More Noise Please by brian ostroff

RE NOI NOISE

THANK YOU TO MY INVALUABLE MENTORS: SEAN ADAMS, SAMANTHA FLEMMING, STEPHEN SERRATO, TREVOR GREENLEAF,CONSTANTIN CHOPIN, KJELL VAN SICE

TO OWEN JOSEPH OSTROFF. YOU WERE 1 WHEN I STARTED AND 3 WHEN I FINISHED. YOU ARE A RIDICULOUSLY AMAZING BIG BOY.

The Essence of Stimulation cranking it up.

MORE NOISE PLEASE brian ostroff graduate thesis artcenter college of design spring 2020

steven jesse bernstein, 1992.

MORE NOISE PLEASE. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I live on a street where there are many, many cars and trucks and factories that pump and bang and grind all night and day. It is a miracle that I can write poetry or sleep or talk on the telephone or that my lover will visit me here. There is so much noise. Every few minutes a jet in comes in low or a prop job swings down like a kamikaze. There is an airport at the end of my street. The New Age people say that you choose all these things, choose the cars and trucks and airplanes, me and all of my neighbors. Well, maybe this is true, maybe we can't live without all this God damn noise. Maybe I need the noise to write poems, make love, and eat. I'm going to hang a sign out my window that says More Noise Please, or Thank You For Making Noise! Maybe we are the kind of people who need to have what we don't want just to get along, to do the basic things. Myself, I could not sleep last night and I could not close the window, either. I tried to tear the window out of its frame and put it in a closed position, banging and ripping with a hammer and a screwdriver, standing on the window ledge in my socks, three stories up. But the window wouldn't come out, the factory was screaming and the trucks were rumbling and the whole world was praying for silence and it was up to me to shut the window and I couldn't get it down. I was just making more noise. A jet went by and all the people waved. "Thanks!," I yelled as the shift changed without a lull in production at the big plant across the street. The workers lined up at the bus stop, watching me with my hammer in the window. I put sponge stoppers in my ears but I can't stand those things for more than a few minutes. Finally I put my head between two pillows. It is the same every night. I love it. I need it. 'Without you I could not live! I would not have written this poem!,' I yell, the window dangling half on, half off.â&#x20AC;?

STEVEN JESSE BERNSTEIN Prison . SubPop Records . April 1992

CONTENTS 13

INTRODUCT

the essence of s

“IT IS A MIRACLE THAT I CAN WRITE POETRY OR SLEEP OR TALK ON THE TELEPHONE OR THAT MY LOVER WILL VISIT ME HERE. THERE IS SO MUCH NOISE.”

more noise please, prison. steven jesse bernstein, 1992.

453

BIBLIOGR

103

break this design the erasing machine collage theory. laszlo k. gefin

TION

stimulation

173 184. 267.

FRAGMENTATION

NOISE building a labl in defense of distraction. sam anderson

RAPHY

49 51. 81.

X NOTES

LINEAR FOCUS the direction of learning the deepening page. nicholas carr

285

412. 416.

the clumper templated

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essence.

INTRODUCTION

losing myself while trying to make sense of it all.

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THESIS STATEMENT

More Noise Please: The Essence Of Stimulation

1. early saxon alphabet. john fortescue.

3. television advertisement. 1939.

2. mri of brain activity.

introduction

5. iphone 11. 2019. 4. box television. 1970.

6. card catalog. 1925.

Through written word, deep, linear thought has evolved and been upended over the past two decades by screen based technology. The pace of information, and its fragmented disruptions, are stunting our creative output by limiting our abilities to form memories and retain knowledgeâ&#x20AC;Ś

7. notification bell.

deteriorating the essence of who we are by encouraging us to rely on a network of easily accessible, external information. 8. micro sd card. 2020.

9. google. 1998.

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1. don't listen. brian ostroff, 1998.

2. self inflicted. brian ostroff, 1997.

2. eat your peanuts. brian ostroff, 1995.

I used to sit in coffee shops, pool halls, arcades, diners, parks, fields, city ledges, art museums, my bedroom, the kitchen table, classrooms, friendâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s houses, and strangerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s apartments drawing image after image from a flow of ideas that I could never keep up with. I would glance up and down from my sketchbook, trying to collect, document, and visually communicate the social patterns I observed. My sole distractions were occasional conversa4. listen to yourself talk. brian ostroff, 2003.

tions, unexpected outbursts, my pen running out

13. chicken legs. brian ostroff, 2002.

of ink, or accidentally spilling something in my lap. Experiences were superfluous then; the connective tissue between me, my art, and the world. Ideas flowed easily and effortlessly, often built from the smallest of interactions, or occurrences. A phrase muttered across the room that was out of sync, or something I had heard time and time again. Mannerisms and personal style spoke volumes to

5. exchange. brian ostroff, 1999.

me about the ways people perceived themselves

12. thinking. brian ostroff, 1994.

and, in turn, the ways they were perceived. Throughout my time at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was lucky enough to practice these skills in upscale bars with a mentor, Gregory 11. infecshin. brian ostroff, 1999.

6. your group. brian ostroff, 1998.

7. cut off my arm. brian ostroff, 1995.

8. i'm a salad. brian ostroff, 1996.

9. the other brain. brian ostroff, 1997.

10. behligerent. brian ostroff, 2000.

14. narcissus. brian ostroff, 2002.

29. human. brian ostroff, 2001.

28. me?

26. nastiness. brian ostroff, 1998.

27. where are my pants? brian ostroff, 2000.

25. freedom. brian ostroff, 1995. 24. confused. brian ostroff, 1997.

15. ka-ka. brian ostroff, 1994.

23. polese. brian ostroff, 1997.

16. leg muscles, anterior. brian ostroff, 2005.

22. litracee. brian ostroff, 1997.

17. birth. brian ostroff, 1998.

18. what he likes. brian ostroff, 1996.

30. liqqeur. brian ostroff. 1996.

19. deserving. brian ostroff, 2001.

21. dashed. brian ostroff, 1999.

20. memor... brian ostroff, 1998.

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Warmack, a.k.a. Mr. Imagination. He would introduce me to the wealthy patrons and I would do drawings for drinks, based on given words and a probed personality. These activities were like social brain exercises, uninterrupted by the buzzing of cell phones, a blaring television, or open desktops dinging with email. Live performances by Link Wray, De La Soul, Aretha Franklin, and more existed in the environments either further inspiring or fading into the backgrounds. I often got lost in the napkins that held my deep focus and the tip of my pen. Today my creative processes have changed considerably. When given the opportunity to propose an idea for a thesis topic, I struggle to find my voice. My mind was empty. I began exploring options on the computer from other institutions googling phrases Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m sure most graduate graphic design students investigate. Nothing seemed to connect. I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find anything appropriate, to appropriate. I began researching subcultures and countercultures, as well as the sociology of deviationâ&#x20AC;Ś due to my interests in history and pushing boundaries. I jumped to Design Theory

introduction

trying to find connections that would pull information together. Original ideas seemed beyond the horizon. Creativity seemed elusive. Ideas are not as readily available as they once were. I find myself sitting inside, scrolling through the Internet for inspiration. Minutes into my research, I open my email, check the news, or find myself on YouTube. My phone might vibrate a few times and I find that I am sidetracked with a text stream, or a conversation. My thoughts are broken by distraction. I am limited to a constant way of skimming over material rather than wading down a stream of deep contemplative thought. I become stressed, which adds to the mental coronary. My watch ticks. The ticking gets louder. I float in and out of interruption hunting for inspiration, for information I hope to be able to relate. With my eyes glued to a light bulb and my mind fragmented by technological noise I began to realize my age wasn't affecting my creativity, rather the culprits were my distracted processing, reliance on easily accessible information, and a lack of daily exposure, or consistent, inspirational experiences.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Our growing achievements, no matter how primal, would not have mattered, if we did not realize we had to preserve our banks of knowledge. â&#x20AC;&#x153; 8. use it, or lose it. 1. jonestown. 1978.

I began researching creativity and neuroscience. I read about axon and dendrites, synapses and neurotransmitters; the ways neuropathways form and atrophy over hours, weeks, months, and years. History well beyond my own held arguments that brought expanded insight, and surprising revelations. 2. binary data.

If we are not animals, then what are we? We are inherently stuck in a mode that prioritizes our survival. To do this, our fatty, miraculous brains are wired in a non-linear fashion; we are programmed to be distracted. From our early days as hunters and gatherers, we had to be aware of our surroundings. A noise, a flash of color, a change in scent

9. ac wiring diagram.

would alert our senses of potential danger. We remained in this predominantly external 3. india. c. 6500 bce.

state for centuries and our populations grew. We made new discoveries that aided in increased mortality rates. Our distracted states made us problem-solvers. We looked

4. taki 183.

7. beja nomads.

5. phaistos disk.

6. ideograms.

introduction

10. sentence diagram.

11. phoenician alphabet.

for disturbances in our environments and focused on them. Without this ability a lurking tiger may have ended multiple lives, slight hue differences in berries could have been the death of an entire family, and mutations towards weaker traits may have sent us on a trajectory towards distinction. Our growing achievements, no matter how primal, would not have mattered, had we not realized we had to preserve our banks

12. earth from the apollo. 1969.

of knowledge. We understood the vastness of information and knew we had to store our explorations and discoveries, to give our offspring equal if not better lives. Around 9000 B.C.E., we began scrawling pictograms on anything we could. With many populations being nomadic, stick figures, hand prints, forms of animals, and other recognizable images were used to commu-

"Spoken language was not enough to maintain the survival of our species." 13. we always need more.

nicate to the masses. These illustrations signified ideas such as hunting grounds, warnings, simple stories, and boundaries.

“Oral traditions arose, which took our minds to other places...”

15. imagination land. 16. demosthenes. 384–322 bce

14. darwin’s finches. 1947.

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Pictograms became ideograms; a more symbolic pictorial language. Instead of the images representing exactly what it depicted, a pictogram symbolized an idea; expanding language and affecting thinking. We began to interpret our environments rather than ape our worlds. Roughly 4000 years later, pictograms evolved into logograms, which simplified and systematized pictograms into symbols that could be strung together to write even more descriptive documentation. In other parts of the world, alphabets developed turning letters into words and then sentences. The neurological transformations that changed our primitive ways of understanding, interpreting, communicating, storing, and experiencing the world was evolving; our brains were evolving. Oral traditions arose, allowing our minds to travel to other places, slowly rewiring our individual and collective consciousness â&#x20AC;&#x201C; expanding our awareness beyond known hunting grounds, familiar walls, or protective fencing. Around 1000 C.E., words and sentences were strung together in long

introduction

lines known as scriptura continua - a precursor to paragraphs, word spacing, and punctuation. The ability to twist thoughts together, and record them on something other than stone, moved writing from oral traditions towards reference material, historical documentation, and propaganda. Scriptura continua was difficult to read leaving its transcription and oration to specialists. The use of scribes inadvertently censored personal and private authorship, which limited what was recordedâ&#x20AC;Ś until after the collapse of the Roman Empire,in approximately 480 C.E. Words were soon spaced out, broken into sentences, paragraphs, and chapters using syntax that would reorganize the coding of language. Cognitive strain was lessened allowing for information to be absorbed faster... ultimately, initiating complex changes in the circuitry of our brains. These changes allowed us to dedicate more mind power to comprehension while disciplining a new mental focus. Black words were arranged on a white page eliminating any distractions. We became deeply involved

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;The act of silent reading rewired our brains from a fragmented, distracted, non-linear awareness into linear modes of thought and comprehension. The ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, represents a strange anomaly in the history of our psychological and applied evolution; measurably changing our DNA.â&#x20AC;?

introduction

8. genetics.

1. the velveteen rabbit. margery williams bianco, 1922.

7. human evolution. 2. fragmentation and regeneration in planaria.

3. distracted driving. 6. batman and his elephant. 9. titian’s workshop. c. 1543

COMPRENDE 4. it includes.

27 5. mr. miyagi. “focus, daniel san!”

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9. atomic bomb. bikini atoll. 1946–1958. 1. eastern bangkok, outer ring road.

with this form of entertainment, which tricked our brains into thinking what we were reading was our reality. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs nurtured experiential neurology. Particles traveling between our neurotransmitters made this a reality indistinguishable from tangible practice. The advent of the printing press caused broad cultural change by shifting communal

“We have reverted to distractions, to non-linear, external thought processes...” 8. simian regression.

development to individual, creative pursuits. Thanks to Aldus Manutius, books became smaller and cheaper. As in all developments, a reduction in scale contributed to price 2. amida. celestial buddha.

reduction, availability, and wide spread use. Knowledge and perspective spread further reducing our innate, or reptilian, modes of basic survival. The act of silent reading rewired our brains from a fragmented, distracted, non-linear awareness into linear modes of thought and comprehension. The ability to focus on a sin-

7. do not touch downed power lines.

gle task, relatively uninterrupted, represents 3. concrete wet dump.

“Buzz, crack, ding, buzz!” 28

4. dial-up connection. 5. birth of the internet. 1989.

6. we have stolen your wallet.

introduction

a strange anomaly in the history of our psychological evolution; measurably altering our DNA. We became more entrenched in our creative thoughts. Our wiring for problem-solving morphed as comprehension of ourselves and our worlds continued to grow. Ideas were shared expanding our imaginations during the Renaissance, honing our rational thinking through Enlightenment, garnering inventive minds of the Industrial Revolution, and creating subversive approaches in what became known as Modernism. We became deep thinkers growing interconnected knowledge riding, on thoroughfares of ideas brought to us by authors who lacked inhibition and the restrictions prescribed by scribes. The slow drip. The under-stimulation that books have offered cemented knowledge, highlighting and prompting intellectual pursuits and inventiveness. 550 years of growing, zen-like trances, and then: Buzz. Crack. Ding! Buzz. The Internet was born. We have been rewired again. Our modes of mass communication have shifted and so too have

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The slow drip... that books offered cemented knowledge...â&#x20AC;? 10. dromology.

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our neuropathways. Pathways that mold our mental strengths and weaknesses collectively and as individuals . Information comes at us fast and steady with a regular flow of interruptions from beeping notifications, buzzing cell phones, addictions to social media, and all too important email. We have reverted to distractions, to non-linear, external thought processes, ways of operating that have never been far from familiar. Only this time our brains are wandering along a never-ending bombardment of electrical excitement they have not traveled prior. Our brains are not able to process this onslaught of information biologically. The massive influx of fragmented images and statements are impossible for our minds to gather, hold, and use. Our working memory only allows roughly 2 to 4 pieces of information to be processed and then stored over a length of time. Memorization is far more than a means of storage. It is the first step in synthesis, a process that leads to deeper and more personal understanding and eventually application.

1. catapult.

2. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz. buzz.

introduction

6. electric!! 7. affordable onslaught. $1.75.

Coupled with cognitive overloadâ&#x20AC;Ś the distractions and ease of accessibility inherent in screen based media cause our experiences to fade as fast as the electricity fizzes from our neurons. We lose our abilities to associate and contrast ideas because we do not store and maintain them internally. 8. where did i leave my phone?

What is left is knowledge and memory stored on external, mechanical, devicesâ&#x20AC;Ś In turn erasing and disintegrating our individual 5. nonlinear relationships.

networks of knowledge and the experiences necessary to think deeply and create intrinsically. Our memories are more than gained knowledge and visceral involvement. They are the essence of the unique self, a way of creating unique ideas. Without them what is our thinking made of?

4. i own your time.

When we, as designers, become used to writing down the thoughts of others, we become less dependent on the contents of our own memories. We reiterate what exists while erasing the personal... the visceral.

31 3. validate my existence.

11. exile.

10. malfunction.

9. synthesisâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;organic chemistry

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In doing so, we succumb to the “pleasures” of non-linear immediacy, negating processes that expand our approaches and inform our potential outcomes. In other words we become used to copying and/or creating less thoughtful, less connected, or out of context, images. Leading me to question: As researchers, thinkers, and packagers of culture are we really preserving and doing justice to the essence of the subject, or are we just creating postmodern collages and perpetuating the amplification of experiential noise? If the essence of a subject can be lost, did it matter in the first place? Does context really matter? Do audiences understand the historical references due to perpetual fragmentation? Does the power of a designer’s intuition negate market research? Is design strategy a way to market the need for graphic designers, or is it truly an avenue to analyze and market to targeted audiences? What do audiences really notice? If there is a market for “things” that people recognize? What truly sets “things” apart? Does the compression of time and the need for immediacy change our processes in such a way that

introduction

â&#x20AC;&#x153;As researchers, thinkers, and packagers of culture are we really preserving and doing justice to the essence of the subject, or are we just creating postmodern collages and perpetuating the amplification of experiential noise.â&#x20AC;?

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“Is creativity affected by our current ways of absorbing information?” 54. high school classroom.

5. creativity is affected by everything.

1. proto eto. alexander rodchenko, 1923.

INVERT TYPE ON PORTRAIT OVERLAP

6. teaching and learning, sponge effect.

3. radiant. brian ostroff, 2019.

PHOTOGRAPH: BLACK AND WHITE PORTRAIT - STARING AT CAMERA INCLUDE NECK AND UPPER TORSO

JUST S DDO IT 2. just do it. brian ostroff, 2019.

7. apollo and the nine muses. 6th century.

8. born in 2002. 4. hooked worm.

introduction

limit creative accidents and therefore academic and creative growth? If we rely on temporary information rather than an internal library of knowledge, are we erasing who we are and therefore culture? If we know nothing, what can we do? How do we know where to start? Can graphic design systems be reemployed, or reused, across a myriad of “topics” and still hold interesting relevance? Instead of fighting against future innovation, how can it be used to allow us to maintain deep thought… deep work? When does over-stimulation start to affect people? These questions took me on a journey of improbable and existing solutions. I began experimenting with templates based on historically recognized designers. Using the same fonts and the exact same structures, I replaced the original information with contrasting advertisements to see if the change of messaging erased origin... history. Cipe Pineles’s Charm Magazine became an advertisement for Charmin Toilet Paper. Saul Bass’s The Shining poster became an advertisement for Chuck E. Cheese. Alexander Rodchenko’s cover for Vladi-

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mir Mayakovski book About That became advertisements for Nike and Tampax. The Stenberg brothers iconic poster for The Man With The Movie Camera was converted into an advertisement for Colgate. When designers were presented with the appropriated images, I found that context was indeed lost. The new context was observed and commented on while the original history and meaning was erased. One well trained designer thought the Nike advertisement was real without mentioning or thinking about Rodchenkoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original piece. The Internet fragments information in this same way through resources like Pinterest and Google images but also by a capitalistic business model that brings monetary rewards for breaking data into smaller chunks. By splitting information into the smallest pieces possible companies like Google have more opportunities to make money through more robust websites and therefore more opportunity for clickable advertisements. Google is currently trying to collect and purchase every book ever written through the Google Book Project, originally coined as The Library Project.

introduction

While they will offer this library for free, they will also intermittently erase history by dividing chapters, pages, and paragraphs for greater potential profit through distracting "click bait". I decided to expand on this thinking to see how it directly affects people. I used a small sample to see if creativity is affected by our current ways of absorbing information. I took over two classes at the local High School to educate others on my research while testing my hypothesis. Each class was given the same topic to research and each class had the same assignment for output. They were to digitally produce a poster based on Charlie Chaplinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fractured script for his classic silent film Modern Times. Both classes were given an overview of graphic design and communication, typographic hierarchy, grid systems, InDesign Lessons, and Photoshop masking. The only difference between the classes was the way they conducted their research. One group was only allowed to use books and scanned images. While the other group had free reign of

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10. halibut.

