Pin I Lee (Amber Lee)
Final Major Project
Is Everything Connected? Design & Conspiracy University for the Creative Arts
Graphic Communication Y3
Final Major Project
Rest in Peace
Isaac Kappy
1977-2019
CONTENTS
01 Introduction // The beginning of everything 02 Field of Study // Underground press & Conspiracy 03 History // The 1960’s 04 Focus // The influence of the blacklisted American Journalist on my FMP 05 Case Studies - Visual 06 Literary Review - Theory // Do we live in the age of post-truth? 07 Conclusion 08 Personal Reflection 09 Bibliography
01 page 8
Introduction In my dissertation I investigate the kitsch aesthetics in graphic design, exploring the changing meaning of kitsch as I mention in my dissertation that during my research on how graphic designers have engaged with kitsch I also noticed in the contemporary art world, there seems to be a tendency of designers exploiting kitsch aesthetics when topics relevant to countercultures, controversy, or politics emerge. FMP, so to speak, is the final major project of my degree Graphic Communication in which I am allowed to create my own brief that fits into my future interests and as a graphic communication student, I have always been interested in how I, as a graphic communicator can possibly shape my surroundings through my design; in this presumably metamodernist era, the world seems more complicated than ever with fast changing patterns in communications. Therefore, I have decided to publish five issues of posterzines called Conspiracy Digest that tell stories about human cloning technology from the perspective of conspiracy while exploring the underground press from the 1960s, investigating its history, attitude, graphic styles, and aesthetics as the references for my FMP outcome. This introspective researchbook is the digest of my research findings, a similar approach to Tom Forcade’s Orpheus magazine, and how my research influnenced on my design decisions in my FMP.
how it all star
rted... In 2019 summer, I joined a five-day Editorial Design short course at the Royal College of Art where I were to design a publication within that timeframe. Then I had already decided it would be the starting point of my FMP and I would design something that could be evidently developed further in my third year. Although I had not had an idea or topic for my FMP, I had just begun my journey in conspiracy “theories” due to the incidental death of the actor Isaac Kappy (Khalaj, 2019). I wanted to tell the crazy, fictional?, far-fetched stories about how Michael Jackson might still be alive, Britney Spears being a human clone, Princess Dianna was murdered, and so on as a Graphic Communication student. On that note, by no means I believe all conspiracy theories to be true, yet I am surprisWed at how gullible people can be, and how much some people overlook the involvement of politics in our everyday lives and over-trust our governments even in this seemingly post-truth era. Thus, I started wondering how I could raise the awareness of how unconsciously accepting we are to be spoon-fed by our governments, and approach the audience with the ideas of conspiracy as a designer. At the end of the short course, I designed an oversized Chinese takeaway menu (see fig.3.) printed on neon yellow paper in which I introduce five conspiracy theories that I believe could turn out to be true, and on the back it says, “Do Your Own Research.” It is uncertain if this project reached the audience the way I intended to or if it was seen as more of a joke, but I was
drawn by how because of its format, the scale, the typography I chose, and the materiality of this design, such design decisions formed a sense of humour and tackiness, and thus this piece can arguably be categorised as kitsch. Not only did this project I had designed in five days become the starting point of my FMP, in order to have a deeper and grounded understanding of the concept of kitsch, I had also chosen to write the kitsch aesthetics in graphic design as my dissertation topic.
Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy
To give a fuller picture of what my FMP is about and why the chosen topic of my FMP is important to me, I will start by talking about how other artists and designers have produced similar work or come up with similar ideas. It is not new that throughout history artists and designers have voiced themselves through their work to oppose political corruptions, the hidden power of our governments, etc. There was an exhibition at the MET called Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy (2019) which is the first major exhibition to address this provocative topic featuring seventy works by thirty artists (Fox, 2018). Taking Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structures as an example, a collection of drawings which the artist himself referred to as “narrative structures” are spider diagrams attempting to trace the structures of financial and political power, corruption and affairs among capitalists, and government and the military-industrial complex (Lucarelli, 2012).
Narrative Structures by Mark Lombardi
Another example is Emory Douglas’s The Black Panther which is a piece of illustration Douglas made for the Newspapers The Black Panther in 1974, though arguably this piece is less about conspiracy, the Black Panther Party (BBP), the revolutionary political organization founded by two Marxist college students in Oakland in 1966, practiced the open carry armed citizens’ patrols in order to supervise police brutality in the city (History. com Editors). Although the intentions of these art projects about conspiracy might vary, I am very intrigued by how artists and designers can possibly make changes through their work. In my opinion, to become a graphic communicator is to change my surroundings and shape the way people think; I question the information I get every day in this digital fast changing age, and I wanted to encourage the audience to experience an alternate reality that I constantly have my mind on— the world of conspiracy.
Black Panther by Emory Douglas
RE– VIEW
/
by
DAN FOX
https://frieze.com/article/everything-connected-art-and-conspiracy-met-breuer
The Met Breuer – host to the exhibition ‘Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy’ – is located at 945 Madison Avenue, New York. By applying a basic alpha-numeric cipher we find that the numbers 9, 4 and 5 tally to the letters I, D and E in the alphabet. Swap the ‘I’ with the ‘D’ and we have the word ‘DIE’. It can be no coincidence that this Marcel Breuer-designed building was completed in 1966. Turn the ‘9’ upsidedown and we get Satan’s numerical ID, ’666’: 1 + 666 means Number One, Six Six Six, aka First or Premiere Demon, also the year of the Great Fire of London and Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity. (Surprising that a more sophisticated encoding system was not used by the George Soros-funded operatives who buried a copy of the Necronomicon in the foundations of the museum during its construction.) Now consider that trapezoid-shaped single window on the museum’s upper facade. Turn it 90 degrees counter-clockwise and you’ll notice it forms the middle section of a triangle, which corresponds to the mid-section of the Masonic hierarchy pyramid; a list of secret societies including the Illuminati, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and The Order of the Trapezoid. Avant-garde filmmaker and occulist Kenneth Anger is a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis. His work was shown at the Breuer in 1975 when the building was masquerading as the so-called ‘Whitney Museum of American Art.’
