution

The Poster Annual ain't pretty

I've been staring at this image for five minutes, trying to remember what I was supposed to be doing. Even as my memory starts trickling back in I'm tying hard to look at the keyboard and not at the poster. I think I was going to open this post along the lines of this poster and the red crotch piece perfectly summing up the attitude of this year's annual, but I'm not sure. Nothing seems sure anymore; even my  gaze seems unsure. I'm trying to write here, but my eyes will gaze up to the thigh high boots, down to the shoes, and then back up to the thigh and I can't help from wondering how it would feel to be wearing those boots while holding a gun. With a pony tail. The cod piece and matching bullet belt are too much of a mental black hole to even begin thinking about. I could gaze at that moustache for hours without knowing who, what, where and why I was. 

Even now I keep scrolling back up to sneak a gaze, and once again my concentration is broken. I can't understand how it didn't win, it wasn't even included in the finalists. Which is a disappointment considering it's the best of the lot. It's simple, a witty juxtaposition and paints a negative view of the future. Which makes up most of not just the winning entries but all entries entered into this year's annual. It's alarming when today's designers feel the progress of mankind to be a scary place to go to. Where greed, water, waste and unfettered irony run rampant as we head towards our demise. It seems Melbourne's designers feel either helpless or guilty for the current global malaise, considering there were very few uplifting messages to take away this year. Leather boots. I quite liked the use of the poster as a critique on the competition itself. Quite a nice twist on the theme Sample the Future. They didn't really look at the future, but a nice co-opting of the message nonetheless.

Speaking of messages, there was what could have been a very interesting project at the exhibition site. A public message board could have been a fantastic medium but ended up being nothing more than frivolous notes, jokes and quotes. Which is a shame, considering the intent of this wall would have been to create an evolving picture of the thoughts of the exhibition. Pony tail. Unfortunately, the only message to not resemble a prettier version of a public bathroom is the inclusion of Shaun Micallef as a judge on the panel.  

Red. Posters. Focus. I was quite a fan of the green roof poster, despite it's aesthetic misgivings. But it's looking forward. It's not whinging or whining and it's looking at solutions. Although the solutions remain in the realm of architecture, industrial design, gardening and landscape design (and contains some very awkward and unnecessary typography), it does take a stab at looking to a positive future despite the dark tones. Sean Connery. Meanwhile, I'm disappointed that neither of these two posters from Studio Pip & Co were included in the finalists. But I'm not surprised, considering their uplifting colour palettes don't suit the helpless and grim message portrayed by the final posters selected. Instead, they're clever musings on the theme. And I thought of the jar idea as well. Moustache. But while I may be disappointed in the exclusion of some posters (I should add that half of the posters were dross) I'm downright angry that the poster below wasn't included. It would have been refreshing to see something more abstract, less jingoistic. A poster is a large format, yet many of the shortlist could have fit on a postcard with their simple ideas that could more easily be summed up in a logo. Heck, most of them were logos. But future/matter, by Daniel Peterson and Anthony Nelson is a damn fine piece of work that would have been great at large scale. Taking ideas from radical architecture movements from the 60s and 70s (and therefore utopian in the brightest, most hopeful and completely ridiculous sense of the word) the poster looks at design through a realignment of not just values, but through process and production as well. Fragmented, relational and traversing different scales of experience. It positions humans as part of nature, not outside and separate from it. By asking the audience to engage with the theme, and thereby think more about the themes instead of proposing a solution, they have done far more than the other posters. Although action needs to be taken – something many of the other posters have highlighted – whining about the state of affairs with simplified terms and images will not produce the considerate and useful modes of thought that is needed to sample the future as we move towards it. Red crotch.

Cloudy19

What bothers me most of the exhibition Cloud19 is it's subtitle: Not One Style Religion. That and it's at the back of the newly converted space of the 1000 $ Bend, from the folks who brought you St Jeromes. It all just makes me feel old, uncool and waaay behind the times. Just thinking about it makes me feel like sitting down, drinking herbal tea and listening to a charming lecture on the morality in politics of the new citizenship on the ABC. Which I am. But that's behind the point. The point is that there isn't much point to this exhibition. Don't get me wrong, I like some of the individual pieces here. Some of them genuinely have value on either a conceptual or formalistic basis. But to bring them all under one trendy and converted roof and mention the words style and religion just seem so very pointless and commercial considering the rest of the stuff on hand at the festival. But like I said, I feel old so maybe I'm missing the point. But like I said, there is some great work here so there's no point in making you put up with my crankiness for the next few minutes.

