Eye on Design magazine - Issue #06 “Utopias” by Eye on Design

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Editors’ Letter

Dear reader,

For the next 150-odd pages, we’ve allowed ourselves to indulge in a sweeping interpretation of a topic that has fascinated people— not just designers—for centuries. The term “utopia” was first coined in the 1500s by Sir Thomas More, who borrowed from the Greek ou-topos, meaning “no place.” And yet, when you consider utopia in relation to design, the immediate association is one rooted in a place in time, namely, in the histories of the Bauhaus and Constructivism, both of which have recently celebrated their 100th anniversaries. In this issue, we look back at these movements before we look forward, and ask the question, “Do those singular, idealistic visions of modern design still have a place in our world?” This is not a yes-or-no question, and issue #06 of Eye on Design magazine explores the theme “utopias” with nuanced stories and design that takes you to some surprising places. We start in London, where modernist architecture failed to meet the needs of its 8

inhabitants—which, in this case, happened to be zoo animals. Moving to the other side of the city more than half a century later, we visit publishing group OOMK, run by three women who are employing a ground-up approach to collective space with their open-access print studio. In New York, we follow student protesters and their decade-long fight to save one of the last U.S. colleges to offer free tuition, and in Ahmedabad we look back at the school that produced some of India’s most ubiquitous branding. We also sought out individuals who are quite literally building the world in which they’d like to live. In a small Canadian town, the cartoonist Seth lives in a house that looks like it sprung straight from one of his graphic novels set in the 1940s—every knickknack, appliance, piece of furniture, and even his signature wardrobe. Meanwhile, in Johannesburg, creative Rendani Nemakhavhani looks toward the future with her alter-ego The Honey, portraying the type of South

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

welcome to our own private utopia.

African woman she’d like to see more of. With so many different versions and visions of utopia from around the world, it’s clear that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. We also discover new perspectives on well-known histories, such as Stefanie Leinhos’s illustrated guide to utopias constructed by women, or Mindy Seu’s index of cyberfeminist projects from around the world. And in an essay on digital nomadism (the working millennial’s spin on the idea of “no place”), artists Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira remind us that working across borders is a privilege not afforded everyone. While utopias may be idealistic, they can’t be separated from their more dystopian counterparts. It’s this approach that makes the theme particularly relevant to Eye on Design magazine right now, as we transition from our tri-annual schedule to an expansive new publishing model (more on that very soon). It’s also why we decided to bring on Na Kim as this issue’s guest designer, whose work

draws from the bold modern designs of the early 20th century, while also remaining fluid and dynamic—perfectly suited to our notion of plurality. Love, The Editors

Table of Contents

The thing about other worlds is you have to be ready for anything.

Page 8 Editors’ Letter Page 12 Designer’s Letter

Page 14 Modernism Isn’t for Everyone —Least of All, Penguins A cautionary tale about universal solutions, zoos, and ideas about redesigning poverty By Madeleine Morley

Page 22 It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times The publishing collective One of My Kind on zines as a medium for community building in the age of clickbait, statement culture, and rapid gentrification By Anoushka Khandwala Page 35 Rendani Nemakhavhani for PR$DNT The South African art director thrives on creating imaginary worlds that Johannesburg creatives can turn into reality By Neo Maditla 10

Page 40 Upgrade or Die Max Guther’s illustrations accompany a dystopian satire on the future of work By Perrin Drumm

Page 46 Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave The half-satirical, half-earnest, much-memeified aesthetic lived the way it (almost) died By Emily Gosling

Page 55 What Would You Do with 168 Hours? Five designers rework their workweeks to better meet their needs With Forest Young, Kate Johnston, Liana Jegers, Clay Hickson, Jihee Li, Antonia Terhedebrügge, and Mado Klümper Page 65 Free At What Cost? The fight to keep renowned art school Cooper Union tuition-free has earned its students an honorary degree in activism By Meg Miller

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Page 76 Shift Work A failed Soviet experiment offers a warning to today’s burnout generation By Liz Stinson

Page 113 The Web We Want Imagine an internet that’s owned and run by you and everyone else who uses it. This is the promise of the distributed web. By Gary Zhexi Zhang

Page 85 Herland An illustrated guide to utopias constructed by women By Stefanie Leinhos

Page 116 Fake It ‘Til You Keep Faking It The cartoonist known as Seth has built a real life around his fictional work—set in the 1940s. We pay him a visit. By Zachary Petit

Page 91 What Does it Mean to be a Responsible Designer Today? We asked three design teams what responsibility means to them and their work in the context of today’s global climate emergency. With Seetal Solanki, Robin Howie, Marie Otsuka, and Lauren Traugott-Campbell.

Page 96 Quiet World Order Shy Radicals by Hamja Ahsan proposes equality for introverts and proves that activism needn’t be noisy

Page 105 An Identity of Its Own In the 1960s, the National Institute of Design trained India’s first design educators and produced some of the country’s most ubiquitous branding By Ritupriya Basu

Page 132 The Myth of the Digital Nomad For a generation that can supposedly work from anywhere, freedom of movement isn’t granted to all By Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira

Page 135 EOD™ Presents WeWingIt Satirical sponsored content By Tala Safié

Page 141 The Cyberfeminism Index By Mindy Seu

Designer’s Letter

A magazine will often go through a redesign in order to indicate a change in direction or tone. But when you delve into the content, you’ll find that there’s been no change in the magazine’s direction or perspective. It’s simply had an aesthetic refresh. A redesign might shift the look of a publication, but it doesn’t necessarily reflect an encompassing change in the magazine-makers’ outlook. For the designers Will Holder and Stuart Bailey, if you want to change a magazine, then you have to change the editorial—the content itself—as opposed to placing the responsibility on design. In 2005, they reduced editorial design to a set of fixed templates for the design of Metropolis M, a bi-monthly contemporary art magazine based out of the Netherlands. The design was simple: full color on off-white coated paper, staple-bound, with considerable margin area to accommodate reference images or supplementary material. This “basic container” sought to eliminate design, or at least reduce its subjective 12

dimensions as much as possible. They wanted to minimize “arbitrary design decisions,” as Holder said in an interview with designer Aya Nakata. In 2006, Bailey and Holder put the template up for sale. If another contemporary art magazine wished to design according to their specifications, this would continue to advance the underlining argument of the designers—that a reduction of design decisions does not limit the content, but instead allows each piece of content to subtly shift the reader’s perception of the design. Paradoxically, they suggest, simplification makes way for plurality. The design of Eye on Design’s “utopias” issue takes Bailey and Holder’s specs and adapts them to the form of this contemporary design magazine. The content of Eye on Design is diverse; the utopian visions or ideals explored in the various articles are never one and the same. The tone of the articles vary, as do the locations, timelines, histories, perspectives, and opinions. And the template adapts

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

accordingly but always consistently, which allows the content to do the work of defining each article’s perspective. Branding offers another utopian dimension to the pages of this issue. The design also turns its attention to contemporary graphic design’s role in building aspirational imaginaries. Brand hype is a fiction of sorts—a powerfully alluring, carefully crafted promise. The pages of this issue contain the brand message of EOD™. All of the images used for its advertisements and mock-up products have been sourced via open-source image libraries. Unsplash.com has been a key collaborator, an image library with more than 1,000,000 free photographs, and the site where EOD™’s advert backgrounds have been found. For working designers today, it’s no longer a matter of creating material from scratch when so much is readily available. EOD™’s slogans are sourced from the issue’s articles, each statement representing one of

the many utopias explored in these pages. EOD™—a world they’d like to see. Branding speaks for itself, but only by speaking in tautologies. A brand exists by saying it exists, and it becomes universal by declaring itself so. Contemporary graphic design often creates brand identities that entice consumers to project their greatest desires and anxieties upon them. In this way, they become utopian surfaces that promise the attainment of one’s dreams. A contemporary fable. A time control experiment. Everything, ultimately, a story. Make of EOD™ what you will, and let it take you wherever you want to go. Na Kim

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins A cautionary tale about universal solutions, zoos, and ideas about redesigning poverty By Madeleine Morley Photography by Louise Benson In the summer of 1934, a strange spectacle appeared near Regent’s Park in North London. Families and architecture enthusiasts alike stared in amazement at two reinforced concrete ramps weaving together effortlessly as if floating in air. And it wasn’t just the feat of architectural engineering that caused the stir. Marching down their glorious new walkway, posing for the crowds in their dinner-jacketed attire, were the city’s latest attraction: a rookery of Antarctic penguins. Today, the iconic Penguin Pool,with its double helix ramps designed by Soviet émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin of Tecton Group, is a Grade I listed building at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It’s one of several experimental structures built at the zoo, which has a long history of applying the architectural ideas of a period to the housing of its animals, so much so that architectural critic Ian Nairn has famously likened it to an “architectural Tower of Babel.” Yet how the animals themselves have felt about living inside models of avant-garde architecture is a whole other story. Indeed, the Penguin Pool, Lubetkin’s Gorilla House, and the elephant and rhino house designed by Sir Hugh Casson all failed to meet the needs of their inhabitants—circumstances that are hard not to compare to the decline of modernist and brutalist movements at large. For Solly Zuckerman, the British zoologist and research anatomist driving many of the zoo’s early 20th century commissions, there was only 14

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

a small degree of difference separating animals from human beings. He believed that if modernist architecture could provide hygienic, efficient new living quarters for people, surely the same could be done for other species. Of course, swapping traditional habitats for monuments of modernism also had the added potential to draw more crowds to the zoo, but not at the expense of scientific integrity. As Peder Anker puts it in The Bauhaus of Nature, “It was the promotion of public health and not amusement which prompted the zookeepers to build modernist architecture.” Loosely modeled on the shape of an egg, Lubetkin’s Penguin Pool, and its off-kilter ramps that cascade to the water like a slide, are meant to remind visitors of the comical movements of the birds themselves. When it opened, it was hailed by numerous architectural critics as a delightful piece of theater with which to display the penguins to the public. And initially, the penguins seemed to agree. Free from predators and enjoying regular food, they appeared to the zookeepers to be healthy and happy. But as it turns out, reinforced concrete is not a viable longterm replacement for soft sand. The famous ramps caused the birds to contract bumblefoot, an inflammatory bacterial infection, and the pool itself wasn’t deep enough to allow them to swim properly. In the 2000s, the penguins were moved to Penguin Beach, a re-creation of a South American beach landscape complete with sandy nooks, private nesting areas, a 4,000-square-foot diving pool, and a nursery for baby chicks. Lubetkin’s pool has been repurposed as a “water feature;” its contemporary function simply provides shade for worn-out zoo visitors. Lubetkin’s first commission for the zoo, which was finished in 1934, proved even worse for its inhabitants than the Penguin Pool. The Gorilla House, as it was then known, consists of a circular structure, one half of which is reinforced concrete and the other half a sliding door. The dual construction intended to protect the zoo’s two new gorillas babies, Mok and Moina, while also displaying them to the public. Since zoologist Zuckerman believed that the life of primates was “a crude picture of a social level from which emerged our earliest human ancestors,” he felt it was crucial to place to gorillas in a home that exposed its manmade modifications that aimed to keep them healthy. Lubetkin’s Gorilla House therefore had running water, air-conditioning, and sliding dustscreens, so that visitors could witness the benefits of modern domesticity for themselves. Unfortunately, Mok and Moina died after being moved into their new designer home. Today, the zoo’s troop of western lowland gorillas lives in the Gorilla Kingdom, with a large, grassy clearing, a hidden island 17

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

for privacy, and an indoor gymnasium featuring ropes, ladders, and immense wooden climbing structures. The Gorilla House, in turn, has been renamed The Round House, and has housed a variety of different species in recent years including a colony of fruit bats and a Ring Tailed Lemur. Peter Chalmers Mitchell, the secretary of ZSL between 1903 and 1935, believed in the liberating potential of modernist design, and that the theories tested on zoo animals could be translated to the poor, who were also “in desperate need of being liberated from their natural conditions of criminal and filthy slums.” It was “of revolutionary importance to display thriving animals in an unnatural setting as if to prove that humans too could prosper in a new environment,” writes Anker in The Bauhaus of Nature. Lubetkin applied the early 20th century’s theories of mass social housing to his zoo architecture, including ideas of streamlining and cleanliness, as well as investment in the potential of new technology and materials. Sites like the Gorilla House and the Penguin Pool, as well as his curved concrete canopy kiosk, promoted a particular brand of modernism to the public, and were an exceedingly clever marketing strategy for the new design approach. ZSL’s modernist homes were a blueprint for the future of a human metropolis on the one hand; on the other, a form of animal testing. And even into the ’60s, Zuckerman was still keenly pursuing the idea that architecture could enhance the theatrical impact of the zoo. The Snowdon Aviary, for example, made pioneering use of aluminium and still punctures London’s skyline dramatically with an array of lopsided triangles. In 1965, Sir Hugh Casson was commissioned to apply his brand of brutalism to a pavilion for elephants and rhinos. Casson’s curved walls and asymmetrical timber, copper-clad roof frames set out to deliberately display the massive animals in the most dramatic way possible. Critics celebrated how the wrinkled concrete looked just like coarse elephant hide, and how the sculptural shape of the structure whimsically gestures to the sight of a herd around a watering hole. Despite receiving the Royal Institute of British Architects award for the best building in London at the time, the Casson Pavilion is now also obsolete, at least from its initial purpose. In recent years, the elephants have been relocated outside of London (they now live at Whipsnade Wild Animal Park in Bedfordshire) so that they have more space, and the Casson Pavilion is home to a sounder of bearded pigs who like to sunbathe in the sand beneath their green-tipped concrete castle. The building’s future is still subject to ongoing debate. Once celebrated as a tool for solving the problems of poverty and 20

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mass housing, many modernist and brutalist projects have suffered a similar fate to those at the ZSL. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been repurposed or even demolished, found unsuitable to their specific geographic and environmental contexts or unable to cater for the dynamics of family life and diverse needs of their inhabitants. The story of the ZSL is a contemporary fable of sortsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a warning against technological utopianism and attempts at universal solutions. One size doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t fit all, regardless of species.

It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times

It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times The publishing collective One of My Kind on zines as a medium for community building in the age of clickbait, statement culture, and rapid gentrification By Anoushka Khandwala Photography by Grace Gelder

Cover of OOMK Zine, issue 6.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Surrounded by biryani restaurants and betting shops in the North East London borough of Newham sits a quaint terracotta-colored building. A library in a former life, the building was transformed in recent years into a Risograph print studio. Walking into Rabbit Road’s Press (RRP) on a Wednesday afternoon is like happening on a secret party: friends collage letters together on tables, art students design prints, and siblings help each other lay their work onto the printer beds. Always standing nearby are Sofia Niazi, Rose Nordin, and Heiba Lamara, the co-creators of publishing collective One of My Kind (OOMK), and the founders of this space. Their open access sessions offer the local community the chance to learn Risograph printing for free, and they’re specially designed to make the press as accessible as possible. It was during my final year studying graphic design that I first began to appreciate the beauty of this free resource. My art school hadn’t yet caught on to the possibilities of Risograph printing, so many students would make the weekly trek to Manor Park to take advantage of RRP’s facilities. In a time often referred to as the “Risograph Renaissance,” when the art world’s demand for these printers soared and the practice can feel like it’s becoming somewhat elitist, RRP is a breath of fresh air. It taps into the machine’s egalitarian spirit and history; its original function as a cheap, simple printing device used by communities such as schools, churches, prisons, and political groups in order to quickly and efficiently spread their messages. Since 2014, when OOMK first formed, publishing as community-building has been at the heart of the collective’s practice. Its eponymous OOMK Zine centers on “the imaginations, creativity, and spirituality of women,” and its RRP has existed since 2016 when it was first granted funding by the Arts Council England. In recent years, OOMK undertook a residency at the central London gallery Somerset House, where it curated the zine fair PROCESS!, and has worked with institutes

including London College of Fashion, Kingston University, and the Peabody Foundation. Niazi also co-curates DIY Cultures, an annual independent publishing fair in the UK focused on marginalized voices and histories. On a hot day when sunlight coyly peeked out from behind the clouds, I took the 25 bus out to Manor Park to discover more about the world that Niazi, Nordin, and Lamara have built for their local community. Anoushka Khandwala: How did you all meet? Rose Nordin: I came across one of Sofia’s zines when she was at SOAS University of London (School of Oriental and African Studies), and then I encountered her at a zine fair. I knew it was her immediately because she looked exactly like her drawings! Sofia Niazi: I was part of a zine collective called Walrus Zines at the time, which I started with my best friend Sabba Khan. Rose is Muslim and we were like, “Cool, we’re also Muslim.” We decided to make a zine about significant Muslim women throughout history, but it very quickly became clear that none of us knew about history... so in 2012 we decided to make a zine about creative women instead, with Muslim women as a major focus. How Muslim women are written about and depicted in mainstream media is very prescriptive, and we wanted to bypass all of that and ask, “Who would we be if we didn’t have to create work in response to this weird narrative?” Heiba Lamara: I came to the launch of the first issue of OOMK completely by accident and met Sofia and Rose. There was an opening to be involved in the OOMK collective, and they asked me to join. SN: We were based in this really crappy studio in South Kilburn, which we got for free. The owners said that 23

It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times

From left to right: Rose Nordin, Sofia Niazi, and Heiba Lamara.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

in order to have the studio we needed to take on a trainee from the local area. We weren’t actually looking for an extra person, we were trying to tick this box… HL: Oh thanks! [All laugh] SN: You were a wonderful surprise that we did not bank on. Heiba came in and she was just above and beyond amazing. She kind of kept me and Rose in check.

AK: Tell me a bit more about your individual practices. You’re all multidisciplinary, but perhaps Sofia is more of an illustrator, Rose a designer, and Heiba a writer. Would you align with those labels? SN: I’m deeply cynical about the art world, so my profession is teaching. I’m a primary school teacher, and off the back of that security I was able to do an MA in illustration. I would probably still label myself as an artist though, as it allows more flexibility in terms of what you can produce. RN: I consider myself a graphic designer. We often use “artist” as an overarching term so we can fit into different spaces. But my work has always had an emphasis on books: I’m interested in the book as an object and as a force to participate in activism, conversation, and education. HL: I studied English at university and when I left there wasn’t a clear trajectory as to what to do. So I began working as a part-time volunteer at an archive called The George Padmore Institute, which

was an archive with a bookshop called Beacon Books, a radical Black publishing house in the ’60s and ’70s. I became interested in archives, and a lot of my work is related to archiving or excavating. AK: It sounds like OOMK began organically, rather than you all setting out with the specific intention to start a zine. SN: Yeah. We had some core values that we shared: We all have the same set of rules and religion, we have trust, and we take risks together. There are a lot of things we’re on the same page about, so we’re able to put our relationship as friends and people at the center of what we do. I remember early on in 2014 we were approached by this very business-y, corporate person about transforming our zine to make it more ‘clickbait-y,’ and he was like, “You need to make content every week, you need to make a video.” RN: He kept talking about a campaign, and we were like, “For what? What would we possibly make a campaign about?” SN: It was all influencer BS. It was really apparent that if we took that route, we would destroy our friendship completely because we’d be putting so much pressure on each other. We’d probably get 100k followers, but what would we be getting from that? At the time, I wanted there to be much more content online. And Heiba and Rose were like, “Why?” [All laugh] In hindsight, I’m so glad we didn’t go through with that incessant Instagram-post-every-day route, because there’s no end to it. And there’s also not really any long-lasting benefit, in terms of people nurturing creative practices, creating places that are warm, and creating relationships that are meaningful. HL: It’s the nature of zine culture 25

It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times

as well, in that it’s a real life community, and your focus is equally on creating work and nurturing all your relationships around it. For each issue of OOMK we decide on a theme, and then we invite everyone down, so that readers can create the issue with us. There’s a much wider OOMK collective of people who’ve been there from the beginning, and who have supported events and contributed stuff to the zine. AK: Why did you choose to call it “One of My Kind”? RN: That was a reference to a Conor Oberst song, which has references to Cain and Abel and various other brotherhood stories. It just felt like it had a nice ring to it. It also has a sense of collectivity, but also individuality. You’re a “one” but also a part of a larger “kind.” I also like to say “OOMK” in full (ew-mm-ke), as it’s just a fun sound.

AK: I can sense that sentiment through your work, how you don’t take yourselves too seriously. SN: It’s true! I think we have a really good balance of cute times and dark times. There must be, otherwise it just gets too bad. For us this has been an escape from other serious stuff, like having to be a serious person in the world, and having to deal with all of the horrible things going on. HL: It’s a cute, safe space. AK: Why is publishing a good medium for 26

community building? RN: Because it occupies physical spaces. It’s a route to community that makes sense, because you can put yourself in unusual and unexpected places, or meet people in a way that’s not planned by an algorithm. SN: You publish because you have something to say. We currently live in such a statement culture, where people are just saying statements to each other all the time. There’s not much room for discussion. With print publishing, you’re saying something, and you know that it’ll be received in a way that someone is actually going to listen to it. And financially, it doesn’t cost a lot to publish on a small scale, so you’re able to create a space where people are able to take risks. A physical press can give people a little bit of security, through the knowledge that the space will be a constant, and that it will allow them to really develop something over time. AK: Were there any collectives or publishing practices that you were inspired by? HL: I was really inspired by New Beacon Books, and a lot of the publishing houses that were around in the ’60s and ’70s like Bogle-L’Ouverture. It embodied that do-it-yourself culture, but it was completely international in terms of its reach, from South America to East Africa. It had writers from everywhere. It was putting out work that involved really intense community projects in London, about Black and brown people in the UK that were linked across the diaspora. RN: I know that when we started, the Tumblr Girls Get Busy was really important to the kind of culture that we were into. It was such an education. It informed so much of my wider understanding of identity politics, which is more common

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now. A lot of Beth’s (founder of GGB) content was submission-based, similar to ours, but it was a lot more immediate in that it was just photocopied on really beautiful, fun paper in these very tropey white girl feminist aesthetics, but it wasn’t done to death at that point. AK: It seems like for you a publishing practice and a printing press go hand-in-hand, so what particularly interests you about Risograph? RN: I interned and worked at London’s Hato Press for a while. Seeing Risograph as a way of art making and graphic design was really exciting to me. Before that, I encountered it in more of an activist context, where it was more about immediacy. The history of Risograph as being so pivotal in campaigns and activism aligned with what we were interested in, and also, it was genuinely easy to use and it was attainable. We were inspired by screen printing collectives like the See Red Women’s Workshop, but it’s so hard to get a screen exposed and set up. While our Riso machines always break, there’s something a little bit more solid about the piece of machinery. It feels like activism just putting your image on the bed, and having something come out, even if it’s just on a nice shade of pink paper. HL: We never had a plan to open a Riso studio or anything like that. Sophie Chapman, who worked for Create London, set up a meeting between us and the project’s curator, who was looking for a new collective to be residents at Old Manor Park library. We applied to do a community printing press pilot project, with open access afternoons at the core of the project. We wanted something like an open house, or a kitchen where people sort of gather around; those spaces that crop up and become little catalysts for other things to happen. Then we were learning on the job

with the people we were meant to be teaching. They’d have a problem and would be like, “How do I do it?” and we’d be like “I dunno!” and then we’d Google it together. AK: I heard about Rabbits Road Press because I didn’t have a Risograph machine at university and then I found out about your open access afternoons. You started these free sessions so that locals could learn about Risograph. The afternoons were of great value to me and so many other students, although at times I worried that I was using facilities that were intended for the local community. HL: Well, art students turn up because we’ve gone to universities and given talks. Also at some point, those art students will leave university and no longer have access to facilities. At the same time, people who come here, whoever they are, they’re paying for printing costs that always go back into the press, and Newham residents are always able to access the press at subsidized rates. So the students are helping sustain an ecosystem that local people eventually benefit from. SN: Their presence also adds to the seriousness of the space as an art school space, and not only a community art project, which is always seen as second grade, tokenistic, etc. So I think it’s really valuable that a lot of students and tutors use the space. I’m not invested in us being in an “us vs. them” scenario. HL: Yeah, when you say open access, it means open access. SN: We don’t want to dictate who the public are. We have a set structure in place, and we know it will take time for people who don’t feel entitled to be in this space to come. We make extra efforts to go to primary schools and to invite specific groups into the 27

It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

space outside of open access times to do private workshops. It’s everybody’s right to have access to public services and to arts provision. AK: Do you think spreading awareness of the press is integral to the work you do? SN: Sometimes I think, what if Dazed or i-D did a big feature on us? It would be really bad. [All laugh] RN: It’s just been natural, hasn’t it? Because people tell their friends. HL: It’s a nice place for people to mix, from the kid who comes with their little brother to someone who just wants to spend a nice evening with a friend. Or there are people with full-time jobs who are not professional artists, but hobbyists. Everyone helps each other as conversations get started. SN: We’re in an old library, so there’s a feeling of familiarity to local people. There’s this sense of belonging that would be really difficult to forge if it was a new build, white gallery space. HL: We still get people knocking on the door like, “Is there Zumba or English language classes here?” which are down the road now. RN: Or trying to return books! HL: They’re like, “I’ve had it for three years.” I’m like, “It’s not a library any more.” SN: We’re blessed by the fact that we’re not in trendy East London, because this project would be so different. The fact that it’s in Manor Park means you’ve got to make an effort. AK: What happens if Manor Park becomes the new Shoreditch? HL: Oh, it probably will at some point. But we’re not that invested in being here forever. RRP is not going to turn into an institution: We’re here until the lease is up, or until the project ends, or if

we run out of money. There is gentrification creeping in heavily, coming in from Stratford, from everywhere. We talk about that a lot: Are we some big trojan horse in this big arts ecosystem to gentrify Newham? At the same time, I really like the idea of not blowing up the place on the way out, but just for whatever time we have to use this space, invite as many people to use it for their own needs as possible, including housing groups, local charities, etc. Whatever’s in our capacity to offer, we’ll offer it. SN: Part of our ethos is to make local people independent within their art practice. So if that’s been successful, then that’s what we’re giving them: If they learn to use Riso, then they can go to other places to print after using this place. We were happy to get paid a little bit less than our day rates to be at RRP, because we get a lot from the project that is not financial. We’re really interested in thinking outside of capitalism, and not letting it dictate our demands or our expectations. We value other things beyond money, like people and relationships. AK: In activist work, it can often feel futile to create a space, particularly for women and ethnic minorities, in a world that’s constantly against us. What would your feminist anti-racist utopia look like? And what do you think of this word “utopia”? RN: I feel like we use that word when we write our Arts Council application, and we’ve got this vision of how we want our press to be. I feel like it’s our little vision of our utopia in our own world and space. I don’t feel like it’s a goal to be achieved in a wider world, but it’s a safe space that we’re making for ourselves and our own practice. It’s about having this inner, personal utopia in your own work 29

It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

as a drive and allowing people to come in through open access, but I think maybe we’re all… HL: Cynical? SN: I think we’re being realistic! RN: There’s a term “radical skepticism,” which I heard in a talk about Stuart Hall that I went to recently. I like the term because it implies that it’s not negative to be skeptical. There’s a sense of rationale and strategizing how to navigate the world by having radical skepticism and questioning institutions or opinions. Maybe it’s not about working towards utopia, but just about challenging the things we’re struggling with. SN: We don’t subscribe to this idea of heaven on earth, which I think is another way of saying “utopia.” And even if we were able to achieve heaven on earth in a small area, the fact that overall it’s not heaven on earth negates that, like it’s not going to be good for everyone, so it doesn’t seem honest to try and create one. More and more, I’m thinking about this idea of sitting with your blessings instead of trying to smash and change things all the time. Things like racism are there to waste your time, and part of wasting your time is just having a miserable life and complaining about all the things that are bad, instead of claiming the things that you have that are good. I went to a talk with Faith Ringgold the other day and she was saying how her autobiography wasn’t welcomed with open arms by her publishers. She said, “It’s because my life is not a horror, and that’s what people want to hear.” I was thinking that our life is not a horror. I have a nice life, and sometimes it’s not nice, but we’re going to get through it together, and that’s quite a radical thing because it allows you to be where you are, instead of running towards this utopian future which will never arrive.