House on Fire by Sarah Anne Johnson
Educated observers will note that in order to enter the Breuer, visitors must cross a bridge over what is clearly a moat, easily fortified by filling it with toxic water, pre-poisoned for such purpose by Islamist cells operating in Flint, Michigan. Why does this museum have so few windows and such thick concrete walls? How many art works have you seen on view here, but never witnessed actually leaving the museum after the show has closed? Could it be that a collection of priceless artworks is being brought in under the guise of a temporary exhibition, then hoarded in a bomb-proof storage facility beneath the building in preparation for the New Civil War, when Manhattan will be closed off and turned into a heavily-defended enclave for the global elites, who will be able to enjoy masterpieces of global art in safety whilst everyone else perishes in lawless zones beyond the banks of the Hudson and East Rivers, overrun by illegal immigrant warlords indoctrinated into radical socialism by Hilary Clinton at the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant? I mean, you only have to take a map of the island and draw a line linking the locations of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Neue Galerie, Frick Collection and the Jewish Museum, to reveal a reversed ‘L’ shape. And what does the ‘L’ stand for? That’s right. Liberals. Leftists. Luciferians. Also, Led Zeppelin, whose recording of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ transmits the message ‘Here’s to my sweet Satan’ when played backwards. The organizers behind ‘Everything is Connected’ are masters at hiding in plain sight. Douglas Eklund’s Swedish last name means ‘oak grove’. His job is in the arts. So, obviously, Eklund = Bohemian Grove i.e. an occult ceremony for the Bilderberg Group aka Illuminati held in California every year. The last name of his co-curator, Ian Alteveer, is an anagram of ‘revelate’ i.e. Book of Revelation therefore the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse thus you will D.I.E., or I.D.E., ie. 945 Madison Ave, to whit, the IDEs of March = 15 March, aka the Roman deadline for settling debts, i.e. the murder of Julius Caesar which is the archetype for all state assassinations. JFK, anyone? The Met alleges that Eklund and Alteveer were ‘assisted’ in putting this show together by Meredith Brown and Beth Saunders. Assistants, or powers behind the throne? You decide. I’ll take the fact that these curators have made no attempt to contact me since I started writing this piece as a coded warning that I should watch what I say and write a straight-up exhibition review instead. If the Met chooses to advertise in frieze following publication of this piece, it’s clearly a sign
that they’re scared and think they can control me through money. This is the kind of shit that happens when the forces of Big Museum flex their muscles. The story that Eklund and Alteveer want us to believe is that their exhibition is the first major show to examine the batteries of paranoia that fuel Western democracies, specifically the US. It plays to Richard Hofstader’s 1964 essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, which argues that the US has always made room for ’heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.’ The history of this country has been shaped by fears that outsiders will infiltrate it or insiders will bring it down from within. ‘Us’ versus ‘them,’ and you name them, someone’s blamed them: Indians, French, British, Irish, Mexicans, Iranians, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Rosicrucians, Mormons, freemasons, hippies, bikers, black revolutionaries, gays, atheists, communists, Nazis, bankers, socialists, satanists, witches, aliens, advertising companies, rappers, rock’n’rollers and Dungeons & Dragons players. (In 1987, Tipper Gore claimed in her book Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society that D&D was ‘linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides.’) Understand the history of American paranoia and how it legitimates violence, and you will understand how Donald Trump’s lies gain traction, steroid-boosted by Sean Hannity, Alex Jones and other credulous, craven conservative loudmouths. But I’ve said too much already. ‘They’ still think that I think that Fox News is news targeted specifically at Dan Fox. Fools. ‘Everything is Connected’ – or is it? – broadly splits its 30 artists into two sections. (Divide and rule. Classic seditionary tactic.) The first looks at how artists have used research and information in the public realm to work as citizen journalists, revealing secret business interests and ideological alliances that the powers-that-be would prefer to remain hidden from view. Here are Mark Lombardi’s elegant and frightening ‘narrative structures’; spider diagrams which show links between figures in finance, government and the military-industrial complex. Jenny Holzer’s digital ticker-tapes use language taken from classified government documents, and Trevor Paglen’s photographs depict CIA ‘black site’ prisons – images all the more sinister for their banality. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971– (1971) is here too. Haacke shone his interrogation lamp on slumlord ownership in New York, which infamously led to the cancellation of his exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum that year, along with the dismissal of curator Edward Fry. The section also features illustrations made by Emory Douglas for the Black Panthers, and ACT UP’s iconic poster SILENCE = DEATH (1987). ACT UP brought to attention the Reagan administration’s refusal to acknowledge the AIDS crisis. Arguably both of these are less ‘about’ conspiracy than engaged in real struggle against it. It’s tin-foil hat time in the second half. Rachel Harrison’s installation Snake in the Grass (1997) pulls photographs taken on the ‘grassy knoll’ in Dallas into a web of taut ropes, which look like the work of feverish Kennedy assassination theorists trying to figure out lone gunman ballistics. Jim Shaw connects JFK’s death to little green men in his UFO Photos: Zapruder Film (1978–82), which finds flying saucers in Abraham Zapruder’s footage of the Kennedy shooting. Mike Kelley satirizes the ‘Satanic panic’ child abuse rumours of the 1980s in his ‘Educational Complex’ (1995). On a long display table are architectural models of every educational institution the artist attended: underneath the table, as if locked in a hidden basement or the subconscious, lurks a small, grubby mattress. But these are almost affectionate play-acts of paranoia. Darker stories of real exploitation lurk in Sarah Anne Johnson’s disturbing sculpture House on Fire (2008–09), and the suite of hand-doctored photographs which accompany it. Johnson evokes the terrible psychological distress suffered by her grandmother who was duped into the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project in the 1960s – an experiment in using psychotropic drugs to control minds – under the pretext of being treated for post-natal depression The idea to stage ‘Everything is Connected’ came from a 1991 interview between John Miller (also included in the show) and Kelley. According to the Met, Kelley had seen an early version of the checklist for the show before his death in 2012, enthusiastically suggesting additional artists and ideas. Kelley’s art detailed the landscape of the American Weird like no other, and his spirit of imaginative, playful skepticism,
his fondness for the far-out, permeates this show. It suggests that the most imaginative acts of art-making are those that are willing to make tangential leaps of faith and counter-intuitive connections. In the video Winchester (2002) by Jeremy Blake, the artist attempts to get inside the fearful, paranoid mind of Sarah Winchester. Widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, she spent almost four decades from the end of the 1800s in never-ending construction on her California mansion, believing this would appease the spirits who had cursed her family. Historical photographs and ink drawings float and merge into one another. Visual connections appear then evanesce, leaving you to wonder if you had seen or merely imagined them. An uneasy idea, easily intuited from Winchester, is that the suspicious, superstitious or conspiratorial mind, ever vigilant for new dots to connect, is also a creative one. The Comte de Lautréamont’s line about ‘the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’ is both a Surrealist maxim and a fair description of the conspiracist theorist’s imaginative short circuits. Close followers of the art world might detect stranger, sadder resonances in ‘Everything is Connected.’ The deaths of Blake and his partner Theresa Duncan in 2007 were shadowed by rumours of harrassment by the Scientologists. Lombardi took his life in 2000, in circumstances that his biographer Patricia Goldstone has argued were suspicious; in the weeks following Kelley’s suicide, there was ghoulish speculation that the pressures of art market success had led him to take his. The reasons for all these deaths are too complex and tragic for anyone to know the real truth. But the art world still loves to write its own micro-conspiracy theories about money and careers: if you feel unrecognized by the industry, then it’s natural to try and rationalize your lack of agency by intuiting invisible forces ranged against you. ‘Gods always behave like the people who make them,’ said Zora Neale Hurston. The truth behind an overlooked or scuppered career is often more depressingly banal than fiction wishes, yet in the instances where gender and race are a factor in someone’s disempowerment, a belief in invisible forces of oppression is usually well-founded. As if to literally illustrate the exhibition title, the end of the second, wilder, section of ‘Everything is Connected’ takes viewers back to the more sober start of the first. But make a repeat circuit around the show and you will drag behind you, like LSD-laced chemtrails, the idiosyncractic, folkloric, macabre, fringe fascinations of Kelley, Shaw, Miller, Johnson, Sue Williams and others. Now the sensibilities of the first and second halves of the exhibition don’t seem so different from each other. Questions emerge and the curators aren’t giving up any answers. Why do we believe what artists say, and always presume them to be on the side of progressive values? Why do ‘research-based practices’ that never get peer-reviewed, and citizen-journalist works about politics that never get passed by editors or fact-checkers, be given credence as journalism? Do artists receive the benefit of the doubt because, deep down, we still cling to a Romantic belief that the artist is the conduit for higher truths? Or is it because to risk the idea that an artist could be wrong in their assertions might jeopardize all the systems that support them, and accidentally plunge art into the Bermuda Triangle of ‘fake news’? Then again, what if artists are right? Haacke was. ACT UP were. The Black Panthers too. Quite possibly, so was Lombardi. In her 2015 biography of the artist, Art, Conspiracy and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi, Goldstone reveals that months after the artist’s suicide in 2000, and following the 9/11 attacks, the FBI visited the Whitney Museum asking that it remove one of his drawings linking the Bank of Credit and Commerce International to Saudi-funded terrorist networks. Where do the responsibilities of creative people lay? Conspiracy theorists today derive their ideas and language from culture, especially movies and television. Neo-fascists describe their conversion to the right as being ‘red-pilled’, a reference to The Matrix movie trilogy in which Keanu Reeves’ character Neo is given a tablet that, when swallowed, shows him the true nature of reality. The quasi-military jargon that conspiracists employ in order to give legitimacy and the appearance of expertise to their speculations – talk of agents, deep state operatives, false flag operations, disinformation campaigns and so on – is more likely learned from episodes of The X-Files and Homeland than it is from real sources in the intelligence community. The register of language in which individuals such as Robert Bowers write to justify their vile ideology – he is currently charged with 29 federal crimes relating to the murder of eleven people and wounding of seven others at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh – reads as if it is straight out of an action film. ‘I can’t sit by
and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics. I’m going in,’ was his final posting to the social network Gab before the shooting. Histrionic, macho one-liners learned from the movies but delivered by nobody’s hero. I could continue, but I’ve just noticed a dot of red light moving across my window. A sniper’s laser-guided telescopic sight? It’s gone now. Must have been the reflection from a passing car tail-light. Probably a Mossad surveillance vehicle. Or MoMA. In any case, I guess you’re wondering who’s paying me to write all this, so let me map the money trail for you. The cover story is that I get paid by frieze with money generated from advertising, subscription and newsstand sales. Truth is, the ads money is made to appear as if it comes from multiple sources – galleries, museums, consumer brands – but these are merely front organizations processing payments made by a centralized funding source controlled by – wait, there’s that red laser dot again, hovering over my chest … Red Yellow Looming by Jenny Holzer
“In 1994 I began a series of drawings I refer to as “narrative structures.” Most were executed in graphite or pen and ink on paper. Some are quite large, measuring up to 5 x 12 feet. I call them “narrative structures” because each consists of a network of lines and notations which are meant to convey a story, typically about a recent event of interest to me, like the collapse of a large international bank, trading company, or investment house. One of my goals is to explore the interaction of political, social and economic forces in contemporary affairs.” Mark Lombardi
Government of California by Peter Saul
Design by me
Presentation
Underground Press
Final Major
UNDERGROUND PRESS
I have chosen the graphic styles of the underground press as the editoral presentation for my FMP. And to understand the attititude of the underground press and its radicalness and tackiness, it would be futile not to look into the sixties. My focus on my underground press lies on 1960s history mainly in the U.K. and the U.S.. Although the countercultural movements were different in these two countries. In the mid-1960s, London was home to a significant community of writers, artists, musicians and political activists expressing themselves in alternative or underground magazines such as OZ, first published in Australia before moving to the UK, INK, Frendz or International Times (IT). After a certain amount of research on the '60s, I have felt more affirmed to utilize my research on the underground press in the 60's in my FMP design decisions. It is also my aim to design digest publications (posterzines) that are also political, radical, dramatic just as the underground press in the sixties.
Field of Study
Underground press & Conspiracy
r Project
Context
Conspiracy
CONSPIRACY
In order to have a better understanding of the context I deliver in my FMP I need to understand what conspiracy is. As much as I dislike the word conspiracy as I think there is a “conspiracy” behind the word conspiracy. Certainly, the majority of people probably don’t take conspiracy seriously, the term “conspiracy theory” usually comes of something negative, sometimes far-fetched or fictional, almost as if the governments label anything partly true and damaging to them as a “conspiracy” to make it lose credibility. Perhaps, how the world functions has been shaped in a way that is convenient for the authority sides to run their evil business. What concerned me the most while developing my FMP is how I could raise the awareness of political involvement in our daily life through the perspective of conspiracy, by evaluating how my design could have an impact on society in general I have acknowledged the existence of this post-truth phenomenon in order to have a better understanding of my target audience
https://www.amazon.com/Saucerian-Bulletin-1956-First-issues/dp/B00N58C37M
page 26
History of the 1960s Underground
“ To figure an underground space is to economize the social in particular ways. To produce an underground space is to have read the social—or a social moment or a social product—in some particular way that articulates the dissatisfaction or the unease produced in that reading. Thus, to figure or produce an underground is to have imagined the ground, too, under which one‘s underground forms. ” Stephan Royce Giddens
The 1960s was a unique period when change was rapid and people’s attitudes were challenged by increased affluence, the tensions and uncertainties of the cold war and the growth of mass media and leisure opportunities. The 1960s: the development and differences of what happened socially and culturally between those born before the start of the Second World War and those born afterwards, especially about what is now referred to as the “Counterculture”. But the question raises: What exactly is counterculture? According to Oxford dictionary:
counterculture Noun
A way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the prevailing social norm.
Thus, underground press became the major form of expression of the countercultural movements in the sixties. Like McMillan says, "These papers educated and politicized young people, helped to shore up activist communities, and were the movement’s primary means of internal communication.” The name the Counterculture gave itself at it’s beginning was The Underground, something of a misnomer considering the theatricality and visibility of the movement in the West. Generally speaking, counterculture of the 1960s is an anti-establishment cultural phenomenon that soon branched into different forms of expression, often surpassing the culture/counterculture divide.
page 30
Conspiracy
My decision to design publications on conspiracy rasied many questions such as: however would skepticism of such theories ever be justifies? and what exactly is a conspiracy? According to Stephan Royce Giddens’ essay, the most minimal conception of what counts as a ‘conspiracy theory’ is that it is a theory about a conspiracy: conspiracy theories posit that some conspiracy explains the occurrence of an event. For example, some people believe that there exists a shadow world government, made up of political elites, organisations like the Freemasons, and dynastic families like the Windsors and Rothschilds. Together they decide economic policy, engage in war games and generally plot to make the world better for them at the expense of making it worse for us. I utilised Giddens’ definition of
conspiracy theories as an evidence to support the context of my publications. He believes the most minimal conception of what counts as a conspiracy must satisfy the following three conditions: 1. The Conspirators Condition – There exists (or existed) some set of agents with a plan, 2. The Secrecy Condition – Steps have been taken by the agents to minimise public awareness of what they are up to, and 3. The Goal Condition – Some end is or was desired by the agents.