As mentioned, there is some good work, and there is a large variety of stylistic genres. And so we're all clear, I've only included work that I like or found interesting for this post; you'll have to imagine what I don't. But I still don't see the point. Is anyone disputing the lack of a variety of styles within Melbourne, Australia or the world? It feels like small scale biennialism in a warehouse. Which is fine, but one generally needs a dense manifesto to back up your 'ism' before starting. But considering where between isms right now, maybe this type of curation is allowed. It hinges between post and whatever we're moving into next (and no, altermodern doesn't count no matter how noble the cause). But aren't we beyond celebrating diversity? Aren't we all well aware that multiplicity is the order of the day? Haven't we been there for the past 40 or so years? 

Grumpiness aside, I'm quite a fan of glitch brought to life above (and not just because Netzer is a good friend). I'm a big fan of his VJ work and this model is his animated form crystallised. On a bed of salt. Yes, salt. I just noticed that the energy meters below are lamps, something I hadn't noticed before, which only makes me like it more. And then frustrates me as I realise that almost everything there was for sale. Which neatly ties into my distrust of the 'style' tag. Anyway...

As you can guess, I fell in love with this chair. I wouldn't want it anywhere near my house but I dearly love it. Smacks you in the face with vernacular and then screams to remind you to make that V uppercase. My knees always go week when confronted by aussie tea towels and this was just almost too much. Meanwhile, the telephone chair as an outdated piece of furniture is an idea that has been swimming around my head for a few months now and this progress charmed the pants off of me. I've even been collecting photos of them for a post sometime, and to see someone else realise this made me smile. But like I said, I'm saving that idea so I'll stop discussing it there.

The exhibition asks for "Not one style religion, but many in collaboration will create the diversity and rich fabric that is vital to our style survival". True, there isn't one style, and by using a diversity of styles to argue this point is fine. But it comes off feeling like they've all come from the same strata of Melbourne's scene.

This is not a Design Post

By all accounts, the day was a huge success. It was a fantastic market in a fantastic space. It was great to see some new vendors at this market as opposed to the usual faces (although they were there too). We had a great stall for the Museum with lots of space to spread out and show off our wares and what the Museum is all about. Cam and Monica made some lovely market specific posters for us to sell there which gave a lovely view of the rest of the market from our luxurious penthouse view of the place. 

Knowing how successful the cards were last time I printed variations of the logo on card before hand which worked fantastically, showing off not just the ludlow type which we printed onsite but some of the postertype in the collection. Still feeling guilty for not staying there the whole day and helping out but from what I've heard the rest of the day was just as good as the first. 

Shelter Stories

The future from ground level. Towering apartments, hotels, media and professional service companies that do everything everywhere; in the background, remote, distant yet ever present. Participative, constantly evolving, unfinished, process orientated, dynamic, informal and autonomous structures and spaces in the foreground. Architects Without Frontiers has a lovely exhibition looking at the huge rise in squatter cities throughout the world. Mankind is now an urban species, yet the recent explosive growth has been in squatter cities and informal settlements throughout the developing world. 

Incomplete structures: sprawled on the ground, made from reused materials and flapping in the wind. My only complaint is the structures are too ordered. The shapes are too regular, made from squares and triangles. They achieve the notion of informality and the lack of a finished 'product', but when placed next to Fed Square the formal similarity seem the antithesis of squatter cities. 

But it's lately become too easy to fall in love with the decentralised and interconnected nature of squatter cities when this is a real problem. The installation seeks to create a dialogue about this problem, and whether or not we are ready to face this problem and find genuine solutions for these slums. I wasn't aware that the exhibition had night component to it, with images and slides projected over it. From the images at The Design Files they look like it would have countered any lingering concerns with the lack of dialogue I have with this semi-abstract piece. I suppose I should have clued on to the paper bags and tea light candles. 