1. suspect.

the Internet. They were instructed to journal their thought processes each day.

9. feelings are like fish.

The results were as one might suspect. The group that were privy to existing material relied on it for their output, while the group that partook in deep thought came up with new and creative solutions based only on discussion and history. Context made a difference and it showed in their results as well 2. output.

as their thinking. Time and ease were also factors. Those with access to the Internet never asked to use the available books to gain more insight.

8. machine learning.

If we have become so reliant on templates and appropriation, who is the author? Who is the artist? With the increased availability of Artificial Intelligence, and the growth of machine learning, we are getting to a point 3. creativity.

that we will no longer need to be creative. We can allow a computer to data mine images and information to construct design and art while continually correct itself through

38 5. wall clock. c 1870.

6. the internet.

4. crusty, old book. 7. hand puppet template.

introduction

11. an audience.

12. water pump.

referenced material and stored experiential application; what has become known as Machine Learning. A field of study being taken over by computer scientists across the globe. I played with this, using a Generative Adversarial Network (DeepArt.ISO); a free online

19. eraser.

resource… one of many: A user uploads two

13. logarithm.

images into a logarithm that scans the underlying code that formulates the location

“Online resource.”

of pixels and their color properties. It then combines the collective information to form a new image.

14. one of many..

I used well known pieces of design for this process, rather than my own work. While I had no control over the outcome of these ex-

18. lifting exercise.

ercises, I did have control over which images were dragged and dropped into the interface. With little to no effort, or understanding of the works I was lifting, I felt as though I had created something new, and at times more visceral than the original works. In doing so, I managed to erase context.

“Generative Adversarial Network.” 16. the singularity

15. morse code.

17. skin poster.

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I could do this all day, pumping the Internet full of â&#x20AC;&#x153;newâ&#x20AC;? image, without any knowledge, without any new knowledge being created. For five weeks, I sat and thought about all of this. What could a solution be to curb distractions, to upend fragmentation, to attempt to quash the ease of stealing and misappropriatingâ&#x20AC;Ś to quiet the noise that overwhelmed and purposely motivates us to not think. Applications have already been developed that turn off the Internet for amounts of time a user sets. Customizing search results to bring linearity to information is already well under way. Lobbying companies like Google to stop some of their insidious practices could be an answer. Although I found that activism itself has become mostly an on-line institution that undergoes the same fracturing. We rarely march together on the streets and light shit on fire like we used to. If we do many of us do it for validation, or dating opportunities, rather than passion. With these seemingly direct options, obvious, and unoriginal, I leaned towards exacerbation.

introduction

With all of this noise befuddling us and erasing what we know, what we thought we knew, why not amplify it? Why not create noise in the new, virgin spaces that are being digitally developed? Invisible spaces that can only be seen through the eyes of the machines that create it. I have begun to develop an augmented reality application that allows others to leave information in these digital spaces; like virtual graffiti. A place to leave fragments of ourselves, our thoughts about a place, an object, or a person at any given point in time. There is little recourse to the anonymity it provides, while freeing us to produce as much noise as we want, while getting distracted by it as frequently as we would like. Using biometrics, pattern recognition, GPS cross-referencing, machine learning, and a cell phone users can plant messages on a person, or a specific point in their environment. The user can set the amount of time the message exists while having the option to access an archive that fragments information more through broken historical record.

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Other users with this application will be notified anytime they are in an environment where messages exist; potentially giving them endless distractions and noise within noise. Other features would allow users to see messages left around any city, in locations they have not ventured. Overhead maps can be accessed, which show hot-spots, or areas that have amassed considerable messages within specified time periods. Windows of opportunity for corporations to flood the space with slogans, logos, and hyperlinks allow for even more noise, data collection, and a never-ending funnel of customization. Customization that works off of biometrics linking perceptions about how we look and what we wear to our personalities, our likes, and dislikes. Indoors, or out, bars, museums, parks, hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, Walmart, Target, your bedroom, your grandparents, your mom, your dad, your brother, your sister, your girlfriend, your wife, your dog, your cat, your Vietnamese pot-bellied pig,

introduction

your beta fish... all can be tagged with referential information that inspires, defeats, and perpetuates the trajectory of our machine-motivated humanity. Either this application will implode on its own insidious nature, or the amplification of visual and psychological turbulence will entice and enhance our thinking once again. More noise please.

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2. temple of learning.

6. sister.

1. the wilderness.

5. father and son.

introduction

7. transgender uncle (aunt).

8. husband and wife.

9. girlfriend.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Indoors, or out, bars, museums, schools, hospitals, parks, hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, malls, your bedroom, your mom, your dad, your baby brother, your big sister, your transgender uncle, your grandparents, your wife, your girlfriend, your dog, your cat, your squawking bird, your koi fish... â&#x20AC;?

4. grocery store.

10. loyal companion.

11. highest form of reincarnation.

45 3. bar.

12. bottom feeder.

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introduction

LINE LINE FOCUS LINE LINE

LINEAR FOCUS

LINEAR LINEAR LINEAR LINEAR

FOCUS history of deep focus and deep distraction.

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CLASSROOM EXPERIMENTS

The Direction of Learning:

A history of deep focus and deep distraction.

1. group a: linear input.

3. modern times, charlie chaplin. 1936. 2. group b: nonlinear input.

linear focus

What is Graphic Design? 4. who knows?

5. anatomy of type.

6. typographic hierarchy.

Having a background in education, I decided to test my thesis at the local public High School. I taught two classes the same subject matter. Each class learned about Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times using different methods; Group A used books for absorption, while Group B used the Internet. Both groups began to compose 11” x 17” movie posters from the information they gathered while documenting their thought processes throughout.

53 10. photographic treatment.

9. iconography.

7. grid systems. josef müller-brockmann.

8. illustration.

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Group A. Linear. 1. learning from books.

2. deep focus.

Day 1: Introduction. Who am I? What is Graphic Design PowerPoint presentation. Job opportunities within the field. Project overview. Read a printed copy of Modern Times. Use books to look for more information. Capture keywords / images in journals to be used for research and idea development. Day 2: Use books to photograph and email 9–10 images. Sketch 3–5 thumbnails. Iterate one, discussed direction. At the end of class write 2–3 sentences that outline thinking, image selection,

3. classroom, front view.

and thought about type choices. Write 2–3 taglines. Day 3: Using InDesign, set-up 11” x 17” document with a 6, 8, 10, or 12 column grid. Use Photoshop to treat images. Write 2–3 sentences that outlines process / thinking. Day 4: Use InDesign document to compose image. Review of typographic hierarchy and font choices. 4. classroom, back view.

Day 5: Project and view posters from both classes. Discuss ways of talking about images: Hierarchy, narrative, craftsmanship. Explain purpose of project. Write 1–2 paragraphs about their overall thoughts.

5. stack of books.

linear focus

4. wealth of information.

Day 1: Introduction. Who am I? What is Graphic Design PowerPoint presentation. Job opportunities

Group B. Nonlinear. 2. learning from machines.

within the field. Project overview. Read a PDF copy of Modern Times. Use the Internet to look for more information. Capture keywords / images in journals to be used for research and idea development. Day 2: Use the Internet to compile 8–10 images. Sketch 3–5 thumbnails. Iterate one, discussed direction. At the end of class write 2–3 sentences that outline thinking, image selection, and thought about type choices. Write 2–3 taglines. Day 3: Using InDesign, set-up 11” x 17” document with a 6, 8, 10, or 12 column grid. Use Photoshop to treat images. Write 2–3 sentences that outlines process / thinking. Day 4: Use InDesign document to compose image. Review of typographic hierarchy and font choices. Day 5: Project and view posters from both classes. Discuss ways of talking about images: Hierarchy, narrative, craftsmanship. Explain purpose of project. Write 1–2 paragraphs about their overall thoughts.

8. chromebooks for all.

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3. process.

PROCESS

Anchor Standard 1: Generate and conceptualize design ideas and systems. Essential Questions: How do graphic designers generate ideas? How can ideas for media arts productions be formed and developed to be effective and original?

California Common Core State Content Standards. 1. knowledge, concepts, and skills students should acquire in each grade level.

Design Process: Research, Strategy, Exploration, Development, Refinement, Production

DEVELOP

Anchor Standard 2: Organize and develop design ideas and systems. Essential Questions: How do graphic designers organize and develop ideas and models into process structures to achieve the desired product? Sketching, Critique, Time Constraints,Limitations, and Constraints of Resources

CREATE

Anchor Standard 3: Refine and complete design. Essential Questions: What is required to produce a design that conveys purpose, meaning, and communicative qualities?

7. parse.

Font Choice, Typographic Hierarchy, Grid Structures, Iteration, Intent

56 4. develop. 5. create.

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Anchor Standard 5: Develop and refine designs for presentation.

2. the state of california.

PRACTICE

Essential Questions: What skills are required for creating effective Graphic Design? How are creativity and innovation developed through the design process? How do graphic designers use tools and techniques? Active Listening,Inquiry, Journaling, Critique, Design Strategy, Presentation, Tools

Anchor Standard 6: Convey meaning through the presentation of graphic design.

PARSE

Essential Questions: How does time, place, audience, and context affect choices in graphic design? Audience, Medium, Choice of Content

Anchor Standard 7: Perceive and analyze graphic design. Essential Questions: How do we read graphic communications and discern their relational components? How does graphic communication manage audience experience and expectation? Hierarchy, Image Choice, Copy, Narrative

57 6. practice.

8. perceive.

PERCEIVE

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EVALUATE

Anchor Standard 9: Apply criteria to evaluate graphic design. Essential Questions: When and how should we evaluate a design to improve it? Critique, Narrative, Audience Perception

SYNTHESIZE

Anchor Standard 10: Synthesize and use gained knowledge to create a poster. Essential Questions: How do we relate knowledge and experience to understanding and make affective design? How do we learn about, and create meaning, through design? Create a poster that holds the meaning of the provided content and communicates to an intended audience.

2. happiness is big.

Californ Commo Core State Conten Standar 1. knowledge, concepts, and skills students should acquire in each grade level.

nia on

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4. synthesize.

nt rds. 3. evaluate.

brian ostroff

artcenter college of design

BRIAN OSTROFF

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design strategy . research . education. fine art

redondo union high school

spring 2020

5. first slide.

Group A. Linear. 1. learning from books.

2. deep focus.

32 students filed in and stared at me, the stranger, standing in the front of the room. They were quiet, still waking up from an early

brian ostroff

morning rise. My partner teacher introduced

1922 1.

me and I started with 2 questions. Who wants hands went up. What does a Graphic Designer

13. key takeaway.

outline the project in vague terms. The students

I dove into the later question and began to

trajan’s column. 106–113 ce

typography, illustration, photography, communication 7.

do? A good answer was create communications.

hierogl 3300 bce

GRAPH DESIGN

to be a Graphic Designer? Approximately two

Students Using the Internet were less focused.

william dwiggins

the graphic design basics

redondo union high school

7. third slide.

were given a paper copy of the Modern Times nature of the silent movie scribblings. A slew

Students reading from print had greater comprehension. 14. key takeaway.

of books on the topic were made available. Students documented their initial thoughts in the form of keywords and thumbnails. We had a discussion at the end of class about the images that popped into their heads, images that could be used to communicate the script as a small poster. Answers were very descriptive and varied from smoke stacks in people’s mouths, to the relationships of the main characters. Thoughts were informed and creative.

brian ostroff

artcenter college of design

WHAT IS GRAPHIC DESIGN? redondo union high school

6. second slide.

Greater focus on limited resources. 13. key takeaway.

60 spring 2020

DAY 1

script. Very few complained about the broken

lyphics. e

HIC N

brian ostroff

artcenter college of design

THANK YOU.

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lets get started.

redondo union high school

spring 2020

12. final slide.

4. wealth of information.

Two periods later 34 students sat staring

Group B. Nonlinear. 3. learning from machines.

at the stranger in front of their classroom. I again was introduced by my partner teacher artcenter college of design

systems 7.5

and then began my PowerPoint presentation.

the glue

After heckler in the back of the room allowed me to dive deeper into areas of Graphic

5. industrial revolution. 1760–1840

Design, students were directed to take out 4. illuminated manuscript. c. 500–1600 ce 6.

ginza neon. japan spring 2020

brian ostroff

artcenter college of design

anatomy

typography

their Chromebooks, open their email, and read a PDF of the same Modern Times script. They were also told that they could scour the Internet for more information. I noticed a

HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO HELLO

typefaces

redondo union high school

spring 2020

8. fourth slide.

much more distracted class. Students finished documenting their findings early and were brian ostroff

artcenter college of design

wandering about the classroom. Individual discussions I had with students were not quite

illustration

as descriptive as the first group. I also found that most of the images and words being scrawled were similar with a central theme of a cog... a visual element that is all over a Google

spring 2020

redondo union high school

9. fifth slide.

image search. Our wrap up discussion followed suit. Students were less engaged in a prodded

brian ostroff

artcenter college of design

conversation about what they found, what 1.

they thought the film was about, and ideas for

layering

further development.

color adjustments

juxtaposition

photography

spring 2020

redondo union high school

10. sixth slide.

Had greater access to information— wrote down more.

brian ostroff

artcenter college of design

14. key takeaway.

grid systems

systems

61 redondo union high school

11. seventh slide.

spring 2020

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Group A. Linear. 1. learning from books.

DAY 1

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Group B. Nonlinear. 3. learning from machines.

KEYWORDS AND IDEAS. 1. a sampling of research

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Group A. Linear. 1. learning from books.

2. deep focus.

Time is a major factor. Today we iterated a single direction three to five times. Iterations included scale and placement within a simple grid in sketchbooks. Iterations were then realized, as students began to scan images they needed from books to later populate

Using books for research takes more time!

their poster ideas digitally. The time it took

5. key takeaway.

be discovered in the books on hand and from

to find the "right" images was extensive and exhausting. Choices were limited to what could

of objects compromised ideas forcing greater creative problem solving. illustration and the

The method of input allowed for more thinking, more controlled compositions, and simpler approaches to messaging. 6. key takeaway.

creation of iconography were options, but no students partook in this process. The time it took for many to research in this manner put a wrench in my research. I realized that most of my students had never used books for research. The majority of the "readers" absorb fiction, or comic books. The neurology of my students is already wired to obtain information from digital sources. Having to sift through books lowered moral and even hurt the confidence levels of those involved.

A lack of confidence in an unfamiliar research process. 7. key takeaway.

12. key ta

DAY 2

the school library. Angles of objects and types

STUDENT WORKED PRINTED M HAD GR RETENTION WEEK TO T

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4. wealth of information.

TS WHO D WITH MATERIAL REATER N FROM ONE THE NEXT.

akeaway.

A hiccup slowed the creative process of many.

Group B. Nonlinear. 8. learning from machines.

This hiccup was attached to images I drew on the board to help students understand how to iterate a single idea. At least a third of the class copied my ideas and had to be goaded to think in terms of their own research and discovery. Half of those involved had little retention from the digital research conducted the previous week. Very few, if any, did further research on the Internet to fill these gaps... they settled for what they knew. I did see a greater wealth of

Less individual thinking when information is easy to obtain. 9. key takeaway.

ideas, but many included jail bars, gears, and smoke stacks. I also saw overly complicated designs that confused communication and an intentional narrative. This type of distracting output mirrors the source of the information. Very few ventured outside of the realm of what was easily available on the Internet, as far as visual examples that related to Modern Times. Time did allow students to find a greater number of images on the web, which afforded

Designed communications mirrored the complexity and smorgasbord of information provided by the internet. 10. key takeaway.

them various angles of objects and various types of the same object. The energy level and excitement in this group was much greater.

Students were very excited to continue their progress in the coming weeks. 11. key takeaway.

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Group A. Linear. 1. learning from books.

DAY 2

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Group B. Nonlinear. 7. learning from machines.

MOLDING IDEAS LIKE LUMPS OF CLAY. 1. a sampling of iterations

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8. commodity.

9. everywhere.

1. buy more than you need.

7. covid-19.

2. social distancing.

6. pandemic. 3. contaminated.

4. distressing.

5. particle masks?

17. uneducated.

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11. potty training. 10. apocalyptic.

12. thermal testing.

13. trust no one.

14. what happens next?

16. wash hands.

15. daily bullshit.

DAY 3 POSTPON FURTHER

SCHOOL CLOSURES THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY.

DAY 4 NED UNTIL R NOTICE

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THE DEEPENING PAGE Nicholas Carr

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THE DEEPENING PAGE Nicholas Carr In the Shallows | Ch. 4 When people first began writing things down, they’d scratch their marks on anything that happened to be lying around—smooth-faced rocks, scraps of wood, strips of bark, bits of cloth, pieces of bone, chunks of broken pottery. Such ephemera were the original media for the written word. They had the advantages of being cheap and plentiful but the disadvantages of being small, irregular in shape, and easily lost, broken, or otherwise damaged. They were suitable for inscriptions and labels, perhaps a brief note or notice, but not much else. No one would think to commit a deep thought or a long argument to a pebble or a potsherd.

“No one would think to commit a deep thought, or a long argument, to a pebble or a pot shard.” The Sumerians were the first to use a specialized medium for writing. They etched their cuneiform into carefully prepared tablets made of clay, an abundant resource in Mesopotamia. They would wash a handful of clay, form it into a thin block, inscribe it with a sharpened reed, and then dry it under the sun or in a kiln. Government records, business correspondence, commercial receipts, and legal agreements were all written on the durable tablets, as were lengthier, more literary works, such as historical and religious stories and accounts of contemporary events. To accommodate the longer pieces of writing, the Sumerians would often number their tablets, creating a sequence of clay “pages” that anticipated the form of the modern book. Clay tablets would continue to be a popular writing medium for centuries, but because preparing, carrying, and storing them were difficult, they tended to be reserved for formal documents written by official scribes. Writing and reading remained arcane talents.