https://life.spectator.co.uk/articles/the-60s-underground-press-revisited-barry-miles-qa/
page 36
03
OZ (SYDNEY)
History
why the 1960’s? In my dissertation I subscribe to the idea of kitsch becoming much more relevant in postmodernism as the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture started to break down (Gura, 2017:274) . While I was researching on the underground press in the ‘60s, I saw commonalities between the kitsch aesthetic in graphic design and the graphic styles of the ‘60s underground press, such as its controversy, political factors, aggression, excessiveness, involvement of countercultures, etc,. I assume one of the reasons is that the 60’s was the period to transition into postmodernism, and the pattern in graphic communication design started to alter in the post war era. Throughout the process of designing the posterzines I always asked myself these two questions: How can I make my research on the underground press in the ’60s helpful in my design practice? Why do I think that the graphic styles of the underground press is suitable for my FMP? Theoretically speaking I am in-between a Millennial and Gen Z, and researching on the underground press in the ‘60s has definitely been a fascinating journey to me as a creative; it was without a doubt a thrilling era and it brought about the rise of many things as one can easily find. Additionally, I have grown to appreciate the attitude of the ‘60s, I find its radicality and aggression appealing; for instance, in about 1968, the literature showed a sense of violence to such an extent that the writers took to calling their pamphlets “shotguns (McMillian, 2011:31),”
and it got me thinking: How can I transform this aggressive, assertive attitude and integrate it with today’s meta-modernist interpassivity in my FMP? In the late 1960s the underground publications were radical and political, involving the rise of the New Left, countercultures, politics, queer studies, etc, and as a result they drew attention of the local and federal authorities (McMillian, 2011:142), and because of this war between the underground press publishers and the authorities I believe that the aesthetic and the graphic styles of the underground press are suitable for my FMP, I am too a political individual, trying to challenge and question the information given by our governments in our daily live through my FMP.
Underground press in the ‘60s
https://life.spectator.co.uk/articles/the-60s-underground-press-revisited-barry-miles-qa/
“ At the dawn of graphic design history, two movements changed
the face of our society: the International Style - with its rational, industrial and practical ideals - and the Psychedelic Revolution - that freed itself from the rigidity of the mainstream industry. Let’s dive into the rainbow tide that swept over the western world of the Sixties and the revival of the underground press.
”
Matthieu Visentin During the 1960’s, an alternative press emerged that became the voice for youth culture and the era’s social movements. These scrappy publications reported stories the mainstream media would not touch, mobilized anti-war activism, promoted rock and “underground” music, and ultimately played a central role in creating a vibrant 1960’s counter-culture. As a graphic communication student who has been interested in countercultures and subcultures, I gladly took advantage of this opportunity to do research on this particular era. A lot had happened in the ‘60s, it is a period of time that is known for being radical and political, which has much to do with my FMP, too. It is clear in 1960s, the climate for youth-oriented, antiestablishment newspapers had quickly become fertile. The radical journalisr Walt Crowley observed that by the summer of 1966, underground newsheets were “popping up...like mushrooms after a spring rain.” Although the quality of underground press in the ‘60s varied in quality, size, and style, together they documented the movements of New Left, the countercultures, the campus based activism, which stood at the heart of a new society. While mainstream media covered weddings, deaths, sport events and the stock market - as it still does - underground press concentrated on radical politics, psychedelic drugs and religious prophecy. Despite the fact most underground papers drew on the same informational pool as well each other, they were not copies of one another. The underground papers in the ‘60s reflected the diversity of the countercultures, and depending on who the intended target audience was, empasized certain issues over others. In Britain, the countercultural movement was quite the opposite of the countercultural movement in America in 1960s. There was full employment and this this was the first time that young people had any money. They could not afford to buy a car, and the idea of a mortgage did not even occur to people, but they could buy clothes and records and go to concerts. etc.. The biggest cultural change was that young people were much better eduacated than their parents in general. This meant that for many people, their parents couldn’t be their mentors, their children knew so much more. Instead of getting information from their family, they turned to a supermarket of ideas and lifestyles: from radical politics to the Beat Generation – Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac et al – and from the pronouncements of rock and roll figures like John Lennon – to literature and radical philosophy and the questioning of all traditional attitudes.
“Human beings are worth a risk. Peace is erotic. Joy, affirmation, chaos, flowers to the enemy. Political non-violence, psychedelic pacifism, terror to the old Left, innovator to the New”. The sixties often fuctions like a shorthand in contemporary debate, denoting a time of protest and rebellion, a set of easily identified cultural motifis. It was a time when the boundaries between the political and the aesthetics were deliberately blurred.
“ The 1960’s were presented in retrospective as a period of possibilties, where dreams, however ridiculous, could be dreamt and even realised.”
Underground and GI alternative periodicals in Europe between 1965-1975
In the mid-1960s, London was home to a significant community of writers, artists, musicians and political activists expressing themselves in alternative or underground magazines such as OZ, first published in Australia before moving to the UK, INK, Frendz or International Times (IT). Launched in 1966 with a gig headlined by Pink Floyd, and founded by John Hoppy Hopkins, Barry Miles, Jim Haynes and playwright Tom McGarth, International Times is a remarkable barometer of the 1960s and 1970s British underground political debates, musical creativity, avant-garde theatre and psychedelic experiences. With its famous logo featuring the 1920s American silent film star vamp Theda Bara, IT dominated the British underground press until the mid-1970s. The IT offices were located in the basement of the Indica bookshop on Southampton row, the acme of swinging London, the happening place for contemporary artists in the IT vampsixties. As Barry Miles recollects in his book London Calling, the 1960s underground London scene was largely a West End phenomenon. West end London was the focus of alternative and underground embracing “hippies, beats, mystics, madmen, freaks, yippies, crazies, crackpots, communards and anyone who rejects rigid political ideology, and believes that once you have blown your own mind, the Bastille will blow up itself” IT works as an interesting barometer of the new left debates. Politics entered IT with the student protests that were sparking in Paris and Berlin. Issue 29, released in May 1968, featured a translation of an interview with Rudi Dutschke which appeared a couple of months before in the German leftist magazine Konkret (#29, 1968) and, following the London anti-Vietnam rally which turned into a pitched battle with police, a rather hostile open-letter to Mr Tariq Ali written by John Hopkins. Hopkins was inviting Tariq Ali, the rally’s organiser, to read a little bit more on the subject of street fighting and urban guerrilla warfare “or else cop out and start thinking. That’s all you have to do” . However, Despite the introduction of a more political tone and some interest in issues of sexual liberation, IT was hardly the most hard-edged political underground journal when it comes to gay rights, racial equality and women liberation movement.
o l q f n l r q u t h e w t y
IT is an extremely precious underground magazine when it comes to understanding the long sixties, a time of a huge revolution in living standards, relationships and attitudes. IT was also irremediably male-centred and rather sexist. By the mid-1970s IT was financially crippled and closed after 164 issues in 1973. During the 1970s and until the mid-1990s, the famous IT logo reappeared episodically but IT as a journal disappeared entirely in the 1980s at a time when the London underground was literally falling apart. Time Out and Spare Rib were less underground and definitively more political. They took over IT. They gave great testimony to how the 1970s are not to be lampooned and despised as a non-decade.