For more images head on down to my Flickr set.

The Singularity

Charming isn't it. Mankind opening up new horizons, new vistas of possibility. Men and women, white and blue collar. To a world unmistakably changed from before. The point in the future in which change happens so quickly, with such severity, that previous predictions are unreliable. I'll bet these poor bastards never saw the sixties coming. 

Where's my damn jetpack?

Win. So very much a win. Hell, I'll even hashtag that baby. #win. I must read this book. Even the front cover is a total and bona-fide win.

Nostalgia for a future that never happened

A nicely paced video that looks at an amusing illustrator, Bruce Mccall. The use of gouache heightens his ability to convey his ideas; that of looking back at how we looked forward. The first I watched this video I paid it little attention, and fast forwarded through most of it with the sound off, assuming that it was the work of a serious artist. Only on re-watching it did I realise the humour evident here and the tongue in cheek nature of his work. A rather lovely fusion of form and content. Going through six categories of work, the first three are of particular interest here. 

Retro-Futurism: Looking back to see how yesterday viewed tomorrow.

Techno-Archaeology: Past miracles that never happened.

Faux-Nostalgia: Sentimental yearning for times that never happened. 

It's quite charming that he's able to encapsulate all the issues I'm trying to raise with his brush. Made even better by his painfully dry wit.

Transport of Tomorrow

Civilisation depends not only upon possessing the means to make things, but also the means to move them. The history of civilisation might, indeed, be described as the history of transport. This will be even more true tomorrow, although the present century has already seen advances in transport that equal all the progress made in every other century.

A little bit of post war enthusiasm can go along way. The predictions are, however, laughable. Not because they are so far off the mark (which they aren't), but because we take so many of them for granted. I find it hard to believe that people put up with such a lack of basic infrastructure within the past two generations. It's mostly the front cover illustration that sets up a ludicrous premise. The text is mostly conservative in it's predictions of how the men and women of tomorrow will live. Take the issue of the jetpack. There is no mention of man's desire to commute via them; instead it focuses on ensuring that roads are not built for the horse and cart, but for automobiles. There is some small space dedicated to the jet plane, and how it should be the norm in travel. Disappointingly, the article is not referring to a daily commute via the plane, but instead urges the engineers and scientists of yesterday's tomorrow to create planes capable of transporting more than 100 people at a time. Which, by today's standard is laughable. Horrendously laughable.

The exchange of goods between countries has been revolutionised, and transport has made possible the existence of industrial Britain; all our skill and enterprise in industry would have been wasted if ships, aeroplanes, trains and motor vehicles did not bring us and distribute vast quantities of food. 

The topic of the transportation of goods is lightly discussed above, but generally the focus seems to be on the transportation of people. Perhaps the most important infrastructural system and object of the 20th century has been the shipping container. The standardisation of the shipping container (there are only two sizes) brought about huge changes in not just the transportation of goods, but world trade, manufacturing systems and ports throughout the world. I haven't read it, but The Box by Marc Levinson charts the story of the shipping container to the cog and gear that it is today. Most appropriate to this post is how far removed it is from the scrumptiously curved forms of yesterday's tomorrow. It is almost the aesthetic antitheses: ugly, stackable, modular and angular. 

Despite this, or because of it, container architecture seems to be popping up everywhere. Not just in trendy laneway bars and pop up ethical cafes, but as genuine bona fide housing. I've taught English to Israeli Bedouins in a makeshift classroom made from a converted container. Hell, there was that proposal for a new type of shipping container housing estate replacing the trailer park. On the trendier scale there is the Container Home Kit which utilises them to create gritty urban looking prefab housing. Shipping container ideas just keep on popping up all over the web these days (often to the point of saturation); something about them seems to tap in today's tomorrow. Don't take my word for it, go read BLDGBLOG's love affair with them: 

What I think is, actually the point of reusing shipping containers as architecture is: 1) when you can, you should reuse existing materials for somewhat obvious environmental reasons, and 2) the spatial, logical and combinatorial systems that cargo containers imply are simply awesome. The possibilities excite me. Container-made buildings are fun to look at, they're fun to render, and they're fun to imagine forming new architectural reefs and Tetris cites, interlocking in a sci-fi future coming soon to a landscape near you.