AK: Do you feel that a lot of people try to project pain onto your life? SN: I think that the horror narrative is people trying to simplify others by saying, “Ah! You have a sad life” or “You are persecuted.” And we know we’re part of this suspect community, but we’re also kind of fun, cool people who have a nice time. HL: I subscribe to the idea of “cute times/dark times.” I have actually felt horror when I’ve experienced immigration courts and stuff like that. That’s a particular kind of terrifying, where you feel like this process could kill you very slowly, so you need to come up with a way to live in response to that. How do you live having known horror? How do you create something that is equally as healing or beautiful? AK: What do you think about the label “people of color”? A lot of people find solace and identity with the label, but at the same time feel it can inhibit them in some ways. RN: I found that term difficult at first. I remember Sofia explained it to me, that it’s about unity. I felt conflicted about it, because of being young and described as “colored” by my white relatives. It feels so othering, but I also like that it includes the word “people.” It’s collective. I do feel like those labels have been useful as a shorthand for... HL: Non-white people. RN: Yeah, or to white people, to institutions. HL: Calling us all the same thing doesn’t make sense all of the time, because it completely flattens that inter-community experience in relation to white people, as if we all experience it in the same way, and that’s not the case. SN: I think it’s a signalling thing. Like, “Look over here;” like a friendly flag. 31

It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times

HL: Yeah like, “One of my kind, come join us.” AK: When you’re trying to create change, is it effective to integrate into and diversify existing structures, for example places like Somerset House where you did a residency, which is already a big name in the art world? Or is it best to create something of your own that will always have your values? SN: It’s really contradictory the way that big institutions want to change, and they want to take on people of color to help them change, or appear as if they’re changing. It’s a bit like gentrification. People see something that they like, and then they flock to it and then destroy it. The fact that we’re different is why people come to us, and the fact that RRP is independent and we have our own identity is what people like. But if I stopped working here and went on a payroll at Tate or something, they wouldn’t be interested in me anymore. I’d just become like them. We do work across lots of different institutions, but we work in a freelance capacity which means we still have freedom.

HL: We’re not going to change those institutions, which are part of an oppressive structure. It’s on others to change that, not me. And no amount of hiring artists for one day to put on a show is going to change that. With RRP, we have somewhere to retreat to, and we have our own world here, which is not going to change. SN: We’re trying to build our own world, with assets like the Riso machines. We want to operate independently so we have security. We’re happy to be visible in those institutions. And we’re very conscious about what we’re giving and what we’re taking. We realize that it looks good for galleries to be working with people of color, but we also realize that it’s good for our press to have lots of money. We’re happy to exchange. You know, we’re not operating within this idea of purity and that we can’t touch anything that isn’t grassroots. Rather, we’re just recognizing the world as it is.

Text from “Rendani Nemakhavhani for PR$DNT,” Image by Augustine Wong.

L E A D E R

MY LEADER

Text from “Herland,” Image by Austin Chan.

A SE R U LF N -S E U N F TI F R IC EL IE Y N B T Y SO W C O IE M T E Y N

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Rendani Nemakhavhani for PR$DNT

The South African art director thrives on creating imaginary worlds that Johannesburg creatives can turn into reality By Neo Maditla 35

Rendani Nemakhavhani for PR $DNT

In the first months of 2019, a curious series of posters began popping up on social media and in the streets of Johannesburg. It was just ahead of the South African national elections, and campaign posters depicting smiling politicians silhouetted against boldly colored backgrounds and sans serif slogans hung from street poles across the country. But this series was different—more album promo than campaign design—and it featured a black woman in a beret and gauzy pink veil. In one of the images, she stands with her back against a wall with her eyes closed. In another, she looks directly at the camera with the veil covering her face and neck. She looks more magisterial than presidential, but unmistakably, there it was: bold type announcing the political debut of PR$DNT HONEY.

According to the posters, the PR$DNT’s major campaign platform was “to restore the national wealth of our country, and the heritage of all women.” She was there “for plentiful supply of cheques, peace, and rounds.” The campaign was devised by the Johannesburg-based art director and illustrator Rendani Nemakhavhani, as an ambitious extension of her art alter ego, The Honey. She lost to seasoned politican Cyril Ramaphosa, but winning was never the point, anyway. Since 2014, Nemakhavhani has been remaking herself into a series of fictional characters for the camera, and self-styling worlds that are familiar to herself and to other South African women. Or, in the case of PR$DNT HONEY, a world they’d like to see. Nemakhavhani works full-time as an art 36

director at a Johannesburg advertising agency, but it’s through her personal projects that she aims to create an ongoing conversation about the representation of black women in South Africa. For the past five years, she’s continued to re-fashion herself as part of an ongoing photography series called The Honey, in which she tries on different personas in order to imagine different possibilities for women like her. This collaboration with street photographer Kgomotso Neto Tleane lives as an eight-part series on Tumblr, where PR$DNT HONEY is the latest installment of the project. It’s Nemakhavhani’s alter-ego brought to life. The Honey allows Nemakhavhani to imagine different versions of herself, but it also works to portray the type of South African women not usually celebrated in the media. It’s a project that’s part of a long, feminist tradition of self-portraiture employed by artists like Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman, Tony Gum, Yasumasa Morimura, Zanele Muholi, and others. In Nemakhavhani’s case, she’s reinventing herself as different versions of a young woman in Johannesburg to show a complexity that she feels is usually flattened. The Honey consists of chapters that each reveal a different side of the character played by Nemakhavhani. In the series, The Honey navigates the city; she deals with her love interest Gavini and being young in Johannesburg. In a chapter entitled “Ungazikhohlwa bbz, never forget to love yourself,” she wears a black and white wig with a white fur coat covering a green dress that hangs off one shoulder. Something about the way her purple lips are parted shows the audacious confidence of someone who absolutely knows who they are. In another image for “Honey, Leader my Leader,” we see a side profile of The Honey in a leopard print fez and brown fur coat. Her cheeks are covered in sweat. The image is reminiscent of pictures of African dictators like Idi Amin and how they’re portrayed in movies. “My initial thoughts when I was brainstorming the series was to create a body of work that would try to speak to the diversity

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Rendani Nemakhavhani for PR $DNT

of women, and show that we are a layered and dynamic species,” she says. All of the women that Nemakhavhani portrays are bold and defiant—certainly not afraid to occupy a public space, whether it is the highest office in the land or just being more visible within the creative space. Nemakhavhani calls The Honey series a “live moodboard” that she and Tleane had to create from scratch because they couldn’t see themselves and their friends reflected in public imagery meant to illustrate South African youth. The last time Nemakhavhani and Tleane remember seeing themselves in something on screen was in Yizo Yizo, a South African television series that became popular due to its raw depiction of what it’s like to be a young person growing up in South African townships. It depicted the lives of young people as they navigated their way through school, violence, fun, and heartache. And for a lot of young South Africans, the series made them feel seen in all their complexity, and not just through the binary of being “good” or “bad.” Nemakhavhani and Tleane pay tribute to Yizo Yizo in chapter three of The Honey, and when they later included it in an exhibition of the work, the creators of the TV series were in attendance. For Nemakhavhani, it was validating. “It felt like the universe and God were saying, ‘You are doing good, you’re stepping in the right direction, don’t stop.’” Nemakhavhani dreamt up PR$DNT HONEY about two years ago, while watching a documentary on the South African struggle activist Winnie Mandela. She saw a similarity in Mandela and her grandmother, who had recently passed, and wondered what a woman like her might look like as a presidential candidate for South Africa. Just like that, the PR$DNT HONEY campaign was born. Unlike her Tumblr series, PR$DNT HONEY doesn’t only exist in the form of a photography series. Nemakhavhani extended her fiction into the organization of an event for Johannesburg’s creative community, where speakers could share their experiences in the industry and speak honestly together. She 38

gathered together her ideal creative “ministry,” one composed of Johannesburg-based creatives whose work she respects, including event entrepreneur Nandi Dlepu; the founder of the creative network Creative Nestlings, Dillion Phiri; and YouTuber and co-founder of Pap Culture, Nwabisa Mda. For Nemakhavhani, just because youth unemployment in the country stands just over 50%, and just because it’s often hard to get into the creative arena, doesn’t mean one should not create space—whether imaginary or on the ground. While The Honey is a fiction, the ministry event that came out of it was very much in the real world. In imagining and performing a better, or more complex, world—and in creating images that are more representative of the varied experiences of black people in South Africa—fragments of her fictionalized universe have begun to trickle into Nemakhavhani’s everyday reality. When Nemakhavhani first studied graphic design at the University of Johannesburg, she says it didn’t feel like it was for her. She almost quit in her second year because her grades were low and she wasn’t able to identify with the mostly European examples given to her by lecturers on what constituted great graphic design. “I really struggled with my thesis, because I was writing about South African graphic designers, and I wanted to write about black South African graphic designers in particular,” she says. “I couldn’t find anything that was written in books that I could use as references.” Through making work like The Honey and PR$DNT HONEY, Nemakhavhani strives to ensure that other young graphic designers don’t have to go through the same struggle she did. All images courtesy of Rendani Nemakhavhani. Photography by Kgomotso Neto Tleane.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Upgrade or Die

By Perrin Drumm Illustrations by Max Guther

Earth, 2164 The first sign that things weren’t going well was the dog. Actually, that’s not true. It was just the latest sign. But coming home to see that Spot2.0 had failed—died, essentially— right there in the middle of the room, and that neither Dan, so deep in his VR bullshit, nor the Assist had noticed didn’t help matters. I was removing my anti-radiation hairnet in the Reverso mirror like I always do after a long day at Zuckerberg, Bezos & Musk. Today was a particularly challenging one for the SpacebookPrime team. We’re almost a go for Mission Last Hope, but as I was quadruple-checking the uranium collection devices, I spotted a small structural flaw in one—just one, but there it was. They had to be strength-tested again, all 500,000 of them. So yeah, I was wiped. It’s a risky mission—the riskiest we’ve ever run, in fact. We’ve never sent a spacecraft this far away from Earth... and returned. But

Upgrade or Die

we need every little bit of uranium ore we can extract, now that we’ve mined the Earth’s to pieces. The next planetary system update will require more energy than any previous update—ever. There are a lot of bugs to fix this time around. The PerfectTemp365 update alone will reverse the whole sea-level rise issue. That’s a biggie. I think Miami would like to come up for air already! I shouldn’t joke about that; it’s a bad scene down there. And not just in Miami, either. That’s why there’s no more time for test flights or exploratory drones. We’re running out of options. If this mission fails, it’ll cost $7 trillion and the lives of our crew—and some pretty advanced drones and bots—but Earth 4.0 will be worth it. Plus, if the mission is successful, I’ll get a major bonus, a promotion, equity, maybe even a few extra hours of paid vacation—imagine what I could do with eight consecutive nonjob hours! At the very least I’ll be able to afford to download the latest version of CelebStyle into my personal OS and upgrade this basic 2.0 lob haircut. And I can finally upgrade to a Dan3. I mean, look at Dan2. He’s either a hack or his update was privately endorsed by LyfePlanet, because all he ever wants to do is play with their headset. And he’s so buggy! I’ve had him for just four months and he’s already balding. I knew I should have opted for Karim2. His update has a man bun. So much hair he has to tie it into a tiny ball behind his head. I leave Dan on the couch and port over to the PowerUp. My meeting with the Very Important Bosses is in the morning, and reaching max charge always clears my head. As I boot up, I go through the presentation in my head one more time and picture myself entering the VIB chamber all ready to go in My Ideal Form. Then I begin the presentation I’ve been practicing for years. It’s been a long time coming, and now, with the launch date of Mission Last Hope quickly approaching, the moment is finally right: I’m going to nominate myself as Space Pilot. It’s the whole reason I got into this crazy interstellar mining 42

business to begin with. You think I want to be stress-testing uranium collection devices for the rest of my life? When I came on the scene, the only jobs available at Zuckerberg, Bezos & Musk were in the mining department, which had switched focus to energy once data lost its value. I rose to the top of my galactic geology class and nabbed a spot on the R&D team (this was still way back when SpacebookPrime was just a glimmer in the founders’ cryogenically frozen eyes). I scrounged and saved up for the latest Wing Commander and Space Pirate upgrades, and I’ve ranked either Palladium or Titanium in all the requisite tests: the Fight or Flight Simulation test, the Resource Resourcefulness test, the InterBeings Intelligence test, and the Undead Defense test. It’s been 50 years of testing. I’ve been rebooted and rebuilt as many times. I think I’ve proven my loyalty and dedication. Not that the testing phase isn’t important. The thing about other worlds is you have to be ready for anything. You never know what you might find: The atmospheres might be toxic, or the strata might be barren, all mined out by other beings. The survivors—if there are survivors—end up on psych leave for a full OS generation. When they come out they’re never the same, they can’t ever seem to keep up with the latest updates. But with the mission in my capable Space Pilot hands, I would never let that happen.

The Next Morning With my presentation just minutes away, I prepare myself for The Reskinning. The company Assist, an innocuous-looking v3.9 butler-type in standard issue pinstripes, guides me to an antechamber near the boardroom. It looks different from the last time I was here, though that was almost a full update ago, so of course they’ve redecorated. I like how they’ve rearranged the furniture and added the sunken living room. It’s tasteful, if a tad retro. And the plants—I’ve never seen such pixel-perfect

Upgrade or Die

potted ferns. The fronds even wave realistically in the simulated breeze. The butler offers me an arm and leads me to a wall of laminated wood panels. When he presses a thumb into the center of an elaborate whorl pattern, the panels slide apart to reveal a stainless steel countertop and a familiar metal box. When he lifts the lid, vapor waves of dry ice waft out. I peer in and see the syringe, the pill, and the little paper cup of water. The transformation process itself lasts less than a minute, but it’s intense. There’s always the FeelNoPain pill, but if I swallow it, the VIBs will be informed, and who wants a pilot that needs to numb a bit of excruciating pain? The new form I’m transferred into is temporary, too. It’s all been preselected and scientifically designed to render me in the most physically appealing and non-threatening version of myself, according to the VIBs’ personal likes and dislikes along with centuries of psychological research into power dynamics. They say the whole Reskinning practice sets us back 100 years, rebuilds the glass ceiling, or whatever. But at least this way, everyone’s physiological biases are stripped away—no touchy race or gender issues to get in the way of presenting your good ideas. Last time, I trotted out of the antechamber as a Border Collie, a very cute and exceptionally intelligent breed of dog. Thank god I didn’t see my reflection until afterward! It worked, though. I got the job. And now, here I am. The butler looks up at me. I take the syringe and brace myself for what’s to come. To steady my breathing, I try to find something calming to focus on—the fern frond!—and wonder why they gave Probots the ability to feel pain. I roll up my sleeve, picture myself deftly maneuvering the mission’s spacecraft in warpspeed, and plunge the syringe into my arm. When I blink my eyes open, the butler is standing over me. His face is huge. Wait, what’s happening? Ow! My left arm is being… snapped into place? He’s still assembling me! WTF. It feels like I’ve been punched in every joint of my body. No wonder people take the 44

pill. Oh shit, now what—I’m in the air, moving. He’s… picking me up with his fat little fingers. How small a dog am I? Okay, okay, I’m standing up now on my own two feet. I stretch my sore arm out and see the familiar skinless, articulated joints of my own beta Assist. I lift a leg up and, yep, I’ve got the body of a metal Barbie doll, minus the wardrobe—and the boobs. Over to the left I see a pencil that’s as big as my leg, and a mug of coffee I could Jacuzzi in. So that’s how the VIBs like their female colleagues now. I’m an adrogynous, v1.0 Assist, standing just 18 unintimidating inches tall. You know what? That’s fine with me. If I get to pilot this mission, they can keep me in whatever form they want. Fuck the glass ceiling—I’ll shatter it with my spacecraft on the way back down. What’s the alternative? If we don’t find enough uranium on the first planet we reach, we don’t stand a chance of updating Earth. We’ll have to keep searching the galaxy for other viable sources—with me at the wheel. It could take decades, centuries even. But as long as they make good on the remote upgrades—I’m talking the full OS suite—I’m cool with that. After all, I have my whole future ahead of me.

All images courtesy of Max Guther: page 41 for Zeit Wissen, page 43 for Pitchfork, page 45 for Institutional Investor.

Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave

Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave The half-satirical, half-earnest, much-memeified aesthetic lived the way it (almost) died By Emily Gosling

1. Computer soft/hardware that’s been announced, but as-yet unreleased. 2. Its use of an edited photograph of Greek god Helios against a lurid pink and checkerboard background became the source of numerous memes, is copied across many posters designed for vaporwave-themed club nights, and is also sold (not by the designer) as a phone cover.

Ramona Andra Xavier aka Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe artwork, album cover, 2011.

Vaporwave is a thoroughly internet-birthed phenomenon unlike any sonic or visual style before it. Taking its name from a play on “vaporware1,” the musical genre emerged around 2010 as an eerie amalgam of loungy elevator muzak, television, advertisements, infomercials, and video game samples. Vaporwave’s visuals were like ghostly, neon-lit dreamscapes of childhood nostal gia: metallic but sweet, like fortified breakfast cereals packaged in saccharine colors and MS Paint aesthetics. Its entire ethos is digitally constructed—a subversion of hypercapitalism dusted with the ashes of Gordon Gekko-like hubris, and its designs have been so aped to have become an established part of our visual lexicon. Take, for example, the cover of electronic musician Macintosh Plus’s 2011 release Floral Shoppe, which is a mix of pixelated computer graphics, a disembodied Grecian bust, Japanese lettering, and sickly sweet pink. It’s since been parodied ad nauseum2, with its creator Ramona Andra Xavier rarely referenced by its imitators. Vaporwave designs are like posters that promise the bubble hasn’t burst, thrust in front of the eyes of those who know it definitely has. They sell us a Bitcoin-built time-share utopia we will never be able to afford, and probably wouldn’t want to stay in anyway. Both sonically and visually, vaporwave relies on looping and fetishizing familiar trash culture motifs (infomercials, retro video games, ’80s and ’90s TV, old-school Word Art) and rendering them queasily 46

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

unsettling. In his 2016 book, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification Of Ghosts, author Grafton Tanner explains why the genre makes us so uncomfortable: “Vaporwave is the music of ‘non-times’ and ‘non-places’ because it is skeptical of what consumer culture has done to time and space.” The genre presented a unique critique of the marriage of art and capitalism in a way that’s both earnest but utterly insincere, emerging just after the 2008 global financial crash and, interestingly, at a time when the Muzak corporation went bankrupt3. Vaporwave as we know it really started to accelerate around 2010 and 2011, mostly through Turntable.fm4, Soundcloud, and Bandcamp, where the likes of Internet Club (Robin Burnett), Luxury Elite, Infinity Frequencies, Transmuteo (Jonathan Dean), and Ramona Andra Xavier (under numerous aliases, including Macintosh Plus) emerged. Those years also saw two of the touchstones of vaporwave released by Daniel Lopatin/Oneohtrix Point Never (Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1) and James Ferraro (Far Side Virtual), and both artists’ work has since far transcended the genre. With most vaporwave music distribution happening digitally, things like materiality and printing costs were rarely a concern. But in both online and physical releases (usually cassettes or CD-Rs), the cover designs are characterized by a warped version of utopia that merges internet-age insignia and pop-art tropes. The “style” of vaporwave is (unsurprisingly) very “internet”—often spelled out as full-width characters “ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ5”. Vaporwave music videos mostly lean on kitsch sincerity6. Using neon-heavy, glitchy, net art-like imagery, they often shift CGI versions of classic art (Greek sculptures, for instance) into “uncanny valley” territory. This is achieved through “ugly-design”—stretched fonts and screensaver graphics; eerie, often marbled, 3D geometric shapes; glistening bubbles and architectural renders; alien landscapes; gradients in soothing variations of pink and teal; yuppie-ish emblems (palm trees, skyscrapers, pyramids, etc.)—all tarnished with the unpredictability of analog technology like VHS graininess. As adroit Format journalist Genista Jurgens surmised, “People have been quick to dismiss the trend as an indulgent in-joke between unemployed suburban music producers and freshly graduated graphic designers.” The sleeve for Lopatin/Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, for example, mixes the shimmering turquoise beloved of ’80s video games with fragments directly ripped from the cover art for Mega Drive video game Ecco the Dolphin. The dolphin is no accident: the creature is the poster 47

3. Muzak has since been bought out and renamed, releasing pre-existing songs for use in stores. 4. A now-defunct social media music sharing platform site that shuttered in 2013.

5. This was partly because it was simply eye-catching, and also (some suggest) draws on the fact that Japanese phone and computer keyboards bear a spaced out English typeface alongside its “normal” version. 6. “It’s kind of like you are living in a junkyard in a dystopian future and you find a bunch of VHS tapes and you’re the only person in the world and you’re kind of lonely and you have a bunch of weed and you’re high all the time, and you’re in Japan, and you’re in the sky,” as YouTube user Frank JavCee puts it in his hilarious (now deleted) instructional video How to Make Vaporwave.

Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave

Ramona Andra Xavier artwork for her alias Vektroid, Neo Cali album, 2011.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Isaac Roberts, image created for Discord’s Vaporwave 10th anniversary project, 2019.

Ramona Andra Xavier artwork for her alias Vektroid, Seed & Synthetic Earth album cover, 2017.

James Webster, design for Virtual Utopia Experience album by Death’s Dynamic Shroud, released on Ailanthus Recordings, 2014.

Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave

Ramona Andra Xavier for her alias PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises, Home™ album cover art, 2013.