http://explosivepolitics.com/archive/international-times-archives-voice-of-the-british-underground/
https://depts.washington.edu/moves/altnews_map.shtml
“There will always be a bohemia, a dissenting group, a group of people who challenge the status quo, and a good thing, too, because without people testing the rules and pushing for change you have stasis, a dead society that inevitably decays. Without people pushing for change we would still have children down the mines, women would not have the vote, slavery would be legal and the rest. The counter-culture is out there online, still challenging, still getting up people’s noses.� Barry Miles
https://frieze.com/article/everything-connected-art-and-conspiracy-met-breuer
https://hoodline.com/2017/06/summer-of-love-look-back-the-sf-oracle-newspaper-of-the-counterculture
INTER VIEW by
JONAH RASKIN
/
Typewriters Still Smoking? An Interview with Underground Press Maven John McMillan
An associate professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta, with degrees from Michigan State and Columbia, John McMillan is the author of the best book about the underground press. Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University Press) looks at the past though the lens of the present and the present though the lens of the past. Written with panache and a keen appreciation of rebel journalists and reporters, McMillan’s book has appealed to both students and teachers and elicited praise from Tom Hayden, Susan Brownmiller—the author of a distinguished memoir about the Sixties —and Todd Gitlin, the author of the classic, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. This spring, Columbia University hosts a series of events to commemorate, memorialize and perhaps even abuse 1968. Fittingly, Professor McMillan kicked off the series with a talk in Butler Library in January titled “The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America.” The festivities at Columbia culminate April 27-28, with the return to campus of former student rebels including Mark Rudd. The following interview with McMillan was conducted by email just as he was preparing his talk.
Q: Has it struck you that the phrase “the underground press” was a misnomer since the newspapers weren’t produced, published and distributed clandestinely? A: Yes, the “underground press” was a bit of a misnomer. The overwhelming majority of “underground newspapers” sold openly, at bookstores, newsstands and on the street. Some publications better deserve the underground label. GI publications during the Vietnam War were often published and distributed clandestinely. Fuck You! (A Magazine of the Arts), was a crudely mimeographed, poetry-centered magazine that Ed Sanders published and distributed secretly, in NYC’s East Village, from 1962-1965. You could get it from behind the counter at just a handful of stores. Q: What do you think the phrase “underground press” initially meant to those who worked for it and those who relied on it for information? A: The first underground papers—the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and the East Village Other— appealed to self-styled cultural outlaws, radical intellectuals, beatniks, eccentrics and artists. Underground papers could seem genuinely subversive, openly flouting society’s conventions and, by the late 1960s, they championed the revolutionary overthrow of the U.S. government. Q: Some papers, such as The Oracle, seemed to care as much if not more about the look than the content. The design and the artwork made them a challenge to read and understand. Perhaps that was intentional since the papers were aimed at the cognoscenti. A: Yes, many of the papers associated with the counterculture produced very creatively designed layouts. Prose could be fitted around swirling drawings, and photo collages. And some of the papers used split-fountain printing techniques, which allowed them to blend colorful inks and create beautiful rainbow effects on their pages (no two of which were ever exactly alike). It was rumored that The Oracle received funding from Owsley Stanley, the infamous LSD chemist. Q: I enjoyed The Seed and The Great Speckled Bird, for example, more than The Rat. Do you think it helpful to say that some papers where aimed at “freaks” rather than “hippies”? A: I found the The Rat very interesting, when I was exploring radicalism on NYC’s Lower East Side, which is where The Ratwas produced. But it often had an ugly, angry, macho energy. By the late 1960s, it became harder to distinguish between hippies and politicos. It was even harder to draw precise distinctions between “freaks” and “hippies,” though hippies were supposed to be gentle and loving, whereas “freaks” were more hard-edged and violent. Some of street kids who contributed to The Rat, took speed and clashed with cops. They didn’t have much in common with the flower-power types from the Haight-Ashbury.
f e h j k r w g y o l q f n l r q u t h e w t y h
Q: Looking back, do you think that some papers were better than others? Better written, better designed? A: There was a huge difference between the best and the worst papers. I like Atlanta’s Great Speckled Bird, the (Chicago) Seed, The Rag (from Austin, Texas), the Berkeley Barb (before it got too radical), the Los Angeles Free Press and The Willamette Bridge. Also, Liberation News Service (LNS) —which functioned like a radical alternative to the Associated Press (AP)—did consistently good work. Still, we shouldn’t judge underground newspapers by conventional standards. Almost all of them styled themselves as “community” papers. They were open to whoever wanted to contribute and they were democratically structured. The writings and perspectives of the most talented, and the most experienced underground journalists, didn’t necessarily prevail over the work of those who were less talented, or more amateurish. Most underground press “editors” tended not to do much editing! All this gave the papers an anarchic, freewheeling quality that some people found charming. But that wasn’t for everyone. Q: The first writers to describe the history of the underground press, such as Abe Peck, belonged to the Sixties. You and Blake Slonecker belong to a second wave. Do you think that you and Slonecker saw aspects that the Abe Pecks didn’t see because they were too close and personally involved? A: It was more the case that Slonecker and myself, and a handful of others, have done huge amounts of archival research that Peck, and others, simply did not have a chance to. So, in some respects, we had more and better material to work with. Q: You were the first person whose work I read who distinguished between the 1960s as a chronological decade and “The Sixties” as a state of mind and as a cultural and political phenomenon. What do we gain by seeing the “Long Sixties” as it has come to be known? A: Historians always have to define periods and place parameters on whatever it is they study. We’re always asking, “Where to begin, and where to end?” When I teach courses on the 1960s, I begin in 1955, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, because that seems to signify the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, which catalyzed the New Left. And I end in 1975, with the fall of Saigon, which seems a fitting end of the era we call “The Sixties.” Q: Do you think The Sixties would have happened even if there were no underground newspapers? A: I suspect that a lot of what we associate with The Sixties would have happened even without the underground press. The Civil Rights Movement and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley were already underway when the underground press started in 1965-1966. But the main argument in Smoking Typewriters is that the underground papers helped the movement grow. They would arise in their communities, often in response to local issues or as a product of regional subcultures. The underground papers brought a lot of like-minded people together, and gave them a sense of connection to a larger movement and a cause greater than themselves. They raised democratic expectations and socialized people to become radicals. Q: Were underground newspapers different than the pamphlets and broadsides of previous eras? A: Underground journalists of the 1960s sometimes drew self-serving comparisons between themselves and the pamphleteers of the American Revolution. Pamphlets had the virtue of flexibility; George Orwell once quipped that they need only be “topical, polemical, and short.” After the Port Huron Statement, many more New Left pamphlets,
o l q f n l r q u t h e w t y h
manifestos and broadsides found their way into print. Individuals usually wrote them. They were not the preferred form among young people who wanted to build a movement based on cooperation and democratic participation. The fact that underground newspapers were made collectively was a huge part of their appeal. Q: Historians such as Eric Foner have said that tens of thousands of people going online and registering their displeasure with and rejection of government policies is not as effective in terms of protest as tens of thousands of people actually going into the streets. A: Eric is correct, and I’m surprised we haven’t seen many more mass mobilizations against the Trump Administration. After the great Women’s March last year, I thought they’d become a regular thing. If they were done correctly, I suspect that anti-Trump mass marches could be very effective. Q: How do you feel about social media? A: I’m not a fan. I don’t use Twitter, and my Facebook account is deactivated (mostly for mental health reasons). President Trump seems to get good mileage out of his Twitter account, though I know his tweeting has caused problems. On the other hand, his core supporters seem unshakably loyal. I hate to say it, but maybe his tweets have something to do with that. It’s astonishing to me that his base hasn’t started growing tired of his antics. Q: You’re speaking about the underground press at Columbia on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the student protests on campus in 1968. What do you want today’s generation of undergraduates to take away from your talk? A: It’s not a talk meant to offer lessons to activist undergrads. Nowadays, I think we have far too much amateurishly produced radical and alternative journalism! If any students come to my talk—I hope they do—I’ll try to persuade them to make a habit of reading daily newspapers and prestige magazines, where professionally trained editors and reporters are trying their best to get the news out accurately, and to give the right shape and proportion to the stories they put out. Jonah Raskin wrote for Liberation News Service in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Along with more than 700 protestors he was arrested at Columbia in April 1968 and jailed at “the Tombs” in New York City.