His book better make its way to a bookstore near me or I will be very disappointed. Meanwhile, in the other issue of Authentic Science is an article titled Sport and Leisure in the Future. Just as verbose as the previous one and in this case, the predictions are laughable because of how far off the mark they are. 

Our hours of work could be halved tomorrow, giving every man another twenty odd hours of leisure a week. The price would be that of halving the number of things he could buy or, for that matter, which would be available. Some might consider this worthwhile. The need, therefore, is to draw up a "work and play" budget in which hours of work and leisure for the nation are balanced as money expenditure and revenue are balanced financially.

The author then goes on to predict sweeping changes to sports in how they are scored and the eventual weeding out of blood sports through mans elevation to a higher state of cultural intelligence. But really, I only needed that as a vague segue into Matt Jones' Reboot 9 video on Travel and Serendipity. But considering it insists on not wanting to be embedded here means I'll have to just provide the link and his summary of the talk:

Travel has always been part of how humanity has broadened its horizons and minds. Humans are more mobile than ever before, but we're still passengers in an industrial-era travel infrastructure. Paradoxically, industry has been using informatics for lowering the economic and environmental costs of transporting goods for decades. A new age of personal travel information tools will change this, and to illustrate this we'll talk through our thoughts in developing Dopplr. Dopplr is a service we hope will play a part in this change: to increase serendipity in your social world, lower the impact of travel on our biosphere and help create a new golden age of travel. Don't worry though. This won't be a sales pitch for anything other than getting all of us to rethink and rehumanise travel - and look at tools to help us do so.

Some good old fashioned enthusiasm.

My point exactly

Seriously. My thoughts exactly. There are so many more things we were promised by now. What do we have? Nothing. The internet doesn't count, we were never promised the internet. Black swans don't count. We have Personal Communication Devices, but booooooring. If I don't get to meet aliens before my time is up I am going to be one seriously disappointed and pissed off dude. Where's my moon base? Flying car? Intergalactic travel? And don't start about the New Zealand dude who made his own jetpack. It's not really portable or useable, so it doesn't count either. This t-shirt is sold out, but you might be able to find them around town. In case you can''t read it: Where is my robotic companion, dinner in pill form, hydrogen fuelled automobile, nuclear-powered levitating house, cure for this disease. And yes, I'm still waiting for my jetpack.

Mind Grenades: Manifestos from the Future

Despite never having held this book until well into my second year at uni, the contents within stirred me to want to be a designer years before. When I first stumbled across Wired magazine I could never understand why, at the start of each issue, surrounded by adds were these stunning double page spreads. Dripping in cyber cool and using all the tricks in the computer enabled post modern designers arsenal they shouted at me that I needed to read this thing. I think they still stand as the greatest editorial device I've ever come across. I can remember the issue when they stopped using it as I nervously flipped through the pages trying to find my beloved Intro Quotes. But alas, they were gone, and I've never looked at that specific issue with fondness, but with scorn. I think the end of the intro quotes signalled the end of my initial love affair with Wired and it took me a few years to get back on the bandwagon. While the recent (brilliant) redesign of Wired drips with visual intelligence on a scale unmatched by the previous issues; it still lacks the genius of those mind grenades. 

Taking a quote from somewhere in the magazine, the creative director John Plunkett would design these spreads as a way to advertise the contents of the magazine. Bending the capabilities of the computer (in those days) and printed using 6 plates (yep, six) they exploded off the page with ideas my fragile juvenile mind was just beginning to understand. My bedroom (refer two posts back) was plastered with these grenades, skilfully sliced out of the magazine. I only mildly regretted cutting them out and ruining the magazine, and have kept all of them in good condition in a box somewhere. The book, Mind Grenades, reproduces the first three years of Wired's Intro Quotes and it's funny looking back at them now. The ones on my wall were from later years, and so weren't as grotesquely dated as these are. They seemed so current, so very very now. But these ones (printed with 25 match colours (double yep) are so laughably dated that I just can't take them seriously. They really went all out with the fluoro in Wired's early days, and the front cover screams how proud they are of this. To let everything just pop off the page and into the fluoro appreciating part of the brain (c'mon, we all know we have it, it's between the pleasure seeking part and the reptilian core). Hell, I've had a headache just looking at the front cover - both here and on the screen.