Ramona Andra Xavier for her alias PrismCorp Virtual Enterprises, ClearSkies™ album cover art, 2013.

boy for gaudy-glamorous vacations, the star of aspirational billboards promising sunshine and a faux-New-Age sense of escaping middle-management drudgery for a more “meaningful” experience. Where Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual critiqued what he termed a culture of “frozen yogurt” consumer blandness, Fatima Al Qadiri’s early-2010s work took well-worn cliches of hip-hop into the vaporsphere—or more precisely, into the spa. Her video for “Hip Hop Spa,” by Kamau Patton, used collage and glitches to conflate the idea of prison’s solitary confinement with that of the solitude of a luxurious spa experience. Things get even darker in the “Vatican Vibes” video, by Tabor Robak, which also conflates two similar but opposing power structures. In Al Qadiri’s words, the video “constructed an imaginary architecture for a Catholic video game, adapting many of the religion’s signifiers and symbols for the digital realm.” Vaporwave’s use of typography in artist and track names is significant. It’s almost exclusively bold, all-caps, and frequently displayed in Chinese and Japanese characters indecipherable to most Western eyes. This underscores both vaporwave’s smash-and-grab approach to sampling, and its allegiance with the whirring, oblique, hidden machinations of global capitalism. Some critics have argued that this use of non-Western characters is a form of cultural appropriation. “Japanese text was an inescapable attribute of vaporwave’s visual identity, but most producers were often young white men in the West, channeling a language they, troublingly, associated with ’80s tech affluence,” writes Rob Arcand on Noisey. “But then again, is geographical legitimacy really all that meaningful in the post-internet era, a time where ‘place’ seems to matter so little anyway?” That sense of nihilism—albeit nihilism painted in bright colors—is perhaps what makes vaporwave so fascinating. Vaporwave’s sound and visuals are about terribleness, and they satirize that terribleness to the point of making it good again. By consuming it, we’re accepting the foibles and awfulness of capitalism, bad graphic design, war, technology, heck, even ourselves. And we’re getting in on the joke. In that way, vaporwave is ultimately postmodern—almost Dadaist—merging high and low; good and bad. It’s blindly, optimistically futuristic. By 2012, vaporwave had garnered wider acclaim, spawning inevitable offshoot genres including “mallsoft,” “vaportrap,” and “vaporgoth,” among others. Its early pioneers soon moved on from the vaporwave internet in-joke: By 2013, Daniel Lopatin (also known as Oneohtrix Point Never/Chuck Person) had signed to Warp Records, wrote the score for 50

Ramona Andra Xavier aka Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe artwork, sticker, 2011.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, and was collaborating with artists like Jon Rafman. In just a few years after its emergence in 2010, vaporwave had gone mainstream. A 2015 Rolling Stone “new artists you need to know” list that namechecked vaporwave act ２８１４ and a number of vaporwave producers’ remixes of Drake’s Hotline Bling put the previously “micro” genre under a more macro lens. Many see 2015 as the year that signalled the end of vaporwave, as its formerly niche “ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣＳ” were swallowed up and churned out for the masses. When Richard Turley joined MTV in 2014, the channel’s new look was distinctly vaporwave: gaudy pinks, deliberately glitchy, off-kilter motion graphics, hyperactive fusions of user-submitted content, and ’90s-esque computer game graphics. When vaporwave—at its heart, a Baudrillardian simulacra of consumerist trappings—becomes itself appropriated as a corporate brand, it’s probably safe to say that its time is nigh7. By December 2015, it even had its own eulogy, Sandtimer’s album Vaporwave is Dead. In the years since the aping of the style to sell music television, things became even more absurd as vaporwave’s style embedded into meme culture. In 2016, then-19-year-old student and YouTube user Lucien Hughes dreamed up Simpsonwave, which morphed and spliced The Simpsons clips with rudimentary Adobe Premiere and After Effects to create a bizarro version of classic vaporwave aesthetics (pool-water reflections, glitches, faux-analog TV fuzz, Gameboys, Greek sculptures, titles like ＴＡＭＡＧＯＴＣＨＩ). The clips were, naturally, set against fittingly chill soundtracks. At times, Simpsonwave feels incredibly and surprisingly moving. Like vaporwave itself, this made-for-meme remodelling evokes both poignant reveries of the innocence of childhood TV-watching and adult ennui provoked by the sad nature of existing in a screenbased world. Things get more sinister with “Fashwave” [or F∆ϟHW∆VE], which started surfacing around 2016 from self-identified fascist musicians like ＣＹＢＥＲＮ ∆ ＺＩ and Xurious8. The visuals for these acts lean on vaporwave tropes and throw Nazi insignia into the mix. Vaporwave’s relatively short existence offers us a different type of nostalgia today. In the decade since vaporwave first appeared, the digital world has significantly re-shaped our sonic and visual language. The early 2010s were the halcyon days when no one, thank god, said “wheelhouse.” We snarfed gluten-laden office cookies as our Windows Squares danced on. Even retro-futuristic vaporwave seems kind of retro now. In 2019, we don’t yearn for the simpler times of Sega Megadrives; we miss the time when people didn’t shout “Hey, Google” to avoid looking at a fucking clock.

Discord user Tupperwave, artwork for for Discord’s Vaporwave 10th anniversary project, 2019.

7. As Esquire put it, vaporwave is the “anti-consumerism music that died the way it lived.”

Lucien Hughes, Still from Simpsonwave video ＴＡＭＡＧＯＴＣＨＩ, 2016.

8. Xurious’ YouTube account has been terminated “due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy prohibiting hate speech.”

James Webster, design for 失われた時REGRET mixtape by Death’s Dynamic Shroud, 2014.

Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave

Richard Carl, image created for Discord’s Vaporwave 10th anniversary project, created from manipulations of imagery from vaporwave Twitter feed Origami Girl, 2019.

Jeff Cardinal, design for Palm Mall album by 猫シ Corp, 2014.

Jeff Cardinal, design for Acid Arcadia album vinyl sleeve by Vaperror, 2016.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Vaporwave Is Dead album by Sandtimer, an alias of Dream Catalogue record label founder HKE, cover design, 2015.

Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave

Discord user Tupperwave, Koala Korp artwork for Discord’s Vaporwave 10th anniversary project, 2019.

Ramona Andra Xavier, album cover art for her alias 情報デスクVIRTUAL, Contemporary Sapporo album, 2012.

Vaporwave fans recently created a Discord channel to celebrate the genre’s 10th birthday, where they submitted sounds, videos, and artwork for a compilation. The designs don’t exactly demonstrate an evolution in vaporwave style as much as they show a deeply ingrained understanding of what that style is. The still-fervent vaporwave community seems to have unanimously coalesced on what the genre “looks like” rather than intending to push it forward, despite the reams of new music being created today in the genre. Crucially for graphic designers, such internet-based projects demonstrate how intrinsic and easily identifiable vaporwave’s signifiers are, even to those who have never heard the term. Vaporwave flourished, in both its sound and design, because it’s one of the few aesthetics that so succinctly sums up the rapid and terrifying pace of change we face today. Change, especially with such rapaciousness, is frightening; vaporwave’s sonic and aesthetic amalgamation of nostalgia and the utopian/dystopian future summed up this fear perfectly. Vaporwave fetishizes both analog technologies and the new, ever-evolving online platforms that allow it to be disseminated. It coddles the television and games of our childhood while placing them on the platforms that ultimately killed those shows and games. As Redmond Bacon puts it, “By criticizing the naivety of the past, vaporwave shows how poorly the present has gone.” Vaporwave merges nostalgia with dramatic irony: As viewers in a play, we see what’s wrong with the world and feel powerless to stop the narrative from unfolding.

Jeff Cardinal, design for Vaperror, aka DJ Camgirl, Cannon. Design uses EmojiOne font with UN Scimitar Tank model by Lee Wilkin, 2016.

Campaigning to shorten the length of the workweek has been integral to labor movements throughout history. The fight for these kinds of regulations originated in the eighthour workday movements that have long advocated for a fairer work-life division; often making use of grassroots posters and badges that bear charts, clocks, and other time-keeping devices. In 1817, workers in the United Kingdom began campaigning for

an eight-hour workday, coining the slogan: “Eight hours’ labor, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest.” In 1886, workers in the United States picked up that mantle and reframed the call, demanding for “eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.” Before these movements, workdays could last up to 16 hours, six days a week. In 1867 in Das Kapital, Karl Marx emphasized

Five designers rework their workweeks to better meet their needs

What Would You Do with 168 Hours?

the importance of time when it comes to the health and well-being of workers: “Extending the working day [capitalist production]… not only produces a deterioration of human labor power by robbing it of its normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity, but also produces the premature exhaustion and death of this labor power itself.” In recent years, discussions centered on the reorganization of the workweek have resurfaced: There’s been newfound interest in pursuing the four-day workweek as well as more flexible working hours. In her 2019 book How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell has recentered the history of the eight-hour workday in the context of today’s precarious gig economy: “The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries—eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will—so that we are left with 24 potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles [...] Time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’” Drawing from the time-keeping devices that they use to organize their day-to-day lives, we asked five designers to visualize their ideal working week—one better suited their needs and desires.

Forest Young, global principal at Wolff Olins / New York City, New York, United States / Forestyoung.com

Sunday Saturday Friday Thursday Wednesday Tuesday Monday

7pm–12am

11am–7pm

8–11am

12–8am

Kate Johnston, founder of Present Tense / Los Angeles, California, United States / Presenttense.studio

Liana Jegers and Clay Hickson / Los Angeles, California, United States / Lianajegers.com, Clayhickson.com

Sleep well for 8 hours Take a shower and eat something without laptop or phone for 2 hours 3 Work for 3 hours 4 Eat lunch and drink coffee in the sun 1

for 2 hours Work for 4 hours 6 Cook, eat, and clean up with another human being for 2 hours 7 Have a conversation with a human (or animal) for 1 hour 5

â&#x2122;Ľ

Spend time in solitude for only 2 hours

Never !

1 678 5 4 2 3

WORK

WORK ! Jihee Lee / Hamburg, Germany / Jihee-lee.com

T O C K

T I C K

61266 9 3 6 12 36 9 12

96 6 6 3 1 23 31 26 1 2

9 9 12

9 6121 2 12 3 69 12 9 3

Collaborators Antonia Terhedebr端gge, founder of Studio Terhedebr端gge, and Mado Kl端mper, founder of Studio Mado Kl端mper / Berlin, Germany / Terhedebruegge.de, Madoklumper.de

Text from “Fake It Till You Keep Faking It”, Image by Augustine Wong

Text from “Shift Work,” Image by Powel Czerwonski.

THE MACHINES

NEVER STOP RUNNING

Text from “Fake It Till You Keep Faking It.” Image by W.

WE’RE WORKING ON CREATING OUR OWN DREAM WORLD THAT WE WANT TO LIVE INSIDE

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Free At What Cost?

The fight to keep renowned art school Cooper Union tuition-free has earned its students an honorary degree in activism By Meg Miller

Free At What Cost?

Student occupiers in President Bharucha’s office, May 2013. Image originallypublished in Vice.

On May 9, 2013, the brownstone building that houses Cooper Union in New York City glowed red. To people crossing the busy East Village streets below, it must have looked like an omen—a blood red bat signal shining below the clock tower of the school’s historic academic building. Behind arched windows, the office of the college’s then-president, Jamshed Bharucha, was packed with around 40 students, sitting cross-legged on the floor and hunched over laptops in office chairs, all bathed in the glow of the red bulbs they’d just installed.

The day before, they had stormed the office to deliver Bharucha a vote of no confidence, and finding no one there, they decided to stay. Now they were projecting their message outward into the heart of the city: Cooper Union, one of the last remaining colleges in the country to not charge tuition, should remain free. It was the end of a disorienting school year, and the occupation of the president’s office was the culmination of a flurry of tense board meetings, behind-the-scenes revenue reports, and simmering unrest in the months prior. During the 2012 spring semester, the college announced that it would start charging tuition for graduate students in the fall of 2014 due to a spate of financial trouble and mounting debt. It would be the first time in well over a century that the art, architecture, and engineering institution, renowned for its progressive founding philosophy, would not be free for its students. The school’s founder, Peter Cooper, a self-taught industrialist and inventor who amassed a fortune from iron milling, insurance, and real estate1, endowed the school in 1859 for the purpose 66

of educating working-class New Yorkers at no cost to them 2 . Cooper was an abolitionist and an ardent supporter of education for all, regardless of gender or race, and that sense of social responsibility, coupled with high qualifications for acceptance due to the full-tuition scholarship3, has earned Cooper a unique reverence in the art and design world. Thomas Edison is a Cooper alum, as are sculptor Eva Hesse and architect Daniel Libeskind. In graphic design alone, the school can claim Herb Lubalin, Milton Glaser, Seymore Chwast, Lou Dorfsman, Stephen Doyle, Carin Goldberg, Ellen Lupton, Abbott Miller, and Emily Oberman as graduates. By December of 2012, the school was tense with anticipation. In response to the announcement of graduate tuition and an inclination that a broader tuition plan was to come, a small group of student activists staged the first of their lock-ins—this one in the Peter Cooper suite, housed in the clock tower. It lasted a week, and in the following months students, faculty, and alumni worked together with the administration to prevent what was at the time still considered a last resort measure. But by April 23, 2013, when the chairman of the board called an early morning meeting in the Foundation Building’s Great Hall, it was already apparent that tuition was on the horizon. As students filed into the lecture hall, they were greeted by the full board of trustees sitting onstage. When they announced that Cooper would definitively end its free-tuition policy for undergraduates, effective the following fall, many of the students who had participated for months in working groups, task forces, open discussions, and public protests felt that they had been given the runaround. In the weeks after the meeting at the Great Hall, a group of students drafted a document to indicate they no longer supported President Bharucha, and more than 400 of their peers signed it in person4. Wanting to deliver it by hand, they forced themselves through narrow hallways and double doors, past the feeble protests of the office administrators, only to arrive at an empty office. It

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Courtesy of Free Cooper Union.

seemed that Bharucha had heard they were coming. So they set up camp in his office, and they stayed there for 65 days. May turned to June, and the office evolved from a red-tinted symbol of resistance to a well-organized activist headquarters. Provisions were brought in, the police were sent away. Students took calls, talked to press, liaised with the board and faculty, and ran a sophisticated social media strategy, consisting mainly of Vine videos. Occupying students who graduated at the end of the spring semester left the office to cross the stage, then went right back up. “We were connecting with all these people from other countries, wheeling and dealing with the board, having these very intense conversations, and then I would get a phone call that was like, ‘Your student loans are due,’” says Victoria Sobel, an artist and activist who took out loans for her living expenses while a student at Cooper. “There was this real collapsing of time.” After a while, visiting lecturers were brought in so people could keep up with their studies. Art students found ways to transform the cramped office into a makeshift studio space, creating small sculptures out of the dwindling office supplies, making videos, and even staging an art show within the Foundation Building. One night, they held a performative reading of the 41-page board of trustees meeting transcript leaked by the Village Voice, variously taking on the speaking roles of Bharucha and members of the board.

The occupation ended with an agreement that called for the formation of a working group made up of trustees, faculty, students, and alumni tasked with preparing an alternate plan to charging tuition. The working group’s

report— which involved suggestions for restructuring academic programs, cutting costs on administrative overhead, and renting out areas in academic buildings—was ultimately declined by the board in favor of their original tuition plan, prompting a new group of students, faculty, and alumni to sue the school. Last year, as required by the lawsuit settlement, Cooper Union announced that it would reinstate free tuition by 2028. In the five years between the protests and the new plan, the energy amassed and the impact made by the occupation led those former students to explore the crisis at Cooper, and the premise of a free institution in deeper, more probing, and more sustained ways. For many of them, the spirit of protest made its way into their art or design for years following the sit-in. By making social activism and community engagement an extension of their art and work, these students experienced a feeling of agency—of not only envisioning an ideal, but leading an effort that forced an actual change of course. It made them rethink the artist’s role in society, and what they themselves were capable of. Cooper Union remained divided over the board’s decision, which seemed to serve as a sort of microcosm, or at least a sign, of the larger crisis of college funding and student debt playing out on a national scale. If paying tuition at Cooper sounded the death knell for the idea of fully-funded education in the U.S., its students were not going to let it go down easy. “There’s a lot of power in ‘free education’—a simple message that can be understood and that people can rally around,” says Casey Gollan, an artist, designer, and a mem 1. He also designed America’s first steam locomotive and, weirdly, patented the powdered gelatin we now know as Jell-O. 2. In the very early days of the school’s history, some students who could afford to pay did so. 3. Cooper Union is a private college with about 1,000 students per year. 4. Over 2,000 signed an online petition. 67

Free At What Cost?

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

ber, with Sobel, of the student protest group Free Cooper Union. “It’s a lot more diffuse once you start to expand those ideas and parse out the different meanings: What is free? What is education?, but that for me is the thing that I’m still interested in doing—pushing those goalposts further and further in exploring what a place like Cooper could be.” After the occupation, both Sobel and Gollan finished school, but neither of them ever really left Cooper. Along with a small group of other students, they continued to run Free Cooper Union, leading reading groups and making it their mission to provide incoming and prospective students with information about recent events that would provide an alternative to the official statements from the school. The group published Disorientation, an extensive website and PDF reader comprised

FREE COOPER UNION A Disorientation Reader

of an introduction to the tuition struggle, a toolkit for joining the cause, and a series of essays that “dig into why Cooper matters, what’s going wrong with education everywhere, and how we might fix it.” Done in the cutand-paste, Risograph-printed style of a punk zine—with snippets of slogans like “Get Your

Thieving Hands Off Our Community Assets” and “A Streetcar Named Tuition”—the reader

is an impressively comprehensive overview of Cooper Union’s story, albeit one with a definite agenda. At the bottom of the website, an illustration of the clock from the Cooper clock tower about to strike midnight flashes red with the scroll-over; beneath it a mantra reads “Stay Free or Die Tryin’.” Sobel and Gollan continued to organize around and teach about free education, and in 2015 they launched Nonstop Cooper, an initiative they describe as a “community residency”

that was housed in the former St. Mark’s bookstore—a beloved neighborhood institution that was forced to move from its space near Cooper Square when the college raised its rent. The timing was right: the lawsuit brought against the school by the Committee to Save Cooper Union (CSCU) had reached a settlement that required the school to return to a tuition-free policy and forced the departure of President Bharucha. “We kind of took advantage of the fact that there was a transition in leadership to point out that there was a very acute lack of community space, and a lot of unresourced time and effort that had gone into what had just happened,” says Sobel. Nonstop Cooper was loosely an outgrowth of the Free Cooper Union group, focused more on public engagement, art, and discourse (including outreach to other institutions, like Ohio’s Antioch College5, which had recently experienced similar tumult) 5. Founded in 1850 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and led by educational reformer Horace Mann, Antioch is a progressive liberal arts college with shared governance between faculty and students and a mandatory co-op education program. It shut down in 2008, but was reopened as a separate institution thanks to a movement organized by students, faculty, and alumni called Nonstop Antioch (where Nonstop Cooper got its name). 69

Free At What Cost?

than the traditional protest tactics the group had employed before the settlement. After proposing the residency to the school administration, they were given free rein of the vacant space for one month. That month—the end of August to the end of September 2015—coincided with the beginning of the school year, and Nonstop opened its doors to the new students filtering into the dorms and classrooms around them. They held a community discussion with the Cooper board of trustees, held workshops, and brought in guest lecturers, creating a “school outside of the school,” as Sobel puts it. The group quickly made the space their own, covering the broad storefront windows with a mission statement, printed in undulating type. A collective mural painting workshop produced enormous Dalí-esque melting clocks on the white interior walls. A donation of pillows from a “pillow fight flash mob” during student orientation provided lounge seating for a movie night. A theme began to emerge. “We were joking at the time that it was like waking up from a fever dream,” says Sobel. Nonstop Cooper held karaoke nights, potlucks, clothing exchanges, and small concerts. Members logged diaristic accounts of their days to their gradient-infused Tumblr6, which took the form of a calendar. They also took seriously their self-imposed mandate to provide resources and useful context for students about the environment at Cooper7. Their discussions aimed to frame the crisis as a cultural problem rather than strictly a financial one, and question the meaning of “free.” On September 2, 2015, the fourth day of the Nonstop residency, the lawsuit against the

school ended in a settlement agreement brokered by New York State attorney general. An independent monitor was appointed to oversee the school’s finances, and yet another committee was created, this time by the trustees, tasked with creating a plan to return the school to tuition-free status. This was anticipated by the organizers of the Nonstop residency, most of whom had been advocating to keep Cooper free since 2012, and many of whom had been involved in the lawsuit. But over the course of those three years, Sobel and Gollan started to think more broadly about the prospect of free education in general, and not only within the confines of getting Cooper back to financial solvency. Their correspondence with Antioch College had brought about questions of governance, and whether an institution needs to be run by a board of trustees and an administration, or if it could be self-governed by students and faculty. “Especially in the past couple of years, it’s become less and less clear to me whether we are still even trying to influence the course

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

of events at Cooper, or whether we are just working with Cooper as subject and material,” says Gollan. “To think through some of the questions that this has brought up has became more important than arm wrestling with the institution.” After the Nonstop residency ended, Gollan and Sobel continued their research into free education as fellows at the New School’s Vera List Center, where they looked into the corporatization of art institutions and universities. They’ve lectured at Yale, exhibited as part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and in March of this year, Sobel gave a talk at CalArts amid students protesting a tuition hike. After the lawsuit, the media moved on, and the new administration at Cooper began to focus on developing a plan to return to free tuition under New York state’s regulatory oversight. But Sobel and Gollan wanted to continue to expand the conversation they helped start, even if it was less visible and perhaps less accessible than their early protest efforts at Cooper. After school, Sobel and Gollan’s decision to continue that work came at a very real price, as it did for many of their fellow organizers. Gollan went into debt working freelance and Sobel worked restaurant jobs to make ends meet, with most of their effort, and a ton of their time, going into organizing. Like many college students, Sobel and Gollan couldn’t have predicted the way their careers panned out as undergraduate students studying art and design. But in a less typical turn of events, their college’s story became inextricable from their own. And it still is. Gollan says he now views the dichotomy between art and activism as a false one, especially for students at Cooper. “It’s always been unclear and a little bit contentious around what constitutes artistic practice or activism, and I’ve come to understand it as something that’s inescapable for everyone that’s here,” Gollan says. “Whether you see yourself as contributing to the struggle or not, everyone is part of that system—everyone is implicated.”

In 2018, Cooper Union’s current president, Laura Sparks, released the plan required by the settlement to reinstate free tuition by 2028. Students currently enrolled at Cooper pay $22,275 a year (the full tuition, according to Cooper’s admissions site, is $44,550, but each student receives a “half tuition scholarship”). The price squares with average tuition costs across the country. For the 2018-19 school year, the average tuition price was $35,830 per year for private four-year colleges, and $10,230 at public four-year schools. In 2014, the year the first undergraduate class at Cooper paid tuition, student loan debt in the U.S. had exceeded $1 trillion. Today, it’s risen past the $1.5 trillion mark. Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, college affordability and debt forgiveness are major issues for democratic primary candidates, with at least two—Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—proposing policies that would make all public undergraduate education free8. It hasn’t always been this expensive to attend college in the U.S. As Warren has mentioned on the campaign trail, her tuition at the 6. The Tumblr entry for September 1 reads: “One of the first truly bustling days at Nonstop Cooper! Freshmen have moved into the dorms above the space and across the street and are starting their orientation programming, Nonstop offers a space away from the official posturing for students to have access to an alternate telling of the state of Cooper from the perspective of other students, alumni, faculty, and staff.” 7. Another entry on the Nonstop Tumblr page, for example, explains the concept of a cy pres filing, which allows the court to amend the terms of a charitable trust (in this case, Cooper Union). Part of the lawsuit hinged on the CSCU’s argument that the decision to charge tuition by the school’s trustees violated its tax exemption status, which is based on the school providing tuition-free education. They argue that the trustees should have petitioned the court for a cy pres relief to change the terms of the trust before making the decision to impose tuition. 8. Warren has also proposed a debt forgiveness program that would cover about $1 trillion of the current student loan debt, meaning students who have already received their education would have their loans forgiven. 71

Free At What Cost?

Victoria Sobel (second from left) and Casey Gollan (third from left) along with other members of Nonstop Cooper.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Courtesy of Wiki Commons.

University of Houston was just $50 a semester. In the mid-1970s, the average total tuition, room, and board for all four-year institutions ran at about $2,500 a year. In New York City, Cooper was joined by the City University of New York (CUNY) colleges in providing free tuition until 1976, when a city fiscal crisis led the public university to start charging9. By the early aughts, Cooper’s free tuition program was considered an anomaly—a unique holdover from a time before rising college prices and default rates. While the college was struggling internally to pay off its deficits, to the outside world it looked like it had figured something out that the rest of the U.S. educational system could learn from. On June 30, 2009, in the middle of a recession that had introduced state-funding cuts for education and contributed to rising tuitions, the Wall Street Journal ran an article on Cooper Union with the headline “One College Sidesteps the Crisis.” That turned out to be false, but even in Cooper Union’s best years, its model for free tuition was never broadly replicable across other American universities. Much of Peter Cooper’s fortune was tied up in real estate holdings in what is today some very valuable property in New York City; a sizable portion of the school’s annual revenue, for example, comes from leasing the land beneath the Chrysler Building10. Even with its endowment, though, the school still struggled to keep its finances in the black. That came to a head after it added a $166 million building at 41 Cooper Square11 to serve as the new academic building.