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Around 2500 BC, the Egyptians began manufacturing scrolls from the papyrus plants that grew throughout the Nile delta. They would strip fibers from the plants, lay the fibers in a crisscross pattern, and dampen them to release their sap. The resin glued the fibers into a sheet, which was then hammered to form a smooth, white writing surface not all that different from the paper we use today. As many as twenty of the sheets would be glued end to end into long scrolls, and the scrolls, like the earlier clay tablets, would sometimes be arranged in numbered sequences. Flexible, portable, and easy to store, scrolls offered considerable advantages over the much heavier tablets. The Greeks and the Romans adopted scrolls as their primary writing medium, though parchment, made of goat or sheep hide, eventually replaced papyrus as the material of choice in making them. Scrolls were expensive. Papyrus had to be carted in from Egypt, and turning skins into parchment was a time-consuming job requiring a certain amount of skill. As writing became more common, demand grew for a cheaper option, something that schoolboys could use to take notes and write compositions. That need spurred the development of a new writing device, the wax tablet. It consisted of a simple wooden frame filled with a layer of wax. Letters were scratched into the wax with a new kind of stylus that had, in addition to the sharpened writing tip, a blunt end for scraping the wax clean. Because words could be erased easily from the tablets, students and other writers were able to use them over and over again, making them far more economical than scrolls. Though not a sophisticated tool, the wax tablet played a major role in turning writing and reading from specialized, formal crafts into casual, everyday activities—for literate citizens. The wax tablet was important for another reason. When the ancients wanted an inexpensive way to store or distribute a lengthy text, they would lash a few tablets together with a strip of leather or cloth. These bound tablets, popular in their own right, served as a model for an anonymous Roman artisan who, shortly after the time of Christ, sewed several sheets of parchment between a pair of rigid rectangles of leather to create the first real book. Though a few centuries would pass before the bound book, or codex, supplanted the scroll, the benefits of the technology must have been clear to even its earliest users. Because a scribe could write on both sides of a codex page, as a model for an anonymous Roman artisan who, after the time of Christ, sewed several sheets of parchment between a pair of rigid rectangles of leather to create the first real book.

linear focus page and his heart explored the meaning, but his tongue was still,” wrote Augustine. “Often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” Baffled by such peculiar behavior, Augustine wondered whether Ambrose “needed to spare his voice, which quite easily became hoarse.” It’s hard for us to imagine today, but no spaces separated the words in early writing. In the books inked by scribes, words ran together, without any break, across every line on every page, scriptura continua. The lack of word separation, combined with the absence of word order conventions, placed an “extra cognitive burden” on ancient readers, explains John Saenger in Space between Words, his history of the scribal book. Readers’ eyes had to move slowly and haltingly across the lines of text, pausing frequently and often backing up to the start of a sentence, as their minds struggled to figure out where one word ended and a new one began and what role each word was playing in the meaning of the sentence. Reading was like working out a puzzle. The brain’s entire cortex, including the forward areas associated with problem solving and decision making, would have been buzzing with neural activity.

A SHELL WITH MARKINGS THAT SEEM TO HAVE BEEN CARVED INTENTIONALLY HALF A MILLION YEARS AGO. Though a few centuries would pass before the bound book, or codex, supplanted the scroll, the benefits of the technology must have been clear to even its earliest users. Because a scribe could write on both sides of a codex page, a book required much less papyrus or parchment than did a one-sided scroll, reducing the cost of production. Books were also much more compact, making them easier to transport and to conceal. They quickly became the format of choice for publishing and other controversial works. Books were easier to navigate too. Finding a particular passage, an awkward task with a long roll of text, became a simple matter of flipping back and forth through a set of pages.

The slow, cognitively intensive parsing of text made the reading of books laborious. It was also the reason no one, other than the odd case like Ambrose, read silently. Sounding out the syllables was crucial to deciphering the writing. Those constraints, which would seem intolerable to us today, didn’t matter much in a culture still rooted in orality. “Because those who read relished the mellifluous metrical and accentual patterns of pronounced text,” writes Saenger, “the absence of interword space in Greek and Latin was not perceived to be an impediment to effective reading, as it would be to the modern reader, who strives to read swiftly.” Besides, most literate Greeks and Romans were more than happy to have their books read to them by slaves.

Even as the technology of the book sped ahead, the legacy of the oral world continued to shape the way words on pages were written and read. Silent reading was largely unknown in the ancient world. The new codices, like the tablets and scrolls that preceded them, were almost always read aloud, whether the reader was in a group or alone. In a famous passage in his Confessions, Saint Augustine described the surprise he felt when, around the year AD 380, he saw Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading silently to himself. “When he read, his eyes scanned the

Not until well after the collapse of the Roman Empire did the form of written language finally break from the oral tradition and begin to accommodate the unique needs of readers. As the Middle Ages progressed, the number of literate people—cenobites, students, merchants, aristocrats—grew steadily, and the availability of books expanded. Many of the new books were of a technical nature, intended not for leisurely or scholarly reading but for practical reference. People began to want, and to need, to read quickly and privately. Reading was becoming

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GREEK SCRIPTURA CONTINUA. THE ROSETTA STONE. 196 B.C.E.

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more noise please of spaces between words alleviated the cognitive strain involved in deciphering text, making it possible for people to read quickly, silently, and with greater comprehension. Such fluency had to be learned. It required complex changes in the circuitry of the brain, as contemporary studies of young readers reveal. The accomplished reader, Maryanne Wolf explains, develops specialized brain regions geared to the rapid deciphering of text. The areas are wired “to represent the important visual, phonological, and semantic information and to retrieve this information at lightning speed.” The visual cortex, for example, develops “a veritable collage” of neuron assemblies dedicated to recognizing, in a matter of milliseconds, “visual mages of letters, letter patterns, and words.” As the brain becomes more adept at decoding text, turning what had been a demanding problem-solving exercise into a process that is essentially automatic, it can dedicate more resources to the interpretation of meaning. What we today call “deep reading” becomes possible. By “altering the neurophysiological process of reading,” word separation “freed the intellectual faculties of the reader,” Saenger writes; “even readers of modest intellectual capacity could read more swiftly, and they could understand an increasing number of inherently more difficult texts.”

EARLY PUNCTUS. VIRGIL’S AENEID. 29–19 B.C.E. less an act of performance and more a means of personal instruction and improvement. That shift led to the most important transformation of writing since the invention of the phonetic alphabet. By the start of the second millennium, writers had begun to impose rules of word order on their work, fitting words into a predictable, standardized system of syntax. At the same time, beginning in Ireland and England and then spreading throughout the rest of western Europe, scribes started dividing sentences into individual words, separated by spaces. By the thirteenth century, scriptura continua was largely obsolete, for Latin texts as well as those written in the vernacular. Punctuation marks, which further eased the work of the reader, began to become common too. Writing, for the first time, was aimed at the eye as well as the ear. It would be difficult to overstate the significance of these changes. The emergence of word order standards sparked a revolution in the structure of language—one that, as Saenger notes, “was inherently antithetical to the ancient quest for metrical and rhythmical eloquence.” The placing

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Readers didn’t just become more efficient. They also became more attentive. To read a long book silently required an ability to concentrate intently over a long period of time, to “lose oneself” in the pages of a book, as we now say. Developing such mental discipline was not easy. The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of distractedness. Our predisposition is to shift our gaze, and hence our attention, from one object to another, to be aware of as much of what’s going on around us as possible. Neuroscientists have discovered primitive “bottom-up mechanisms” in our brains that, as the authors of a 2004 article in Current Biology put it, “operate on raw sensory input, rapidly and involuntarily shifting attention to salient visual features of potential importance.” What draws our attention most of all is any hint of a change in our surroundings. “Our senses are finely attuned to change,” explains Maya Pines of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “Stationary or unchanging objects become part of the scenery and are mostly unseen.” But as soon as “something in the environment changes, we need to take notice because it might mean danger— or opportunity.” Our fast-paced, reflexive shifts in focus were once crucial to our survival. They reduced the odds that a predator would take us by surprise or that we’d overlook a nearby source of food. For most of history, the normal path of human thought was anything but linear.

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”To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object... They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another.”

was that the deep concentration was combined with the highly active and efficient deciphering of text and Interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply. Even the earliest silent readers recognized the striking change in their consciousness that took place as they immersed themselves in the pages of a book. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria described how, whenever he read to himself, “as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.” Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading. It was the technology of the book that made this “strange anomaly” in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain.

To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, would call “the still point of the turning world.” They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another. They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater “top-down control” over their attention. “The ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted,” writes Vaughan Bell, a research psychologist at King’s College London, represents a “strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development.” Many people had, of course, cultivated a capacity for sustained attention long before the book or even the alphabet came along. The hunter, the craftsman, the ascetic—all had to train their brains to control and concentrate their attention. What was so remarkable about book reading

The changes in written language liberated the writer, and the reader. Scriptura continua wasn’t just a nuisance to decipher; it was a trial to write. To escape the drudgery, writers would usually dictate their works to a scribe. As soon as the introduction of word spaces made writing easier, authors took up pens and began putting their words onto the page themselves, in private. Their works immediately became more personal and more adventurous. They began to give voice to unconventional, skeptical, and even heretical and seditious ideas, pushing the bounds of knowledge and culture. Working alone in his chambers, the Benedictine monk Guibert of Nogent had the confidence to compose unorthodox interpretations of scripture, vivid accounts of his dreams, even erotic poetry—things he would never have written had he been required to dictate them to a scribe. When, , he lost his sight and had to go back to dictation, he complained of having to write “only by voice, without the hand, without the eyes.”

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Developing such mental discipline was not easy. The natural state of the human brain, like that of the brains of most of our relatives in the animal kingdom, is one of dist-ract -e -d -n -e -s -s. â&#x20AC;? 91

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more noise please Authors also began to revise and edit their works heavily, something that dictation had often precluded. That, too, altered the form and the content of writing. For the first time, explains Saenger, a writer “could see his manuscript as a whole and by means of cross-references develop internal relationships and eliminate the redundancies common to the dictated literature” of the earlier Middle Ages. The arguments in books became longer and clearer, as well as more complex and more challenging, as writers strived self-consciously to refine their ideas and their logic. By the end of the fourteenth century, written works were often being divided into paragraphs and chapters, and they sometimes included tables of contents to help guide the reader through their increasingly elaborate structures. There had, of course, been sensitive and self conscious prose and verse stylists in the past, as Plato’s dialogues elegantly demonstrate, but the new writing conventions greatly expanded the production of literary works, particularly those composed in the vernacular. The advances in book technology changed the personal experience of reading and writing. They also had social consequences. The broader culture began to mold itself, in ways both subtle and obvious, around the practice of silent book reading. The nature of education and scholarship changed, as universities began to stress private reading as an essential complement to classroom lectures. Libraries began to play much more central roles in university life and, more generally, in the life of the city. Library architecture evolved too. Private cloisters and carrels, tailored to accommodate vocal reading, were torn out and replaced by large public rooms where students, professors, and other patrons sat together at long tables reading silently to themselves. Reference books such as dictionaries, glossaries, and concordances became important as aids to reading. Copies of the precious texts were often chained to the library reading tables. To fill the increasing demand for books, a publishing industry started to take shape. Book production, long the realm of the religious scribe, started to be centralized in secular workshops, where professional scribes worked for pay under the direction of the owner. A lively market for used books materialized. For the first time in history, books had set prices. For centuries, the technology of writing had reflected, and reinforced, the intellectual ethic of the oral culture in which it arose. The writing and reading of tablets, scrolls, and early codices had stressed the communal development

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“The writing and reading of tablets, scrolls, and early codices had stressed the communal development and propagation of knowledge. Individual creativity had remained subordinate to the needs of the group.” and propagation of knowledge. Individual creativity had remained subordinate to the needs of the group. Writing had remained more a means of recording than a method of composition. Now, writing began to take on, and to disseminate, a new intellectual ethic: the ethic of the book. The development of knowledge became an increasingly private act, with each reader creating, in his own mind, a personal synthesis of the ideas and information passed down through the writings of other thinkers. The sense of individualism strengthened. “Silent reading,” the novelist and historian James Carroll has noted, is “both the sign of and a means to self-awareness, with the knower taking responsibility for what is known.” Quiet, solitary research became a prerequisite for intellectual achievement. Originality of thought and creativity of expression became the hallmarks of the model mind. The conflict between the orator Socrates and the writer Plato had at last been decided—in Plato’s favor. But the victory was incomplete. Because handwritten codices remained costly and scarce, the intellectual ethic of the book, and the mind of the deep reader, continued to be restricted to a relatively small group of privileged citizens. The alphabet, a medium of language, had found its own ideal medium in the book, a medium of writing. Books, however, had yet to find their ideal medium—the technology that would allow them to be produced and distributed cheaply, quickly, and in abundance.

linear focus also developed a refined version of a wooden-screw press, used at the time to crush grapes for wine, that was able to transfer the image of the type onto a sheet of parchment or paper without smudging the letters. And he invented the third critical element of his printing system: an oilbased ink that would adhere to the metal type. Having built the letterpress, Gutenberg quickly put it to use printing indulgences for the Catholic Church. The job paid well, but it wasn’t the work Gutenberg had in mind for his new machine. He had much greater ambitions. Drawing on Faust’s funds, he began to prepare his first major work: the magnificent, two-volume edition of the Bible that would come to bear his name. Spanning twelve hundred pages, each composed of two forty-two-line columns, the Gutenberg Bible was printed in a heavy Gothic typeface painstakingly designed to imitate the handwriting of the best German scribes. The Bible, which took at least three years to produce, was Gutenberg’s triumph. It was also his undoing. In 1455, having printed just two hundred copies, he ran out of money. Unable to pay the interest on his loans, he was forced to hand his press, type, and ink over to Faust and abandon the printing trade. Faust, who had made his fortune through a successful career as a merchant, proved to be as adept at the business of printing as Gutenberg had been at its mechanics. Together with Peter Schoeffer, one of Gutenberg’s more talented employees (and a former scribe himself), Faust set the operation on a profitable course, organizing a sales force and publishing a variety of books that sold widely throughout Germany and France.

JOHANNES GENSFLEISCH ZUR LADEN ZUM GUTENBERG, 1400–1468 Sometime around 1445, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg left Strasbourg, where he had been living for several years, and followed the Rhine River back to the city of his birth, Mainz. He was carrying a secret—a big one. For at least ten years, he had been working covertly on several inventions that he believed would, in combination, form the basis of an altogether new sort of publishing business. He saw an opportunity to automate the production of books and other written works, replacing the venerable scribe with a new fangled printing machine. After securing two sizable loans from Johann Faust, a prosperous neighbor, Gutenberg set up a shop in Mainz, bought some tools and materials, and set to work. Putting his metalworking skills to use, he created small, adjustable molds for casting alphabetical letters of uniform height but varying width out of a molten metal alloy. The cast letters, or movable type, could be arranged quickly into a page of text for printing and then, when the job was done, disassembled and reset for a new page.18 Gutenberg

Although Gutenberg would not share in its rewards, his letterpress would become one of the most important inventions in history. With remarkable speed, at least by medieval standards, movable-type printing “changed the face and condition of things all over the world,” Francis Bacon wrote in his 1620 book Novum Organum, “so that no empire or sect or star seems to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs.” (The only other inventions that Bacon felt had as great an impact as the letterpress were gunpowder and the compass.) By turning a manual craft into a mechanical industry, Gutenberg had changed the economics of printing and publishing. Large editions of perfect copies could be mass-produced quickly by a few workers. Books went from being expensive, scarce commodities to being affordable, plentiful ones. In 1483, a printing shop in Florence, run by nuns from the Convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli, charged three florins

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more noise please for printing 1,025 copies of a new translation of Plato’s Dialogues. A scribe would have charged about one florin for copying the work, but he would have produced only a single copy. The steep reduction in the cost of manufacturing books was amplified by the growing use of paper, an invention imported from China, in place of more costly parchment. As book prices fell, demand surged, spurring, in turn, a rapid expansion in supply. New editions flooded the markets of Europe. According to one estimate, the number of books produced in the fifty years following Gutenberg’s invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years. The sudden proliferation of once-rare books struck people of the time “as sufficiently remarkable to suggest supernatural intervention,” reports Elizabeth Eisenstein in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. When Johann Fust carried a large supply of printed books into Paris on an early sales trip, he was reportedly run out of town by the gendarmes on suspicion of being in league with the devil. Fears of satanic influence quickly dissipated as people rushed to buy and read the inexpensive products of the letterpress. When, in 1501, the Italian printer Aldus Manutius introduced the pocket-sized octavo format, considerably smaller than the traditional folio and quarto, books became even more affordable, portable, and personal. Just as the miniaturization of the clock made everyone a timekeeper, so to did the miniaturization of the book helped weave book reading into the fabric of everyday life. It was no longer just scholars and monks who sat reading words in quiet rooms. Even a person of fairly modest means could begin to assemble a library of several volumes, making it possible not only to read broadly but to draw comparisons between different works. “All the world is full of knowing men, of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries,” exclaimed the title character of Rabelais’ 1534 best seller Gargantua, “and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato’s time, nor Cicero’s, nor Papinian’s, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as we see at this day there is.” A virtuous cycle had been set in motion. The growing availability of books fired the public’s desire for literacy, and the expansion of literacy further stimulated the demand for books. The printing industry boomed. By the end of the fifteenth century, nearly 250 towns in Europe had print shops, and some 12 million volumes had already come off their presses. The sixteenth century saw Gutenberg’s technology leap from Europe to Asia, the Middle East, and, when the Spanish set up a press in Mexico City in 1539, the Americas. By the start of the seventeenth cen-

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tury, letterpresses were everywhere, producing not only books but newspapers, scientific journals, and a variety of other periodicals. The first great flowering of printed literature arrived, with works by such masters as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, and Milton, not to mention Bacon and Descartes, entering the inventories of booksellers and the libraries of readers. It wasn’t just contemporary works that were coming off the presses. Printers, striving to fill the public’s demand for inexpensive reading material, produced large editions of the classics, both in the original Greek and Latin and in translation. Although most of the printers were motivated by the desire to turn an easy profit, the distribution of the older texts helped give intellectual depth and historical continuity to the emerging book-centered culture. As Eisenstein writes, the printer who “duplicated a seemingly antiquated back-list” may have been lining his own pockets, but in the process he gave readers “a richer, more varied diet than had been provided by the scribe.”Along with the high-minded came the low-minded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of pornography poured into the marketplace and found eager buyers at every station in society. Priests and politicians began to wonder whether, as England’s first official book censor put it in 1660, “more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography.” The famed Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega expressed the feelings of many a grandee when, in his 1612 play All Citizens Are Soldiers, he wrote: So many books—so much confusion! All around us an ocean of print And most of it covered in froth. But the froth itself was vital. Far from dampening the intellectual transformation wrought by the printed book, it magnified it. By accelerating the spread of books into popular culture and making them a mainstay of leisure time, the cruder, crasser, and more trifling works also helped spread the book’s ethic of deep, attentive reading. “The same silence, solitude, and contemplative attitudes associated formerly with pure spiritual devotion,” writes Eisenstein, “also accompanies the perusal of scandal sheets, ‘lewd Ballads,’ ‘merry bookes of Italie,’ and other ‘corrupted tales in Inke and Paper.’”29 Whether a person is immersed in a bodice ripper or a Psalter, the synaptic effects are largely the same. Not everyone became a book reader, of course. Plenty of

linear focus people—the poor, the illiterate, the isolated, the incurious— never participated, at least not directly, in Gutenberg’s revolution. And even among the most avid of the bookreading public, many of the old oral practices of information exchange remained popular. People continued to chat and to argue, to attend lectures, speeches, debates, and sermons.30 Such qualifications deserve note—any generalization about the adoption and use of a new technology will be imperfect—but they don’t change the fact that the arrival of movable-type printing was a central event in the history of Western culture and the development of the Western mind. “For the medieval type of brain,” writes J. Z. Young, “making true statements depended on fitting sensory experience with the symbols of religion.” The letterpress changed that. “As books became common, men could look more directly at each other’s observations, with a great increase in the accuracy and content of the information conveyed.”31 Books allowed readers to compare their thoughts and experiences not just with religious precepts, whether embedded in symbols or voiced by the clergy, but with the thoughts and experiences of others.32 The social and cultural consequences were as widespread as they were profound, ranging from religious and political upheaval to the ascendancy of the scientific method as the central means for defining truth and making sense of existence. What was widely seen as a new “Republic of Letters” came into being, open at least theoretically to anyone able to exercise, as the Harvard historian Robert Darnton puts it, “the two main attributes of citizenship, writing and reading.”33 The literary mind, once confined to the cloisters of the monastery and the towers of the university, had become the general mind. The world, as Bacon recognized, had been remade.