I'm beginning to love the act of looking back at the future. I'm reading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock at the moment and it's just so quaint. The same for these. Not just the texts but all the Photoshop gimmickry and horrible 3D models. It is probably the most dated design publication I have (save maybe for Typographics 2: Cybertype), but that's what I love about it. It isn't a Manifesto from the Future, it's a Manifesto of a Future. Not our future, but yesterdays future. 

Jack In

A nice little happy accident occurred with the white balance when I was photographing this book; but I think William Gibson would have wanted it this way. With everything turned up, way up. Looking down at Spinal Tap's setting of 11 and laughing at it. With the book acknowledging it's age, the cracks and folds turning it back in on itself and the background behind. Turning those cracks of ink into a crackling of the artefact and novel itself. A nice way to age considering it just hit it's 25th anniversary. I read this book when I was 17 and it blew my mind. Completely and utterly transformed it into something else and I've been eternally grateful for that mental reboot ever since. 

One thing that has always bothered me with the nature of the Gibsonian Matrix is how little it has to do with the workings of the internet. The money quote from the book still tingles the hairs on my head but only in it's impossibility:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

Don't get me wrong, I like my neon Cartesian grids as much as the next guy, but there's nothing Cartesian about the internet. Where's the sense of a network? The spatial aspect of the matrix is incompatibable with the linked internet we deal with day to day. What makes it worse, although thankfully we seemed to have moved away from this metaphor, is the constant attempts to visual the web this way. The one area where we seem to be moving towards in regards to a spatial understanding and visualisation of the interwebs is with the geospatial web on the mobile phone. This is a far cry from the old fashioned but very (very very very) awesome method of plugging in a jack into the rear of our cranium. Hell, even Gibson himself has remarked that we don't leave the internet anymore. There's no difference between cyberspace and meatspace, it's all around us, overlaid.

But as a world building exercise, this book is second to none. I was fully convinced (I secretly still am) that this future would come true. That we were on a path towards not just this consensual hallucination but a world of chips inserted into the head, mirror shades implanted over the eye sockets and runaway artificial intelligence. Not to mention neon lights at every turn and the odd bit of vat meat here and there.

I thought it might be worthwhile tracking the tone of some of his later novels. Clearly, the top two still share the breakneck extremist cyberpunk aesthetics of Neuromancer, but with an early nineties facelift. The Neuromancer cover is a child of the eighties, with all it's airbrushing and neon lined cityscapes. These two, while the literature is a product of the eighties, are steeped in mid-nineties visual mythology. The layers upon layers of dirt, noise and texture, the use of Helvetica (appropriate?) and the killer dreadlocks and sunglasses. The Neuromancer edition in this series is just as extreme, but with an aggressive male and a moody blue palette. But even still, we can see a delineation of the original cyberpunk into something else, something more realistically digital. I've omitted my copy of Count Zero here, notably because the edition I have is fairly uninspired and doesn't match the aggressive nature of the rest of The Sprawl series.

Moving on to the Bridge Series, Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. These three tap into the nineties in much the same way that the previous three ripped up the eighties. I'm digging the use of Letter Gothic over the artificial Japanese celebrity. I mean, you can't more 1996 than that, even the colour of the blue fish is spot on. All Tomorrow's Parties, released in 1999 is my favourite of all his novels. Only on the second reading did I realise it to be a product of pre-millennial fever. The description of nodal points as a way of understanding history, progress and change (not to mention the networked links of the internet) still fascinates. By changing tack with the latest trilogy (I am painfully waiting for the last one to be finished) and writing about the present, he successfully makes the case that we're in the future now. Which, considering that it's halfway through 2009 is a fair case to make. 

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.