The building’s $10 million annual mortgage, coupled with the investment of $35 million in borrowed funds in the stock market just before

it crashed, is what pushed Cooper into the financial crisis that precipitated the tuition plan. The scope of this financial mismanagement was revealed in the investigation by the state’s attorney general, which resulted in the imposition of a reform plan in 2015. The plan required that the school spend three years developing a strategy to reclaim its tuition-free status, and assigned it an independent financial monitor to ensure that the administration was held accountable for its financial decisions. The details of this type of house cleaning—and the logistics that go into financial planning, cutting costs, and ensuring total transparency—might have been lost on the student protesters at the time of the occupation, but that had quickly changed. “The first questions we were confronted with at the start of this were, ‘What is the root of these problems, and who is responsible? Who can affect the course of events here?’” says Gollan. “A lot of what came out of that was research on the power structures of the institution, finding out for the first time, things like: We have a board of trustees. Okay, who’s on it? And why do colleges and nonprofits have boards?” The unsexy truth is that idealism must be backed by planning and logistics and a real understanding of what’s at play. The path back to its former tuition model had to be informed by these things if Cooper was ever to return to a sustainable model for free education. In April of 2016, Gollan and Sobel got an offer to co-teach a class within Cooper’s art department the next fall term. The class, a studio elective called Projects, almost felt like 9. New York State’s recently announced Excelsior Scholarship seeks to cover tuition for New York residents, but requires certain qualifications. 10. In 2018, revenue from leasing this building alone was $32.5 million. 11. Designed by Thomas Mayne, the new academic building sits across the street from the old Foundation Building, its glittering perforated metal facade and glass lobby provide a stark contrast to the latter’s old New York brownstone. 73

Free At What Cost?

report on the school’s progress. According to Cooper’s plan, once the school hits a CFI of 4.0 (it is currently at a – 2.01), it will be solvent enough to reinstate free tuition14. Rendering of the Composite Financial Index outside of 41 Cooper Square. Artwork by Casey Gollan.

a curriculum-sanctioned extension of Nonstop Cooper. Gollan and Sobel wanted to give their students the space to see how their work and their ideas were being affected by their academic environment and questions around free education. They saw a similar psychological toll taking hold on their students, who were some of the first to pay to go to Cooper, as they themselves had experienced in their last year at school, when so much of their physical and mental energy was going toward the events unfolding around them. The class existed for six semesters, during which Sobel and Gollan led students to create work that addressed the school’s current state and recent history. In that time, they also watched Cooper change significantly, and they became increasingly disillusioned with what they saw. Since the early, energetic years of protests, their ideas and discussions had become underpinned by extensive research and a real understanding of the historical record of free education. They found precedent in efforts like Wages for Students12, a movement for student compensation that arose from the unrest in the 1970s when CUNY started charging tuition. As students and recent alumni, their activism required them to become familiar with the power structures inherent in nonprofit institutions. And in many ways, the resulting years of working groups, committees, and task forces gave way to an environment of shared governance, in which students played a key role. This instilled in them the belief that artists are more capable of self-governance than they might think. What they were witnessing now, back inside the formal institution, was a much more bureaucratic approach. It had to be: the attorney general had handed Cooper a reform plan with benchmarks for the school to achieve. The state assigned the school a financial monitor to keep Cooper on track to become free again in 2028 and make sure its board remains truthful and transparent about its financial situation. A proprietary “Composite Financial Index”13 which is generated algorithmically based on the school’s financial statements, is used to

For Gollan and Sobel, these methods are too data-driven and normalizing. They believe the plan puts too much emphasis on financial ratios, measurable indicators, and quantifiable improvement—tactics that might work for other institutions, but not for Cooper. They see it as taking standards and approaches from tuition-paying colleges and applying them to a school that had always been the exception to the norm, simply because of the visionary ideas of its progressive founder. Over the last couple of years, Gollan and Sobel watched as the fight back to free lost sight of the movement’s original vision. Now, they’re asking themselves a new question: Free at what cost? “We’re now perceived as ‘against the fight for free,’” says Sobel. And that’s not altogether wrong. Much of the current faculty, many of whom took part in the same fight as the two former students over the past decade, do believe in the school’s new plan. But for Sobel and Gollan, even the language around getting “back to free” is anachronistic and nostalgic, and they’re questioning whether a past version of the school is something it should even want to return to. Time has a way of warping things. In the rhetoric surrounding the course of events at Cooper over the past decade, the story of the school’s founding is often evoked. But less often mentioned is that Cooper wasn’t officially

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

a college at first; it was a civic institution with a library and a Great Hall that was open to the public for forum and debates. The first classes allowed people to wander in; they didn’t take attendance. For Gollan, it’s that history that has the most interesting potential for guiding the school into the future. “It’s not inevitable that Cooper is a college by the standard of what colleges are in 2019, and in fact, that might be a failing model, and not an interesting one to carry forward,” says Gollan. “Policy interventions around debt forgiveness and free education are important, but I think they stop short of being visionary and actually leveraging the expertise of artists.”

Through their work and teaching, Gollan and Sobel have been trying to envision what a new kind of institution could be. What they’re proposing now is not a cut-and-dry solution to the rising costs of college—it’s a seismic, idealistic shift in the way we think about education. The last ten years have given them the language with which to talk about their ideas and convictions, and the agency with which to act on them—even when they’re viewed as unpopular or impractical. That’s not something you typically learn in art school.

12. The name riffs on the famous feminist campaign Wages for Housework founded by Silvia Federici in 1972. 13. Per Cooper Union’s website, “The Composite Financial Index (CFI) is a widely-used metric within higher education to measure long-term financial health and determine the financial impact of strategic decisions.” 14. This has been criticized as a flawed metric as to hit the 4.0 score, the school will need to have a minimum of $152 million in reserve. Former trustee Mike Borkowsky, among others, has argued that the high surplus is not necessary. All images couretsy of Nonstop Cooper, unless otherwise stated. 75

Shift Work

Shift Work A failed Soviet experiment offers a warning to today’s burnout generation By Liz Stinson

1. According to The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week, most rural soviets remained tethered to the traditional seven-day work week.

What’s a week anyway? By the numbers, it’s seven days, 168 hours, or 10,080 minutes tidily packaged into a set amount of time that is agreed on by most everyone. However, for one brief but disorienting moment, a week meant something entirely different to people living in the former Soviet Union. In 1929, the Soviet government launched the nepreryvka, a new plan that completely upended the structure of the work week as we know it today. Colloquially called the “continuous working week,” the plan dictated that the week would become five days long. Then, less than two years later, the government changed it to six days (called the shestidnevka). Eventually, they returned the week to its original seven days, but only after thoroughly shattering people’s mental model of time. Under the nepreryvka, the government divided workers—primarily those in factories and offices1—into five groups. Laborers worked seven hours a day for four days in a row with one day off. These free days were scattered throughout the week, which meant 80% of the labor force worked at the factory while 20% remained at home at any given time. This new work week ensured that the machines never stopped running. This period, between 1929 and 1940, was part of Joseph Stalin’s radical economic overhaul that aimed to turn the Soviet Union into a ceaseless machine of productivity and its people into tireless cogs. 76

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

On page 77 and 80: Continuous work week calendar for 1930. Image courtesy of the exhibition Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum of Art.

Shift Work

When the nepreryvka took effect on October 1, 1929, the Soviet government was in the middle of a spirited attempt to transform itself into a modern industrial powerhouse on par with the more developed nations of the world. In the years after the October Revolution of 1917, workers reduced their workload, going from ten- or twelve-hour shifts six days a week to eight-hour shifts. By the late 1920s, however, Stalin felt the pressure to modernize the country even quicker. A year prior to the nepreryvka, Stalin announced his first FiveYear Plan: a multipronged effort to rapidly industrialize the Soviet Union and maximize its output. “In 1929, it was ‘all hands on deck,’ ” says Robert Bird, a historian at the University of Chicago whose 2017 exhibition Revolution Every Day explored the everyday life of Russian citizens—particularly women—after the 1917 revolution through posters. “They needed the factories to be working constantly.” The nepreryvka was a means to that end. Yuri Larin, a Soviet economist, originally proposed the nepreryvka in May 1929 in a document titled “Three Hundred or Three Hundred and Sixty,” a cleverly worded dig at the Soviet workforce’s productivity. Stalin and his cabinet were initially skeptical of the idea, but the nepreryvka caught on in the press where they heralded it as the “great socialist idea.” By August 1929, the Soviet government approved the plan and was ready to roll it out to workers.

2. In 1793, French revolutionaries replaced the Gregorian calendar with the Republican calendar, a 12-month calendar that aimed to get rid of all religious and royal influences. A month in the Republican calendar was comprised of three 10-day weeks.

Throughout history, efforts to restructure time often accompany social upheavals2. The way we arrange our days, weeks, and months is a reflection of how we aspire to live our lives. The week, in particular, is rooted in cultural norms and attitudes about work. It’s a barometer of productivity—e.g. “this week is busy”—and a consistent marker of time. Change the days of the week, and you effectively alter a person’s priorities. This is exactly what the Soviet government was trying to do with the nepreryvka; it wanted to bring shift work to a national scale. While the nepreryvka was a disruptive temporal shift, it didn’t abolish the seven-day week altogether. Rather, it used the staggered five-day work schedule to render the original days of the week meaningless. With the weekend gone, labor became the framework around which people built their lives. The days themselves ceased to matter. In his book, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week, sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel explains that the intent of the nepreryvka was to retain the original names of the weekdays or give them new revolutionary names such as, “Trade Union, Soviet, Lenin, Komsolol, 78

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

â&#x20AC;&#x153;High rates of industrialization make the USSR an independent state.â&#x20AC;? A 1930 propaganda poster by an unknown designer. Image via Alamy.

Shift Work

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Shift Work

“Uninterrupted work increases the nation’s wealth.” A 1930s poster by constructivist artist Sergey Vlasov. Image via Alamy.

Party, Hammer, and Sickle.” Yet very soon the days were consumed by work patterns and became known only as “first day,” “second day,” and so forth. Recognizing that the nepreryvka could potentially lead to productivity-killing disorientation, the government created a new calendar system that employers distributed to their workers. These calendars were designed around a grid, and most included the names of weekdays and months. Because workers were divided into one of five groups, a color-coded symbol came to represent their work and free days on the calendar. In addition, work schedules were laid out in full years, creating a colorful lattice that looked, perhaps intentionally, like a chore chart. “The chart itself is an interesting information design solution,” says Alexander Tochilovsky, curator at the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography at Cooper Union, who grew up in the former Soviet Union. “Though I’m not sure how successful it was.” It’s not entirely clear who designed the calendars, but Tochilovsky says it was most likely someone at the state-owned printer who was following a mandate from a higher power. Most calendars proudly featured symbols of industrialization, and each had its own way to designate work days and rest days. Often, instructions printed in block type explained how to decipher the gridded rows of colors and symbols. “Memorize your color, and you will always know your day of rest,” reads a calendar from 1930 with jewel-colored diamonds that correspond to different worker groups. Another calendar from the Russian town of Sverdlovsk features an off-white grid filled with symbols like a wheatsheaf, book, and sickle. The background is a collage of industrial imagery including smoke stacks and gears. The calendars, which hung in homes and factories, were essentially pieces of pro-socialist propaganda that glorified the notion of collectivist work. And their implications were clear: People no longer needed to know what day it was because they could simply reference this colorful piece of paper to know exactly where they were supposed to be. “The calendars were essentially a tactic of mass control,” Tochilovsky says. In just a year’s time, the strains of continuous shift work started to wear on the Soviet people who quickly realized that staggering rest days meant they rarely got to spend time with family and friends. A letter published in the communist newspaper Pravda on the day the nepreryvka took effect succinctly summed up the problem: “What is there for us to do at home if our wives are in the factory, our children 82

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at school, and nobody can visit us ...? It is no holiday if you have to have it alone.” The nepreryvka appeared to also erase days of worship3 for most people since Sundays were now a work day for 80% of the population. The nepreryvka might have been designed as a tool for increasing productivity, but it was ultimately most successful at preventing people from organizing around anything other than labor. Ninety years and a technological revolution separate the nepreryvka from today’s world, but it’s not hard to make the connection between Stalin’s push for relentless productivity and our contemporary always-on mentality. The current obsession with “getting shit done” isn’t government mandated, but it is the product of a culture that encourages and rewards the monetization of time over pretty much everything else. Among many other factors, technology shifted productivity from a collectivist, nationalist pursuit to one that’s far more individualistic, but the underlying motivation is the same even if the medium has changed. The nepreryvka calendar is a great example of this. In the same way the calendar made it easier for people to mindlessly ease into their new life-as-shiftwork mentality, we now have new tools—notifications, reminders, calendar events—to help us maintain a one-track mind. These are tools of momentum, and they tell us: Don’t think, just follow. By the end of 1931, the Soviet government realized that giving people one day of rest for every four days they worked ultimately wasn’t the brilliant plan for productivity it originally assumed. Politicians switched the work week from five to six days and instituted a common day off for workers. In 1940, the Soviet Union abandoned the idea of a truncated work week altogether and reinstituted a seven-day week with six consecutive eight-hour work days and one common day of rest. The explanation for why the Soviet Union’s time control experiment failed is simply that the government’s hypothesis didn’t work when tested on its citizens. Productivity dropped, machines broke down under the stress of constant use, and workers became unmotivated. “It was just the arrogance of absolute power—of someone saying, ‘Let’s just try this,’ ” says Bird. But most crucially, the Soviet government ignored an important fact: People, not machines ultimately powered its policy. Stalin implemented the nepreryvka with little thought as to how the creep of discontent can eat away at even the most structured plans for productivity. For all time’s inherent malleability, people want it to be consistent, and more importantly, they want it to be theirs. In the end, bending time to a political will never works, nor does 83

3. According to Zerubavel, only once every 35 days, when the traditional and new weeks would coincide would a soviet worker be able to actually attend church on a Sunday, mosque on Friday, or synagogue on Saturday.

Shift Work

translating it into sheer monetary value for that matter. It’s not an overstatement to say many people are experiencing their own form of nepreryvka today, and they’re just beginning to explore how to deprogram their brains from the expectations of constant connectivity. The fallout from this will look different—productivity might rise, computers rarely fail, and there will always be a new, hungrier person to take a jaded worker’s place—but in the end, the same underlying dissatisfaction will remain.

Continuous work week calendar for 1930. Image courtesy of the exhibition Revolution Every Day at the Smart Museum of Art.

by Stefanie Leinhos

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

ďŹ g. a Space Composition 4, Katarzyna Kobro, 1929

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

Book 1. Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, Christine de Pizan, 1405

Book 2. A New World Called The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish, 1668

Book 3. Description of Millenium Hall, Sarah Scott, 1762

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

ďŹ g. b Space Composition 2, Katarzyna Kobro, 1928

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

ﬁg. c Space Composition 6, Katarzyna Kobro, 1931

Book 4. Dies Buch gehört dem König, Bettina von Arnim, 1843

Book 5. Mizora: A Prophecy, Mary Bradley Lane, 1890

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Book 6. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915

ďŹ g. d Space Sculpture, Katarzyna Kobro, 1925 89

Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

HERLAND Artist Stefanie Leinhos explains her illustrated guide to utopias constructed by women

My process as an artist and illustrator often begins with research. The topic “utopia” is large and expansive, but there are definitely movements and major players that spring to mind in art or literary contexts. There are the ideals of international modernism, for example, that embrace the aesthetics of machine culture while touting the wonders of industrial life. Avant-garde artists also searched for ideal forms in movements from Futurism to Dada, Russian Constructivism, to Surrealism. Yet in all these movements, male practitioners consistently have greater visibility than their female counterparts. C hanneling the idea of “messy history”—an approach to history that seeks to discover alternative perspectives—I explore what utopia means to women in the history of art and literature. My illustrated guide is a space where female visions and versions of a better world are just as well-known as Plato’s The Republic or the ideas of Walter Gropius. Daisy Duck, who’s never afraid to kick up a fuss, becomes our unlikely feminist guide, helping readers of all ages to navigate through the contents. My guide is just one strain of one messy history—there are other utopias dreamed up by marginal-

ized groups that offer their own alternative narratives to the canon. I sourced my literary examples from Bettina Roß’s Political Utopias from Women: From Christine de Pizan to Karin Boye. The texts from this book are examples of utopias by Western women that are often written from a heteronormative and religious point of view. But they were radical for their time, and many were published during periods when women rarely wrote books or took part in political and cultural life. Match the descriptors in my illustrations on the previous pages with the following blurbs to track the messy lineage of utopias imagined by women. Figs. a–d. Space Composition 4, Space Composition 2, Space Composition, and Space Sculpture by Katarzyna Kobro, 1928–1931: Katarzyna Kobro is the artist that represents my counterpoint to well-known men of the Avant-garde. Born in Moscow in 1898, she moved to Poland in the 1920s where she created sculptures from a variety of materials and aimed to build abstract work based on objective rules. Most of her work is lost, and that’s why I drew my designs from photographs or reproductions based on her sketches. I’m interested in how her surfaces become an alternative panel structure in the context of my guide.

Book 1. Le Livre de la Cité des Dames or The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan, 1405: Christine de Pizan was a French writer born in Venice circa 1364. This is her most famous text, which 90

advocates for women’s education and constructs an allegorical city that’s home to famous women from the Bible and throughout time. Each woman is a building block in the city’s structure, forming its sturdy houses and walls.

Book 2. The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish, 1668: Cavendish’s prose tells the story of another world that can only be reached via a portal in the North Pole. It’s a world populated with talking animals, submarines powered by fish men or brid men that protect the kingdoms. In her fiction, Cavendish subverts numerous 17th century norms, especially in regards to politics, gender, and identity.

Book 3. A Description of Millenium Hall and the Country Adjacent by Sarah Scott, 1762: Scott’s novel describes an ideal society organized by a group of upper class women cut off from the rest of the world. Its anonymous narrator is a gentleman. He discovers the society when his carriage breaks down and he seeks refuge in a nearby mansion. Inside, he discovers Millennium Hall—a name that alludes to a paradise on earth—and a sanctuary of self-organizing, pious women.

Book 4. Dies Buch gehört dem König or This Book Belongs to the King by Bettina von Arnim, 1843: This book constructs Arnim’s views on society, politics, and religion. It criticizes the state and the church, demanding freedom from censorship and relief from poverty. Its nar-

rator seems to resemble the mother of [German writer] Goethe, and through the mask of this semi-fictional character, Arnim petitions for unity between the monarchy and the masses.

Book 5. Mizora: A Prophecy by Mary Bradley Lane, 1880–1881: This portrait of a self-sufficient society run entirely by women has been described as the first feminist technological utopian novel. The science fiction book is part of a long lineage of tales of all-female societies that dates back to ancient Greek mythology. In the story, “videophone” technology connects the community, and rain appears when inhabitants discharge electricity into the air. Women eat chemically prepared artificial meat, and a narrow waist is considered disgusting. The Mizorans practice eugenics, and Lane’s fantasy world is fundamentally a deeply racist one.

Book 6. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915: Herland describes another society composed only of women. In this world, women reproduce asexually like plants, and there are no wars or conflicts. The book explores gender roles and their social construction as well as domestic work, motherhood and education. Though Gilman aimed to empower women, her text has been criticized for ignoring the struggles of women of color and of the working class.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

What Does it Mean to be a Responsible Designer Today? Climate change is here: Global temperatures are at an all time high, the Great Barrier Reef is dying, sea levels are rising, and food and water security for much of the world’s population is at risk. We asked three design teams what responsibility means to them and their work in the context of today’s global climate emergency.

Marie Otsuka & Lauren Traugott-Campbell are designers based in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City. Both work on Low-Tech, an online and offline publication that aims to question “blind belief in technological progress,” by discussing the potential of past and forgotten tech in creating a more sustainable society.

Seetal Solanki is the founder and director of materials research design studio, Ma-tt-er, that works to advise, design, communicate, and educate on what materials are, what they can be, and where they come from in order to implement a more responsible future. Recent projects include the Why Materials Matter book, printed using paper from G. F Smith that was created from post-consumer coffee cup waste.

Robin Howie is founder and creative director of Fieldwork Facility, a London studio with a focus on serving urban communities. Howie recently finished the branding for the Low Carbon Hub social venture in Oxford, and has collaborated with independent shops in the North London neighborhood of Walthamstow to revitalize store fronts on the area’s main streets.

What Does it Mean to be a Responsible Designer Today?

Responsibility is multifaceted. It means considering many things during the design and making process. It can, of course, mean materials, but it’s also about considering context and what kind of behaviors you’re encouraging with what you’re communicating. Re-designing the Low-tech platform meant constantly having to contend with contradictions by reminding ourselves of the context of the project. The site runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and it sometimes goes offline during longer periods of cloudy weather. Its design asks users to consider energy usage on the web. There’s a photography series of underwater sea cables by Trevor Paglen that we find really interesting. It often surprises people that there is actually this physical infrastructure that powers the internet, and that something like an earthquake off the coast of China can affect connections on the other side of the globe. With Low-tech, we really wanted to emphasize the fact that the internet has a global infrastructure—it’s not just a cloud up above. With the website, we use a battery meter to make the relationship between power supply and power demand visible. We compress all the site’s images through a dithering plugin, which means they’re roughly 10 times less resource-intensive than high-resolution, full-color images; but it shows people that images take energy to load. We show Barcelona’s weather forecast so that users can plan their visits accordingly, emphasizing the physicality of our local energy source and asking visitors to change their expectations about the website. Responsibility is context-specific—there really isn’t a one size fits all solution to the issue of sustainability. Low-tech’s choices and energy usage are transparent as a way to open up the conversation to the UX and design community. But it’s complex: We flew from the U.S. to Europe to execute this project. 92

questio A responsib le desi ns the gn contex t of the er task at hand.

Marie Otsuka and Lauren Traugott-Campbell, Low-tech magazine

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er n g i des ls e l sib ateria n o m esp A r nsiders co

Since it would be impossible to do this project without any environmental impact, we knew we would have to wrestle with contradictions and the best we could do was consider this impact as thoughtfully as possible. Ultimately, the design process is an interpersonal experience, and not always a seamless one, and we knew that we would be able to build a much better working relationship and understanding of the organization if we worked together in person (Low-tech’s editor is based in Spain). It was important for us that we were designing not just a responsible end product but a sustainable process that can continue even when we are no longer in Barcelona onsite. Low-tech’s website is just one idea around addressing internet sustainability; but it wouldn’t work for everyone. We wanted it to be a platform to encourage discussion. All our code is online, and we’ve published technical details regarding how we set everything up to encourage alternative approaches. It’s been great to see projects inspired by ours: For example, there have been several stand-

alone online dithering tools that allow anyone to compress their images in the same way we treat ours. Another designer/researcher, Gauthier Roussilhe, writes about his own conversion to a low-tech site, inspired by our techniques but extending them with a more robust CMS, as well as his own considerations on measuring resource use. This is what we love to encourage! It’s important to put ideas out there for others to build on, so that a concept can continue to grow and evolve.

Seetal Solanki, Ma-tt-er We like to use the word “responsible” instead of “sustainable,” and that’s quite a conscious decision. For me, the meaning of “sustainable” has changed quite dramatically in recent years, and it can be more of a marketing term today—it can designate somebody else the responsibility; it feels a bit removed from the individual. 93

What Does it Mean to be a Responsible Designer Today?

“Responsible” or “responsibility” on the other hand feels closer to the individual. The word suggests that there’s an opportunity for somebody to be involved in a more sustainable practice or lifestyle. “Responsible” means taking charge of your behaviors, habits, what you consume—that whole ecosystem. There are many ways of introducing responsible practices into graphic design. You can create products for disassembly or permanent use, for example. Designing for disassembly might mean saddle stitch or staple bound binding. You can avoid chemical-based materials and use soy-based inks or recycled materials. When we consult for brands, companies, or individuals on how to implement responsible materials, we try to give them the tools to change. We want people to feel more informed. We start by showing them that materials have characteristics, personalities, and identities. We have become so used to calling materials “plastic,” “wood,” and “metal,” but I want to change that. I’m trying to get people to look at materials more sensorially—to think about their emotional quality. Are they soft or warm? Flexible, transparent, or rigid? If we define materials in terms of those characteristics, we can work with them in so many different ways and to their full potential, which ultimately makes them more sustainable, as these materials are being used in ways that weren’t deemed possible previously. Changing the narrative around materials allows people to see their greater value. Once you put materials at the center of your practice, you’ll naturally move on to thinking about the life cycles of those materials, too. Understanding where something comes from and where it ends up is imperative. If you start thinking about the life cycle, then that grows into considering system changes that are in opposition to environmentally unsound policies like planned obsolescence. Another approach is thinking in terms of versatility, or when a single material can be used across many different disciplines. I would describe the versatility system as “Seaweed 94

10 Ways:” Seaweed can be used as an ink for printing, textiles, insulation in architecture, food, furniture, fuel—all sorts of things. Lastly, you can think about ability, which is more about enabling people to become part of this system through open-source design. Precious Plastics is a good example of this approach— it’s a platform that teaches people how to construct their own plastic recycling machines through open-source information.