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book, Except that the reader leaned above the page, Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be the scholar to whom his book is true, to whom The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be. The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page.

There are many kinds of reading. David Levy, in Scrolling Forward, a book about our present-day transition from printed to electronic documents, notes that literate people “read all day long, mostly unconsciously.” We glance at road signs, menus, headlines, shopping lists, the labels of products in stores. “These forms of reading,” he says, “tend to be shallow and of brief duration.” They’re the types of reading we share with our distant ancestors who deciphered the marks scratched on pot-shards. But there are also times, Levy continues, “when we read with greater intensity and duration, when we become absorbed in what we are reading for longer stretches of time. Some of us, indeed, don’t just read in this way but think of ourselves as readers.” Stevens, in the couplets of “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” provides a particularly memorable and moving portrayal of the kind of reading Levy is talking about:

GUSTAF DALSTROM. C. 1923

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Along with the highminded came the lowminded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of pornography poured into the marketplace and found eager buyers...â&#x20AC;?

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EROTIC SERIES OF COUPLES IN BED. ANONYMOUS, C. 1750

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more noise please Stevens’ poem not only describes deep reading. It demands deep reading. The apprehension of the poem requires the mind the poem describes. The quiet” and the “calm” of the deep reader’s attentiveness become “part of the meaning” of the poem, forming the pathway through which “perfection” of thought and expression reaches the page. In the metaphorical “summer night” of the wholly engaged intellect, the writer and the reader merge, together creating and sharing “the conscious being of the book.” Recent research into the neurological effects of deep reading has added a scientific gloss to Stevens’ lyric. In one fascinating study, conducted at Washington University’s Dynamic Cognition Laboratory and published in the journal Psychological Science in 2009, researchers used brain scans to examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences.” The brain regions that are activated often “mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.” Deep reading, says the studies lead researcher, Nicole Speer, “is by no means a passive exercise.” The reader becomes the book. The bond between book reader and book writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization. The words of the writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies. And the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer’s work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory. “All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain,” said Emerson. “They knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.” Our rich literary tradition is unthinkable without the intimate exchanges that take place between reader and writer within the crucible of a book. After Gutenberg’s invention, the bounds of language expanded rapidly as writers, competing for the eyes of ever more sophisticated and demanding readers, strive to express ideas and emotions with superior clarity, elegance, and originality. The vocabulary of the English language, once limited to just a few thousand words, expanded to upwards of a million words as books proliferated. Many of the new words encapsulated abstract concepts that simply hadn’t existed before. Writers experimented with syntax and diction, opening new pathways of thought and

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“The ideas that writers could express and readers could interpret became more complex and subtle, as arguments wound their way linearly across many pages of text. As language expanded, consciousness deepened.” 98

linear focus imagination. Readers eagerly traveled down those pathways, becoming adept at following fluid, elaborate, and idiosyncratic prose and verse. The ideas that writers could express and readers could interpret became more complex and subtle, as arguments wound their way linearly across many pages of text. As language expanded, consciousness deepened. The deepening extended beyond the page. It’s no exaggeration to say that the writing and reading of books enhanced and refined people’s experience of life and of nature. “The remarkable virtuosity displayed by new literary artists who managed to counterfeit taste, touch, smell, or sound in mere words required a heightened awareness and closer observation of sensory experience that was passed on in turn to the reader,” writes Eisenstein. Like painters and composers, writers were able “to alter perception” in a way “that enriched rather than stunted sensuous response to external stimuli, expanded rather than contracted sympathetic response to the varieties of human experience.” The words in books didn’t just strengthen people’s ability to think abstractly; they enriched people’s experience of the physical world, the world outside the book. One of the most important lessons we’ve learned from the study of neuro-plasticity is that the mental capacitieswe develop for one purpose can be put to other uses as well. As our ancestors imbued their minds with the discipline to follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages, they became more contemplative, reflective, and imaginative. “New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read,” says Maryanne Wolf; “the increasingly sophisticated intellectual skills promoted by reading and writing added to our intellectual repertoire. ”The quiet of deep reading became, as Stevens understood, “part of the mind.” Books weren’t the only reason that human consciousness was transformed during the years following the invention of the letterpress—many other technologies and social and demographic trends played important roles—but books were at the very center of the change. As the book came to be the primary means of exchanging knowledge and insight, its intellectual ethic became the foundation of our culture. The book made possible the delicately nuanced self-knowledge found in Wordsworth’s Prelude and Emerson’s essays and the equally subtle understanding of social and personal relations found in the novels of Austen, Flaubert, and Henry James. Even the great twentieth-century experiments in nonlinear narrative by writers like James Joyce and William Burroughs would have been unthinkable without the artists’ presumption of attentive, patient readers. When transcribed to a page,

The literary ethic was not only expressed in what we normally think of as literature. It became the ethic of the historian, illuminating works like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It became the ethic of the philosopher, informing the ideas of Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Nietzsche. And, crucially, it became the ethic of the scientist. One could argue that the single most influential literary work of the nineteenth century was Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In the twentieth century, the literary ethic ran through such diverse books as Einstein’s Relativity, Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. None of these intellectual achievements would have been possible without the changes in reading and writing —and in perceiving and thinking—spurred by the efficient reproduction of long forms of writing on printed pages. Like our forebears during the later years of the Middle Ages, we find ourselves today between two technological worlds. After 550 years, the printing press and its products are being pushed from the center of our intellectual life to its edges. The shift began during the middle years of the twentieth century, when we started devoting more and more of our time and attention to the cheap, copious, and endlessly entertaining products of the first wave of electric and electronic media: radio, cinema, phonograph, television. But those technologies were always limited by their inability to transmit the written word. They could displace but not replace the book. Culture’s mainstream still ran through the printing press. Now the mainstream is being diverted, quickly and decisively, into a new channel. The electronic revolution is approaching its culmination as the computer—desktop, laptop, handheld —becomes our constant companion and the Internet becomes our medium of choice for storing, processing, and sharing information, including text. The new world will remain, of course, a literate world, packed with the familiar symbols of the alphabet. We cannot go back to the lost oral world, any more than we can turn the clock back to a time before the clock existed. “Writing and print and the computer,” writes Walter Ong, “are all ways of technologizing the word” and once technologized, the word cannot be detechnologized. But the world of the screen, as we’re already coming to understand, is a very different place from the world of the page. A new intellectual ethic is taking hold. The pathways in our brains are once again being rerouted.

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“...The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: the access of perfection to the page.”

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falling from context.

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G A R F ME

TA T

N ION

disrupt, interrupt, transmogrify

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WHAT IS THAT?

Succombing to Fragmentation: Disrupt, interrupt, transmogrify.

1. google effect + no knowledge = fragmented reality + diminishing culture 3. where do you come form? who are you?

2. ancient alien structures.

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4. pretend to know what you do not know.

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10. puzzled.

11. one half without the other is useless.

9. bliss.

Nonlinear ways of seeing, absorbing, and producing often fragment experiences and erase context. When we do not know what the source of information is we lose the history and are susceptible to altered realities and untruths. As this happens to us, we lose what we believe and what we know; deteriorating the essence of who we are. The following studies were an attempt to prove this hypothesis through the re-appropriation of meaning and context in graphic design.

8. the earth is round.

7. do you know what this is? why not?

107 5. bear, gorilla, yeti, or sloth?

6. science comes from books.

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Appropriation and theft are two completely different ways of representing something, or yourself. When I began my education at ArtCenter, I was amazed at the amount of design theft. My Fine Art education was far afield from these approaches. Images, image treatments, type choices, color choices, grid structures, and overall compositions were being heavily influenced by Pinterest, Google, and Instagram. I was often dismayed when I saw a beautiful design and later discovered that there was an older, near identical version elsewhere on the Internet. Without knowing the authentic context of this “appropriated” image, the significance of the source was lost... the intent for creation of the original was pandered for an aesthetic purpose rather than a conceptual one. I began to think that if we consistently copied existing ideas and uploaded them to the web, the origins of their “creative” birth would be hampered and eventually erased. This idea lived in fragmentation and it’s affects on art, design, society, the self, community, and culture at large.

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Processing of this sort can be found in the ease of access to information versus personal experience. With deadlines being a factor in most projects, being able to quickly find information negated the opportunities afforded through personal experience(s). Relaying immediate information becomes a way of quickly solving a problem. Unfortunately this way of working erases an intuitive process that incorporates a designers essence... their intuition propagated by their personal moments. What makes this situation more problematic is the source. Google makes revenue from fragmenting information. If they can spread these ideas across multiple pages it gives the company a wider margin for clickable advertisements. We are distracted as we work and our ideas are then settled upon based on the correlation of the aesthetic feeling rather deep-seeded, research based on the problem. We mimic this business model as a way to financially survive. We pump it out with a disregard to origin, a sense of self, true authorship, and creativity; slowing advancement of the field while hindering the visceral soul of our own, unique endeavors.

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1. the watching, tony oursler. 1993.

I began making templates from historically recognized, print media. From these templates, I tried to negate the context for their purpose. I inserted information as far afield as possible; likening this to a cutup, forms of collage, or a plagiarist erasing a path. Constructionist designs became advertisements for feminine products, or toothpaste. Charm Magazine, with routes in feminism,

5. screen lovers, eli craven. 2013.

became advertisements for toilet paper. Horror movie posters based on deep research became advertisements for Chuck E. Cheese without the scaffold of market research or specific intention. 2. unknown, asger carlsen. 2017.

What I found was a collage of information. The aesthetic carried through and the message delivered affectively. Authorship and history were disrespected. My personal essence and that of the community were not part of the evolution of ideation. I erased culture by mutating original intent through a process of intentional fragmentation.

110 3. mcluhan caged, nam jun paik. 1967.

4. untitled, dash snow. 2006.

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6. bang! joe webb. 2014.

“WHAT I FOUND WAS A COLLAGE OF INFORMATION THAT IN THE END DIDN’T MAT TER. THE AESTHETIC CARRIED THROUGH AND THE MESSAGE WAS DELIVERED AFFECTIVELY. AUTHORSHIP AND HIS TORY WERE DISRESPECTED AND MY PERSONAL ESSENCE, OR THE ESSENCE OF A COMMUNIT Y WERE NOT PART OF THE EVOLUTION.”

7. accuracy, matthieu bourel. 2018.

111 8. flores desnuda, lola dupre. 2015.

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1. proto eto. alexander rodchenko, 1923.

In 1923, Rodchenko teamed up with the period’s most experimental Constructivist theorists, artists and designers to establish the magazine Left Front of Arts. One of Rodchenko’s most successful projects that appeared in LEF was a 1923 photo collage that he specifically designed to accompany the text of the graet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem, “Pro Eto” (About This). Mayakovsky wrote the poem to his muse and lover, Lily Brik.

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INVERT TYPE ON PORTRAIT OVERLAP PHOTOGRAPH: BLACK AND WHITE PORTRAIT - STARING AT CAMERA INCLUDE NECK AND UPPER TORSO

JUST S DDO IT 2. niked. brian ostroff, 2019. 113

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3. barely where? brian ostroff, 2019. 114

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RRADIANT N 4. beautiful you. brian ostroff, 2019. 115

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1. charm magazine. cipe pineles, 1954.

Charm was a magazine subtitled as â&#x20AC;&#x153;the magazine for women who work.â&#x20AC;? The magazine recognized that women held two jobs, one in the workplace and one at home. Pineles described Charm as â&#x20AC;&#x153;...the first feminist magazine. Similar to her work at Seventeen. Pineles planned a number of fourcolor pages, two color pages, and the general pattern for the issue.

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CHARMIN

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IT IS IMPORTANT TO ALWAYS WIPE MORE THAN ONCE . NOTHING IS L Tmagazine R A S for O Fpeople T Mwho E Gwipe A ROLL W O R S E T H A N P O O P U N D E R Y O U R F I N G E R N A I L S . Uthe . THE SOFTER WAY TO GET CLEAN IN A ROLL THAT LASTS LONGER . ULTRA SOFT SUPER MEGA ROLL . IRRESISTBLE SOFTNESS IN OUR LONGEST LASTING ROLL YET . ULTRA STRONG SUPER MEGA ROLL . GET THE BETTER CLEAN YOU LOVE IN OUR LONGEST LASTING ROLL YET . CHARMIN FOREVER ROLL . NOW GO UP TO ONE MONTH BEFORE CHANGING YOUR ROLL . YULTRA STRONG MEGA ROLL . GET THE BETTER CLEAN YOU LOVE IN A ROLL THAT LASTS LONGER . CHARMIN ESSENTIAL SOFT MEGA ROLL . ESSENTIALS SOFT MEGA ROLL . CHARMIN ESSENTIALS STRONG MEGA ROLL . CHARMIN ESSENTIALS STRONG MEGA ROLL TOILET PAPER . ULTRA GENTLE MEGA ROLL . PAMPER YOURSELF AND ALSO GET A BETTER VALUE WITH MORE GO'S PER ROLL . CHARMIN FLUSHABLE WIPES . GET THE FRESHEST CLEAN . FLUSHABLE WIPES FOR THE FRESHEST AND CLEANEST CLEAN . CHARMIN IS ROTO-ROOTER APPROVED . NEVER HAVE ITCHY BOTTOM . IT IS IMPORTANT TO ALWAYS WIPE MORE THAN ONCE . NOTHING IS WORSE THAN POOP UNDER YOUR FINGERNAILS . ULTRA SOFT MEGA ROLL . THE SOFTER WAY TO GET CLEAN IN A ROLL THAT LASTS LONGER . ULTRA SOFT SUPER MEGA ROLL . IRRESISTBLE SOFTNESS IN OUR LONGEST LASTING ROLL YET . ULTRA STRONG SUPER MEGA ROLL . GET THE BETTER CLEAN YOU LOVE IN OUR LONGEST LASTING ROLL YET . CHARMIN FOREVER ROLL . NOW GO UP TO ONE MONTH BEFORE CHANGING YOUR ROLL . YULTRA STRONG MEGA ROLL . GET THE BETTER CLEAN YOU LOVE IN A ROLL THAT LASTS LONGER . CHARMIN ESSENTIAL SOFT MEGA ROLL . ESSENTIALS SOFT MEGA ROLL . CHARMIN ESSENTIALS STRONG MEGA ROLL . CHARMIN ESSENTIALS STRONG MEGA ROLL TOILET PAPER . ULTRA GENTLE MEGA ROLL . PAMPER YOURSELF AND ALSO GET A BETTER VALUE WITH MORE GO'S PER ROLL . CHARMIN FLUSHABLE WIPES . GET THE FRESHEST CLEAN . FLUSHABLE WIPES FOR THE FRESHEST AND CLEANEST CLEAN . CHARMIN IS ROTO-ROOTER APPROVED . NEVER HAVE ITCHY BOTTOM . IT IS IMPORTANT TO ALWAYS WIPE MORE THAN ONCE . NOTHING IS WORSE THAN POOP UNDER YOUR FINGERNAILS . ULTRA SOFT MEGA ROLL . THE SOFTER WAY TO GET CLEAN IN A ROLL THAT LASTS LONGER . ULTRA SOFT SUPER MEGA ROLL . IRRESISTBLE SOFTNESS IN OUR LONGEST LASTING ROLL YET . ULTRA STRONG SUPER MEGA ROLL . GET THE BETTER CLEAN YOU LOVE IN OUR LONGEST LASTING ROLL YET . CHARMIN FOREVER ROLL . NOW GO UP TO ONE MONTH BEFORE CHANGING YOUR ROLL . YULTRA STRONG MEGA ROLL . GET THE BETTER CLEAN YOU LOVE IN A ROLL THAT LASTS LONGER . CHARMIN ESSENTIAL SOFT MEGA ROLL . ESSENTIALS SOFT MEGA ROLL . CHARMIN ESSENTIALS STRONG MEGA ROLL . CHARMIN ESDECEMBER E MEGA SENTIALS STRONG MEGA ROLL TOILET PAPER . ULTRA GENTL 2019 H MORE R O L L . P A M P E R Y O U R S E L F A N D A L S O G E T A B E T T E R V A L U E W I25TCENTS

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2. ultra strong. brian ostroff, 2019. 117

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CHARMIN

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please don't squeeze the charmin

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3. charm(in)ed. brian ostroff, 2019. 118

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CHARMIN

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please don't squeeze the charmin

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4. squeeze it. brian ostroff, 2019. 119

E S E E H C . E WHERE A KID CAN BE A KID . FUN FUN FUN AND MORE FUN . THE BEST FUN YOU CAN HAVE . CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES AT OUR FAMILY FUN CENTER . DID SOMEONE SAY THE BEST BIRTHDAY PARTIES EVER . PIZZA, GAMES, BEER AND MORE 0.5” MARGIN

2. cheesed. brian ostroff, 2019. 120

0.5” MARGIN

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1. the shining. saul bass, 1980.

The inspiration that came to Bass for this poster was in the form of stippled images that emerge and recede from white space. Stanley Kubrick really didn’t like that. The final poster overloads the stippling effect to create a black background, satisfying Kubrick’s need for more visual heft. Instead of objects lost in the snowbound home of the Overlook Hotel, we see Danny Torrance’s face emerging from the darkness, creating a sense of fear and dread that tap into Edvard Munch’s, The Scream.

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1. the man with the movie camera. stenberg, 1929.

The Man with the Movie Camera, by Dziga Vertov; most famous for his 1929 experimental silent film The Man with a Movie Camera. Exhibiting a Marxist aesthetic, the film is an account of the crazy adventures of an artistic filmmaker hell-bent on exploring the possibilities with the newly discovered medium of film. Shot over a period of three years, the film chronicles the mundane events of a Soviet city that is at once realistic and idealistic. It employs a range of cinematic techniques.

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2. fresh. brian ostroff, 2019. 123

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I t A i n ' t e A s y b EIn c h EEs y .

DA NG E ROUS LY

C RU NC HY

CHE E OS

THE CHEESE THAT

GOES CRUNCH

Chester Che etah WHITE CHEDDAR BITES. FLAMIN HOT ASTEROIDS. CRUNCHY CHEESE. CRUNCHY FLAMIN' HOT. PUFFS CHEESE SNACKS. PAWS CHEESE SNACKS. CRUNCHY FLAMIN' HOT CHIPOTLE RANCH. CRUNCHY FLAMIN' HOT LIMON CHEESE. CRUNCHY XXTRA FLAMIN' HOT. CRUNCHY CHEDDAR JALAPENO. PUFFS FLAMIN' HOT. SIMPLY PUFFS WHITE CHEDDAR. SIMPLY PUFFS WHITE JALAPENO CHEDDAR CHEESE.

2. crunchy!. brian ostroff, 2019. 124

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1. the man with the golden arm. saul bass, 1955.

Bass became widely known in the film industry after creating the title sequence for Otto Premingerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). The subject of the film was a jazz musicianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s struggle to overcome his heroin addiction, a taboo subject in the mid-1950s. He chose the arm as the central image, as it is a strong image relating to heroin addiction. The titles featured an animated, white on black paper cut-out arm of a heroin addict.