https://frieze.com/article/everything-connected-art-and-conspiracy-met-breuer
page 54
“(I) returne me, and I b experiences finding new easygoing l
Photograph by Philipp
Photograph by David Noble
Swinging London
ed to London because I felt this city was caressing became a new human being with all these visual s I had in London,” he said. “Young people were w ways of expressing themselves with peace and an life — you know, “make love not war.” ”
pe Le Tellier
Frank Habicht
Swinging City: A Cultural Geography of London, 1950-1974 This book is a great resource to have a glimpse of the history of London in 1960s. Published under the auspices of Ashgate’s Re-Materialising Cultural Geography series, Simon Rycroft’s Swinging City tunes into a broad range of cultural sources to construct an experiential portrait of London during its international moment in the mid-1960s. This is not a book about London in a literal sense. As Rycroft admits early on, the style, aesthetics and social order of swinging London had a global geographical history, so much so that many of the innovations with which London of the 1960s became associated were in fact not of London. British aspects of the swinging city were largely a set of compromises and meetingshalfway with American culture at large. Rycroft offers a compelling slate of mainly literary sources that fed into the ideas of the London counterculture (ideas that were also present, in less rigorous ways, during the largely commercialised and publicly hyped moment of 1966-1967). He demonstrates how the Beat generation (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) became an inspired source of freethinking and bohemian living. The look that defined swinging London was also sourced in American (as well as broadly modernist and international) influences in the design and art worlds. This title works with two contrasting imaginings of 1960s London - the one of the excess and comic vacuousness of ‘Swinging London’, the other of the radical and experimental cultural politics generated by the city’s counter-culture. The book argues that these disparate threads cohere around a shared imagination. http://literarylondon.org/london-journal/autumn2013/flanagan.html
04 page 58
Focus
The blacklisted American journalist Tom Forcade & my FMP My research on the underground press began with this certain individual who has inspired me a lot in my FMP and who I want to be as a creative. An absolute underground press enthusiast and cannabis right activists Tom Forcade who underscored great dedication and enthusiasm for underground newspapers.
but his first and earliest underground magazine Orpheus— “a radical literary magazine from which he operated on a 1946 Chevy school bus he drove around the state to avoid police harassment (afka, Unknown),” an underground digest in which Forcade amassed a large collection of radical tabloids from across the U.S. (McMillian, 2011:144).
Perhaps this is not a name a lot of us are familiar with, but his works are well-known around the globe. Forcade founded an underground magazine called Orpheus, ran the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS) for many years, founded High Times magazine, contributed to fund the Yippie Newspapers, and was the first activist to be documented using pieing as a form of protest (Vinciguerra, 2000). His life was full of controversy, bravery, shockingness, adventures, surprises and achievements, though he decided to end his life by gunshot to the head in 1967 (Blackbird, 2018).
There’s not much I could find about this particular magazine, but the graphic styles and the aesthetics of the magazine have influenced my design decisions in terms of the techniques, the typesetting and layouts, the colours, and the metamodernist approach I chose. I appreciate the kitsch aesthetics of this magazine— its tackiness, excessiveness, involvement of countercultures, strong appeal, etc,, this magazine Orpheus fits perfectly into the criteria of kitsch which I gathered for my dissertation.
Forcade’s life has inspired me as a designer. I also dream to be a revolutionary like himself, except I am not suicidal. In an interview before his death, he described himself as a “social architect, taking mega concepts and make them work in mass and in macro scale,” and to me that’s also my ideals of being a creative in the world— a progressive individual who is able to shape their surroundings and the way people think. Through the story of Tom Forcade, I had a clearer idea of what kind of work I wanted to deliver to the audience in my FMP. Forcade’s work and journey was constantly on my mind when I was designing the outcome of my FMP. It is yet not his most-well known invention High Times that inspired me most,
Through the process of finding out about Forcade’s work and life in the underground publishing world and even his personal interest in conspiracy theories I have felt particularly inspired, and such historical context as well supports the evaluation and reasoning of my FMP and this critical reflection. It is also important to add that it was not my intention to design underground publications for the audience in the ‘60s, nor was I designing underground publications that look like the ones in the ‘60s; however, by researching on the underground press in the ‘60s and learning why these people did what they did, I have become more affirmed in the reasoning of my FMP.
“I function on a conceptual level. I usually confer with two or three of my associates during the day, make a few phone calls, read a lot, do a little editing and writing, a little business. I work hard every day. I take responsibility for everything.� Tom Forcade
https://www.etsy.com/listing/719165582/orpheus-magazine-volume-2-number-2
https://www.afka.net/Mags/Orpheus.htm
Orpheus magazine & My FMP the Conspiracy digest
Through the communication in my FMP I attempt to induce a belief to the audience, an almost anti-government belief that we lack certain degree of scepticism in the information we receive every day. Yet, with the kitsch aesthetic in my FMP there seems to have a sense of humour and disingenuousness, making my publications look unserious and fictional, but does that make my communication ineffective? I don’t know the answer myself but I like what Yuval Noah Harari writes for TED, “I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion — just the opposite. Fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit (Yuval Noah Harari, 2018).” Forcade’s work and journey was constantly on my mind when I was designing the outcome of my FMP. It is yet not his most-well known invention High Times that inspired me most, but his first and earliest underground magazine Orpheus— “a radical literary magazine from which he operated on a 1946 Chevy school bus he drove around the state to avoid police harassment (afka, Unknown),” an underground digest in which Forcade amassed a large collection of radical tabloids from across the U.S. (McMillian, 2011:144). Coordinating the syndicate was just one of Tom’s endeavors. The floating psychedelic periodical Orpheus was his pet project—the forerunner to HIGH TIMES. There’s not much I could find about this particular magazine, but the graphic styles and the aesthetics of the magazine have influenced my design decisions in terms of the techniques, the typesetting and layouts, the colours, and the metamodernist approach I chose. I appreciate the kitsch aesthetics of this magazine— its tackiness, excessiveness, involvement of countercultures, strong appeal, etc,, this magazine Orpheus fits perfectly into the criteria of kitsch which I gathered for my dissertation. Through the process of finding out about Forcade’s work and life in the underground publishing world and even his personal interest in conspiracy theories I have felt particularly inspired, and such historical context as well supports the evaluation and reasoning of my FMP and this critical reflection. It is also important to add that it was not my intention to design underground publications for the audience in the ‘60s, nor was I designing underground publications that look like the ones in the ‘60s; however, by researching on the underground press in the ‘60s and learning why these people did what they did, I have become more affirmed in the reasoning of my FMP.