Robin Howie, Fieldwork Facility Our ethos is that design is a role of citizenship: Before we’re designers, we’re citizens. Citizenship implies that you can have a proactive and participatory role in a community. For us, “design” and “citizenship” are very closely related. Lately, with each brief we receive, we’ve been asking, “What if each project somehow created a public good?” Designers often say that they’re problem solvers—and a large part of design is definitely that, but I think this definition can diminish what a designer is capable of. It’s such a shame to me that designers pigeonhole themselves as just being part of a problem-solving client-service industry. How about designers as entrepreneurs, activists, board members, facilitators, community leaders, good neighbors, and volunteers? Designers have been very aware of their carbon footprint for decades, and frankly, any sort of reform has just been far too slow. Environmentally friendly paper stocks and things like vegetable inks are such easy changes to make, so why aren’t they more commonplace? We need this locked down so we can start to tackle the impact of more sticky problems around supply chains within print and production. One problem is minimal visibility on the impact of production decisions. For example, in a public bathroom, it’s hard to know which is the lesser evil—paper towel or electric dryer? The paper is obviously a renewable

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

ner desig ost. sible d forem spon n A re n first a itize

is a c

resource; but what kind of energy went into its manufacture, shipping, and storage? With the dryer, how was the electricity made? Renewables or coal? Supply chains are a massive dilemma for any environmentally conscious decision and perhaps magnified when designing for scale. Just like the food industry, design uses resources in creative ways. Some of the best chefs in the world are inspiring—taking ownership of their supply chains by creating long-lasting, collaborative relationships with local makers who deliver their produce, and as such, being more environmentally conscious and supportive of their communities. Some restaurants are even starting their own supply chains by creating their own farms specifically for their kitchens. Designers, too, need system change—but that will only happen if there is enough demand, and it’s up to us to create that demand and actively work towards material and production innovations. You have to establish relationships with new suppliers if your existing ones don’t get it. When we worked on an exhibition for Southwark Council in London, for instance, we kept 67.5% of expenditure on print and production within the neighborhood to keep the council’s spending local. There’s environmental sustainability on one hand, which arguably in this project we could have improved on, but on the other hand, there’s community sustainability, too. Designers need to ask themselves: “What else can I do?” and “How might every project create a public good?”

Quiet World Order

Quiet World Order Shy Radicals by Hamja Ahsan proposes equality for introverts and proves that activism needn’t be noisy

The first line in Hamja Ahsan’s book Shy Radicals reads, “This book is written on the back of a lifetime of resentment.” It’s dedicated to the Shy Radical struggle, to generations of Shy Peoples who have suffered bullying, humiliation, belittlement, and subjugation “at the hands of Extrovert-Supremacism.” It goes on to document the political demands of introverts, one of which includes an independent homeland called Aspergistan in territories formerly known as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. There, “introversion is inviolable,” and freedom from small talk is guaranteed. No one is required to attend social gatherings. This is not Susan Cain’s Quiet1. Shy radicals are part of a resistance, and they’re ready for a reprieve from the Loud World. Ahsan started working on the book in 2014 after responding to an open call for book proposal submissions from the UK publisher Book Works. He brought on Rose Nordin, a designer, illustrator, and member of publishing collective OOMK (profiled in this magazine, page 22), to design the book and help him visually map out a New Lexicon of Democracy, a series of hand and body motions to be used to negotiate democratic decisions. The flag of Aspergistan consists of three dark circles against a black background to form an ellipsis, and the national anthem is the sound of a seashell when held up to one’s ear. In person, Ahsan is as funny as his book, and equally as steeped in historical knowledge and anti-colonial theory. Shy Radicals is in part a critique of the rise of Islamophobia, as well as the stigma against mental health and autism. It looks for alternate power structures and challenges 96

Hamja Ahsan and Rose Nordin, “New Lexicon of Democracy” from Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert, published by Book Works, 2017 — a) staring at the floor, b) turning back .

1. Writer and TED speaker Cain gained recognition for her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking about how introverts are misunderstood in modern Western culture.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Shy Radicals: The Antisystemic Politics of the Militant Introvert by Hamja Ahsan, published by Book Works, 2017. Cover design by Rose Nordin.

Quiet World Order

the qualities we typically associate with world leaders. Ultimately, it asks that we embrace one another’s cultures and ways of being. As an introvert, how do you feel about doing interviews?

Well, it’s called interview—inter-view, so the idea is that it’s digging deeper. I remember a time when music journalism was very different— I grew up around the time of Kurt Cobain’s suicide and all that—and a lot of my connection with alternative rock music and learning about depression and other things came out of the long-form music interview. Interviews can be very introspective when they’re not trying to be clickbaity. There are several forms of public speech that aren’t necessarily extroverted. Think of someone like Greta Thunberg, who is a very good public speaker, and someone I really admire. She has selective mutism and is autistic. I think all forms of sincere speech in the public domain are introverted, and I’ve been trying to trace a historical legacy in this vein. Patrick Pearse, who led the Easter Uprising in 19162, was retrospectively diagnosed as autistic. He was also very shy and awkward, and yet he led a revolutionary movement and was an amazing orator. I also think of Francis Bacon’s interviews, which gave insight into him as an artist. How did you start working on Shy Radicals?

f) c) palms to open a book, d) rock hand, e) scissorhands, f) wax on

The book took me three or four years to write, but I feel like it’s been in my blood since I was a child. Any time I felt alienated or subjugated, or told to cheer up, or asked why I was being so quiet, I knew I was not the only one. In doing talks around the book, I’ve met people from Africa, Iran, Greece, Portugal, the United States—there’s this entire geography of people who feel exactly the same. I feel like it’s like a transnational identity. I had begun to develop a language around that identity. If an extroverted activist would say to me, “Hamja, why are you being so sheepish?” I would ask back, “Why are you being such an Extrovert-Supremacist?” The language and the neologisms that developed while being belittled constantly became a way to turn the tables so that I was the one setting the terms. Many people have since written to say that I’ve given them a vocabulary to ease their pain and to understand the world.

2. An uprising launched by Irish republicans to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent Irish Republic.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Can you talk to me a bit about developing the Republic of Aspergerstan in the book? I’m curious about the fact that it’s rooted in actual territory: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. Susan Cain, who I regard as the Tony Blair of introverts, maps out a world in which extroverts rule America and there’s a very Oriental picture of Japan where everyone is quiet, etc. I thought this mapping of the world was inadequate, so I inserted other geographies in there. I’m also thinking of domestic counterterrorism, such as the “Prevent strategy3,” which is a surveillance program developed by the British. They have very wide criteria for developing suspicion. I looked at some of the guidelines and it talked about people who are quiet, withdrawn, and moody.

3. The Prevent policy was introduced in 2003 in the UK as part of its broader counter-terrorism strategy with the aim of preventing radicalization to terrorism.

But as you note in the book, “Terrorism is always noisy.” Right. I also think it’s strange that [being quiet or withdrawn] is not only pathologized by psychology but also seen by the state as a form of deviant behavior. I’m very critical of the Institute of Psychiatry and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I was at one point diagnosed with anxiety disorder—I’ve since been re-diagnosed— and everything was about correcting me as an individual rather than thinking of a way in which to restructure the world. I’m also from Bengali Muslim background, and we’re just generally a bit more sober than a British mainstream white, binge-drinking culture. I think the culture of hedonism as representing freedom or liberation is still very much tied into the narrative around the War on Terror and Islamophobic rhetoric—that other cultures are somehow repressed, rather than another way of being. Do you consider the book a piece of satire?

The book is supposed to make people laugh: It’s poking fun at power and maybe some of the resistance movement too. It also parodies how combative identity politics can be today. It’s hard to categorize, though. In some libraries it’s classified under sociology. I’ve seen it elsewhere under “Imaginary Societies.” And in Brown University it’s being taught under neurodiversity [because of the autism references]. I love the section of the book that illustrates the “New Lexicon of Democ99

g) staring up at the sky, h ) staring at the sea

Quiet World Order

racy,” and especially the Shy Radicals’ salute of holding a fist up to your mouth. How did you come up with it?

i) i) curling fist in front of mouth

I started working with designer Rose Nordin several years ago. I directed [the formation of the lexicon] and she illustrated it. The idea behind it is that politics could be different if people communicated differently. I’m very interested in former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who introduced the National Health Service. He was the longest leader of the Labour Party, and he won the general election against Winston Churchill. He also very awkward and shy. Around the same time, you also had Mussolini at the pulpit, the charismatic authoritarian—the fascists with the hand gestures. What I look at is this very humble, very shy leadership of Attlee, and the idea that introverts can be in a position of leadership or power.

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Text from “Modernism Isn’t for Everyone—Least of All, Penguins,” Image by Michael Olsen.

WEAVING TOGETHER

EFFORTLESSLY

AS IF

FLOATING

IN AIR

WORLD AS IT

Text from “It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times,”, Image by Pawel Czerwinski.

NI ZING THE

JUST RECOG

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

An Identity of Its Own

In the 1960s, the National Institute of Design trained Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first design educators and produced some of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most ubiquitous branding By Ritupriya Basu

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An Identity of Its Own

Gautam Sarabhai with Indira Gandhi.

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the abstracted eye spiral out before stabilizing into a static symbol, marked a seminal moment in Indian history: it was most of India’s introduction to television. Until 1975, television was only available to residents of seven Indian cities. This broadcast service, and its decidedly modern logo, signalled the dawn of a new culture. Fittingly, this groundbreaking identity was born in a classroom in India’s first design school, the National Institute of Design (NID), located in the westerly city of Ahmedabad. Much like the Doordarshan logo, the concept of design education—and the notion of design as an academic and institutional pursuit—was a novel one in India at the time. It was at NID that a celebrated group of design thinkers, practitioners, and educators learned their craft. The inspiration for NID traveled from the Bauhaus and, years later, the Ulm School of Design in Germany. But long before the plans for India’s first design institute had been made, ideas from the Bauhaus had already found their way to the country. In 1922, an exhibition at the Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta introduced the works of Bauhaus masters and students of the Weimar period, including the paintings and graphic works of László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, and Lyonel Feininger. They were later described in reverent detail

in Rupam, India’s most prestigious journal of culture at the time, and inspired debates among the students and teachers of the Kala Bhavana Institute of Fine Arts in Shantiniketan, a small town in the state of West Bengal. The exhibition whetted India’s appetite for modern design, and it was one of the many forces—both global and local—that led to the founding of NID. In 1955, hundreds of miles from India, another such formative event was unfolding in New York. Pupul Jayakar, a cultural activist and writer on Indian craft traditions, met Charles Eames at the Museum of Modern Art and the two began a lifelong dialogue. On a grant from the Ford Foundation, which Jayakar helped them receive, the Eameses traveled across India, interacting with writers, craftsmen, architects, scientists, and industrialists. In 1958, they drew up their observations in The India Report, where they suggested that the Indian designer could be the connective tissue between the perceived traditional past and the modernity that the country was revving up to embrace. This report outlined the contours of a design training program that would become the inspiration for the founding of NID. Simultaneously, architect Le Corbusier was introducing his concept of modern design to India through another means, creating several buildings there during the 1950s. One of these, the Sanskar Kendra museum in Ahmedabad, became the grounds on which the idea for NID was conceived. Meetings were moderated by industrialist Gautam Gautam Sarabhai with a visitor from the Ford Foundation.

The Doordarshan logo designed by Devashish Bhattacharyya.

On April 1, 1976, a black and white morphing eye stunned India when it aired on grainy television screens across the nation, relayed by the country’s first broadcast service, Doordarshan. The minute-long animation, which saw

Sarabhai who, along with his sister Gita, played a significant role in establishing the institute. As Professor H. Kumar Vyas, an 107

industrial designer who was also one of the first teachers to join NID, recalled in a 2010 interview, “Gautam always began at the basics. Here, the basics pertained neither to design, nor design education, but the concept of education itself1.” Huddled in the attic of the museum, Sarabhai asked a group of intellectuals questions as basic as “What is education?” and “What is design?” They were tasked with creating a curriculum for a field of education that was unheard of and introducing a profession that did not yet exist. In 1961, the National Institute of Design was established in Ahmedabad. Sarabhai side-stepped the prevalent educational system protocol, which was still reeling under a colonial hangover that had always prioritized theory over practice. Instead, “he strove to establish the efficacy of the Bauhaus postulate—‘learning by doing’ that prompted a simultaneous learning of theory and practice,” writes Professor Shilpa Das in 50 Years of the National Institute of Design 1961–2011. “Later, in relation to a design process that begins with the need to know the nature of a problem, he rephrased it as ‘learning to know and learning to do.’ ” With that, the pedagogical approach was set, but NID had another problem: in a country previously without a dedicated design school, there were also no design teachers. In 1964, an advertisement in the Hindustan Times called for art, engineering, and architecture graduates to join the NID’s educational and training program. These students, who were essentially being trained to become the first NID teachers, were sent to institutes across Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France, 108

and England for further education. By 1969, 25 of the 60 faculty trainees were absorbed as teachers, while the rest worked as India’s first generation of design professionals and educators. That same year, NID ushered in its first “real” students. The NID’s Foundation Program drew on the pedagogies developed at the Bauhaus and at the Ulm School of Design. It wasn’t until almost a decade after NID’s opening that the Foundation Program would truly find an identity of its own, underscoring the importance of translating other design pedagogies for an Indian context. This was achieved through professor Mohan Bhandari’s environment awareness course, in which students would choose a micro-environment in or around Ahmedabad to visit, closely studying the area’s shops, homes, temples, and food carts. Over the four-month semester, they critiqued and recorded their chosen area’s lifestyle, sanitation, and hygiene through detailed sketches, sharpening their senses and highlighting the relationship between humans and the spaces they occupy. Ivan Chermayeff working on the Indian Airlines identity manual.

Shekhar Kamat (right) with H. Kumar Vyas and Gautam Sarabhai.

An Identity of Its Own

Over the years, the institute turned out some distinguished graduates, including graphic designer Vikas Satwalekar, type designer Mahendra C. Patel, educator and design thinker M.P. Ranjan, animators Ishu Patel and R.L. Mistry, product designer S. Balaram, and graphic novelist Orijit Sen. A collaborative spirit thrived in NID’s classrooms, which the school referred to as “studios.” International designers like Armin Hofmann, Bob Gill, Adrian Frutiger, Ivan Chermayeff, and 1. H. Kumar Vyas, interview, 2010. 50 Years of the National Institute of Design 1961–2011.

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Bob Gill (seated center), P.M Choksi (standing third from left), N.N Patel (between Choksi and Bob Gill), Girish Patel (second from left) and Naveen Patel (right).

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An Identity of Its Own

Details from Indian Airlines identity manual. A scheme for the graphic identity of the airline.

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it for hours as if it had a life of its own. Then he would come and ask us, ‘Hey, what do you think? Does it look like an IA?’ With great hesitation, we would say, ‘No!’ and he would go and work on it again4.” The Indian Airlines logo by Benoy Sarkar.

architect Louis Kahn were invited on campus, where they would often spend weeks creating challenging briefs and developing projects alongside the students. Studios were a sacred place—a space of unfettered experimentation, where the design process was trusted and relied on completely. It was in one of these studios in the ’70s where eight graphic design students created the identity for Doordarshan. Devashis Bhattacharyya drew a circle for the eye and created two bulbous curves around it, depicting “the yin and the yang.” The importance of the mark was not lost on him. “The challenge with this project was to communicate the idea of television before half the country had even seen the machine,” Bhattacharyya said in a 2017 interview2. “The eye alone doesn’t make sense. You don’t just see, you also hear television. The interlocking of the curves and the space between them is about getting information and transmitting it.” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi picked Bhattacharyya’s work from the 14 designs sent to her by NID. Mistry3 later animated the symbol by making copies of Bhattacharyya’s design and shooting them with a camera, rotating the image until it formed the final symbol. The animation was accompanied by music composed by Pandit Ravi Shankar. According to Vikas Satwalekar, the “DD eye” was the first classroom project that NID sold to a client. Through its early projects in the late ’60s and ’70s, NID set the stage for modern Indian graphic design, and crafted its own visual language. In 1967, the Indian Airlines Corporation commissioned NID to design its visual identity. At the time, flying was considered a revolutionary technology in India, and the resulting logo needed to encapsulate that. The Yale-educated graphic designer Benoy Sarkar started experimenting with the letters IA, while Vyas worked on the color scheme. Gopinath Rao, one of Sarkar’s students, remembers the maestro sketching innumerable iterations of the lettering. “He would put the bars in combination, one with a slope, and look at

The final logo designed by Sarkar featured a sliding crossbar of the letter “A,” slanted at a forward angle, hinting at the idea of motion. It was at once modern, clean, and uncluttered, with the four elements of the identity representing the four engines of aircrafts at the time. Above the windows, Indian Airlines was written in English on the starboard side and in Hindi on the port side, while the tail was painted bright orange, with the logo in white. Although the final identity was approved, NID could never convince the client to adopt a consistent design policy in which to root it. Never one to call it quits, NID continued to work on the project in the form of a study program and developed an identity manual together with Ivan Chermayeff. The manual outlined how the logogram would be translated across aprons, buses, airstairs, and in-flight food packaging. Through the decades, NID students also started several influential magazines. Often working on a shoestring budget, students collaborated on articles, artwork, and the design of the magazines, and produced them at the printing studio on campus. Almost like an unofficial club, this exercise was carried 2. Devashis Bhattacharyya, interview by Hindustan Times, 2017. 3. Then a student, R.L Mistry later went on to spearhead the animation department at NID. 4. Gopinath Rao, interview by Hindustan Times, 2017. 111

A spread from Bananas, a student magazine from the late 1970s.

An Identity of Its Own

A spread from Studio Magazine, edited and published by students in the 1990s.

on by generations of graphic design students, and each decade boasted a striking title: Bananas was a crowd favorite in the â&#x20AC;&#x2122;70s, followed by Our Bit and Eggsactly (which was stacked near the canteen). Studio became the star of the â&#x20AC;&#x2122;90s.

While NID may have defined the visual mother tongue of India, an understanding of the power of design only existed in small, siloed circles for many years. The fact that a large chunk of early design projects were left undocumented, and hence lost over the years, didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t help. And yet time and again, these designers underscored the importance of the principles of form, construction, and color: a defining legacy that informed a spectrum of visuals from the post-colonial vernacular street signs to corporate identities that celebrated modern Indian graphic design. All images couresty of NID Archives. 112

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

The Web We Want

Imagine an internet thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s owned and run by you and everyone else who uses it. This is the promise of the distributed web. By Gary Zhexi Zhang 113

The Web We Want

Centralized, Decentralized and Distributed Networks.

In the theater of the Whitney Museum, a crowd undulates in tentative unison. Arms wrap around torsos; everyone takes a step to the left. Participants move to calm voiceover instructions on the PA underscored by the brooding arpeggios of a live modular synth soundtrack. At one point, the dancer Jerron Herman gathers the crowd into a series of circles on the theater floor and asks them to “imagine an invisible string that connects them all.” Later, when an actual spool of pink yarn is passed among the groups, Herman tells them, “In the distributed configuration, the intention is to remain connected as you complete the choreography.” The collective becomes a thick swarm as participants circumnavigate one another, moving in and out of the throng.

It’s late March 2019, and the event, hosted by artist and educator Taeyoon Choi and collaborators (including hacker Jonathan Dahan, assistive technologies advocate Chancey Fleet, and sound artists Tiri Kananuruk and stud1nt) is called Distributed Web of Care. The shifting geometry of the pink yarn is a living enactment of one of the most iconic diagrams in the history of modern technology: the distributed network. Published by engineer Paul Baran in a report for RAND corporation in 1963, the diagram of the centralized, decentralized, and distributed topologies was meant to illustrate the affordances of redundancy in a communication network. In the distributed network, all the nodes are connected, but none is more connected than any other. It was 114

this design, conceived simultaneously by Baran in the U.S. and computer scientist Donald Davies in the UK, that laid the groundwork for ARPANET, the packet-switching network that foreshadowed the internet. Like the internet protocols it’s built on top of, the world wide web was always meant to be distributed—a meshwork of linked information without a singular point of control. In practice, however, that turned out rather differently. Today’s web is largely shaped by just a handful of technological platforms— Google, Facebook, and Amazon chief among them—that serve as its centralized corporate gatekeepers, monopolizing services to extract value produced in the digital commons. Drawing on this idea of interconnection, the Distributed Web of Care event asked participants to examine what it means to act with openness and consideration as individuals in a networked world. By creating a web of bodies and lines, the challenges of networking can be understood as interpersonal and ethical, rather than purely technical. The workshop also helps explain the complexities and the utopian vision of the “distributed web”—a movement of technologists, policymakers, artists, and activists who are interested in building a more equitable digital world. In its most basic and most radical form, the distributed web proposes to restructure the information space of the world wide web on the principles of peer-to-peer production. Think, for instance, of the file-sharing protocol BitTorrent, in which participants in a “swarm” act as both “seeders” and “peers” to download data from the network while simultaneously serving that data to newcomers. Similarly, on the distributed web, rather than downloading data held on centralized and privately controlled servers (e.g. watching a video hosted on YouTube’s servers), individuals would be both server and client, accessing and sharing data from and with one another. The seeds of this distributed web of communication were sown in the ’60s and ’70s, in the early years of network culture, whose pioneers dreamt of a limitless cyberspace

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

where individuals, like information, could be free. For them “freedom” meant forming communities and exchanges beyond the regulatory purview of states and corporations. In many ways, the internet was designed according to the logic of private property: Servers, which host the web’s data, are a bit like the network’s real estate. This paradigm allows companies to monopolize and enclose a particular set of services, and extract users’ data in the process. Take Facebook, for instance. The platform stores its user’s information and behavioral data on its own servers, where it’s then packaged and sold to Facebook’s advertisers, making billions of dollars for the company. But imagine a social network where you could interact with others while keeping all your personal data on your own machine. This is the promise of the distributed web. It’s a version of the web built on “possession and participation” rather than “ownership and access1.” As both server and client, surfer and node, your own little piece of the network is contiguous with those of your peers, collectively constituting the total information space of the web. This same discourse around decentralization can also be seen in the rise of cryptocurrencies and blockchain, systems that enable secure peer-to-peer transactions without third parties like social institutions or banks. While there’s overlap between the two communities, the distributed web is less concerned with financial exchange and more focused on embedding the principles of openness and access into the infrastructure of the web itself. The social networking application Scuttlebutt, for example, uses a “gossip protocol” that emphasizes a local-first approach: As long as a user can form a local connection with another peer, they need not be “online” to be connected. Emphasizing care and community in the network, Scuttlebutt states of its moderation processes, “Tending and pruning are not a stranger’s duty… infrastructure is a voluntary act.” While the distributed web movement is gathering momentum, it’s far from achieving significant adoption. Nonetheless, events like

the Distributed Web of Care make room for optimism and invention. They also create a conversation in which the protocols and infrastructures of the digital world are far more than merely technical, but are folded into a living metaphor of growth, kinship, and care. On p2pforever.org, artist Laurel Schwulst’s “humble hub of peer to peer resources,” she notes the time and location of each update, reminding visitors that her webpage is not a finished product, but is “always under construction” contingent on the piecemeal and personal effects of an individual in the world. For Choi, Schwulst, and others, the distributed web represents an opportunity to make the web more accessible, and to think about how we co-exist as a network. In the intimate negotiations between those bodies connected by yarn, the distributed network becomes a performative metaphor for enacting the social fictions of the web—and world—we want.

1. As the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), one implementation of the distributed web, puts it. Painting on previous page courtesy of Taeyoon Choi. 115

Fake It Til You Keep Faking It

Fake It Til You Keep Faking It The cartoonist known as Seth has built a real life around his fictional work—set in the 1940s. We pay him a visit. By Zachary Petit Photography by Zachary Petit

Upon this spot, the morning after the terrible Allan-Bridge Train Disaster of 1912, this 1,000-pound stone was mysteriously discovered. According to local legend, it had not been there the day before. Though no remains were ever officially recovered, locals swore that this same spot was also where the lifeless body of the train’s brakeman had been seen in the fiery aftermath of the crash. In the decades following the tragedy, residents of The Ward have reported strange mists hovering over the rock, ghostly sightings on the rails, and mournful whispers from the surrounding trees. Also rumored is a voice that calls out, ‘Stop the train,’ each year on the anniversary of the crash. This plaque unveiled September 16, 1962. — dedication to The Lost Brakeman This is the marker bolted to a boulder in the front yard of a cartoonist named Seth—yes, just Seth—no last name. Many objects have stories. Why does a boulder need a story? Entrance to the yard is barred by a towering wrought-iron archway, custom-made to read: omnis temporalis. All things are temporary. This archway leads to his turn-of-the-century house, which isn’t so much a 116

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house as it is a private island of Seth’s own making. There isn’t a stone that hasn’t been turned and given a character name and personal history. Three illuminated signs hang on the front porch. There’s one for the Dominion Historical Society, a nod to the fictitious city of Dominion that often appears in Seth’s work. He recreated this town in miniature form in his basement, complete with more than 100 buildings. Another porch sign declares his status as a G.N.B. Double C Member—a reference to The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, a graphic novel he created to document the fictional club. And finally, there’s a sign that announces your arrival at this house, dubbed Inkwell’s End, in Guelph, Ontario, where Seth has been playing meticulous homemaker for the past decade. I step up to the porch. PLEASE HELP YOURSELF to a souvenir free pen as a gift from Inkwell’s End, a plaque—another one—by the front door reads, offering a tray of dimes to insert into an antique Vendorama Ball Point Pen machine immediately below it. I plunk one in and a pen emerges. Compliments of Inkwell’s End is printed on its side in Seth’s trademark script. From the moment you enter his realm, he’s directing you—moving you through his story, his world, panel by panel. I turn the mechanical twist doorbell. And there he is, springing to life from the 1940s—hair neatly cropped and slicked back, tiny circular tortoise-shell glasses framing his eyes, the white lab coat he works in protecting a stunning green suit in a classic cut. He opens the door to a world that is all things past, present, and future, exquisitely crafted and customized. I look at my watch to see if I’m on time, and in a twist of absurdist fate, the battery is no more. It has stopped. Guelph (pronounced “Gwelf”) is a town of roughly 132,000 inhabitants, about an hour and fifteen minutes’ drive from Toronto. The modern settlement was founded by novelist John Galt, and there’s a certain sense of remove to the place. One drives past rural stretches and forests on long highways leading to other places only to emerge into a landscape of chain motels, a mall with an H&M and Old Navy, a KFC/Taco Bell, and a Walmart. In other words: the type of place I imagine to be diametrically opposed to everything Seth stands for, given his work. Inspired by The New Yorker cover artists of the mid-century, Seth made a name for himself with semi-autobiographical literary comics rendered in that classic style, most notably his Palookaville series, including It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken and the acclaimed Clyde 119

6. Gate: Seth designed wrought-iron gates that flank the house, proclaiming “Inkwell’s End” and “Omnis Temporalis.” The archway represents electrical towers, a theme throughout the home.