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1. obit. kristen bye, 2016.

Directed by Vanessa Gould, feature documentary Obit explores the daily rituals, joys and existential angst of New York Times writers as they chronicle life after death. Obit premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, screened at over 40 festivals, and was released theatrically in 2017. NPR called Obit “heartfelt and unshakable” and the New York Times chose it as a Critics’ Pick, describing it as “observant, and nonchalantly witty.”

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2. rituals. brian ostroff, 2019. 127

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The time it took to make templates and fill them in with information proved to be very stressful. As I measured distances between graphic elements and notated them across nearly twenty different images, thesis deadlines loomed and a pile of projects awaited. Weeks passed and I looked for faster ways of creating images. The dirt road led me to generative processes that pushed the idea of fragmentation even further. There are a handful of Generative Adversarial Networks online that offer their services for free. These networks are a basic form of Artificial Intelligence, or machine learning. They take data, parse it, and recombine it to create something new. Many of these GANs were developed primarily for images. One in particular, deepart.io, allowed me to easily upload two images into a simple interface. The data of each pixel was deconstructed and then put back together with an algorithm that searches for balance in color and structure. The images I used were well known amongst the graphic design community. I opted to use these images in an effort to create something new from

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their parts. In effect, a collage of fragmented information, erasing context. The results left me with questions of authorship. None of the combined pixels were of my own construction. The tool used was of my choice like a paintbrush, scissors, glue,or Photoshop, but I had no control over how the tool worked. The resulting images would not have been created had I not chosen the subject matter. Although, the subject matter chosen, was without regard to context and had no specific intention for a combined outcome. The results were retrospectively random due to the nature of the immediacy of the fragments provided to the code. Some of the output proved to have more of a visceral impact on audiences then the originals. If I created these new feelings were the works mine? If I continued to strip images of their foundations, would I be creating something truly unique or just disrupting, interrupting, and transmogrifying history and culture? Would I be adding to the noise? Would my lifted works influence others, further removing the pieces from their foundations?

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3. man with vertigo. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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2. vertigo. saul bass, 1958.

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1. man with the movie camera. stenberg brothers, 1929.

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1. itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a baby. tibor kalman, 1991.

2. bauhaus school poster. joost sch

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hmidt, 1923.

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3. itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a bauhaus. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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3. i am a kennedy. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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2. i am a man. designer unknown, 1968.

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1. dead kennedyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s concert poster. designer unknown, 1984.

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1. kino glaz (film eye). alexander rodchenko, 1924.

2. obey eye. shepard fairey, 2009.

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3. glaz eye. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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3. grill design. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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2. grill fest. felix pfĂ¤ffli, 2015.

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1. graphic design: now in production. experimental jetset, 2011.

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1. aiga detroit. stefan sagemesiter, 1999.

2. anatomy o

of a murder. saul bass, 1959.

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3. anatomy of detroit. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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3. humanscale machines. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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1. olivetti accounting machines. giovanni pintori, 1962.

2. humanscale manual. neils diffirient, 1974.

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1. moins de bruit (less noise). josef mĂźller-brockmann, 1960.

2. al capone. lola dupree, 2011.

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3. prohibit noise. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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3. tagged pelican. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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2. merz pelikan. kurt schwitters, 1925

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1. tag wall. barry mcgee, 2010.

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1. olivetti summa prima 20. giovanni pintori, 1957.

2. vertigo. saul bass, 1958.

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3. vertigo prima. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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3. rue de sadness. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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2. rue de seine. jacques villeglĂŠ, 1964.

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1. sadness. lola dupree, 2012.

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1. container corporation of america. a.m. cassandre, 1938.

2. legibility. marcos faunner

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r, 2013.

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3. contain legibility. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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3. bazaar booze. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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2. harper's bazaar. alexey brodovitc

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1. al capone. lola dupree, 2011.

ch, 1955.

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1. imagination blockcopy. ikko tanaka, 1993.

2. holy other0. felix pfĂ¤ffli, 2016.

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3. holy imagination. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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3. electric bob. brian ostroff & deepart.io, 2019.

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2. dylan. milton glaser, 1966.

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1. rural electrification administration. lester beall, 1937.

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COLLAGE THEORY, RECEPTION, AND THE CUTUPS OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS Laszlo K. Gefin

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COLLAGE THEORY, RECEPTION, AND THE CUTUPS OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS Laszlo K. Gefin Perspectives on Contemporary Literature In attempting to formulate a theoretical and practical context for his method of writing, William S. Burroughs has repeatedly made reference to the collage compositions of the Dadaists and Surrealists as the direct antecedents of the cutup. As he wrote in The Third Mind, co-authored by Burroughs and the painter-collagist Brion Gysin, “Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ technique to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint ... lengthwise, for example and shuffle the columns of text”. Although the cutup was not used during the writing of Naked Lunch, its chapters were put together at random, giving the appearance as if some such “shuffle” had already taken place; but the intention that later materialized in the cutup proper had been articulated quite clearly in Burroughs’ “atrophied preface” to that work: “I am a recording instrument. I do not presume to impose ‘story’, ‘plot’, or ‘continuity’. In so-far-as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function”. In renouncing claims to an organizing self or ordering intelligence, and proposing instead an ostensibly undifferentiated, unpremeditated (re)recording of various data, Burroughs seems to restate a well-known modernist technique with a postmodernist twist (an opting for reproduction instead of production). For while the heterogeneous juxtapositions in such works as The Waste Land or The Cantos do give the illusion that the diverse materials organized themselves “naturally,” forming image clusters by “natural” cohesion (“by no man these verses,” writes Pound in Canto XLIX), the ordering self is there all the same. In the Burroughs cutup, on the other hand, the disposing-arranging self is absent; the juxtapositions happen by “pure chance.” Since there is no clue to possible intentionality, the question arises, In what sense can readers as further reproducers receive such garbled transmission? What is the cutup writer’s “limited function” Burroughs alludes to?

L ASZLO K. GEFIN

CUTUP BY WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS AND BRION GYSIN. THE THIRD MIND, 1978. As opposed to the anti-art pranks and demonstrations of the Dadaists (for instance, Tristan Tzara’s performance of pulling words from a hat to compose a “poem”), Burroughs’ claims for the cutup sound almost conservative and utilitarian: “Cutups,” he says, “establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision expands”. But just how exactly do these operations come about? Burroughs does not precisely define it; he only makes reference to the collage as an earlier, painterly form of the cutup, declaring that “the cutup method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years”. The collage, therefore, as a legitimating ground for the cutup and as its privileged ancestor, should be briefly examined before we turn to the cutup, and especially since in the hands of recent theorists it has become a preeminent art form: in one formulation, “Collage is the single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century”.

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fragmentation What does the collage, in effect, do? No general answer seems to be possible, for by their very indeterminacy and ambiguity collages would elicit different interpretations from the maker/producer, the scholar or art critic, and the nonprofessional reader/viewer situated in his/her particular economic, political, historic-al context.

essence [by being evaluated against one another; by being dematerialized they become material for the picture”. This loss by the individual piece of its own context results in incoherence, or the new relationship between the incongruous fragments--theatre, train, and bus tickets, program notes, parts of newspaper headlines, advertising slogans cut out from magazines--becomes, from a more sophisticated point of view, particularly ironic. Schwitters’ fascination with the flotsam and jetsam of print culture, with the “value of the worthless,” has just such irony for its basis; in his own words, “I tried to construct new art forms out of the remains of a former culture,” in which “everything had broken down in any case”.

The earliest practitioners of the collage, Braque and Picasso in their analytic cubist period around 1912, had already charged their innovative work with self-confessed messages, the most notable being that by the inclusion of printed characters, numbers, fragments cut out from newspapers and posters the painter sought to “blur” the boundary line separating “art” and “life.” As Braque expressed it, he placed these objects in his paintings “in order to come ever closer to reality”.

The Dadaist dualism is present in the work of Schwitters as well: first, the artist’s initial private fascination with textual scraps, to the extent that “the forgotten, discarded, moldering things he worked with had for Schwitters an unprecedented magic-something akin to the power of fetishes”; and second, the social aspect of the juxtapositions, documenting Schwitters’ own profound disillusionment with postwar German reality. As “magical” objects, the collages profess an access to the absolute; as cultural products, they aim to serve as historical indices of irony to that corrupt reality.

The art critics were also engaged in providing a theoretical framework for the collage; according to E. H. Gombrich, in his comments on the cubists’ objective of demolishing the mimetic tradition, they insisted that theirs was “an exercise in painting, not in illusion”. Later, the work of Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Hanna Hoch, and others was appraised similarly, both by the artists themselves and theorists of the avant-garde. Ernst, for example, chose to explain his collage technique by referring to Lautreamont’s definition of the beautiful (sewing machine, umbrella, dissecting table meeting by chance), calling it the cultivation of “systematic displacement and its effects”.

Leaving aside the “magical” element for the moment, it would seem plausible that the ambiguous nature of the collage would not strengthen, but rather weaken the effectiveness of its ironic stance. In several of Schwitters’ textual collages, featuring names and pictures of commercial products (the artist’s glue Pelikanol, for example), the

Of the Dadaist collage artists Kurt Schwitters seems to stand the closest to Burroughs and the cutup, mainly because textual fragments acquired a prominence in Schwitters’ work far beyond their role in Braque and Picasso, so that most of his collages have incited some form of textual interpretation in addition to a pictorial one. Schwitters himself and many art critics sympathetic to Dadaism saw the textual both as “clues” to the “real world,” as well as “startling, exciting, fascinating, admonitory”. As later in the cutup, the intended effect is estrangement and reunification: the removal of a textual fragment from its original context and its incorporation in a new set of relationships, so that the various materials, in Schwitters’ words, “lose their individual character, their own special

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“Each cited element breaks the continuity or linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality.”

The collage artists’ “road to the absolute” through the creation of a modern and/or postmodern “sublime” will be discussed later; at this stage it is worth noting the ambivalence of the Dadaists’ program, and the investing of the collage method with metaphysical meaning.

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“...the intended effect is estrangement and reunification: the removal of a textual fragment from its original context and its incorporation in a new set of relationships, so that the various materials, in Schwitters’ words, 'lose their individual character, their own special essence ...”

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“...a movement castrating the continuum of meaning...” Similar to the Dadaists, Burroughs has burdened his own method with a considerable ideological load; he claims, for instance, that the cutup initiates “a movement castrating the continuum of meaning, the breaking up of the Hegelian structure,” with the result that “the text eventually escapes from the control of its manipulator”. As for Arp and Tzara, the disruption of linear order and imposed structure in the cutup of heterogeneous textual material makes it for Burroughs also a potential weapon for those desirous of “scrambling” information / propaganda disseminated by the culture industry via its own controlled media. This blissful unawareness shows in the message on a greeting card sent by Burroughs to Gysin: “Blitzkrieg the citadel of enlightenment” – the weapon being the cutup. Also, Burroughs applauds the cutup because it, like the collage for the Dadaists, destroys univocality, uniformity, linear structure, and ownership. In his appeal to the readers to start making cutups, Burroughs counsels that “you’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody can make them gush into action”. All this sounds deceptively simple; in point of fact, the perception, interpretation, and final integration of the collage / cutup is somewhat complex and as ambiguous as the method. Theoretically, the reception of the collage or the cutup may be seen either as syntactic or semantic, or both. From the point of view of artist / producers and other initiates, the syntactic approach receives emphasis, i.e., the single most significant aspect of collage composition is the removal of certain particles from their original setting and their placement in a new context. The semantic or hermeneutic approach consists in attempting to give meaning to this operation. (To illustrate: Dr. Johnson’s definition of metaphysical poetry as “heterogeneous elements yoked ... together” may be an example of the syntectic mode; but with his insertion “by violence” the definition also becomes semantic.) Either way, “collage experience” for the third type of receiver, the nonprofessional reader or viewer, will depend on that reader’s horizon of expectation, the entirety of the reader’s past knowledge, experience, prejudice, and predilection. The reader can only know with some certainty if he/she is having a collage experience if the original materials are still there in their contexts and then are removed to form new wholes.

Collage writing, as seen by Ulmer and others, is deemed revolutionary also by violating ownership, while also doing away with concepts such as property and propriety-all that is “proper” to logocentric discourse. That the essential ambiguity of the collage makes for a double-edged, rather than a single revolutionary, weapon, seems to escape the partisans of the method; that instead of unswervingly maintaining its irony the collage can easily be appropriated by the culture industry, has been ignored by most artists and theorists. This blindness or innocence may be rooted in wishful thinking; that is, the collage has become invested with something akin to fetish power and surrounded with an aura that would conceivably be self-legitimating and would also legitimate the critical and theoretical practices of those thinkers who have become disillusioned with most aspects of modernism, but would like to salvage for the present its prime method. With the collage as ambiguous and indeterminate in its uses, we may return to Burroughs’ cutup and the problematics of reception his own post-collagist method presents to the reader.

"...violating ownership, while also doing away with concepts such as property and propriety-all that is 'proper' to logocentric discourse." intention and effect may be found ironic, yet viewed differently, or displayed in a different context, the work may also pass as an imaginative piece of advertising, designed to sell that very product. For its producers, as for its contemporary theoreticians, collage’s instability and ambiguity has always counted as a definite asset; to quote Gregory Ulmer, “Each cited element breaks the continuity or linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists also of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition”.

fragmentation

more noise please “recipe” in grammatical English, using the text of the program quoted at the beginning of this study: “Writing is fifty years behind painting, etc.” Then they proceed to cut the text vertically into three strips of even width and switch them; thus, the original order of the sections designated as A, B, and C will be changed to A, C, B. The scrambled text is as follows: “Writing is fifty. I propose to apply ears behind painting. The painters’ techniques as simple and use to writing; things immediate as collage through the pages or montage. Cut right of any book or newspaper example, and shuffle into ... lengthwise, for the columns of the text”. The new text makes nonsense of the original, although it may amuse certain readers aware of the irony in such semantic units as “ears behind painting,” “cut right of any book,” etc. Nevertheless even these readers, predisposed to enter a novel language game, will find entertainment or other value in these cutups because they were made aware of the “proper,” unscrambled text preceding it, the “proper” text having become part of their own horizon before coming to the fragmented-reassembled version. It is thus important for readers to know that the cutup is a version, and that it is a version of something specific against which it can be tested.

WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING. WILLIAM BURROUGHS, 1964 Faced with a ready Schwitters collage or a Burroughs cutup, the reader cannot be expected to duplicate the original collage experience of these artists by being exposed to the results of that primary experience. In this case, the syntactic aspect of the collage situation must first be apprehended by the reader , before it can be subjected to a hermeneutic approach intent on producing a meaning of that-recognized collage event. But with the understanding that “This is a cutup” the hermeneutic task becomes compounded by the ambiguous nature of the juxtapositions; for how does something begin to “mean” when it is deliberately made indeterminate? The problematics of reading cutups without actual cut-up experience can be seen in The Third Mind, especially where Burroughs and Gysin illustrate the making of cutups. They first give the L ASZLO K. GEFIN

In such cases, however, when Burroughs merely informs the reader of the sources of the cutup by reproducing only the scrambled form and not the original version, the reader’s disorientation will be more severe. Whereas in the first instance the reader, however differently, may be seen as a co-creator of the cutup (for it was the scissors and chance that decided what cuts and what new combinations will result, and Burroughs could no more predict how the lines will be reshuffled than the reader), in the second type it is only Burroughs who can be said to have had a collage experience. In the latter event the reader is forced into a situation where he/she is expected or invited to notice a new unity and then to try to produce some meaning for it, without being told what brought that unity into being. Even in those cases where the reader has access to the uncut version, when attempting semantically to integrate the cutup, the attentive reader’s mind should stop as it reaches the juncture where the cut-in fragment begins; or rather the mind is coerced to “jump” over the invisible yet perceptible “seam” as part of the initial syntactic reading, while also attempting a semantic reconciliation across the “seam.” Since no causal relationship exists be-

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fragmentation tween the newly juxtaposed textual fragments, even after repeated readings the “mind jolt” at the “seam” remains. Whether the “jolt” is experienced as something disquieting, unpleasant, upsetting, ironic, silly, mystical, or just boring, will hinge on the particular reader’s past experience, horizon, and receptivity.

fact, be prelinguistic. Moreover, the chance operation of the collage experience of an Arp, or Burroughs, that was instrumental in the obliteration of the “creative” subject has brought about the reappearance of that subject in the self-aware consciousness of the reader as he/she attempts to come to grips with the cut-in and cut-out textual fragments across the jolting “seam.”