What concerned me the most while developing my FMP is how I could raise the awareness of political involvement in our daily life through the perspective of conspiracy, by evaluating how my design could have an impact on society in general I have acknowledged the existence of this post-truth phenomenon in order to have a better understanding of my target audience as well as Forcade’s target audience. When Forcade was asked why he did what he did, he simply said, “For the good of society,” and that as well is the intention of my FMP as I explain in the first part of the critical reflection. The High Times issue is also another evidence of what Forcade’s work and my FMP have in common, though I would like to think my design is the metamodernist version of today’s underground press. To explain further, in my dissertation I shortly wrote about the relation between kitsch and metamodernism, exploring how because of today’s living condition— a digital reality we live in, people somehow have started to look for a sense of sincerity, looking for meaning and apathy within the postmodern practice which makes metamodernism, a mixture of modernism and postmodernism. Instead of designing my posterzines like the issue of High Times on conspiracy in July 1976, which has a big image of Illuminati sitting right in the centre of the cover and big conspiracy questions like Who shot JFK? Who rules America? I had a different approach by treating the conspiracy as facts in my publications, a somehow more subtle, kitsch, parodic approach by, for example, utilising a picture of Bush and the lyrics of one of Britney Spear’s songs or implying that there’s a secret laboratory somewhere in the world producing armies or clones in the first issue of my posterzine.
Orpheus magazine by Tom Forcade
05 page 70
Case studies - Visuals
The ’60s underground “counterculture” attempted to unite many disparate elements—radical students, left-over beatniks, apolitical hippies, “street people” (the homeless), civil rights activists and rebellious adolescents—into an alternative society that was “counter,” or against, everything that middle-class society had stood for.
First Issue of OZ (Sydney)
OZ March 1968 Pornography of Violence (London)
https://ro.uow.edu.au/ozlondon/
OZ March 1968 Pornography of Violence (London)
page 76
OZ
OZ magazine (LONDON) was published in London between 1967 and 1973 under the general editorship of Richard Neville and later also Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis. Martin Sharp was initially responsible for art and graphic design. Oz magazine (SYDNEY) was first published in Sydney in 1963 under the general editorship of Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp. Taking a pen nib to the eye of Australian conservatism, the magazine covered topics such as homosexuality, abortion, inequality, police brutality, the White Australia policy and the Vietnam War.
Nexus is an Australian-based bi-monthly alternative news magazine. It covers geopolitics and conspiracy theories; health issues, including alternative medicine; future science; the unexplained, including UFOs; Big Brother; and historical revisionism. Nexus has published in-depth articles on health, suppressed news, consciousness, ancient mysteries, future science, unexplained, free energy and much more, from a genuine alternative news and information magazine worldwide for over 30 years. The magazine was first formed in 1986 by Ramses H. Ayana as a quarterly publication covering human rights, the environment, alternative health, women’s rights, New Age, Free Energy, alternative science and the paranormal. Co-founder of the magazine was Jenni Elf and both founders had previously worked on the independent Australian magazine Maggie’s Farm. R. Ayana now publishes sites new illuminati and Her(m) etic Hermit. Nexus was handed on to Duncan Roads in 1990, continuing a long tradition of keeping alternative publications alive in Australia, regardless of monetary considerations. Following the handover, the topics covered by Nexus were changed and it moved to a bi-monthly publication schedule. Duncan Roads and his partner Catherine Simons have produced the magazine since then.
NEXUS
https://nexusmagazine.com/?v=3d9975706be3
page 82
06
Poster by Leander Eisenmann
Literary Review
Do we live in the age of post-truth? In most cases the term “conspiracy theory” usually comes off as something negative. Some may say conspiracy theories are exploited by the governments as some sort of distraction or cover-up to smooth the way for actual governmental wrongdoings, or maybe that is a conspiracy theory, too. Perhaps, it is not the technology that is causing the transition of this post-truth era. Like the art professor Audrey Bennett says in her essay, “ The visual communicator cannot shape the audience’s belief without first understand them (Bennett, 2006:19).” The well-know historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari gives me a different insight of my target audience, he believes that humans have always lived in the age of post truth. In fact, Homo sapiens is a post-truth species according to his belief, and this theory can be evidently traced back to the origin of religions (Yuval Noah Harari, 2018). Through the communication in my FMP I attempt to induce a belief to the audience, an almost anti-government belief that we lack certain degree of scepticism in the information we receive every day. Yet, with the kitsch aesthetic in my FMP there seems to have a sense of humour and disingenuousness, making my publications look unserious and fictional, but does that make my communication ineffective? I don’t know the answer myself but I like what Yuval Noah Harari writes for TED, “I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion — just the opposite. Fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit (Yuval Noah Harari, 2018).”