1. Seth With Book: Inside The Wimbledon Green Memorial Library, Seth inspects a book he had bound: his father’s scrapbook from his days as a scout leader. “This is a thing that’s filled with personal sentiment for me,” Seth says. 2. Lighter: This lighter in Seth’s dining room is one of his most dear possessions. “It’s the only object to survive from my mother’s home in London when it was bombed in the Blitz. I’ve been drawing pictures of that since I was a little kid.” 3. Toys: The stairwell leading to Seth’s basement studio is filled with toys from his childhood, some of which he has repurchased and “reclaimed.” “I like all this stuff—but is any of it really of any great importance? That’s a good question,” he says. “I love these four objects, but I just love them as four objects. It’s not personal.” 4. Plaque: Fact blends seamlessly with fiction at Inkwell’s End. This plaque affixed to a boulder in Seth’s front yard details the legend of The Lost Brakeman. 5. House and Gates: “Inkwell’s End”—Seth’s house next to a historic train bridge in Guelph, Ontario. The lighted signs on the front porch have been known to draw in the occasional passer-by. As one inquired: What is this place? Is it a museum? Seth describes it this way: “It’s a bubble to escape reality. It is kind of a cocoon that I’m building around myself… It’s an art project.”

Fake It Til You Keep Faking It

Fans. Perhaps this encroaching modern world is what he’s guarding against in his own home in Guelph’s historic neighborhood, The Ward. Many curtains are drawn, and custom stained glass windows with the words Inkwell’s End and Nothing Lasts set in beautiful hues, with an illustration of the house pull you deeper into this world as they seal off the one outside. I sit down in the living room as Seth heads to the kitchen for coffee. He returns and politely requests the chair I have selected. “I’m particular, as you can imagine,” he says. Even his speech recalls the cadence of yesteryear. Seth readily acknowledges the incongruous status of his person in Guelph. There’s a bookstore in the nearby mall, where a clerk directed me to the graphic novel section that includes Clyde Fans—but they didn’t know the author lives roughly 10 minutes away. “I do get stopped and talked to, but I think I might be better known as a kind of local eccentric—the guy in the hat, sort of thing,” he says. Sometimes people read about him in the newspaper and realize, “‘Oh, you’re an artist. I just thought you were a weirdo.’ “A famous cartoonist is kind of an oxymoron. I was just over in Spain, where I was getting the most tremendous treatment, like a real celebrity, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them that at home nobody knows who I am.” Reading Seth’s work is like having a conversation with him. His voice resonates throughout his oeuvre, reverberating from page to person and back again—his dry humor, his charm, his unflinching, ruminative perspective on the darker realities of life and what it means to live in this world are omnipresent. “Unlike some artists, I’ve made a very strong effort to personally connect myself to the work—it’s a persona as well. Very carefully, I’ve always been putting myself forward into the world as an image. It’s not something that happened by accident.” Seth was born in Clinton, Ontario, across Lake Huron from Michigan, and, as a kid, he moved with his family from one small town to another. When he was still a baby, his older siblings had already grown up and left home, and his parents fought. Seth’s mother suffered from what he believes to have been postpartum depression after his birth, and was institutionalized. When she returned home, his parents’ routine of drinking and fighting gave way to a deep alienation between them. The family lived largely in isolation. And yet Seth says his parents took an intense interest in everything he did, and he was enormously interested 120

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in them, too. “I was the ideal child in that I wanted to hear their stories over and over.” His earliest narrative drawings (which he calls “proto-comics”) spawned from images he copied from a school reader. By fifth grade, he was drawing ripoffs of Peanuts strips. His father was a shop teacher with access to Ditto machines (early photocopiers, essentially), and he’d print Seth’s comics up so his son could distribute them at school. In a small town, Seth says, you are more or less labeled. He was The Kid Who Could Draw. “I had enough encouragement that somewhere very early on I thought I would be an artist. Although I don’t think I had any idea of what that meant.” In seventh grade, he was assigned to do a project on an artist of his choice, so he consulted the encyclopedia and came across Picasso. He was shocked to discover he was still alive. “I thought he was from the Middle Ages or something. I had no conception of what art was about. It was probably around that time that I started to read comic books, and that’s the thing that really changed my life.” As he drew his own squad of superheroes, he kept his love of comics secret. In fact, he was ashamed of it. Comics were something young kids read, and by this point he was getting picked on enough already. No need to invite any more trouble. “I think that led me to have quite an inner life… I spent a lot of time in busy work: making models, drawing—the kind of stuff all kids did in the ’70s, but I did it very intensely. I think that is the thing that has shaped my whole life, that kind of small world of busy work.” After high school, Seth headed to art school in Toronto, “a typical small town hoser.” He remembers himself in a lumber jacket with a Rush button pinned to it, accented by a small teenage mustache. But the artist born Gregory Gallant had come to Toronto with a plan. He was going to leave Gregory behind and consciously build an entirely new identity. In a small town, he notes, everyone knows you, and you can’t change because, well, everyone knows you. Suddenly, he says, he had the chance to transform into “The more sophisticated person I think I always wanted to be.” He test-drove a series of personalities. He grew a beard. He got involved with an occult group. Then he discovered the punk scene, and things clicked. For one, he says, it felt “super modern.” He’s quick to address the obvious. “That doesn’t sound like something that would appeal to someone like me, but it did then, because it was probably the only time in my life 121

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when I felt in touch with exactly what was going on at that moment. It felt like this was the future. Suddenly you had people with green hair, white hair, wearing shiny silver jumpsuits, and it was all very interesting and modern and kind of ironic... I just really liked the image of it, and it was about creating an individual look for yourself.” He created a new name to go along with this new self: Seth. He regards identity as a central core with layers that form around it, bit by bit. Every book you read, every movie you see, every song you hear and react to—you add those cultural discoveries to yourself as you consume them. But the older he got, the less connected he felt to punk music. At the same time, he had a friend who wore those great-looking suits from the ’40s, and it wasn’t long before he was trying them on for himself. “I think back on it as being kind of bald ambition. The older me would look at the younger me and kind of chuckle because it’s so transparent… Probably my interest in jazz wasn’t because I loved jazz—it was because it went with the suit. Much of it is really calculated, but the interesting thing about calculation is it leads you places. I value affectation. Affectation can be very irritating when you see it in other people, but affectation is a way to earnestly embrace things, and as in art, you learn by copying. There’s nothing wrong with copying. I’m still copying. Anything I get excited about, I think to myself, ‘I’d like to do my version of it.’” His exploration of the aesthetics of the ’20s through the mid-century extended beyond the page to his wardrobe. Eventually, he says, it all became his normal. He doesn’t even think about it anymore—he just wears a suit every day because that’s what he does. When it comes to his work, he just draws the way he draws. “The real connection was my parents. Later I realized that so much of my interest in the postwar world is directly related to them because they were so much older than me; they talked about this stuff all the time and our house was full of these things. This house now is full of things that remind me of that stuff.” The house. Seth sees it as an art project that’s not only directly connected to his work, but to the city of Guelph and the province that runs in his blood. For one, electrical towers are a running theme, depicted in the ironwork outside, in one of the stained glass windows, in the sculptures on the first floor, even in the shower tiles; Seth regards them as a central image of Ontario. Elsewhere, the nearby train bridge and the 122

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two towers of Guelph’s basilica can be spotted in cabinetry masterfully crafted by Seth’s father-in-law. His comic work lives and breathes here, too. For fans, it’s like walking into a museum of the creator’s mind. In the parlor alone there’s a light-up ceramic sculpture of Kao-Kuk, an Inuit astronaut from his book The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists. There’s a trio of nesting cookie jar sculptures of the titular character from George Sprott (1894–1975), a series he originally created for The New York Times Magazine; he removes the top of one to reveal a younger Sprott within, which is then removed to reveal Sprott as a child. There are dolls of all the characters from Wimbledon Green: The Greatest Comic Book Collector in the World. And then there are the unrelated collections amassed and displayed—a “Canadiana” cabinet featuring his many Mountie and Jasper the Bear figurines. “Primarily I think of myself as a collector, and that informs everything I do, everything I write,” he says. “Much of how I organize the house is about where you put things, because I don’t want it to be overwhelming.” True to intention, the house comes across as expertly presented—lit and staged by someone with decades of experience nestling characters and scenes into tight panels. The tour (conducted with an air of formality, though I’m an audience of one) moves to the dining room, where Seth’s gargantuan shorthaired cat Albert looks on warily from his perch. There’s a bookcase containing a collection of rare New Yorker cartoon volumes. Another shelf houses issues of Model Car Science magazine and old Detroit television schedules that Seth has amassed and bound. He once lived across the border from Detroit, in Windsor. So he likes to open them up and discover what he was watching on a particular day and ponder, for instance, why he was taking in episodes of I Love Lucy when Citizen Kane was on. He has also collected a host of videos (digitized across a variety of formats) labeled “WOC”—recordings of live TV broadcasts “With Original Commercials.” “They were broadcasting every day. Most things didn’t get recorded, but somebody recorded something for their own reasons, and then somehow it found its way into my hands,” he marvels. “That’s very interesting to me.” We move to the kitchen. When Seth and his wife, Tania, bought this home, it was a typical 1980s kitchen, so of course the first thing they did was destroy it. Seth rebuilt it from the ground up with antique 125

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appliances. There’s the ivory stove, with once-rusted panels he sent to California to be recoated. There’s the white Crosley Shelvador fridge that he purchased from a company that rents antique appliances to film productions. At some point, he laments, it will inevitably die, and then “I’ll either have to find another one, or the awful thing is I may have to get one of those reproductions.” Of the many things Seth mourns, it’s the loss of the repair shop. They used to be ubiquitous, but now we just throw things away and move on. Upstairs, his obsession with bookbinding is on full, resplendent display. A door frosted with the words The Wimbledon Green Memorial Library—Quiet Please! and a depiction of its comic-hoarding namesake character leads to a wonderland of paper, replete with its intoxicating aroma. Floor-to-ceiling custom shelves hold everything from a full series of Man, Myth & Magic, to Marvel and Star Trek annuals; there are numerous bound volumes of Seth’s research and groundwork on various projects; Wimbledon Green ephemera, from a bust of the character to Green’s framed fictitious rejection from a comic book club. I ask Seth why he enjoys teetering over the line between his literature and real life. “I’m not really sure why I do it. I like the idea of it. The artists I’m most interested in, one of the things I love about them was how they brought the work they did into their lives.” He cites Max Beerbohm, an early 20th-century caricaturist and writer. “He sat around and fiddled about all this life,” Seth says, noting that Beerbohm would do things like write false inscriptions in his own books from famous people. “Much of his life was just playing, and that appeals to me on a basic level. It doesn’t really have to have a big meaning.” While Seth reads books by other authors, he often draws in them. “Some of them have become quite elaborate, where I’ll have glued in individual characters. These have turned into weird little projects on their own, which I don’t really have any purpose for beyond pleasure.” He has somewhere around 100 of them. Detailing Seth’s inner sanctum could stretch for pages. But how does he see it? “It is a bubble. I’m working on creating my own dream world that I want to live inside. When I go out, I am horrified at the vulgarity of the modern aesthetic. But on another level, you are a product of your own time. This is the world I live in and I’m used to it. “Some architect, maybe it was Philip Johnson, was talking about the Guggenheim in New York and how great it looks, and he said the 126

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Guggenheim looks great because all of the other buildings on the street follow the rules. If all the buildings were like the Guggenheim, then it wouldn’t look great. And to some degree, the reason things from the past are so evocative is because they’re surrounded by this garbage of the present. If everything out there was a perfect representation of 1920, you’d lose the evocative quality that the past has.” Beyond the 1950s television he watches, beyond the stack of old books entitled Breeding Aquarium Fishes, beyond the wall of fake cartooning licenses he made for himself, and beyond the set of custom doors frosted with his name, Seth works out of a studio in his dark basement. Inside, it’s a thrilling disarray, a stark contrast to the crisp orderliness of the library. There are cups of pens and paintbrushes, piles of books, and projects in various stages of completion. Take, for instance, the notebooks on the history of Dominion, the fictive city that often appears in his series. Or the massive model he built of the town, where an errant squirrel once took up residence. It’s one thing for artists to get lost in the worlds of their imaginations, but it’s another to actually build them. It’s all part of following a thread. “Following the thread is what leads you to other work. You don’t know where any of it goes. I lately came up with this philosophy, this idea, which is: When you think up an idea for a project and you don’t do it, it’s like, ‘Oh well, you didn’t do it. It’s not the end of the world.’ The real tragedy isn’t the project that got lost, it’s that you would have learned something doing that project that made the next project. That next project is what’s really lost because you will never go down that road. So following the thread to me is what’s interesting.” There are many, many threads. There are his personal diaries, made using rubber stamps of himself, to which he adds text (he’s at least six months behind); his 40 or so books of paper cutouts; The Ministry of Post-War Drabness, a book he worked on for nearly 10 years, exploring Canadian vernacular design. Maybe one day he’ll publish it. Regardless, “It was fun to do, and it was busy work. Like I said, something that’s part of the process.” In addition to his “real” deadline-oriented work, he tends to have eight or nine other projects going at once. Looking around at the objects amassed in his basement, such as those WOC tapes, I wonder aloud what he makes of people who don’t collect anything. He lights up. “I find it hard to understand! I can’t imagine not gathering things. 127

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It’s a natural process. It’s about you—it’s not really about the objects. Why do you want them? Why do you want to display them? What are you trying to say about yourself? “If I wasn’t making art, would I be bothering to think this much about who I am and what identity is? It confuses me because I think the key thing about life is that you try to figure out who you are.” He ponders for a moment. Sure, he says, he collects things like historical Canadian cartooning because he feels it needs to be done. But then there’s the flipside. “Like, why did I suddenly get interested in doll chairs?” he asks, incredulously. It’s time for lunch. Seth used to love a diner downtown called the Apollo Eleven but, “it recently got turned into a craft brewery. That’s the modern world for you.” Despite it being nearly 70 degrees outside, he dons brown leather gloves, one of his signature hats, and a leather briefcase that he wears like a backpack, and we depart. But rather than walking to the street, he goes straight for the woods to the right of his house—a striking move for a man wearing a custom suit. Sticks crack underfoot as we ascend a steep hill. “It’s a not very well-marked path,” he says. “You have to hang on to a couple of trees here, but it’s the nicest way to go into town,” he says, glancing left and right. “We want to make sure no trains are coming. This is strictly illegal, but I don’t think we’ll get in any trouble.” The soaring railroad tracks take us high above the Speed River. It’s sunny and windy. As we come into town, people stare at Seth—some discreetly, others with open inquisitiveness. He doesn’t seem to notice or care. We arrive at the modern Italian joint Buon Gusto, where the staff knows and warmly welcomes him. He orders Tina’s Meatballs (beef, pork, and veal), a Di Casa mixed greens salad, and a glass of Chianti. “Everything here is perfectly adequate,” he says of Guelph. He prefers old jazz bars, but seems resigned to occasionally patronizing the sports bars that have replaced them. The table behind us breaks out in a rendition of “Happy Birthday.” He smiles and claps along with the family when it’s done. Espresso machines scream, waiters buzz by with pizzas. We discuss politics. Physics. Smoking (a former prodigious smoker, he quit about eight years ago). 128

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Vaping (he’s not a fan, despite our proximity to the nearby purveyor Ponyboy Vapes). His wife, Tania’s, Crown Barber Shop (which he designed, and for which he created a detailed backstory and related ephemera that hangs inside). Naturally, the past comes back. He says, “I think I was trying to build some sort of rationale that the world was better then. This is not an argument I would be making now. Obviously the world was not better in the mid-century, nor was it better in the mid-19th century, nor will it be any better 100 years from now. Life is life and it’s complicated. Some things I think were better, and some were worse. Obviously we’ve made a lot of social progress. Not enough, but we’ve made a lot. “What does appeal to me is a kind of formality to the culture that I feel has disappeared. I like that kind of culture based on structure, civic groups, and parades; all the stuff that is kind of corny definitely appeals to me. Much of that has disappeared from our culture because ours is the ‘keeping it real’ culture. ‘Artifice is bullshit.’ But I think artifice is interesting. I miss that element of it, and I’ve romanticized it for sure. I dress in a very calculated way because it’s what I would like things to be. If I had lived in 1950, I probably would have romanticized the 19th century. It’s probably more about rejecting the current era than anything.” As we finish our meal, I tell him about my watch stopping on his front lawn. “Well, there’s the intro to your story,” he says. Everything a story, always. As I leave, I stop at the massive boulder in his yard and stare at it once again: “The Lost Brakeman.” I consider going back inside because I forgot to ask him about it, and I desperately want to know its truth: Was it here when he moved in? Did he have it brought in? Was there really a train accident? Is there any local neighborhood lore, or is a boulder just a boulder? But I leave. Sometimes a story is best left a story.

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The Myth of the Digital Nomad

The Myth of the Digital Nomad For a generation that can supposedly work from anywhere, freedom of movement isn’t granted to all

By Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira Illustration by Yuanchen Jiang

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The first thing we notice is the people. Most look lost, wandering around in all directions, trying to find their assigned space. We’re in the imposing block of gray concrete that is the Ausländerbehörde, Berlin’s immigration office. The early-morning crowd—those who arrived at 4 a.m. because the schedule for visa appointments is perpetually full, or who are here because it’s too urgent, or because they’re desperate—is already waiting inside. The orchestrated movement of bodies flows inside and around the building and files into waiting rooms. There are hardly any names used here, hardly any information save for what’s in the thick stacks of documents placed carefully inside handbags and backpacks, or held close under an arm, muscles tensed with the possibility of loss. People are herded from waiting room to office to waiting room to office, hoping to prove they should be able to stay in Germany, only to be spit back out in the open city in elation, numbness, or despair.

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The Myth of the Digital Nomad

Home is a shifting concept for those who find themselves in this building, for one reason or another. The one thing we all have in common is that we are seeking to stabilize it, at least for a while. This is an easier task for some, those whose names, faces, and passports allow them to create for themselves the utopia of “digital nomadism,” and to think of borders as fluid. Those from Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Israel, the United States, or Canada are assigned to a separate, more comfortable floor for their visa appointments, sometimes even a separate building altogether. Reeling from the unprecedented inconvenience of having to request permission to stay in a foreign country, these citizens often complain about having to find and fill out the right documents. Some will tell you, laughing, about the time they didn’t even mean to apply for a longer stay but were offered one all the same. We politely smile and change subjects. Ease of movement has never been a reality for those of us from the Global South1. The fruits of our labor—our texts, images, sounds, movements, thoughts, gestures, and objects— have always been allowed to cross borders with so much more ease than our bodies. Inside our clinical, always crowded waiting rooms, a TV plays a cartoon about the upcoming European elections on loop. In it, a character with purple skin spreads the European version of peace and justice, swooping into battle scenes to turn warring soldiers into laughing football players. As we are called once more into a room to hear a stone-faced bureaucrat tell us that all the work we’ve done as artists here in the past years, all of the recommendation letters, all of the contracts, all of the degrees obtained here, are still not enough to tether us to Berlin, a place we’ve long called home, it’s impossible not to wonder what, then, would be good enough. What does it mean to be a “digital nomad?” The late Martinique poet Édouard Glissant wrote extensively in the 1980s and ’90s on 134

nomadism as a necessity for establishing Relation—that which brings the world into fruition— and for him, this implied, first and foremost, a fundamental break with the idea of seeking roots. The nomad, digital or otherwise, responds to the fluidity of labor and an attachment to her tools. From crops to laptops, the labor done by the nomad is predicated on her freedom to move, her desire of not-belonging, and, to a certain degree, on wanderlust. Glissant argued that the nomad is “overdetermined by the conditions of his existence.” In an age of fortified borders and detainment centers, of children forcefully taken from their parents, of en masse deportations, the conditions for the existence of the digital nomad are, in fact, their roots. These roots take the shape of a carefully designed object: a passport. For the digital nomad, life can take provisional shape anywhere, because the root, manifested as a little book made of special government-issued paper and signatures, secures them freedom of movement. Here we encounter the paradox, in which what is against the nomad— the “global citizen” doing digital labor—also guarantees the survival of their nomadism in today’s world. For the entitlement to nomadism, some roots matter more than others. For us, our roots prevent us not only from most of this freedom, but also curb our desire to establish roots elsewhere—for instance, in Germany. In the meantime, we move through the carefully choreographed dance of the Ausländerbehörde, or, as a friend once said: a panic attack in the shape of a building.

1. According to the World Bank, countries that are considered low and middle income in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

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The Cyberfeminism Index

The Cyberfeminism Index By Mindy Seu

All New Gen, Dentata & Circuit Boy, VNS Matrix, 1992.

Cyberfeminism? sticker, Old Boys Network, 1997.

This index consists of 575 entries including scholars, hackers, artists, and activists of all regions, races, sexual orientations, and genetic make-up. Their work considers how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology. Together, they map the radical techno-critical activism that begins to shape cyberfeminism. The index is still growing: soon it will become the Cyberfeminism Catalog, a printed publication and an open-source, open-access, crowd-sourced website that will include photos, descriptions, and metadata about the works and their context. For this issue of Eye on Design magazine, it exists as a list. The term “cyberfeminism” was coined in the early 1990s by British cultural theorist Sadie Plant and Australian art collective VNS Matrix. Its emphasis lies in the prefix “cyber,” as in Cybernetics, a 1948 book by Norbert Wiener, and “cyberspace,” from William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. Cyberfeminism began as a critique of the cyber-babes and fembots that stocked Gibson’s sci-fi landscapes. Combining cyber and feminism was meant as an oxymoron or provocation. The term is self-reflexive: technology is not only the subject of cyberfeminism, but its means of transmission. It’s all about feedback. Use of the term dropped after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. Some new terms focus on its evolution, like Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh’s Cyberfeminism 2.0, Kishonna Gray’s black cyberfeminism, and the Post-Cyberfeminist International. Others are intentionally distinct from the term, like Laboria Cuboniks’s xenofeminism, Legacy Russell’s glitch feminism, or Afrofuturist feminism. And similar labels from other regions, such as the hackfeministas in Latin America, 여성주의 (women’s rights) in Korea, or 女权之声 (feminist voices) in 140

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“Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” Mark Dery, published in Flame Wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture, 1994.

Bindi Girl, Prema Murthy, http://www.thing.net/~bindigrl/, 1999.

Brutal Myths, Sonya Rapoport, Marie-Jose Sat, http://www.sonyarapoport.org/portfolio/brutalmyths-1996/, 1996.

Genderchangers Academy, http://www.genderchangers.org/, 2000–2015.

Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health logo, http://www.mum.org/, 1996–2018.

World of Female Avatars, Evelin Stermitz, Jure Kodzoman, Ljiljana Perkovic, Loritz Zbigniew, http://females.mur.at/, 2005–present.

100 Anti-Theses, Old Boys Network, https://obn.org/cfundef/100antitheses.html, 1997.

“Why are Women Like Chickens? Or Cows? Cyberfeminism Interrogates Biotechnology,” subRosa, 2008.

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The Cyberfeminism Index

“Snapshots from Sari Trails: Cyborgs Old and New,” Radhika Gajjala, 2011.

Gynepunk, The Cyborg Witches of Diy Gynecology, https://gynepunk.hotglue.me/, 2015–present.

Courageous Cunts, http://courageouscunts.com/, 2012.

Open Source Estrogen, Mary Maggic, http://maggic.ooo/Open-Source-Estrogen-2015, 2015–present.

Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, Klau Kinky, https://anarchagland.hotglue.me/?decolonizar, 2013.

Afro Cyber Resistance, Tabita Rezaire, https://vimeo.com/168357831, 2014.

gLÁndula de Anarcha, Klau Kinky, https://anarchagland.hotglue.me/, 2013.

buttplug.io, Nonpolynomial Labs, 2018.