When there is no original, uncut copy against which to compare the cutup, the cutup’s potential for an ironic interpretation will be reduced; nevertheless, some readers with certain intellectual inclinations may find the destruction of sense interesting. If we assume that during the constant back and forth movement of the reader’s meaning producing intention between horizons (the text’s and the reader’s own) the reader will always experience the “mind jolt” at the “seam,” is it likely that there will be a general corresponding readerly response to this ever-present obstacle to full semantic unification? If one may further assume, as I do, that since the act of reading consists in this unceasing fusion of horizons with the result that the reader and the text stop being separate identities but

“When there is no original, uncut copy against which to compare the cutup, the cutup’s potential for an ironic interpretation will be reduced...” will constitute a single phenomenon, so that the reader’s ordinary consciousness will be submerged in this new entity, then the cutup’s “mind jolt” will be taken by all readers as an awakening, a distancing, estrangement, or alienation, a sudden self-conscious realization that the reader’s intention cannot merge with the text. The reader may at this point be aware that he/she is not “reading,” but observing him/herself in the act of reading. What, therefore, one may see emerging from the “jolt at the textual juncture is a self that reads, or rather a self caught outside the process of reading, aware of itself as a meaning producing consciousness. It is also evident that the emergence of this reading self, the presence of a subject comes about precisely at the moment when the aesthetic object ceases to be intelligible in a conventional sense, with the reader confronting it only as an absence. The textual cut brings the reader to the limits of language, to an estranged, self-aware consciousness that may, in

It may also be further asked: What may be the content of the estrangement experienced at the “seam”? It would seem that this content may be the absence of the aesthetic object that the reader had expected to merge with in the production of meaning: a coming face to face with an event / object that is unpresentable. This notion approximates Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of the sublime as it is applied to modern and postmodern texts. According to Lyotard, the sublime appears “when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept”. Lyotard follows Kant in his formulation, for whom formlessness, an absence of order suggested a possible index to the unpresentable. As Lyotard sees it, the modern sublime differs from the postmodern in that for the former the unpresentable is indicated as “the missing content,” while the latter “puts forward the unpresentable in the presentation itself”. Both the collage and the cutup would in this view, be considered postmodern, for as Burroughs observed, “Use of scissors renders the process explicit”. The “seam” in the collage / cutup as the universally experienced presence of an absence may also ideally “create” a community of readers that by the act of semantic reconciliation become co-creators, participants in the disseminating process initiated by the "first" author, and by experiencing alienation and selfhood would complete the hermeneutic act. Notions such as “writing subject” and “reading subject” would disappear, replaced by a single transcendent identity re-experiencing together the unpresentable. This postmodern communion of intention and reception may, however, conceal a very real paradox, while at the same time it remains definitely naive. Authors and theorists posit, in a vein similar to their “forgetting” the ambiguous, indeterminate nature of the collage or cutup, that there can actually be a “work” that is not really a usual work at all but is characterized by a semantic-hermeneutic break, an absence that is present in it, while at the same time it attracts a community of readers that are not really readers but co-creators; the art that has become anti-art is thus intended to enter “life” and become synonymous with “praxis.” Just as irony becomes nearly extinct because the collage can be appropriated by the controllers

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more noise please of the culture industry, so the metaphysical aspirations of the authors and critics for a new community via the “revolutionary” sublime of the collage/cutup can be seen to be illusory. As we have seen, from the beginning avant-garde artists refused to accept the traditional separation of art and life, and have used the collage (as Burroughs had used the cutup) as a means to reassume a role in society they no longer possessed. The avant-garde artist experienced the frustration of being without real, communally legitimated function; as Rudolf Arnheim wrote, “The craftsman who had fulfilled an established need in the affairs of government and religion was gradually transformed into an outsider-the producer of surplus luxury goods to be stored in museums or used to demonstrate the wealth and refined taste of the rich and privileged”. This historical shift in the production and reception of art has been documented by theorists such as Walter Benjamin

“In his appeal to the readers to start making cutups, Burroughs counsels, 'That you’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you, or anybody, can make them gush into action.” and Peter Burger, who have signaled the gradual change from sacral or ritual to courtly and then to bourgeois art.4 In Burger’s definition, both sacral and courtly art were integral to the life praxis of the recipient; in such contexts, “as cult and representational objects, works of art were put to specific use” . The intention of the modern (and postmodern) artist to produce something “useful” may be observed in the privileging of the collage/cutup that denies habitual trance-like reception, and in fact pro-

L ASZLO K. GEFIN

poses to “create” of the recipient, in the dislocating moment of the “jolt” at the “seam,” a collaborator, a fellow guerrilla sharing a weapon with the “first author” and using it as intended to “blitzkrieg” the “system.” The re-appropriation of the sacral role of the artist and the creation of a real community-the motivating force at the basis of the ideology for the collage: can be seen to have been similarly embraced by Burroughs, offering in the cutup a device that would make “everyone” not only co-creators but creators in their own right. Both he and most collage artists/theorists seem however to have “forgotten” that reception has at all times been culture bound and historically determined; and while the “mind jolt” at the alienating “seam” may be universal, and even reconstitutive of a “reading subject,” the kind of semantic reconciliation that would take place should at all times be dependent on the individual horizon of expectations inescapably different in each reader. Certainly, as Fredric Jameson wrote, “in the commercial universe of late capitalism the serious writer is obliged to reawaken the readers’ numbed sense of the concrete through the administration of linguistic shocks”; but the real question is; To whom is the “shock” shocking and to what degree? For those critics and readers whose horizon already contains fragmented works, the “shock” will not be that acute. But for those who ideally would benefit most from the “mind jolt” of the collage/cutup, it would perhaps go unnoticed, for the “seam” would simply be an irritant to them since they exist in the hypnotic-seductive realm of the culture industry where the recording instrument of a Burroughs can be seen but not heard. In this realm the collage or cutup, born in the spirit of negation and revolt, become products with a marginal sales potential, ambiguous language games consumed by a tiny minority. The revolutionary phraseology, from Tzara to Burroughs, does not denote a praxis, as suggest ed earlier, but a utopia; Naked Lunch, Exterminator, and the other texts do not work like samizdat, i.e., something truly feared or at least objectionable, but can be found in bookstores. They are, unwittingly or not, consumer items; only for a few are they relics of a voyage to an ideal world.

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“For those critics and readers whose horizon already contains fragmented works, the ‘shock’ will not be that acute. But for those who ideally would benefit most from the ‘mind jolt’ of the cutup, it would perhaps go unnoticed, for the ‘seam’ would simply be an irritant to them since they exist in the hypnotic-seductive realm of the culture industry...”

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NOISE

NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE

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distractions

NOISE

a caca-phony of

NOISE

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1. power.

IS THE EASE OF ACCESS WORTH IT?

Overwhelm & Manipulate:

8. it must b

A ca-ca-phony of noise.

5. relationships.

2. watch, rinse, repeat.

4. induce my anxiety.

3. i like it because you do.

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6. which w

noise

9. what do i even mean?

be important... it's on television.

7. tweet. tweet. tweet.

way(s) do we go?

Visual noise has become the mainstay of society. Printed media and the "screen" are ever-present. They inform, distract, and supply a steady stream of information that we absorb consciously, and subconsciously. Our actions are influenced by the ease of propagation and reception of these messages. What we hold to be true is dissipating through the molding of narratives. Our individuality is dissolving as we search for validation and reprieve; with and through these de-vices.

10. you validate me.

177 12. zoloft.

11. follow the herd.

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1. appropriâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;ate. 6. fetal syphilis. 7. peace be upon you.

The average amount of time we spend on our phones is approximately 3 hours and 15 minute a day... 22 hours and 45 minutes a week, or 3 days and 19 hours every month. In a year, that would roughly be 45 days and 12 hours. 2. lo(o)ser.

We miss at least 12% of our waking, life in a 365 day period; experiences that uniquely inform and shape who we are as individuals. Experiences that teach, connect, motivate, shape, and inspire us. Instead we find ourselves reading about

8. get clean.

the exaggerated lives of others, posting, 3. dispair.

tweeting, looking at pictures, swiping left on strangers, watching porn, and / or watching tantalizing videos on YouTube. These figures do not account for time spent on other screen based devices such as televisions, laptops, gaming devices, or tablets.

9. discriminate.

Time that we spend decompressing with 4. sounds safe.

video games, repetitive news stories, the Kardashians, sports, more YouTube, email, Facebook, Tik Tok, Amazon, texting, and

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5. limited time only.

10. nice drop shadow.

12. contains chemicals.

Spotify usurps even more time. We hide in the noise. We have learned to avoid those things that we know are beneficial. We make promises to ourselves we keep for a week. Promises that are easy to break through distraction and interruption. Distractions and interruptions that are temporary. Fleeting at best as we grasp at the noise for validation and very brief moments heightened by endorphins. 13. intense conversation.

How do we quiet the visual noise that has become a pandemic? How do we navigate through life in the modern era feeling as though the authentic things we think as individuals matter? That our own feelings are good enough, true, and without judgment? My explorations have led me in directions of ridiculousness. Images that are hard to grasp, like brown eggs on white backgrounds, famous people who have no real bearing in anyone's life, sexual relationships that are edited to a heightened level of fantastical reality , lonely people on dating apps

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11. free! free! free!

14. jesus love you.

The trajectory of noise is disturbingly hard to quiet. The modern industrial era manufactures it at an alarming rate.

more noise please

1. shhhhhhhhhhhhhh?

2. what are you doing?

that all want an honest partner in crime, and news broadcasts that operate on completely different sets of "facts"... to name a few. It is too easy to hide, to be distracted, to steal ideas and take credit for them; to appropriate feelings that we find to be cool, or relatable. The noise is nearly impossible to 3. call it dating.

shut off. If it didn't exist what would we do? Without it, would we retain and proliferate the essence of who we are? Do we need friends and strangers to listen, seek us out, and validate our being? Can we truly learn from it, or will we continue to be distracted as the information leaves our heads and lives in the binary universe we have come to trust?

4. ghost each other.

The trajectory of noise is disturbingly hard to quiet. The modern industrial era manufactures it at an alarming rate. Second by minute, we fall victim to it through various means and have learned to tolerate it, be complacent with it, or use it to feel at one with the universe. We question it when it does not 5. do you get it?

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6. listen here.

7. you care.

8. trojan's column.

noise

11. talking head.

9. more popular than jesus.

10. exile from eden.

The noise is nearly impossible to shut off. If it didn't exist what would we do?

12. toilet paper shortage.

13. experience life.

16. toilet paper shortage.

14. temporary documentation. 15. need a new idea?

19. decorum.

17. one out of ten americans have seen this.

18. who do you know?

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20. have you seen this? c. 19% of americans have.

21. facts and fiction.

more noise please

2. follow the herd.

1. why do we care?

entitle us. We go along with it when it is easy, because it is easy. It is our nature to gravitate

...Because it is easy. 3. why not?

towards the path that is flat. Who would we be if the noise suddenly went quiet? How would we learn? How would we find solace in the individuality that defines us... that make each one of us great? What would we do if we had three extra hours of everyday to better ourselves through deep focus? How would society change? 9. role models.

The term "social media" defines our current state(s) of being. Why do we need media to be social? Why can't we operate without being validated? Why do we get depressed when the mechanism does not "like" us? These question try to fight through the noise, but a better response may be one that goes

8. territorial pissing.

with it. A solution that uses it to highlight the 4. teach trolling.

irony of our situation. An insidious mechanism that amplifies its usage exemplifying the trolls that we all are.

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5. internal vs. external knowledge.

6. department of redundancy department.

7. how did you get here?

10. style.

My answer, through research and experience, is to turn the volume up. I propose that we use technology to really let it all go off the rails. Biometrics, pattern recognition, global positioning systems (GPS), and machine learning have made this all possible. We can use technology to plant our thoughts in re-

11. trust.

al-time, in our environments, and on people. Our beliefs about something, or someone, can live for a set moment in time and be archived forever; similar to the models of current social media. Once we are tagged a "creep" we will forever be seen as a creep, through the lens of our

12. follow.

devices. Labels, or fragmentations of our beings, will either continue to drive us into segmented depression, or encourage us to be better people through higher levels of awareness and self-reflection. Either this will get us to change our ways, find inventive ways to use noise in positive, productive ways, or get us to silence the noise we inten17. kids don't play outside.

tionally accumulate, perpetuate, and rely.

Once we are tagged a â&#x20AC;&#x153;creepâ&#x20AC;? we will forever be seen as a creep through the lens of our devices. 13. i did not mean to be creepy.

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16. consistently, positive imagery.

15. posted.

14. superb dialogue.

more noise please

1. noise. 2. noise.

The following pages outline this solution,

3. noise.

its phases for roll-out, and the branding mechanisms that will help infiltrate our current markets and social norms. Many people might see this solution as evil. Although, is it really much different than what we currently prescribe? My answer to this question is"no". 11. noise.

Pleasantries may only last for a short amount, while the horrendously, sublime may continue indefinitely. Time and hubris will let it be doubly noticed with the excuse of making sure the atrocity does not reoccur in the future. As distracted animals, we tend to notice the car accident in the adjacent lane rather than the beautiful flower blooming outside our windows. If our lives were even more full of car accidents and bloody fragments, we may find enough revulsion to look away and

10. noise.

not want to look back. Can you imagine a life 12. noise.

without the noise?

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13. noise.

14. noise.

15. noise.

noise

5. noise.

4. noise.

Can you imagine a life without noise? 8. noise. 7. noise.

9. noise.

18. noise.

16. noise. 17. noise.

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6. noise.

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1. MVP more noise please

As a user, I want messages to appear in real-time to make interactions more authentic. As a user, I want to be able to quickly see the time a message was left to see if it is still relevant.

AUGMENT REALITY.

Building your LABL: More Noise Please.

As a user, I want to know what date a message was left so I know it’s relevance. As a user, I want the camera to pick up AR messages quickly for efficiency and privacy. As a user, I want to be able to turn on, or off, notifications so I know when I am close to a left message.

Beyond research, the idea for LABL came from social media observations, my interests in Street Art, and omnienvironmental Graffiti. To begin thinking about the possibilities of this application I brainstormed 200 user functions,from the absurd to the more practical. This process informed: • • • • • • •

As a user, I want to have a limited number of characters allowed in message to aid in quick read, visual organization, and gamification.

possible phases of development the application's name LABL's identity user interface user experience revenue models future projections.

As a user, I want to have an overly simplified, stress-free interface with few options so I don’t have to think too hard or make too many decisions. As a user, I to place short text messages, on objects, in a shared AR space for others to read and respond. As a user, I want to be able to access an archive of messages left on a particular object, or in a particular location. As a user, I want this technology to operate in a web portal for quick easy access and early phase “shareability”. As a user, I do not want to pay for anything that has to do with this app because it will instantly turn me off.

2. Enhancements As a user, I want to be able move messages in my interface window to be able to see messages that may be covered of hidden. As a user, I want to be able to turn on, or off, notifications so I know when I am close to a left message. As a user, I want to be able to select messages from a readymade list so I can interact quickly with the interface. As a user, I want to be able to leave a message on a car while I am sitting in traffic to warn others of uncouth behavior. As a user, I want to be able to shut all notifications off because they bug me.

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As a user, I want a simple, searchable instruction manual built into a help screen to quickly aid in answering user related questions. As a user, I want a visual reference such a fading messages to help see how long ago a message was left.

As a user, I want messages to pivot from a center axis so I can read them no matter where I am in relation to their placement.

As a user, I want to be notified when another user responds to my messages because I am a curious human looking for reactions.

As a user, I want to be able to filter messages by positive, or negative, content.

As a user, I want to be able to contact the app company directly with feedback, or comments to feel like a greater part of the community.

As a user, I want to have the option to to keep the app running in the background so I can quickly and frequently leave and see messages.

limit the nastiness that is prevalent on the Internet.

As a user, I want to swipe messages away to clear a cluttered interface.

As a user, I want to be able to tag animals because I think they are cute or dangerous.

As a user, I want to leave messages in exact locations to add more affect to the messaging.

As a user, I want to be able to permanently tag a criminal that operates in my space so it is easier for police to track them.

As a user, I want to use biometrics to leave messages attached to others to expand the potential of messaging.Context related... GPS specific. As a user, I want to be able to choose a black, or white, background to my message to make it stand out more in an environment. As a user, I want to be able to control the amount of time a message exists; it may not be relevant 5 min. later As a user, I want to be able to delete my own messages at any time in case I make a typo/mistake. As a user, I want to leave messages above my own head to communicate a feeling, or thought. As a user, I want to be able to control the amount of messages that set off my notifications so I know when I’ve walked into a high traffic area. As a user, I want to be able to leave comments that attach to other comments so their can be a running dialog. As a user, I want an optional spellcheck built in so I don’t look like an idiot. As a user, I want updates to be completely debugged before rolling out to limit any disruptions, or headaches. As a user, I want to the option to automatically install updates so I don’t have to think about it. As a user, I want to leave messages on specific parts of the body to comment and highlight fashion. As a user, I want to be able to preview my message before it goes live so I can see how it will interact with the environment. As a user, I want the option to have comments hyperlinked to messages so the interface does not get cluttered. As a user, I want to be able to turn on, or off, a prompt that asks whether I am sure or not about what I am going to post to make re-see what I leave in a space.

noise As a user, I want a content filter to

As a user, I want to be able to see a complete messaging archive for a location to see it’s history. As a user, I want to scroll through time in a location to control what messages I see based on time.

3. SAFETY As a user, I am concerned about my safety because other users can track, or lure me. As a user, I want to be able to report threatening language for the protection myself and others... moderation systems. 4 flags tagged and then approved by a moderator to go back up, or permanently delete. As a user, I want to be able to cancel service easily to avoid feeling frustrated. As a user, I want threats to notify a screener immediately to limit any potential crime(s). As a user, I want to be notified if a strange device logs into my account to protect my identity. As a user, I want other users who are continuously nasty to be banned from the service to protect the health of the community. As a user, I want to be able to control the amount of messages that set off my notifications so I know when I’ve walked into a high traffic area. As a user, I want to be able to login to protect my privacy. As a user, I want to be able to change password to protect my privacy.

As a user, I want to be able to control how stringent a content filter is so I can limit the strength of the types of messages I see. As a user, I want the parent company to be able to track the real individuals that sign up and leave messages out of safety concerns. As a user, I want to limit the use of images in this app for fear that personal, or inappropriate images could be left in a public sphere. As a user, I want a phone number that I can call and speak to a human when I have trouble with the app. As a user, I want there to be voice to text capabilities, so I can use the app when my hands are busy. As a user, I want there to be text to voice so I can hear what I may not be able to see. As a user, I want to have the option for my user data to not be collected to protect my privacy. As a user, I want the app to only be able to access the parts of my phone necessary to use the app so it can not draw data on my contacts or other stored information. As a user, I want the elimination of bots to enhance the authenticity of information. As a user, I want to be able to immediately report a user for my protection and the protection of others. As a user, I want to be notified of inappropriate users, so I can be aware of unsafe messages, or to be able to block unsafe followers. As a user, I want the app to automatically log me out when it is inactive to protect my account. As a user, I want to be notified if another user tries to log in to my account to protect my account.

As a user, I want to be able to reset a password if forgotten.

As a user, I want my account to lock when another person inputs 3 incorrect passwords to protect my account.

As a user, I want to be able to quickly login so I continuously trust the reliability of the tool and don’t lose interest.

As a user, I want to easily be able to erase any messages I didn’t leave when/if my account gets hacked.

As a user, I want children below a As a user, I do not want this app to certain age to have limited or no work if the phone is moving over access to this app for their and a certain speed to avoid allowing 189our protection. people to slow down traffic to scan an area.

4. PROFILES As a user, I want to be notified in real-time when someone else tags me so I can be aware of what is being said about me. As a user, I want be matched with users that have similar profiles so I can choose whether or not to follow them. As a user, I want other users to be verified to make them think twice about using the tool to commit a crime. As a user, I want the option to stay logged-in so I don’t have to enter my password every time I open the app. As a user, I want other user’s profiles to be accessible so I can learn more about them. As a user, I want to be able to block my identity so I can be more honest about something, or someone. As a user, I want to be able to permanently block my identity for the freedoms that come with anonymity. As a user, I want biometric scans to scour the Internet if I want to know more about a person who is near me. As a user, I want be able to hover over a message to see if another user has social media, then be able to click on any of the icons that appear. As a user, I want to be able to classify myself as a certain type of person on my profile (poet, artist, etc.) to track similar types of people. As a user, I want to be able to tag other messages in the digital space to filter them out of future scans. As a user, I want to have an auto reply feature to respond to messages I see a lot. As a user, I want there to be a limit to how many messages can be left in a single space to prevent one person from taking over that space. As a user, I want to be able to be a one time user so I can log in as someone different each time.

5. OPTIONS As a user, I want to control the color of the backgrounds and type so I can brand myself... make my messages look unique to me. As a user, I want to be able to choose from a list of fonts, so I can add personality to my type without having to think too hard. As a user, I want to be able to control the color of my type to add more emotion.

5. OPTIONS

(continued)

As a user, I want to be able to control the scale of the type so it stands out in a specific environment. User wants to be able to add animations to text to express themselves more. As a user, I want to be able to filter messages by color to help organize the things I see. As a user, I want to be able to control the distance from which messages appear in my AR space, so I can control the visual clutter on my screen. As a user, I want to be able to adjust the fonts and colors in the posts of others, to adjust to my own way of seeing. As a user, I want to set the look and amount of time my messages appear once, not every time I leave a message... to make frequent posting easier. As a user, I want to be able to change the colors of my interface so I can personalize the look of the app.