Conspiracy in the age of post-truth It has never been my intention to associate post-truth politics with conspiracy, yet, I am aware in most cases the term “conspiracy theory” usually comes off as something negative. Some may say conspiracy theories are exploited by the governments as some sort of distraction or cover-up to smooth the way for actual governmental wrongdoings, or maybe that is a conspiracy theory, too. Perhaps, it is not the technology that is causing the transition of this post-truth era. Like the art professor Audrey Bennett says in her essay, “ The visual communicator cannot shape the audience’s belief without first understand them (Bennett, 2006:19).” The well-know historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari gives me a different insight of my target audience, he believes that humans have always lived in the age of post truth. In fact, Homo sapiens is a post-truth species according to his belief, and this theory can be evidently traced back to the origin of religions (Yuval Noah Harari, 2018). Spreading conspiracy theories for political ends is hardly new, it is as old as politics itself. The last decade, however, has seen an explosion of such activity - and it is continuing to intensify. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, allegations of an international Jewish conspiracy were often based on the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a fraudulent document that was widely circulated and believed. Such stories helped set the preconditions for the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism, which also used emerging communication technology such as radio and cinema to spread such paranoia and hatred. Disinformation and propaganda were serious problems throughout history. Yuval Noah Harari says that, “Your attention is captured by a sensational headline and is then sold to advertisers and politicians. In this battle for attention, there is little incentive to safeguard the truth,” and that is why in this post-truth world, or to be more exact, in this world conquered by a post-truth species, conspiracy is at risk becoming the new currency of post-truth politics.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/53685483/A-Post-Truth-Manifesto
A Post-Truth Manifesto by Finn Mullan
“The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. � Yuval Noah Harari
“I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion — just the opposite. Fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit.” Yuval Noah Harari
“Is God Dead?” cover from April 8, 1966
https://ro.uow.edu.au/ozlondon/
“Is Truth Dead?” cover from April 3, 2017
07 page 92
Conclusion
To summarise this introspective researchbook, by evaluating how my research has influenced my FMP I have a better understanding of the role of research in my design practice. The field of graphic design has developed a reputation of being an intuition-fueled practice and having this intuition-based nature over time (Rand, 1993:45); however, without research I cannot imagine how my FMP would look like. Without research I would indubitably be poorly-informed and would not have found out the format I chose for my FMP—Posterzine which reads like a magazine but can be folded out into an A1 poster is not only the productions of People of Prints, but the format itself has a history with Felix Dennis who worked at OZ magazine. By designing and organizing this researchbook I understand what I failed to research more in-depth in my dissertation, but meanwhile I somehow have learnt to know myself better as a designer, having to write critically on my design practice and how my primarily and secondary research had an influence on the outcome of my FMP. Furthermore, I have also realized that I actually enjoy writing and I aspire to improve my academic writing in the future by writing on a regular basis and reading a lot more. I hope in the near future I will progress onto a MA programme where I can refine my design practice and write about design and art as well. Eventually, perhaps I can live a life in the creative industry like Tom Forcade as he said in his last interview, “ I function on a conceptual level. I usually confer with two or three of my associates during the day, make a few phone calls, read a lot, do a little editing and writing, a little business. I work hard every day. I take responsibility for everything (Vocal, 2016).�
“We can ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood.�
Georges Bataille
08 page 98
Personal Reflection
At the end of my FMP, I understand that everything is for sure connected. As a designer, our role is to shape the way people think. It is our responsibility to make the world a fairer place. I have always been interested in how I, as a graphic communicator can possibly shape my surroundings through my design; in this presumably metamodernist era, the world seems more complicated than ever with fast changing patterns in communications. It is not new that throughout history artists and designers have voiced themselves through their work to oppose political corruptions, the hidden power of our governments, etc. There was an exhibition at the MET called Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy (2019) which is the first major exhibition to address this provocative topic featuring seventy works by thirty artists (Fox, 2018). Although the intentions of these art projects about conspiracy might vary, I am very intrigued by how artists and designers can possibly make changes through their work. In my opinion, to become a graphic communicator is to change my surroundings and shape the way people think; I question the information I get every day in this digital fast changing age, and I wanted to encourage the audience to experience an alternate reality that I constantly have my mind on— the world of conspiracy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2020/06/
The Atlantic
Bibliography Fox, Dan (2018) Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy at the Met Breuer https:// frieze.com/article/everything-connected-art-and-conspiracy-met-breuer (Accessed on 20.03.20) Lucarelli, Fosco (2012) Mark Lombardi’s Narrative Structures and Other Mappings of Power Relations http://socks-studio.com/2012/08/22/mark-lombardi/ (Accessed on 10.04.20) History.com Editors (2017) Black Panthers https://www.history.com/topics/civil-rightsmovement/black-panthers (Accessed on 20.04.20) Gura, Judith (2017) Postmodern Design Complete London:Thames & Hudson Khalaj, Gabriella (2019) Thor’ actor Isaac Kappy dies in Arizona at age 42 https://www. usatoday. com/story/life/people/2019/05/15/thor-actor-isaac-kappy-dies-after-jumping-offarizona-bridge/3687012002/ McMillian, John (2011) Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, Oxford University Press Vinciguerra, Thomas (2000) Take Sugar, Eggs, Beliefs . . . And Aim https://www.nytimes. com/2000/12/10/weekinreview/take-sugar-eggs-beliefs-and-aim.html (Accessed on 20.04.20) Blackbird (2018) The Strange Life And High Times Of Tom Forcade https://blackbirdgo.com/ discover/high-times-tom-forcade/ (Accessed on 20.04.20) Afka (Unknown) Zappa At The-Rock-And-Roll https://www.afka.net/Mags/Orpheus. htm(Accessed on 20.04.20) Rudrum, David and Stavris, Nicholas (2015) Supplanting the Postmodern London: Bloomsbury Academic Bennett, Audrey ‘Introduction: The Rise of Research in Graphic Design’ In: Design Studies pp.19 Rand, Paul (1993) Design, form, and chaos, Yale University Press Yuval Noah Harari (2018) Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species. https://ideas.ted.com/are-we-living-in-a-post-truth-era-yes-but-thatsbecause-were-a-post-truth-species/ (Accessed on 10.05.20) Vocal (2016) Tom Forcade Interview https://vocal.media/potent/tom-forcade-interview (Accessed on 20.05.18) JONAH RASKIN (2018) Typewriters Still Smoking? An Interview with Underground Press Maven John McMillan https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/15/typewriters-still-smoking-aninterview-with-underground-press-maven-john-campbell-mcmillan/ (Accessed on 20.05.18) Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet (2016) International Times Archives – Voice of the British underground http://explosivepolitics.com/archive/international-times-archives-voice-of-thebritish-underground/ (Accessed on 20.05.18)
Will Gore (2017) The 60s underground press revisited: Barry Miles Q&A https://life.spectator. co.uk/articles/the-60s-underground-press-revisited-barry-miles-qa/ (Accessed on 20.04.20) Matthieu Visentin (2017) The underground press of the 60s http://www.the-offbeats.com/ articles/the-underground-press-1960-towards-a-graphic-revolution-matthieu-visentin/ (Accessed on 10.04.20) Kathryn Bromwich (2017) Covering the counterculture: the 60s underground press – in pictures https://www.theguardian.com/media/gallery/2017/sep/23/covering-thecounterculture-the-60s-underground-press-in-pictures (Accessed on 10.04.20) The Atlantic (2020) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2020/06/ (Accessed on 10.05.20) The Guardian (2016) Return to Oz: the most controversial magazine of the 60s goes online https://www.theguardian.com/media/shortcuts/2016/mar/06/return-oz-most-controversialmagazine-60s-goes-online (Accessed on 10.05.20) Meredith Blake (2011) Ask an Academic: The Sixties Underground Press https://www. newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ask-an-academic-the-sixties-underground-press (Accessed on 10.05.20) Alisa Scerrato (2017) Summer Of Love Look Back: The SF Oracle, Newspaper Of The Counterculture https://hoodline.com/2017/06/summer-of-love-look-back-the-sf-oraclenewspaper-of-the-counterculture (Accessed on 10.05.20) Yuval Noah Harari (2018) Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species. https://ideas.ted.com/are-we-living-in-a-post-truth-era-yes-but-thatsbecause-were-a-post-truth-species/ (Accessed on 10.05.20) Deborah Dundas (2018) Yuval Noah Harari on big data, a post-truth world and why you need to meditate — now https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2018/09/01/yuval-noahharari-on-big-data-a-post-truth-world-and-why-you-need-to-meditate-now.html (Accessed on 10.05.20) Peter Apps (2019) COLUMN-Conspiracy theories risk becoming new currency of post-truth politics: Peter Apps https://www.reuters.com/article/apps-conspiracy/column-conspiracytheories-risk-becoming-new-currency-of-post-truth-politics-peter-apps-idUSL5N25I3XI NEXUS https://nexusmagazine.com/?v=3d9975706be3 (Accessed on 10.05.20) NIKI D’ANDREA (2014) Over the Counterculture https://www.phoenixmag.com/2014/10/01/ over-the-counterculture/ (Accessed on 10.05.20) OZ Magazine (London) https://www.wussu.com/zines/oz08_10.htm(Accessed on 10.05.20) https://recollection.com.au/collections/oz-magazine