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China never reference the Western term at all. When I set out to build the index, I started by scraping the bibliographies and citations of seminal posthumanist and cyberfeminist texts. This soon branched out to an overwhelming degree, to the point that I felt confident I’d gathered a comprehensive list of theoretical texts. Then I remembered something Susan Rennie, co-creator of the 1973 New Woman’s Survival Catalog1 had told me about her own catalog: “The bibliography needed to have an activist dimension to it, otherwise it wouldn’t be feminist.” A true revolution could never happen within an institution. So I decided to crowdsource international entries to expand the scope. Inevitably, I still hit a wall: The majority of references I received and read drew from a Western context. This may be because of the limits of English; it may also be due to the relatively late adoption of the internet and feminism outside the West. Maybe it’s the difference in terminology and search queries, as many included here do not self-identify as cyberfeminist. The holes in this index should not suggest that non-Western cyberfeminism does not exist. They merely reveal the inherent constraints of my Western vantage and that its systems of archiving prevent me from finding outside references. Please consider this index a work-in-progress. While I’ve initiated this collection, its longevity will depend on its collaborative editing and compilation. In the meantime, here is an excerpt of the forthcoming Cyberfeminism Catalog.

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1. Billed as the “feminist Whole Earth Catalog,” the New Women’s Survival Catalog (1973) was a rigorous documentation of the efforts of feminist bookstores, health centers, collectives, art schools, galleries, publishing ventures, and co-ops across the country.

The Cyberfeminism Index 1990 Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism Mary Daly 1990 The Real World of Technology Ursula M. Franklin 1991 A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century (republished in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature) Donna Haraway 1991 Feminism Confronts Technology Judy Wajcman 1991 Technoculture C onstance Penley, Andrew Ross 1991–1997 VNS Matrix Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, Virginia Barratt 1991 A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century VNS Matrix (Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini, and Virginia Barratt) 1991 Automating Gender: Postmodern Feminisms in the Age of the Intelligent Machine Judith Halberstam 1992 All New Gen VNS Matrix 1992–present Women in Technology 1992–1996 Recombinants (collage series) Faith Wilding 1993 Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” Judith Butler 1993 The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough Anne Fausto-Sterling 1993– 2015 geekgirl Rosie Cross 1993 Computers as Theater Brenda Laurel

1993 Women’s WIRE (Women’s Information Resource Exchange) Nancy Rhine, Ellen Pack 1993 UT Austin ACTLab Allucquère Rosanne Stone 1993–present Colnodo 1994 Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures Allucquère Rosanne Stone 1994 Black to the future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose (published in Flame Wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture) Mark Dery 1994 l0ve0ne Judy Malloy 1994 Cyber Rag Jaime Levy 1994 Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology Autumn Stanley 1995 Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women Anne Balsamo 1995 Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric Diane Greco 1995–present Webgrrls International 1995 Colonizing Virtual Reality: Construction of the Discourse of Virtual Reality, 1984–1992 Chris Chesher 1995 EROS INterACTive JoAnn Gillerman 1995 Tank Girl 1995–2014 iVillage Nancy Evans, Candice Carpenter, Robert Levitan, Tina Sharkey 1995–1998 Tillie and CyberRo-

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berta Lynn Hershman Leeson 1995 Stock Market Skirt Nancy Paterson 1995 Cyberflesh Girlmonster Linda Dement 1995–? webgrrls Cybergrrl (Aliza Sherman) 1995 Femina 1996 Bitch Mutant Manifesto VNS Matrix 1996– present Melanet: Watoto World William and Rodney Jordan 1996 Electronic Civil Disobedience and other unpopular ideas Critical Art Ensemble 1996 Wired women: gender and new realities in cyberspace Lynn Cherny, Elizabeth Reba Weise 1996–present StorkSite Tori Kropp 1996 The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age Allucquère Rosanne Stone 1996 Performing the digital body— a ghost story Theresa M. Senft 1996 When the personal becomes digitial: Linda dement and Barbara hammer move towards a Lesbian cyberspace Holly Willis, Mikki Halpin 1996 Phone Sex is Cool, Chat-Lines as Superconductors Marcus Boon

Douglas MacLeod (editors) 1996 The Woman Source Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women Ilene Rosoff 1996– 2014 Disgruntled Housewife Nikol Lohr 1996 Eve’s Apple or Women’s Narrative Bytes Sue Ellen Case 1996 Sex, Lies and Avatars — Sherry Turkle knows what role-playing in cyberspace really means Pamela McCorduck 1996 Stealing Glances: Women(‘s) Writing on the World Wide Web Greg Dyer 1996 Surfer Grrrls: Look Ethel! An Internet Guide for Us! Laurel Gilbert, Crystal Kile 1996 An introduction to our feminist yellow pages of cyberspace Molly Ker, Theresa M. Senft 1996 A kinder, gentler glossary for net neophytes, and others Cathy Young 1996 Modem butterfly, reconsidered Theresa M. Senft, Kaley Davis 1996–present Studio XX Kim Sawchuck, Patricia Kearns, Kathy Kennedy, Sheryl Hamilton (founders) 1996 Nattering on the Net: Women, power and cyberspace Dale Spender 1996 Cyberfeminism Nancy Paterson

1996 Clicking In: Hot Links To a Digital Culture Lynn Hershman Leeson

1996 Brutal Myths Sonya Rapoport, Marie-Jose Sat

1996 Immersed in Technology Mary Anne Moser,

1996 On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations Sadie Plant

1996–2018 Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health Harry Finley 1997–1998 Flesh Machine Critical Art Ensemble 1997 Zeros and Ones Sadie Plant 1997 Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan_ Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience Donna Haraway 1997 You are Cyborg Hari Kunzru 1997 Affective Computing Rosalind W. Picard 1997 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet Sherry Turkle 1997 Old Boys Network (OBN) Susanne Ackers, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ellen Nonnenmacher, Vali Djordjevic, Julianne Pierce 1997 100 Anti-Theses Old Boys Network 1997 La Tecnologia las ha Olvidado Martha Burkle Bonecchi 1997 Colonial Ventures in Cyberspace Rejane Spitz 1997 First Cyberfeminist International Old Boys Network 1997 Conceiving Ada Lynn Hershman Leeson 1997 Charting the Currents of the Third Wave Catherine Orr 1997–present FACES Diana McCarty, Kathy Rae Huffman, Ushi Reiter, Valie Djordjevic 1997–present HTMLles Festival Studio XX

1997–2005 The Adventures of Josie True Mary Flanagan 1997 Razor girls: Genre and Gender in Cyberpunk Fiction Lauraine Leblanc 1997 Trapped by the body? Telepresence Technologies and Transgendered Performance in Feminist and Lesbian Rewritings of Cyberpunk Fiction Thomas Foster 1997 My Body, A Wonderkammer Shelley Jackson 1997 Female artists manipulate new media at Art-Tech Ann Elliott Sherman 1997 Chik-Tek Spotlights Women in New-Media Art 1998 Slimy metaphors for technology Jyanni Steffensen 1998 Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, & New Eugenic Consciousness Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) 1998– present subRosa Laleh Mehran, Hyla Willis, Steffi Domike, Lucia Sommer, Faith Wilding 1998 DigitalBlood Marjorie Franklin 1998 From Barbie® to Mortal KombatGender and Computer Games Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (editors) 1998 Cyberville: Clicks, Culture, and the Creation of an Online Town Stacy Horn 1998 Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture Margaret Morse 1998 Cybergrrl! A Woman’s Guide to the World

Eye on Design #06: Utopias Wide Web Aliza Sherman 1998 Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism Faith Wilding and CAE

duism and the North American Hindu diaspora Vinay Lal 1999–present Women on Waves Rebecca Gomperts

1998 Bridging the digital divide: The impact of race on computer access and Internet use Donna Hoffman, Thomas Novack

1999 The spectralization of technology: from elsewhere to cyberfeminism and back : institutional modes of the cyberworld Marina Grzinic, Adele Eisenstein (editors)

1998 Digital, Human, Animal, Plant: The Politics of Cyberfeminism? Susanna Paasonen

1999 Third World Critiques of cyberfeminism Radhika Gajjala

1998 Hard, Soft and Wet: Digital Generation Comes of Age Melanie McGrath

1999 Gender, Place, Networks: A political ecology of cyberculture Arturo Escobar

1999 How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics N. Katherine Hayles

1999–late 1990s? CyberSlacker Jaime Levy

1999 Cyberfeminism: Connectivity, Critique & Creativity Renate Klein, Susan Hawthorne

1999 Bindi Gir Prema Murthy

1999 Women Internet: Creating New Cultures in Cyberspace Wendy Harcourt 1999 When Computers Were Women Jennifer Light 1999 Gesturing Toward the Visual: Virtual Reality, Hypertext & Embodied Feminist Criticism Carolyn Guertin 1999 GENIND/NEME, Gender and Identity in New Media Judy Malloy 1999 Next Cyberfeminist International Old Boys Network 1999 Cyborg diaspora and virtual imagined community: Studying SAWNET Radhika Gajjala 1999 The politics of history on the Internet: Cyber-diasporic Hin-

1999–late 1990s? Electronic Hollywood Jaime Levy

2000 Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment Mary Ann O’Farrell, Lynne Vallone (editors) 2000 The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet Margaret Wertheim 2000–2008 TechnoDyke Stacy Bias 2000 cybergrrl.com Aliza Sherman 2000 Container Technologies Zoe Sofia 2000 women.com Nancy Rhine, Ellen Pack, Laurie Kretchmar, Gina Garrubo 2000 Erasing @race: Going White in the (Inter) Face Beth Kolko 2000 Race in Cyberspace Beth Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, Gilbert Rodman (editors)

2000 Mistresses of their domain: How female entrepreneurs in cyberporn are initiating a gender power shift Kimberlianne Podlas 2000–2015 Gender Changers Academy (GCA) 2000 The body caught in the intestines of the computer and beyond : women’s strategies and/or strategies by women in media, art and theory Marina Grzinic (ed.), Adele Eisenstein (ed.) 2001 U.S. Feminism-Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub) Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave Cathy Bail 2001 The Bodies That Were Not Ours Coco Fusco 2001 Women, Work, and Computing Ruth Woodfield 2001 TechniColorRace, Technology, and Everyday Life Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu, Alicia Headlam Hines (editors) 2001 Battle for the Soul of the Internet Philip Elmer-DeWitt 2001 Where is the Feminism in Cyberfeminism? Faith Wilding 2001 Very Cyberfeminist International Old Boys Network 2001 The F–Word 2001 ChickClick 2001–present /ETC (Eclectic Tech Carnival) Gender Changers Academy 2001 Studying Feminist E–Spaces: Introducing Transnational/ Postcolonial Concerns Radhika Gajjala 2001 Desktop Theater

2001 Mez. The Data][h!] [Bleeding Texts Mez Breeze (Mary Anne Breeze) 2002 Tenacity: Cultural Practices in the Age of Information- and Biotechnology Yvonne Volkart 2002 Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture Mary Flanagan, Austin Booth (editors) 2002 Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet Lisa Nakamura 2002 Not every hacker is a woman Cornelia Sollfrank 2002 Thinking through the cybernetic body: Popular cybernetics and feminism Susanna Paasonen 2002 Cyberfeminism, Racism, Embodiment Maria Fernandez 2002 Avatar Body Collision Helen Varley Jamieson, Karla Ptacek, Leena Saarinen, Vicki Smith 2002 Gendering Processes within Technological Environments: A Cyberfeminist Issue Radhika Gajjala, Annapurna Mamidipudi 2002 An interrupted postcolonial/feminist cyber-ethnography: complicity and resistance in the “cyberfield” Radhika Gajjala 2002 Razorgirls and Cyberdykes: Tracing Cyberfeminism and Thoughts on Its Use in a Legal Context Bela Bonita Chatterjee 2003 Domain Errors!: Cyberfeminist Practices Maria Fernandez (Editor), Faith Wilding (Editor), Michelle M. Wright (Editor) 2003 Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life

Sarah Kember 2003 Hacking into Hacking: Gender and the Hacker Phenomenon Alison Adam 2003 Gender and Technology: A Reader Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, Arwen P. Mohun (editors) 2003 Women, Art, Technology Judy Malloy 2003 Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing Jane Margolis, Allan Fisher 2003 Cyberfeminism: Networking the Net Amy Richards, Marianne Schnall 2003 Is Cyberfeminism Colorblind? Maria Fernandez 2003–present Tactical Technology Collective 2003 Racism, Technology and the Limits of Western Knowledge Michelle M. Wright 2003 Asian America.Net : Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace Rachel C. Lee, SauLing Cynthia Wong 2003 Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Console-ing Passions) Audry Yue, Fran Martin, Chris Berry (editor) 2003–present Cyborg Memoirs M Téllez 2004 Techno Feminism Judy Wajcman 2004 Cyberfeminism: Next Protocols Claudia Reiche, Verena Kuni (editors) 2004 Cyber Selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women Radhika Gajjala 2004 A Hacker Manifesto McKenzie Wark

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2004 The Domestic as Virtual Reality: Reflections on NetArt and Postfeminism Jess Loseby 2004 Cyberselves: Feminist ethnographies of South Asian women Radhika Gajjala 2004 On cyberfeminism and cyberwomanism: High-tech mediations of feminism’s discontents Anna Everett 2004 A Rant About Technology Ursula LeGuin 2004 The Cyberfeminist Fantasy of the Pleasure of the Cyborg Yvonne Volkart 2005 From Cyborgs to Hacktivists: Postfeminist Disobedience and Virtual Communities Carolyn Guertin 2005 Gender, Ethics and Information Technology Alison Adam 2005 My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts N. Katherine Hayles 2005 The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (The MIT Press) Sherry Turkle 2005 BlogHer Elisa Camahort Page, Jory des Jardins, and Lisa Stone 2005 Technology and the Spirit of Ownership Paul J. Cella III 2005 Tank Girl, Postfeminist Media Manifesto Elyce Helford 2005 Surfing the Waves of Feminism: Cyberfeminism and its others Susanna Paasonen 2005–present World of Female Avatars Evelin Stermitz, Jure Kodzoman, Ljiljana Perkovic, Loritz Zbigniew

The Cyberfeminism Index 2005 Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics Wendy Hui Kyong Chun 2006 Women and Information Technology: Research on Under representation Joanne Cohoon, William Aspray (editors) 2006 Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture Lisa Gitelman 2006 The Body and the Screen Michele White 2006 Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine Alison Adam 2006 Towards a Loosening of Categories: Multi-Mimesis, Feminism, and Hypertext Jessica M. Laccetti

2007 Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet Lisa Nakamura

2008 Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology Susan Kozel

Erika Smith, Jacsm Kee, Jennifer Radloff

subRosa Federica Timeto

2008–present Datos Protegidos

2007 Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Digital Media and Gender in a Nordic Context Malin Sveningsson Elm, Jenny Sundén

2008 South Asian Technospaces Radhika Gajjala, Venkataramana Gajjala (ed)

2009 Hackteria Andy Gracie, Marc Dusseiller, Yashas Shetty

2010 Feminist Technology Linda L. Layne, Sharra L. Vostral, Kate Boye (editors)

2007–2013 CAMP: studio for critical transdisciplinary practice, Mumbai Shaina Anand, Sanjay Bhangar, Ashok Sukumaran

2008 From “Victims of the Digital Divide” to “Techno-Elites”: Gender, Class, and Contested “Asianness” in Online and Offline Geographies Linda Leung

2007 Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life danah boyd

2008 South Asian Technospaces and “Indian” Digital Diasporas? Radhika Gajjala

2007 Feminist sexualities, race, and the internet: An investigation of suicidegirls.com Shoshanna Magnet

2006 Then isn’t it all just ‘hacktivism’? Karim A. Remtulla

2007 Stitch’n bitch: Cyberfeminism, a third place and the new materiality Julie Wolfram Cox, Stella Marie Minahan

2006 Postfeminism vs. the Third Wave Alison Piepmeier

2007–2013 moddr_ Nancy Mauro-Flude (sister0)

2006–present Nortd Addie Wagenknecht, Stefan Hechenberger

2007 D/t\P disturb.the. peace [angry women] Jess Loseby (curator), Evelin Stermitz, others

2006–present GenderIt Namita Aavriti, Kateruna Fialova, Dafne Sabanes Plou 2006–present #metoo Tarana Burke 2006 Cultural Difference, Theory, and Cyberculture Studies: A Case of Mutual Repulsion Lisa Nakamura 2006 Techno-capitalism meets technofeminism: Women and technology in a wireless world Judy Wajcman 2006 Δίκτυο Γυναικών Θεσσαλονίκης 2006–present? function: feminism

2008 Why are Women Like Chickens? Or Cows? Cyberfeminism Interrogates Biotechnology subRosa 2008 Hey Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene! 2008 On sex, cyberspace, and being stalked Pamela Gilbert 2008 Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action (New Dimensions in Computers and Composition) Kristine L. Blair, Radhika Gajjala, Christine Tulley (editors)

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2008 On Purple Pleasures: Digitally Assembling Bollywood Amit S. Rai

2009 Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, Gender, and Embodiment Jessie Daniels 2009 Reading Hypertext Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco 2009 Cyberfeminism in the Arab World: Analysis of gender stereotypes in Arab women’s Web sites Dalia Al Nimr 2009 Feminist Frequency Anita Sarkeesian

2008 Caste on Indian Marriage dot com: Presence and Absence Archana Sharma

2009 Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History Heather Love

2008 The Hybrid Cultures of Cyborg Diasporas: Making Sense of the Expatriate Odias’ Conversations Anustup Nayak, Natalia Rybas

2009 Race and ⁄as Technology Wendy H. K. Chun, Lynne Joyrich

2008 From cyberfeminism to technofeminism: From an essentialist perspective to social cyberfeminism in certain feminist practices in Spain Sonia Núñez Puente 2008–2013 ArtFem.TV Evelin Stermitz 2008–present Miss Despoinas Nancy Mauro-Flude (sister0), many others 2008 World of Female Avatars: An Artistic Online Survey of the Female Body in times of Virtual Reality Evelin Stermitz 2008 Re-politicizing art, theory, representation and new media technology Marina Grzinic 2008–present Feminist Tech eXchange (FTX)

2009–2014 Devotion Gallery Phoenix Perry 2009 Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transnational Engagement Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff 2009 Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace Anna Everett 2009 Decolonization bell hooks 2009–present FOSSchix

2010 Hypertext and the Female Imaginary Jaishree K. Odin 2010 Cultural Appropriations of Technical Capital: Black women, weblogs, and the digital divide André Brock, Lynette Kvasny, Kayla Hales 2010 Feminist theories of technology Judy Wajcman 2010 From Cybernation to Feminization: Firestone and Cyberfeminism Susanna Paasonen 2010 The Race For Cyberspace: Information Technology in the Black Diaspora Ron Eglash, Julian Bleecker 2010 Cultural Appropriations of technical capital: Black women, weblogs, and the digital divide André LBrock, Kayla Hayles, Lynette Kvasny 2010 Developing a corporeal cyberfeminism: Beyond cyberutopia Jessica E. Brophy 2010 Glitch Studies Manifesto Rosa Menkman 2010 Understanding Gender in a digitally transformed world Anita Gurumurthy

2009–present Mz* Baltazar’s Lab Stefanie Wuschitz, Rodgarkia-Dara, Patrícia J. Reis, Ana Loureiro Fernandes, Sophie Thun, Zuzanna Zajac

2010 Visible or invisible : growing up female in a porn culture Gail Dines

2009–present Geek Girl Meetup

2011 Biopolitics and the Female Reproductive Body as the New Subject of Law Allaine Cerwonka, Anna Loutfi

2010 Unmasking the Theatre of Technoscience: The cyberfeminist performances of

2010–present Diaspora Foundation

2011 Programmed Visions: Software and Memory Wendy H. K. Chun 2011 Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation Beth Coleman 2011 Creating Second Lives: Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual Astrid Ensslin, Eben Muse (editors) 2011 The Gender and Media Reader Mary Celeste Kearney 2011 Race After the Internet Lisa Nakamura, Peter Chow-White 2011 Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play Jenny Sundén, Malin Sveningsson 2011 Nettitudes: Let’s Talk Net Art (Studies in Network Cultures) Josephine Bosma 2011 The Ever Evolving Web: the Power of Networks Wendy Hall 2011 Revisiting Cyberfeminism Susanna Paasonen 2011 Cyber-Animism and Augmented Dreams Tamiko Thiel 2011–2016 Wikid GRRLS 2011–present Black Girls Code Kimberly Bryant 2011 Liberating Ourselves Locally (LOL) 2011–present Theorizing the Web 2011–present Lunch Bytes Melanie Bühler 2011–present PyLadies 2011 Snapshots from Sari Trails: Cyborgs Old and New Radhika Gajjala

Eye on Design #06: Utopias 2011 Queering Internet Studies: Intersections of gender and sexuality Jenny Sundén, Janne Bromseth 2011 Carnal resonance: Affect and online pornography Susanna Paasonen 2012 Becoming Camwhore, Becoming Pizza Jennifer Chan, Rozsa Farkas, Ann Hirsch, Cadence Kinsey 2012 Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health and Technoscience Michelle Murphy 2012 Feminist Biopolitics: Reconstructing Space through Organized Feminism Hilary Barlow 2012 The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities micha cárdenas, Elle Mehrmand, Amy Sara Carroll 2012 Encyclopedia of Gender in Media Mary Kosut 2012–present Afrotopia Ingrid LaFleur 2012 Where is My Profile Picture? Multiple Politics of Technological Motherine and Gendered Technology Natalia Rybas 2012 The (Dis)information Age: The Persistence of Ignorance Shaheed Nick Mohammed 2012 Cyberculture and the Subaltern: Weavings of the Virtual and Real Radhika Gajjala

2012 Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing Janet Abbate 2012 Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age Kurt W. Beyer 2012 Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking E. Gabriella Coleman 2012 How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis N. Katherine Hayles 2012–present ADA FemBot Collective 2012–2017 Geothink Leslie Regan Shade, Renee Sieber 2012 Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction Nancy Baym, danah boyd 2012 Media in our Image Johanna Blakley 2012–present disnovation.org Nicolas Maigret, Bertrand Grimault 2012–present Girls Who Code Reshma Saujani 2012–present FemTechNet 2012 Courageous Cunts 2012–present Mothership HackerMoms 2012–present HOLAAfrica (HOLAA) 2013 Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmaco-pornographic Era Paul B. Preciado

2012 Cyberfeminism 2.0 Radhika Gajjala, Yeon Ju Oh

2013 Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey Klau Kinky

2012 Networked Reenactments: Stories Trans-disciplinary Knowledges Tell Katie King

2013 In Search of Digital Feminisms: Digital Gender & Aesthetic Technology Sol Morén

2013 Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World Ulises Ali Mejias

tion on Internet Rights and Freedoms 2013–present Social Design Lab Andrew De Rosa

2013 Technology, Society and Inequality: New Horizons and Contested Futures Erika Cudworth, Peter Senker, Kathy Walker (editors)

2014 Cyborgs Cabaret

2013 Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet Laurie Penny 2013 Free as in Sexist? Free Culture and the Gender Gap Joseph Reagle 2013 A Queer History of Computing Jacob Gaboury 2013–present Postcolonial Digital Humanities Adeline Koh, Roopika Risam

2014 We are the Future Cunt Claire L. Evans 2014 Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Sexual Reproduction: Sketches for Xenofeminism Olivia Lucca Fraser 2014 Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality Shaka McGlotten 2014–2016 Model View Culture Shanley Kane 2014 #gamergate Anita Sarkeesian

2013–present Feminisms and Technology, a bibliography in progress Jacqueline Wernimont

2014 About Feminism Divya Manian, Jessica Dillon, Sabrina Majeed, Joanne McNeil, Sara J. Chipps, Kat Li, Ellen Chisa, Jennifer Brook, Angelina Fabbro

2013 Hashtag Feminism Tara L. Conley

2014 QueerOS Kara Keeling

2013–present Code Liberation Phoenix Perry

2014 Feminist Principles of the Internet

2013 Minority Tech: Journaling Through Blackness and Technology Anjuan Simmons

2014 Imagine a Feminist Internet meeting

2013 Glitch Feminism Legacy Russell 2013 #Solidarityisforwhitewomen Mikki Kendall 2013 The Future of Online Feminism Zerlina Maxwell 2013–present Syster Server 2013 Don’t Let it Stand! ’ An Exploratory Study of Women and Verbal Online Abuse in India Anja Kovacs, Richa Kaul, Padte, Shobha SV 2013–present The African Declara-

2014 Emotional labor and affective computing panel Joanne McNeil, Sarah Jaffe, Lauren McCarthy, Sabrina Majeed 2014–present Laboria Cuboniks Diann Bauer, Katrina Burch, Lucca Fraser, Helen Hester, Amy Ireland, Patricia Reed 2014–present Gender and Tech Institute

Angelina Dreem, Anibal Luque 2014 Virtual homelands: Indian immigrants and online cultures in the United States Madhavi Mallapragada 2014–present IAM Lucy Black-Swan, Andres Colmenares 2014 Why Talk Feminism in World of Warcraft? Angela Washko 2014 Sonic Cyberfeminisms and its Discontents Annie Goh 2014 The Hypertext of HerMe(s) Judy Freya Sibayan 2014 *digital*media*junk*ware*lore* Gabriele de Seta 2014 Internet Famous: Visibility as Violence on Social Media Shanley Kane 2014 Queering Internet Governance in Indonesia Kamilia Manaf, Dewi Nova Wahyuni, Ikram Baadila 2014 Framing the online women’s movements in the Arab world Ahmed Al-Rawi 2014–present Cybertwee gabriella hileman, violet forest, and may waver 2014–present Lady Tech Guild Ebony fleur, Carla Diana, Sophie Kahn, Natalia Krasnodebska, Annellie Koller, Laura Taalman, Lauren Slowik, Ashley Zelinskie, Katie Wendt