6. SOCIAL MEDIA As a user, I want any major changes in updates to be easily listed so I know what new, or refined features there are. As a user, I want to follow specific people who leave messages to due to my own interests. As a user, I want to be able to “unfollow” users due to lack of interest, spamming, or too many messages. As a user, I want to be able to add contacts and social media friends to follow existing friends. As a user, I want to be able to search other users and have the option to follow them. As a user, I want to close my account to the public to keep my messages amongst those I allow to follow me. As a user, I want the option to turn on and off all messages in my spaces so I can see everything, or just those messages of folks I follow. As a user, I want to be able use the interface to select messages in an environment to follow another user. As a user, I want to be able to tag other messages in the digital space to filter them out of future scans. As a user, I want to explore messages left on my computer at home using something that looks like Google Street view because it is an interface I intuitively already know.

As a user, I want a translator built in so I can read and write in multiple languages.

As a user, I want to easily be able to post stories and screenshots to my social media accounts.

As a user, I want to take a picture of the messages within the environment to preserve a thought, or moment.

As a user, I want this tool to tie into existing social media so I can see the profiles and the likes of other users.

As a user, I want to be able to quickly share an image of messages in my space to communicate with friends.

As a user, I do not want to be able to like or dislike messages, I do not want my thoughts to be validated through the turn of a thumb.

As a user, I want to be able to read messages in locations I can not get to, to be inspired by thoughts from around the world.

As a user, I want to be able to filter a map to see only certain messages left by certain people.

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As a user, I want to be able to filter a map to see only certain messages left by certain people. As a user, I want to be able to explore messages left using a computer at home because I like gossip, want to be inspired, or want to learn about neighborhoods I never go into. As a user, I want to add messages using an interface and a map on my computer so I can participate in a dialog from a distance. As a user, I want to know how many messages other users have left over the life of their membership to gauge activity... whether or not I want to follow them.

As a user, I want to opt out of having this app connect itself to my social media accounts for privacy and anonymity.

As a user, I want to be able to see an archive of messages another user has left, for interest, or safety, concerns. As a user, I want a visual system that ranks users based on the positive, or negative messages they leave as a personality reference.

As a user, I want to be able to track the movements of one person, or a group of people, so I can notice trends. As a user, I want to be able to filter messages by company, industry, or individual. As a user, I want to be notified when someone responds to my post, or question, so I can learn more, or continue a dialog.

As a user, I want to be able to see how often the same message is left in a certain space, or all over the world to gauge our global similarities. As a user, I want to be able to search globally for messages online based on a specific time of day. As a user, I want hashtags to be part of optional metadata included with my messages so I can further promote my “brand”.

As a user, I want to see everything that people have said about a particular individual (biometrics) so I can gain perspective on their character. As a user, I want to be able to leave messages at locations I through the television... in real-time, such as a sporting event so I can feel like part of that environment.

As a user, I want optional metadata like: an image, age, gender, location, short statement, etc. to be left inside of every message I leave– helps me to connect to others like me and gives easy access to the information of others.

As a user, I want to be able to link to specific strangers, or followers, to have group, closed conversations in a space.

As a user, I want to be able to block direct messages from an overzealous fan, crazy person, stranger, etc.

As a user, I want to be able to directly connect with another user and use a space as our private playground to quietly bond.

As a user, I want to receive some sort of credit (socks, T-shirt, etc.) for getting others to download and use the app.

As a user, I want to filter messages by those with responses so I can see what topics are important to others.

As a user, I want to be able to send direct messages to other users who leave messages I agree or disagree with.

As a user, I want to be able to add links so people can access my Instagram, blog, email, etc. As a user, I want to be notified when new messages appear in selected areas of town so I can monitor thoughts and activities within a specific culture.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;As a user, I want to be able to... because...â&#x20AC;?

Univers, the typeface used to document these functions became the font for the LABLS in the application. Univers was selected because of the intention behind its design. It is a font meant to be direct by limiting unnecessary excess. Also, I stared at it for a long time and found that it served it's purpose with letter form that made for a fast, neutral read.

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For naming LABL, I thought about the messages being stuck, or glued to objects. I also thought about labeling, tagging, manners, things that make noise, noise history, and X-rays. LABL was chosen for the action it insinuates, its near universal understanding, and its letterforms. The "E" was left out to give it a touch of uniqueness the brand deserves.

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STACCAT AMUSE POLY POLUS SLAG EXTRA PLUS AMP SWELL DILATE BLOAT PUFF WAX BABBLE HUBBUB HOOHA DIN DRIVEL BURBLE BUBBLE GUSH staccato amuse poly polus slag extra plus amp swell dilate bloat puff wax babble hubbub hooha din drivel burble bubble gush

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SQUEAL SQUELCH SQUACK RANT RAVE YAK JABBER GIBBER BLURT MURMUR BLAB MUTTER MUTE LINGER PASTE HOLLER WELD REVERB PULSE STAMP TAG

LABL LEBAL GOGLE GOGLES BUZZ ENTERFACE INTERFACE HUM LABEL EKHO ECHO THRUM ETIKET DRENCH MNP WHELM SNOW DRIP VIRUS LUNE WARBLE

MARK STAIN X SCRATCH DENT FLAG BRAND TYPE CAST BEEF DEVEL. FIX MONKEY HOOK POKE JUICE MIRE RECORD VIBRATE VIBER TENOR

TREND PITH PULP BLIP CRACK SPANK DING ROUT MASS AMASS PILE SWARM BRUISE HUMMER POMP POLYP REVEL BASTE CATHODE RONTGEN RAYTUBE

XTUBE GLOW NANO CRUX FIBER NUB NEEDLE EXPOSE TURN UP CONTOUR ANTE HYPE YIELD HUBNUB NUBHUB NUZZ HUBBUZZ BLABEL HUMSTUCK NOISTICK DISTRACK

DISTRAK HUMBUB DUBHUB HUMDUB DUBHUM HUX WAXTE WACK OVERWAX WAXE WAXT INFOLOAD BWAX ECHOZ EYEWAX EKOHUM HUMM REVERBER EXOS ETIKET

squeal squelch squack rant rave yak jabber gibber blurt murmur blab mutter mute linger paste holler weld reverb pulse stamp tag

labl lebal gogle gogles buzz enterface interface hum label ekho echo thrum etiket drench mnp whelm snow drip virus lune warble

mark stain x scratch dent flag brand type cast beef devel. fix monkey hook poke juice mire record vibrate viber tenor

trend pith pulp blip crack spank ding rout mass amass pile swarm bruise hummer pomp polyp revel baste cathode rontgen raytube

xtube glow nano crux fiber nub needle expose turn up contour ante hype yield hubnub nubhub nuzz hubbuzz blabel humstuck noistick distrack

distrak humbub dubhub humdub dubhum hux waxte wack overwax waxe waxt infoload bwax echoz eyewax ekohum humm reverber exos etiket

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LABEL label LABEL more noise please

LABEL label LABE

LABEL label LABE The selection of typefaces were based on direct, clear,

LABEL label LAB LABEL label LABE LABEL label LABE LABEL label LABEL label LABE LABEL label LABE efficient communication. As I tested fonts, I was looking for

Bell Gothic

an aesthetic that limited artistic excess. I wanted to give

both a generic, corporate look and feel, as well as represent a modern labeling machine. Neue Haas Grotesk Bold was

chosen as the foundation for the customized identity for it

stop-sign qualities and its neutral disposition. The final cut of fonts choices are displayed on this page and the next.

Frutiger

LABEL label

LABEL label Franklin Gothic

Suisse International

L label

LABEL label

LABEL label noise

EL label LABEL label

EL labelLABEL label

BEL label LABEL la EL labelLABEL la

EL labelLABEL la EL labelLABEL la LABEL la EL label

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Neue Haas Grotesk

LABEL label LABEL label LAB LABEL label LABEL label LABE LABEL label L LABEL label LA LABEL label more noise please

Akzidenz

Akkurat

LABEL LABEL LABEL label label LABEL LABEL label label label LABEL LABEL LABEL label label

LABEL label LAB LABEL label LABE Franklin Gothic

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BEL label LABEL LABEL label LABEL l EL label LABEL lab LABEL label LA ABEL label LAB LABEL label LABEL LABEL label LAB

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Trade Gothic

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LABEL Taking Neue Haas Grotesk and customizing its letterforms, as well as playing with Graphic Elements. Tape was experimented with, as it was suggested that the messages are reminiscent of, "Kick Me" signs. Arrows and speech bubbles were also explored. The tone I explored continued to be fairly neutral, with a touch of aggression; daring users to try LABL.

label

LABEL

L ABEL

L L

Label

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LLABEL LABEL

LABEL

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LA BE L 200

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205 Kerning

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Univers [75] Black

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789 Karla Bold

ABCDEFGHIJKLMN OPQRSTUVWXYZ 0123456789

Graphic Element

30% Opaque Vinyl White Background

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Primary Colors

Polyisobutene Black CMYK: 60 40 40 100 RGB: 0 0 0 HEX: 000000

Vinyl White CMYK: 0 0 0 0 RGB: 255 255 255 HEX: FFFFFF

Secondary Colors

Magenta Hum CMYK: 27 82 0 0 RGB: 255 0 255 HEX: FF00FF

Yellow Buzz CMYK: 6 0 97 0 RGB: 255 255 0 HEX: FFFF00

Cyan Din CMYK: 52 0 13 0 RGB: 0 255 255 HEX: 00FFFF

Icon explorations

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Red, green, and blue were the most generic options, but they lacked the contrast and aggression of CMYK.

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Iconography

archive

follow / unfollow

filter LABLs

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LABL selfie

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Interface and AR conceptual development. 3D type was thrown out early due to increased data, no need for depth of characters, and AR stability issues.

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Integration with existing social media Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook allow the users to access in their feed screen or...

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camera interface.

can be accessed though by pushing social media's camera interface

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in the desired

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Leaving your

The

allows the user to enter labeling mode.

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The first time the users enters the mode, instructions inform how to people, text, objects, or patterns.

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The application uses biometrics, pattern recognition, GPS crossreferencing, and machine learning to quickly scan what the phone sees. Colored areas show what is recognized and labeled.

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After the user selects what they wish to slides up from the bottom of their viewport.

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, the keyboard

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When the user is done, the button plants their message in the chosen spot.

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Older messages are pushed to the extremities. Newer messages appear closer to the object.

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Filtering your

all

Users can filter messages they want to see. They can see all s.

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followed

Only

s from the users they follow.

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people

...only people...

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objects

...or only objects.

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Integration with social media allows the user to follow friends, or strangers, either through the contact screen, or by pressing a and then pressing the follow button.

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unfollow

Users can unfollow other users by selecting an unwanted message and pressing the unfollow button. This button only appears if the user is already following the targeted .

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archive

The archive function allows the user to scroll through time to see messages that are current, or from the beginning of time.

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archive

This feature is limited with the free application. Paid subscriptions allow users to leave their messages for longer time.

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selfie

yourself!

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selfie

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archive

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Abbreviated development of marketing collateral.

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LEFT PAINT IN MY SINK!! CRITICAL1 . 01/13/2020 . 1:42 PM

OUTSTANDING PAINTER. BETTYBLU . 03/08/2020 . 12:01 PM

FREE PAINTING ESTIMATE. BRUSHPRO . 04/24/2020 . 4:21 PM

SLOW DOWN! MOMMYD . 04/24/2020 . 3:01 PM

HAPPY 30th! SUSANH . 04/24/2020 . 7:04 AM

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! BOBERT . 04/24/2020 . 8:31 AM

I AM ALWAYS A BIT BLURRY. TOOFAST . 04/24/2020 . 6:12 AM

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IN DEFENSE OF DISTRACTION SAM ANDERSON

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IN DEFENSE OF DISTRACTION SAM ANDERSON The Best Technology Writing 2010 | New York Magazine Twitter, Adderall, lifehacking, mindful jogging, power browsing, Obama’s BlackBerry, and the benefits of overstimulation.

i. the poverty of attention I’m going to pause here, right at the beginning of my riveting article about attention, and ask you to please get all of your precious 21st-century distractions out of your system now. Check the score of the Mets game; text your sister that pun you just thought of about her roommate’s new pet lizard (“iguana hold yr hand LOL get it like Beatles”); refresh your work e-mail, your home e-mail, your school e-mail; upload pictures of yourself reading this paragraph to your “me reading magazine articles” Flickr photostream; and alert the fellow citizens of whatever Twittertopia you happen to frequent that you will be suspending your digital presence for the next twenty minutes or so (I know that seems drastic: Tell them you’re having an appendectomy or something and are about to lose consciousness). Good. Now: Count your breaths. Close your eyes. Do whatever it takes to get all of your neurons lined up in one direction. Above all, resist the urge to fixate on the picture, right over there, of that weird scrambled guy typing. Do not speculate on his ethnicity, or his backstory, or the size of his monitor. Go ahead and cover him with your hand if you need to. There. Doesn’t that feel better? Now it’s just you and me, tucked like fourteenth-century Zen masters into this sweet little nook of pure mental focus. (Seriously, stop looking at him. I’m over here.) Over the last several years, the problem of attention has migrated right into the center of our cultural attention. We hunt it in neurology labs, lament its decline on op-ed pages, fetishize it in grassroots quality-of-life movements, diagnose its absence in more and more of our children every year, cultivate it in yoga class twice a week, harness it as the engine of self-help empires, and pump it up to superhuman levels with drugs originally intended to treat Alzheimer’s and narcolepsy. Everyone still pays some form of attention all the time, of course—it’s basically

SAM ANDERSON

WEIRD SCRAMBLED GUY TYPING. impossible for humans not to—but the currency in which we pay it, and the goods we get in exchange, have changed dramatically. Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon’s logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention. If the pundits clogging my RSS reader can be trusted (the ones I check up on occasionally when I don’t have any new e-mail), our attention crisis is already chewing its hyperactive way through the very foundations of Western civilization. Google is making us stupid,

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“... A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

HIPPOCAMPUS

STRIATUM

"...when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task or even recall what you’ve been doing once you’re done.”

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more noise please multitasking is draining our souls, and the “dumbest generation” is leading us into a “dark age” of bookless “power browsing.” Adopting the Internet as the hub of our work, play, and commerce has been the intellectual equivalent of adopting corn syrup as the center of our national diet, and we’ve all become mentally obese. Formerly well-rounded adults are forced to MacGyver worldviews out of telegraphic blog posts, bits of YouTube videos, and the first nine words of Times editorials. Schoolkids spread their attention across 30 different programs at once and interact with each other mainly as sweatless avatars. (One recent study found that American teenagers spend an average of 6.5 hours a day focused on the electronic world, which strikes me as a little low; in South Korea, the most wired nation on earth, young adults have actually died from exhaustion after multiday online-gaming marathons.) We are, in short, terminally distracted. And distracted, the alarmists will remind you, was once a synonym for insane. (Shakespeare: “poverty hath distracted her.”) This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates’ famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called “writing.” (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It’s too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. Information rains faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt. Although attention is often described as an organ system, it’s not the sort of thing you can pull out and study like a spleen. It’s a complex process that shows up all over the brain, mingling inextricably with other quasi-mysti cal processes like emotion, memory, identity, will, motivation, and mood. Psychologists have always had to track attention secondhand. Before the sixties, they measured it through easy-to-monitor senses like vision and hearing (if you listen to one voice in your right ear and another in your left, how much information can you absorb from either side?), then eventually graduated to PET scans and EEGs and electrodes and monkey brains. Only in the last ten years—thanks to neuroscientists and their functional MRIs—have we been able to watch the attending human brain in action, with its coordinated storms of neural

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firing, rapid blood surges, and oxygen flows. This has yielded all kinds of fascinating insights—for instance, that when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task or even recall what you’ve been doing once you’re done. When I reach David Meyer, one of the world’s reigning experts on multitasking, he is feeling alert against all reasonable odds. He has just returned from India, where he was discussing the nature of attention at a conference with the Dalai Lama (Meyer gave a keynote speech arguing that Buddhist monks multitask during meditation), and his trip home was hellish: a canceled flight, an overnight taxi on roads so rough it took thirteen hours to go 200 miles. This is his first full day back in his office at the University of Michigan, where he directs the Brain, Cognition, and Action Laboratory—a basement space in which finger-tapping, card-memorizing, tone identifying subjects help Meyer pinpoint exactly how much information the human brain can handle at once. He’s been up since 3 a.m. and has by now goosed his attention several times with liquid stimulants: a couple of cups of coffee, some tea. “It does wonders,” he says. My interaction with Meyer takes place entirely via the technology of distraction. We scheduled and rescheduled our appointment, several times, by e-mail. His voice is now projecting, tinnily, out of my cell phone’s speaker and into the microphone of my digital recorder, from which I will download it, as soon as we’re done, on to my laptop, which I currently have open on my desk in front of me, with several windows spread across the screen, each bearing nested tabs, on one of which I’ve been reading, before Meyer even had a chance to tell me about it, a blog all about his conference with the Dalai Lama, complete with RSS feed and audio commentary and embedded YouTube videos and pictures of His Holiness. As Meyer and I talk, the universe tests us with a small battery of distractions. A maximum-volume fleet of emergency vehicles passes just outside my window;my phone chirps to tell us that my mother is calling on the other line, then beeps again to let us know she’s left a message. There is, occasionally, a slight delay in the connection. Meyer ignores it all, speaking deliberately and at length, managing to coordinate tricky subject-verb agreements over the course of multi-clause sentences. I begin, a little sheepishly, with a question that strikes me as sensationalistic, nonscientific, and probably unanswer-

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noise able by someone who’s been professionally trained in the discipline of cautious objectivity: Are we living through a crisis of attention? Before I even have a chance to apologize, Meyer responds with the air of an Old Testament prophet. “Yes,” he says. “And I think it’s going to get a lot worse than people expect.” He sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought. He compares it, in fact, to smoking. “People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes,” he says, “in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.” I ask him if, as the world’s foremost expert on multitasking and distraction, he has found his own life negatively affected by the new world order of multitasking and distraction. “Yep,” he says immediately, then adds, with admirable (although slightly hurtful) bluntness: “I get calls all the time from people like you. Because of the way the Internet works, once you become visible, you’re approached by people wanting to have interactions in ways that are extremely time-consuming. I could spend my whole day, my whole night, just answering e-mails. I just can’t deal with it all. None of this happened even ten years ago. It was a lot calmer. There was a lot of opportunity for getting steady work done.”

“People aren’t aware what’s happening to their mental processes,... in the same way that people years ago couldn’t look into their lungs and see the residual deposits.” Over the last twenty years, Meyer and a host of other researchers have proved again and again that multitasking, at least as our culture has come to know and love and institutionalize it, is a myth. When you think you’re doing two things at once, you’re almost always just switching rapidly between them, leaking a little mental efficiency

"He sees our distraction as a fullblown epidemic—a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thought." with every switch. Meyer says that this is because, to put it simply, the brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate “channels”—a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel, and so on—each of which can process only one stream of information at a time. If you overburden a channel, the brain becomes inefficient and mistake-prone. The classic example is driving while talking on a cell phone, two tasks that conflict across a range of obvious channels: Steering and dialing are both manual tasks, looking out the windshield and reading a phone screen are both visual, etc. Even talking on a hands-free phone can be dangerous, Meyer says. If the person on the other end of the phone is describing a visual scene—say, the layout of a room full of furniture—that conversation can actually occupy your visual channel enough to impair your ability to see what’s around you on the road. The only time multitasking does work efficiently, Meyer says, is when multiple simple tasks operate on entirely separate channels—for example, folding laundry (a visual-manual task) while listening to a stock report (a verbal task). But real world scenarios that fit those specifications are very rare. This is troubling news, obviously, for a culture of BlackBerrys and news crawls and Firefox tabs—tools that, critics argue, force us all into a kind of elective ADHD. The tech theorist Linda Stone famously coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe our newly frazzled state of mind. American office workers don’t stick with any single task for more than a few minutes at a time; if left uninterrupted, they will most likely interrupt themselves. Since every interruption costs around 25 minutes of productivity, we spend nearly a third of our day recovering from them. We keep an average of eight windows open on our computer screens at one time and skip between them every twenty seconds. When we read online, we hardly even read at all—our eyes run down the

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“The brain processes different kinds of information on a variety of separate 'channels'—

a language channel, a visual channel, an auditory channel...

Each of which can process only one stream of information at a time.” SAM ANDERSON

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noise page in an F pattern, scanning for keywords. When you add up all the leaks from these constant little switches, soon you’re hemorrhaging a dangerous amount of mental power. People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana. Meyer guesses that the damage will take decades to understand, let alone fix. If Einstein were alive today, he says, he’d probably be forced to multitask so relentlessly in the Swiss patent office that he’d never get a chance to work out the theory of relativity.

ii. the war on the poverty of attention For Winifred Gallagher, the author of Rapt, a new book about the power of attention, it all comes down to the problem of jackhammers. A few minutes before I called, she tells me, a construction crew started jackhammering outside her apartment window. The noise immediately captured what’s called her bottom-up attention—the broad involuntary awareness that roams the world constantly looking for danger and rewards: shiny objects, sudden movements, pungent smells. Instead of letting this distract her, however, she made a conscious choice to go into the next room and summon her top-down attention—the narrow, voluntary focus that allows us to isolate and enhance some little slice of the world while ruthlessly suppressing everything else. This attentional self-control, executive function, is at the very center of our struggle with attention. It’s what allows us to invest our focus wisely or poorly. Some of us, of course, have an easier time with it than others. Gallagher admits that she’s been blessed with a naturally strong executive function. “It sounds funny,” she tells me, “but I’ve always thought of paying attention as a kind of sexy, visceral activity. Even as a kid, I enjoyed focusing. I could feel it in almost a mentally muscular way. I took a lot of pleasure in concentrating on things. I’m the sort of irritating person who can sit down to work at nine o’clock and look up at two o’clock and say, ‘Oh, I thought it was around 10:30.’” Gallagher became obsessed with the problem of attenon five years ago, when she was diagnosed with advanced and aggressive breast cancer. She was devastated, naturally, but then realized, on her way out of the hospital, that even the cancer could be seen largely as a problem of focus—a terrifying, deadly, internal jackhammer. It made her realize, she says, that attention was “not just a latent ability, it was something you could marshal and use as

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“...one psychologist has calculated that we can attend to only 110 bits of information per second, or 173 billion bits in an average lifetime—our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives.” a tool.” By the time she reached her subway station, Gallagher had come up with a strategy: She would make all the big pressing cancer-related decisions as quickly as possible, then, consciously shift her attention to more positive, productive things. One of the projects Gallagher worked on during her recovery (she is now cancer free) was Rapt, which is both a survey of recent attention research and a testimonial to the power of top-down focus. The ability to positively wield your attention comes off, in the book, as something of a panacea; Gallagher describes it as “the sine qua non of the quality of life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.” It is, in other words,

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the Holy Grail of self-help: the key to relationships and parenting and mood disorders and weight problems. (You can apparently lose seven pounds in a year through the sheer force of paying attention to your food.) “You can’t be happy all the time,” Gallagher tells me, “but you can pretty much focus all the time. That’s about as good as it gets.” The most promising solution to our attention problem, in Gallagher’s mind, is also the most ancient: meditation. Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on nonBuddhists. (Some psychologists predict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “secular attentional workouts). Meditation can make your attention less “sticky,” able to notice images flashing by in such quick succession that regular brains would miss them. It has also been shown to elevate your mood, which can then recursively stoke your attention: Research shows that positive emotions cause your visual field to expand. The brains of Buddhist monks asked to meditate on “unconditional lovingkindness and compassion” show instant and remarkable changes: Their left prefrontal cortices (responsible for positive emotions) go into overdrive, they produce gamma waves 30 times more powerful than novice meditators, and their wave activity is coordinated in a way often seen in patients under anesthesia. Gallagher stresses that because attention is a limited resource— one psychologist has calculated that we can attend to only 110 bits of information per second, or 173 billion bits in an average lifetime—our moment-bymoment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. Rapt’s epigraph comes from the psychologist and philosopher William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” The jackhammers are everywhere—iPhones, e-mail, cancer— and Western culture’s attentional crisis is mainly a widespread failure to ignore them.

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” WILLIAM JAMES

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noise “Once you understand how attention works and how you can make the most productive use of it,” she says, “if you continue to just jump in the air every time your phone rings or pounce on those buttons every time you get an instant message, that’s not the machine’s fault. That’s your fault.”

if that is possible, Wikipedia entries: puffins, MacGyver, Taylorism, the phrase “bleeding edge,” the Boston Molasses Disaster. (If I were going to excuse you from reading this article for any single distraction, it would be to read about the Boston Molasses Disaster.)

Making the responsible attention choice, however, is not always easy. Here is a partial list, because a complete one would fill the entire magazine, of the things I’ve been distracted by in the course of writing this article: my texting wife, a very loud seagull, my mother calling from Mexico to leave voice mails in terrible Spanish, a man shouting “Your weed-whacker fell off ! Your weed-whacker fell off !” at a truck full of lawn equipment, another man singing some kind of Spanish ballad on the sidewalk under my window, streaming video of the NBA playoffs, dissertation-length blog breakdowns of the NBA playoffs, my toenail spontaneously detaching, my ice-cream-eating wife, the subtly shifting landscapes of my three different e-mail in-boxes, my Facebooking wife, infinite YouTube videos (a puffin attacking someone wearing a rubber boot, Paul McCartney talking about the death of John Lennon, a chimpanzee playing Pac-Man), and even more infinite,

JACKHAMMER

When the jackhammers fire up outside my window, in other words, I rarely ignore them—I throw the window open, watch for a while, bring the crew sandwiches on their lunch break, talk with them about the ins-and-outs of jackhammering, and then spend an hour or two trying to break up a little of the sidewalk myself. Some of my distractions were unavoidable. Some were necessary work-related evils that got out of hand. Others were pretty clearly inexcusable. (I consider it a victory for the integrity of pre-web human consciousness that I was able to successfully resist clicking on the first “related video” after the chimp, the evocatively titled “Guy shits himself in a judo exhibition.”) In today’s attentional landscape, it’s hard to draw neat borders. I’m not ready to blame my restless attention entirely on a faulty willpower. Some of it is pure impersonal behaviorism. The Internet is basically a Skinner box engineered to tap right into our deepest mechanisms of addiction. As B. F. Skinner’s army of lever-pressing rats and pigeons taught us, the most irresistible reward schedule is not, counter-intuitively, the one in which we’re rewarded constantly but something called “variable ratio schedule,” in which the rewards arrive at random. And that randomness is practically the Internet’s defining feature: It dispenses its never-ending little shots of positivity— a life-changing e-mail here, a funny YouTube video there—in gloriously unpredictable cycles. It seems unrealistic to expect people to spend all day clicking reward bars— searching the web, scanning the relevant blogs, checking e-mail to see if a co-worker has updated a project—and then just leave those distractions behind, as soon as they’re not strictly required, to engage in “healthy” things like books and ab crunches and undistracted, deep conversations with neighbors. It would be like requiring employees to take a few hits of opium throughout the day, then being surprised when it becomes a problem. Last year, an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry raised the prospect of adding “Internet addiction” to the DSM, which would make it a disorder to be taken as schizophrenia. A quintessentially Western solution to the attention problem— one that neatly circumvents the issue of willpower—is to simply dope our brains into focus.

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more noise please We’ve done so, over the centuries, with substances ranging from tea to tobacco to NoDoz to Benzedrine, & these days the tradition seems to be approaching some kind of zenith with the rise of neuroenhancers: drugs designed to treat ADHD (Ritalin, Adderall), Alzheimer’s (Aricept), and narcolepsy (Provigil) that can produce, in healthy people, superhuman states of attention. A gradschool friend tells me that Adderall allowed him to squeeze his mind “like a muscle.” Joshua Foer, writing in Slate after a week-long experiment with Adderall, said the drug made him feel like he’d “been bitten by a radioactive spider” —he beat his unbeatable brother at Ping-Pong, solved anagrams, devoured dense books. “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my in-box apparently shut down,” he wrote. Although neuroenhancers are currently illegal to use without a prescription, they’re popular among college students (on some campuses, up to 25 percent of students admitted to taking them) and—if endless anecdotes can be believed— among a wide spectrum of other professional focusers: journalists on deadline, doctors performing high-stakes surgeries, competitors in poker tournaments, researchers suffering through the grind of grant-writing. There has been controversy in the chess world about drug testing at tournaments. In December, a group of scientists published a paper in Nature that argued for the legalization and mainstream acceptance of neuroenhancers, suggesting that the drugs are really no different from more traditional “cognitive enhancers” such as laptops, exercise, nutrition, private tutoring, reading, and sleep. It’s not quite that simple, of course. Adderall users frequently complain that the drug stifles their creativity—that it’s best for doing ultrarational, structured tasks. (As Foer put it, “I had a nagging suspicion that I was thinking with blinders on.”) One risk the scientists do acknowledge is the fascinating, horrifying prospect of “raising cognitive abilities beyond their species-typical upper bound.” Ultimately, one might argue, neuroenhancers spring from the same source as the problem they’re designed to correct: our lust for achievement in defiance of natural constraints. It’s easy to imagine an endless attentional arms race in which new technologies colonize ever-bigger zones of our attention, new drugs expand the limits of that attention, and so on. One of the most exciting—and confounding—solutions to the problem of attention lies right at the intersection of our willpower and our willpower-sapping technologies: the grassroots Internet movement known as “life-

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hacking.” It began in 2003 when the British tech writer Danny O’Brien, frustrated by his own lack of focus, polled 70 of his most productive friends to see how they managed to get so much done; he found that they’d invented all kinds of clever little tricks— some high-tech, some very low-tech—to help shepherd their attention from moment to moment: ingenious script codes for to-do lists, software hacks for managing e-mail, rituals to avoid sinister time-wasting traps such as “yak shaving,” the tendency to lose yourself in endless trivial tasks tangentially related to the one you really need to do. (O’Brien wrote a program that prompts him every ten minutes, when he’s online, to ask if he’s procrastinating.) Since then, life-hacking has snowballed into a massive self-help program, written and revised constantly by the online global hive mind, that seeks to help you allocate your attention efficiently. Tips range from timemanagement habits (the 90-second shower) to note-taking techniques (mind-mapping) to software shortcuts to delightfully retro tech solutions (turning an index card into a portable dry-erase board by covering it with packing tape). When I call Merlin Mann, one of life-hacking’s early adopters and breakout stars, he is running late, rushing back to his office, and yet he seems somehow to have attention to spare. He is by far the fastest-talking human I’ve ever interviewed, and it crosses my mind that this too might be a question of productivity—that maybe he’s adopted a time-saving verbal lifehack from auctioneers. He talks in the snappy aphorisms of a professional speaker and is always breaking ideas down into their atomic parts and reassessing the way they fit together: “What does it come down to?” “Here’s the thing.” “So why am I telling you this, and what does it have to do with life-hacks?” Mann says he got into life-hacking at a moment of crisis, when he was “feeling really overwhelmed by the number of inputs in my life and managing it very badly.” He founded one of the original life-hacking websites, 43folders.com (the name is a reference to David Allen’s Getting Things Done, the legendarily complex productivity program in which Allen describes, among other things, how to build a kind of “three-dimensional calendar” out of 43 folders) and went on to invent such illustrious hacks as “in-box zero” (an e-mail-management technique) and the “hipster PDA” (a stack of three-by-five cards filled with jotted phone numbers and to-do lists, clipped together and tucked into your back pocket). Mann now makes a living speaking to companies as a kind of productivity

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noise guru. He Twitters, podcasts, and runs more than half a dozen websites.

ADHD or depression,” he says. “Your mind is not getting the dopamine or the hugs that it needs to keep you focused on what you’re doing. And any time your work gets a little bit too hard or a little bit too boring, you allow it to catch on to something that’s more interesting to you.” (Mann himself started getting treated for ADD a year ago.

Despite his robust web presence, Mann is skeptical about technology’s impact on our lives. “Is it clear to you that the last fifteen years represent an enormous improvement in how everything operates?” he asks. “Picasso was somehow able to finish the Demoiselles of Avignon even though he didn’t have an application that let him tag his to-dos. If John Lennon had a BlackBerry, do you think he would have done everything he did with the Beatles in less than ten years?”

“...many of our attention problems are symptoms of larger existential issues: motivation, happiness, neurochemistry... Your mind is not getting the dopamine or the hugs that it needs to keep you focused on what you’re doing.”

Mann’s advice can shade, occasionally, into Buddhist territory. “There’s no shell script, there’s no fancy pen, there’s no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that’s gonna help you figure out why the fuck you’re here,” he tells me. “That’s on you. This makes me sound like one of those people who swindled the Beatles, but if you are having attention problems, the best way to deal with it is by admitting it and then saying, ‘From now on, I’m gonna be in the moment and more cognizant.’ I said not long ago, I think on Twitter— God, I quote myself a lot, what an asshole—that really all self-help is Buddhism with a service mark. “Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement,” he continues. “It’s a eceipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it’s gonna say a lot about who you are as a person.”

One of the weaknesses of life-hacking as a weapon in the war against distraction, Mann admits, is that it tends to become extremely distracting. You can spend solid days reading reviews of filing techniques and organizational software. “On the web, there’s a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need,” he says. “But when I get to the point where I’m seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I’m so far off the idea of life-hacks that it’s indistinguishable from where we started. There are a lot of people out there that find this a very sticky idea, and there’s very little advice right now to tell them that the only thing to do is action, and everything else is horseshit. My wife reminds me sometimes: ‘You have all the information you need to do something right now.’” For Mann, many of our attention problems are symptoms of larger existential issues: motivation, happiness, neurochemistry. “I’m not a physician or a psychiatrist, but I’ll tell you, I think a lot of it is some form of untreated

LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON (study), PABLO PICASSO, 1907

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subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.

Sometimes I wonder if the time I’m wasting is actually being wasted. Isn’t blowing a couple of hours on the Internet, in the end, just another way of following your attention? My life would be immeasurably poorer if I hadn’t stumbled a few weeks ago across the Boston Molasses Disaster. (Okay, seriously, forget it: I hereby release you to go look up the Boston Molasses Disaster. A giant wave of molasses destroyed an entire Boston neighborhood 90 years ago, swallowing horses and throwing an elevated train off its track. It took months to scrub all the molasses out of the cobblestones! The harbor was brown until summer! The world is a stranger place than we will ever know.)

My favorite focusing exercise comes from William James: Draw a dot on a piece of paper, then pay attention to it for as long as you can. (Sitting in my office one afternoon, with my monkey mind swinging busily across the lush rain forest of online distractions, I tried this with the closest dot in the vicinity: the bright-red mouse-nipple at the center of my laptop’s keyboard. I managed to stare at it for 30 minutes, with mixed results.) James argued that the human mind can’t actually focus on the dot, or any unchanging object, for more than a few seconds at a time: It’s too hungry for variety, surprise, the adventure of the unknown. It has to refresh its attention by continually finding new aspects of the dot to focus on: subtleties of its shape, its relationship to the edges of the paper, metaphorical associations—a fly, an eye, a hole. The exercise becomes a question less of pure unwavering focus than of your ability to organize distractions around a central point. The dot, in other words, becomes only the hub of your total dot-related distraction.

“Draw a dot on a piece of paper, then pay attention to it for as long as you can.” The prophets of total attentional meltdown sometimes invoke, as an example of the great culture we’re going to lose as we succumb to e-thinking, the canonical French juggernaut Marcel Proust. And indeed, at seven volumes, several thousand pages, and 1.5 million words, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is in many ways the antiTwitter. (It would take, by the way, exactly 68,636 tweets to reproduce.) It’s important to remember, however, that the most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other

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This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox—it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they’re the systole and diastole of consciousness. Attention comes from the Latin “to stretch out” or “reach toward,” distraction from “to pull apart.” We need both. In their extreme forms, focus and attention may even circle back around and bleed into one other. Meyer says there’s a subset of Buddhists who believe that the most advanced monks become essentially “world-class mult-itaskers”—that all those years of meditation might actually speed up their mental processes enough to handle the kind of information overload the rest of us find crippling. The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction. Unwavering focus—the inability to be distracted—can actually be just as problematic as ADHD. Trouble with “attentional shift” is a feature common to a handful of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and OCD. It’s been hypothesized that ADHD might even be an advantage in certain change-rich environments. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that a brain receptor associated with ADHD is unusually common among certain nomads in Kenya, and that members who have the receptor are the best nourished in the group. It’s possible that we’re all evolving toward a

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noise new techno-cognitive nomadism, a shifting environment in which restlessness will be an advantage again. The deep focusers might even be hampered by having too much attention: Attention Surfeit Hypoactivity Disorder. I keep returning to the parable of Einstein and Lennon— the great historical geniuses hypothetically ruined by modern distraction. What made both men’s achievements so groundbreaking, though, was that they did something modern technology is getting increasingly better at allowing us to do: They very powerfully linked and synthesized things that had previously been unlinked— Newtonian gravity and particle physics, rock and blues and folk and doo-wop and bubblegum pop and psychedelia. If Einstein and Lennon were growing up today, their natural genius might be so pumped up on the possibilities of the new technology they’d be doing even more dazzling things. Surely Lennon would find a way to manipulate his BlackBerry to his own ends, just like he did with all the new technology of the sixties— he’d harvest spam and text messages and web snippets and build them into a new kind of absurd poetry. The Beatles would make the best viral videos of all time, simultaneously addictive and artful, disposable and forever. All of those canonical songs, let’s remember, were created entirely within a newfangled mass genre that was widely considered to be an assault on civilization and the sanctity of deep human thought. Standards change. They change because of great creations in formerly suspect media.

The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. We recently elected the first-ever BlackBerry president, able to flit between sixteen national crises while focusing at a world-class level. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zen-like state of focused distraction.

Which brings me, finally, to the next generation of attenders, the so-called “net-gen” or “digital natives,” kids who’ve grown up with the Internet and other timeslicing technologies. There’s been lots of hand-wringing about all the skills they might lack, mainly the ability to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but surely they can already do things their elders can’t— like conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media, or pay attention to switching between attentional targets in a way that’s been considered impossible. More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. London taxi drivers, for instance, have enlarged hippocampi (the brain region for memory and spatial processing)— a neural reward for paying attention to the tangle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information.

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“...the human mind can’t actually focus on the dot, or any unchanging object, for more than a few seconds at a time: It’s too hungry for variety, surprise, the adventure of the unknown. It has to refresh its attention by continually finding new aspects of the dot to focus on: subtleties of its shape, its relationship to the edges of the paper, metaphorical associations...”

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