2014 The dawn of Cyber-Colonialism George Danezis

2014–present Detroit Community Technology Project Diana Nucera (director) 2015 Becoming machine-witch-plant: Gynaecological TransHackFeminism and joyful dystopia Aniara Rodado

2014–present PowerPlnt

2015–present Open Source Estrogen

2014–present Black Girl Tech Lola Odelola, Rebecca Francis

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Mary Maggic 2015–present GynePunk, the cyborg witches of DIY gynecology Ewen Chardronnet 2015 Queer Science: Queering the Cyborg in MyMy Anna Helme 2015 A manifesto for cyborgs thirty years on: Gender, technology and feminist-technoscience in the twenty-first century Thao Phan (editor) 2015–2018 Project Queery Shelly Craig 2015–2022 The eQuality Project Leslie Regan Shade, Valerie Steeves 2015 Superrr 2015 #Ferguson: Digital Protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States Yarimar Bonilla, Jonathan Rosa 2015 New Glory Blue / The Blue Screen of Liberation American Artist 2015 Black Teens Are Breaking The Internet And Seeing None Of The Profits Doreen St. Felix 2015 World White Web Johanna Burai 2015 Zen and the art of making tech work for you XYZ 2015 Technically Female: Women, Machines, and Hyperemployment Helen Hester 2015–present Facets Phoenix Perry, Caroline Sinders 2015–present Dot Everyone Martha Lane Fox 2015 Dot Everyone—power, the internet and you Martha Lane Fox

The Cyberfeminism Index 2015–present voidLab Symrin Chawla, Hillary Rose Cleary, Xin Xin, Lilyan Kris, Amanda Stojanov, Alice Jung, Sanglim Han, Annamaria Andrea, Yuehao Jiang, Evelyn Masso, Leah Horgan, Aliah Darke, Anisa Bashiri, Kate Hollenbach, Echo Theohar 2015 Technology Capitalism Anjuan Simmons 2015 This is For Everyone? Steps towards decolonizing the Web Jessica Ogden, Susan Halford, Les Carr, Graeme Earl 2015 Toward a clear, decolonizing conception of Internet and information technology Amaya Saborit 2015 Towards a New Digital Landscape Kimberly Drew 2015 Where Are the Women of Color in New Media Art? Ben Valentine 2015 Tabita Rezaire: the artist taking on the internet Team TRUE 2015 #twerkgate 2015 Race, Gender, and Virtual Inequality: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Black Cyberfeminist Theory Kishonna L. Gray 2015 Κυβερνοφεμινισμός 2015–present Black Quantum Futurism Rasheedah Phillips, Camae Ayewa 2015 The Collection and the Cloud Amelia Abreu 2015 Sick Woman Theory Johanna Hedva 2015 Hacking Culture, Not Devices: Access and Recognition in Feminist Hackerspaces Sarah Fox, Rachel Rose Ulgado, Daniela

K Rosner 2015 Abortion Drone Women on Web 2015 Feminist Surveillance Studies Rachel E. Dubrofsky, Shoshana Amielle Magnet (editors), Seantel Anaïs, Mark Andrejevic, Paisley Currah, Sayantani DasGupta, Rachel Hall, Yasmin Jiwani, Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Ummni Khan, Kelli Moore, Lisa Jean Moore, Lisa Nakamura, Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Smith, Kevin Walby, Megan M. Wood 2015 Gender, Sexuality And The Internet: 15 Feminist Principles Of The Internet Feminism in India (FII) 2015 Freedom of Speech: The Internet, 66A and Anushka Sharma Shreyasi Bose

2016 On #GLITCHFEMINISM and The Glitch Feminism Manifesto Legacy Russell 2016 TransHackFeminist Meet-Up 2016 Particular Universals (Interview with Helen Hester of Laboria Cuboniks) Helen Hester, Francis Tseng 2016 Laboria Cuboniks in Conversation Laboria Cuboniks, Armen Avanessian, Suhail Malik

2016 The Tampon of the Future Pagan Kennedy

2015 VVVVVV Faith Holland

2016 Sandy Speaks: A Chatbot That Talks Prison Statistics & The Failure Of Surveillance American Artist

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2016–present README

2016 Free Basics and the Internet’s Political Battles Paz Peña

2016 Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship Lori Kido Lopez

2016 Fear of Screens Nathan Jurgenson

2016 Black Cyberfeminism: Ways Forward for Classification Situations, Intersectionality and Digital Sociology Tressie McMillan Cottom

2016 Estrofem Lab (Estrogen Hack Lab) Mary Maggic

2015–present 0s + 1s Choterina Freer, Sonia Hedstrand, Anna Kinbom, Rut Karin Zettergren

2016 QueerOS: A User’s Manual Fiona Barnett BARNETT, Zach Blas, Micha Cárdebas, Jacob Gaboury, Jessica Marie Johnson, Margaret Rhee

2016 3D Additivist Cookbook Morehshin Allahyari, Daniel Rourke

2016–present Feminist.AI Christine Meinders, Claire le Nobel

2016 The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, and Culture Online Safiya Umoja Noble, Brendesha Tynes

2016 A Declaration of the Dignity Image American Artist

2016 Infrastructure of Intimacy Ara Wilson

2016 Teknolust Lynn Hershman Leeson

2015 Speculative Transfeminist AI Coding Rights (Joana Varon, Clara Juliano), MIT Co-Design (Sasha Costanza-Chock)

2015 Feminist Hackerspaces: Hacking Culture, Not Devices: A Guide to Feminist Hackerspaces Sarah Fox, Amy Burek, Emily Alden Foster

Sutela

2016 Bobby Schmurda: Viral and Invisible American Artist 2016 Data: A Four-letter word for feminism Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami 2016 Rich Meme, Poor Meme Aria Dean 2016 Emotions, Technology and Design Safiya Noble, Sharon Tettegah 2016 Slime Intelligence Elvia Wilk, Jenna

2016 GenDyTrouble: Cyber*Feminist Computer Music Annie Goh 2016 Data Colonialism: Critiquing Consent and Control in “Tech for Social Change” Anonymous 2016 Feminism online in West and Central Africa: Identities and digital colonisation Caroline Tagny 2016 What #TwerkGate Taught Me’: Musings On An On going Frustration Siana Bangura 2016–present Center for Afrofuturist Studies Anaïs Duplan 2016 The trouble with white feminism: Whiteness, digital feminism and the intersectional internet Jessie Daniels 2016 The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online Safiya Umoja Noble, Brendesha M. Tynes (editor) 2016 Asian/American Mas-

culinity: The Politics of Virility, Virality, and Visibility Myra Washington 2016 Black Women Exercisers, Asian Women Artists, White Women Daters, and Latina Lesbians: Cultural Constructions of Race and Gender Within Intersectionality-Based Facebook Groups Jenny Ungbha Korn 2016 The Invisible Information Worker: Latinas in Telecommunications Melissa Villa-Nicholas 2016 The Intersectional Interface Miriam E. Sweeney 2016–present EQUALS International Telecommunications Union, UN Women, the International Trade Centre, GSMA and the United Nations University 2016 WOMAN 2016 Tightrope Routines: A Feminist Artist Interviews The Internet’s Most Infamous Misogynist Angela Washko 2016 A (digital) giant awakens—Invigorating media studies with Asian perspectives Sun Sun Lim, Cheryll Soriano 2016 Refresh Collective Salome Asega, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Kathy High, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Maandeeq Mohamed, Tiare Ribeaux, Dr Camilla Mørk Rostvik, Dorothy R. Santos, Addie Wagenknecht 2016 Black Glitch in the Hour of Chaos Marisa Parham 2016 The Incomputable and Instrumental Possibility Antonia Majaca, Luciana Parisi 2016 Big Data and Sexual Surveillance Nicole Shephard

2016 Geochicas 2016 Hope in a hashtag: the discursive activism of #WhyIStayed Rosemary Clark-Parsons 2016 Feminism and (Un) Hacking Shaowen Bardzell, Lilly Nguyen, and Sophie Toupin (SSL Nagbot) (editors) 2016 Feminist Hacking/ Making: Exploring New Gender Horizons of Possibility SSL Nagbot (a.k.a Lilly Nguyen, Sophie Toupin, and Shaowen Bardzell) 2016 Legacies of craft and the centrality of failure in a mother-operated hackerspace Sarah Fox, Daniela K Rosner 2016 cybertwee dark web handbook Cybertwee 2016 Disobediant Electronics Garnet Hertz 2016 PeriodShare Mary Louise Juul Søndergaard & Lone Koefoed Hansen 2016 Technology Now: Blackness on the Internet Legacy Russell 2016 Wandering/WILDING: Blackness on the Internet 2016 Contra Internet Zach Blas 2016–present Le Reset 2016 Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation Laboria Cuboniks 2016–present NOAH (No to Online Abuse and Harassment) Ashell Forde 2016–present MariaLab 2016–present Imilla Hacker 2017 Decolonising Bots

Eye on Design #06: Utopias Ramon Amaro, Florence Okoye and Legacy Russell 2017 Decolonising Bots: Revelation and Revolution through the Glitch Florence Okoye 2017 Open Source Estrogen: From biomolecules to biopolitics… Hormones with institutional biopower! Mary Tsang (Mary Maggic) 2017 Feminist Climate Change: Beyond the Binary Panel, “From C to X: networked feminisms” FACES 2017 Open Source Gender Codes Ryan Hammond 2017 Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy Cathy O’Neil 2017 Broadband Claire L. Evans 2017 Orgs: From Slime Mold To Silicon Valley And Beyond Jenny Sutela 2017 Feminist Internet Manifesto (v 1.0) Feminist Internet 2017 Why Siri Sounds Like A Girl, But Says She Is Beyond Gender Katy Gero 2017 We’re all connected now, so why is the internet so white and western? Mark Graham, Anasuya Sengupta 2017 Austerity is an Algorithm Gillian Terzis 2017 Creating Technology by the People, for the People: An interview with Thenmozhi Soundararajan Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Laura Flanders 2017 After the Future: n Hypotheses of

Post-Cyber Feminism Helen Hester

2017 BBZ BLK BK

2017 The Environment is not a System Tega Brain

2017–present Feminist Data Set Caroline Sinders

2017 The Year in Weather Keller Easterling 2017 Glitch Feminism: Cosmic Bodies & Ghosting the Corporeal Legacy Russel 2017 Data Detox Kit Tactical Technology 2017 Post Cyber Feminist International 2017 The Architectures of Online Harassment Caroline Sinders, Maya Ganesh 2017 Unscripting Harassment Caroline Sinders, Maya Ganesh 2017–present Our Networks Sarah Friend, Garry Ing, Dawn Walker, Benedict Lau 2017 Issue 4: The Internet Rose Nordin, Sofia Niazi, Heiba Lamara 2017 Feminist Chatbot Design Process (FCDP) Ellpha 2017–present Ellpha Brigitte Ricou-Bellan, Stéphanie Creff (founders) 2017–present Feminist Internet Charlotte Webb, Georgina Capdevila 2017 A City is Not a Computer Shannon Mattern 2017 Decolonizing technology: A reading list Beatrice Martini 2017 Dividing Lines: Mapping platforms like Google Earth have the legacies of colonialism programmed into them Mayukh Sen 2017–present Data Domination Mistress Harley

2017–present Ghosha Sachini Perera 2017 Πληρωμένο robot sex, Καπιταλιστική Ετεροπατριαρχία, και Cyber Φεμινισμός: Μερικά Ερωτήματα 2017 Afrofuturism and Black Science Fiction Panel in Black Solidarity Conference Rasheedah Phillips, Camae Ayewa 2017 The Radical Outside Morehshin Allahyari 2017 The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy Lisa Nakamura, Cassius Adair 2017 Blue Dream Marcos Santiago Gonsalez 2017 Re: skinonskinonskin Rindon Johnson 2017 Tech Pride: Celebrations and Challenges for LGBT Members of the Tech Community Camille Crittenden 2017 Let’s Close the Internet Gender Gap Michaela Smiley (Thayer) 2017 Making a Feminist Internet: Movement Building in a Digital Age in Port Dickson, Malaysia 2017 Gendering Surveillance Dr. Anja Kovacs 2017 Feminist activists protest tax on sanitary pads: attempts to normalize conversations about menstruation in India using hashtag activism Deepa Fadnis 2017 Hashtag activism: popularizing feminist

analysis of violence against women in the Horn, East and Southern Africa Maureen Kangere, Jean Kemitare, Lori Michau

2018 Sex and African Feminisms—Utilising the power of digital technologies Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah

2017 #iamafeminist as the “mother tag”: feminist identification and activism against misogyny on Twitter in South Korea Jinsook Kim

2018 A People’s History of Computing Joy Lisi Rankin

2017 #girlgaze: photography, fourth wave feminism, and social media advocacy Ruxandra Looft

2018 Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (History of Computing) Marie Hicks

2017 Cyberfeminist Poetics in China and Taiwan: Zhai Yongming, Yin Lichuan, and Xia Yu Ben Landauer translating Zhai Yongming, Yin Lichuan, Xia Yu 2017 Seed Joanna Walsh 2017–present Color Coded Emily Martinez, Cesia Dominguez, Aya Seko 2017–present Whose Knowledge? Adele Vrana, Anasuya Sengupta, Siko Bouterseç 2017 Black Feminism And Post-Cyber Feminism Akwugo Emejulu + Panel 2017–present Data for Black Lives Yeshimabeit Milner, Lucas Mason-Brown, Max Clermont, Nicole Morris 2017–present Cyborgfeministas 2017–present African Digital Art Jepchumba

2018 Sonic Cyberfeminisms Annie Goh

2018 Carceral Capitalism Jackie Wang 2018 Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya Nanjala Nyabola 2018 Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism Safiya Noble 2018–present XYZ Tactical Technology Collective 2018 I was raised on the Internet Omar Kholeif 2018 The Tools We Need to Fight Online Gender-Based Violence Ali Watson 2018 Understanding the Gender Gap in the Global South Allison Gillwald

2018 Xenofeminist Manifesto Laboria Cuboniks

2018 Failure and Mark-Up Language: Remembering Sandra Bland American Artist

2018 Beyond Binaries Ryan Hammond

2018 A Network of Slaves American Artist

2018 Siri and the Revival of the Feminist Cyborg Emma Goldberg

2018 What You Need To Know About Sextortion Christina Lopez

2018 Gendered Project Omayeli Arenyeka

2018 More Than Words— Investigating online discourse as a space of

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gender-based violence Elena Pavan 2018 Queerness and Privacy: Baby I Love It When You Never Hold Back From Me Joshua Muyiwa 2018 Code Ecologies Taeyoon Choi, Nabil Hassein, Sonia Boller 2018 Finding Intimacy within Black Feminist Criticism Jessica Lynne 2018 Prospekt Geraldine Juárez 2018 See No Evil Miriam Posner 2018 How to Kill Your Tech Industry Marie Hicks 2018 CDH Symposium on Intersectional Data: “Who Counts” in our Machine-Readable World Lauren Klein, Mimi Onuoha 2018 Xenofeminism Review Sarah Richter 2018 How to think differently about doing good as a creative person Omayeli Arenyeka 2018 Fixing the Glitch Seyi Akiwowo 2018 Decolonize the Internet Conference Siko Bouterse, Anasuya Sengupta 2018 New York Tech Zine Fair Taeyoon Choi, Mimi Onuoha 2018 Machine Learning, Inequality and Bias Roundtable 2018 Where Are We Now? Feeling Our Way in Post-Cyberfeminist Space Esmé Hogeveen 2018 Feminist in a Software Lab Tara McPherson

The Cyberfeminism Index 2018 Ethics and Archiving the Web Rhizome 2018 See Me: The digital space as a means of creating community and self Tiffany Kagure Mugo

Amrita Vasudevan, Nandini Chami 2018–present Tour Delirio (Delirium Tour, stories of salsa and surveillance) María Juliana Soto N.

2018 Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence —Between Empirical Science, Spirituality and Philosophy Marisa Tschopp

2018–present Pornografia no consentida (non-consensual pornography) Paz Peña, Francisco Vera, Verónica Ferrari, Constanza Figueroa, Steffania Costa di Albanez e Miguel Soares, Marília Souza

2018 Decolonising the internet: Second International Cyberfeminist Meeting

2018 Hackfeminist Algorithmics Lili_Anaz, Natasha Akhmatova

2018–2019 Privacy in Public

2018 Que no Quede Huella que no que no (May there be no trace)

2018–2019 Bushwick Analytica Tega Brain 2018 Teens in AI Elena Sinel 2018 Fred Turner: Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn’t Exist Fred Turner, Nora Khan 2018–present Afrotech Fest 2018 Politics of Self Care and Feminism Sharanya Sekaram 2018 Communities at a Crossroads: Material Semiotics for Online Sociability in the Fade of Cyberculture Annalisa Pelizza 2018 Women in Hypertext: On Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall’s Forward Anywhere Claire L. Evans 2018 What It’s Like to Be Hit on By a Pick-Up Artist Gabby Bess 2018 Techno-Imaginations: Internet Lore in Asia 2018 Afrocyberfeminismes 2018 Examining Technology-Mediated Violence Against Women through a Feminist Framework Anita Gurumurthy,

2018 Map of cyberfeminist initiatives in Latin America 2018 The Internet and Feminist Awakening, Ch. 2 of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China Leta Hong Fincher 2018–present Sonic Cyberfeminisms Annie Goh, Marie Thompson (founders), Robin Buckley, Marlo De Lara, Jane Frances Dunlop, Natalie Hyacinth, Miranda Iossifidis, Louise Lawlor, Frances Morgan and Shanti Suki Osman 2018 Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence —Between Empirical Science, Spirituality and Philosophy Marisa Tschopp 2018 buttplug.io Nonpolynomial Labs 2018 Design Justice, AI, and Escape from the Matrix of Domination Sasha Constanza Chock 2018 Futures Festival Prakeeta Singh 2018–present Ciberfeminismo 2019 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New

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Frontier of Power Shoshana Zuboff 2019 Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri 2019 Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power An Xiao Mina 2019 Critical Simulation Nora Khan 2019 WYFY: Exorcizing Technology BUFU 2019 School for Poetic Computation, Code Societies Melanie Hoff 2019 Racial Justice in the Distributed Web Taeyoon Choi 2019 404 Page Not Found Kate Wagner 2019 Terraforms—Or, How to Talk About The Weather Ingrid Burrington

sium on Post-Cyber-Feminisms Heike Munder (curator) 2019 Producing Futures —An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms Heike Munder (curator) 2019–present Cyberwitches Manifesto Lucile Olympe Haute 2019 Incomputable Futures 2019 Refiguring Binaries Kelani Nichole (curator), Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Snow Yunxue Fu, Claudia Hart, Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Tabita Rezaire, Lu Yang 2019 Data Feminism Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren Klein 2019 Sexual Assault in Ghana: How technology can help build visibility Doreen Raheena Sulleyman

2019 More Than HumanCentered Design Anab Jain

2019 Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World Meredith Broussard

2019 Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—and Why America Might Miss It Susan Crawford

2019–present Feminist Tech Fellowship Superrr

2019 Refiguring the Future Refresh (Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Dorothy R. Santos) 2019 How to Make a Feminist Alexa Feminist Internet 2019 Why we need to design feminist AI Josie Young 2019 Skincare and Opsec Forever Addie Wagenknecht 2019 Symposium: The Revolution of Digital Languages or When Cyber turns to sound of Poetry A Sympo-

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Contributorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s List

Each of us a world.

Eye on Design Founder + director Perrin Drumm | Twitter @perrindrumm Managing editor Liz Stinson | Twitter @lizstins Senior editors Emily Gosling | Twitter @nalascarlett Meg Miller | Twitter @megilllah Associate editor + art director Madeleine Morley | Twitter @maddymorleyy Designer Tala SafiĂŠ | Instagram @talasafie Online Design Intern Katharina Brenner

Issue #06: Utopia Design Na Kim is a graphic designer based in Seoul and Berlin. She focuses on visual language in her autonomous works, as well as across various cultural commissioned projects. She was the art director and editor of GRAPHIC magazine from 2009 untill 2012 and has initiated a series of projects based on her monograph, SET, since 2015. Kim founded Table Union, a design studio serving as a creative platform. Her work has been shown in exhibitions internationally, including at MMCA, V&A, MoMA, Milan Design Museum and more. | Instagram @nananananananakim

Writing Anoushka Khandwala is a designer and writer based in London whose practice centers on diversifying and decolonizing the design industry. She runs a group for women and non-binary people of color in the creative industries, and is part of the queer feminist Corrrective collective. | Instagram @anoushkakhandwala

Copy editors Esther Gim Whitney Vendt Sarah Dzida Liz Carbonell Social media Plural

Neo Maditla is a journalist and editor based in Cape Town. She heads the content and social media team at Design Indaba, a conference and creative platform with an aim to use creativity for a better world. | Instagram @_maditla 152

Eye on Design #06: Utopias

Luiza Prado de O. Martins and Pedro Oliveira are Brazilian artists and researchers currently living in Germany. They both hold PhDs from the University of the Arts Berlin and are founding members of the Decolonising Design group. Their work explores the entanglements of migration, coloniality, birth control, and sonic violences. Parallel to their individual research interests and artistic practices they also work as A Parede, exploring radical design pedagogies. | Twitter @luizaprado | Twitter @pedroliveira_ Zachary Petit is a writer based in the American Midwest. | Instagram @zachary_petit

Grace Gelder is a freelance photographer and educator who often works on projects that promote equality and wellbeing. She regularly designs and leads courses for galleries, museums, and universities, including V&A, Tate, The Photographers Gallery, UCL, University of the Arts London, and Wellcome Collection. | Instagram @gracegelder Unsplash.com is an open-source online archive of over a million free high-resolution images by photographers around the world. Many of the EOD ad pages in this issue were sourced here. Illustration

Gary Zhexi Zhang is an artist and writer whose research engages with the legacies of ecology and systems theory. He has recently undertaken projects and residencies with Schloss Web (with Agnes Cameron), Delfina Foundation, and Sakiya. He is also a member of collaborative studio Foreign Objects. Ritupriya Basu is a writer, storyteller, and design maniac based in Mumbai. Inspired by the alternative, she is driven to tell the stories of the people, projects, and ideas that deserve to be heard. Her words have appeared in AIGA Eye on Design, Intern Magazine, Broccoli Magazine, Little White Lies, and Stack Magazines. | Instagram @ritupriyabasu Mindy Seu is a designer and researcher. She holds an M.Des from Harvardâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Graduate School of Design and B.A. in Design Media Arts from University of California, Los Angeles. | Twitter @mind_seu

Photography Louise Benson is a writer and photographer based in London. She is currently deputy editor of Elephant, where she examines contemporary culture through the lens of art and design. | Instagram @benson_louise

Max Guther creates worlds with a focus on the interaction between architectural details, interiors, and the human being to convey everyday situations and activities. Influenced by the aesthetic of old computer games and isometric representations of Bauhaus architects and designers, he uses the isometric perspective to create an all-seeing observation position. Since graduating in 2017, he has worked as a freelance illustrator for clients such as The New York Times, Wired, The New Yorker, GQ, Zeit, Pitchfork, and Esquire. Yuanchen Jiang is a multidisciplinary designers working across graphic design, digital art, motion, branding, and storytelling. He graduated from his MFA at Yale School of Art in 2015. Stefanie Leinhos is a freelance artist who lives and works in Leipzig. Her work has been shown internationally and featured in a range of independent publishing projects, including Lagon, Collection and Colorama Clubhouse. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s collaborated with Camelot Typefaces, Migrant Journal, and Colophon Foundry and is working on an upcoming zine for Nieves. | Instagram @stefanie.leinhos

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Modernism Isn’t for Everyone — Least of All, Penguins

WHERE IDEAS LEAD F R O M I N S P I R AT I O N TO I N N OVAT I O N , NEENAH DELIVERS IT neenahpaper.com 154

neenahpackaging.com

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YOU ARE,

YOU’RE HOME

Text from “EOD™ Presents WeWingIt,” Image by Mitch Lensink.

ANYWHERE

Text from “Modernism Isn’t for Everyone—Least of All, Penguins,” Image by Ishan @seefromthesky.

COME SUNBATHE IN THE SAND

BENEATH OUR GREEN-TIPPED CONCRETE CASTLE

WE ARE CHANNELING THE IDEA OF MESSY HISTORY Text from “Herland,” Image by Alexander Pogorelsky.

Text from “It Was the Cutest of Times, It Was the Darkest of Times,” Image by oakie.

WE PUT PEOPLE AT THE CENTER OF WHAT WE DO

A CONTE MPORARY FABLE Text from “Modernism Isn’t for Everyone—Least of All, Penguins,” Image by Pawel Czerwinski.

Text from “Vaporwave is Dead, Long Live Vaporwave,” Image by Tom Barrett.

IS DEAD

Eye on Design magazine - Issue #06 “Utopias”

Articles inside

Fake It ’Til You Keep Faking It

Free At What Cost?

Editors’ Letter + Table of Contents