THE BEGINNING OF RESEARCH
AND
AN
ONGOING
THOUGHT
I sleep naked, and sometimes when I wake up, I just stare at my nude body in the mirror for a minute And I feel like earth Every curve, like rolling hills Like tidal waves Like magnificent rock formations I’m so glad this vessel, used to push towards hopes and dreams goals and a bright future Is no longer a source of hate and discomfort For I look at my body and manifest feelings of pride and warmness Because nobody has the body I have Like rolling hills Like tidal waves Like rock formations Awesome and Powerful Like earth its self
PIL
&
GALIA
KOLLECTIVE
temporal displacement
an individual is never self contained there is always spillage environmental psychology
Why aren't 5 people an individual
inequality due to being competitive
thinking backwards from the future with a confusion of time
don’t criticise society for what it could become will be worse
More than human
I
K
E
A
The Testament of a Furniture Dealer
Simplicity is a virtue.
The fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of development.
Time is your most important resource.
Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes.
Development is not always the same thing as progress.
No method is more effective than the good example.
Experience is a word to be handled carefully.
Quite frequently, I wake up with a sense that something has happened while I've been asleep. It's like the feeling when you know someone is watching you, but more unsettling. As well as this I keep waking up with the taste of metal in my mouth. I mostly just ignore the feeling and the metallic taste in my mouth, as there is no proof to say anything happened, nor to explain the taste. Although recently, I've kept finding photos on my phone, that I have no recollection taking, nor do I recognise what is in the photo. The photos are usually of surfaces or rooms. I don't really know why these things happen. I'm pretty convinced that I'm being abducted by aliens in my sleep. But that's just what I want it to be. If the aliens are reading this, I just want to say: can you wake me up next time? I want to meet you.
M
E
T
A
H
A
V
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N
Manifestos may require multiple decades of incubation time, as Régis Debray accounts for with regard to the Communist Manifesto. On the internet, a manifesto is no longer contained within a printed artefact that protects its integrity. One may choose to read a manifesto only partially, and one may encounter it while searching for something entirely different. This should not harm the manifesto; ideally it should work equally well from each of its sentences, so that in some ways, its fortified structure of arguments becomes a distributed network. We, the undersigned. This sounds like a manifesto. We take the manifesto to be a Utopian form. Surface is not territory. Territory, which is actual and geographical (for that reason limited in supply), can be contested and may become the site of an actual con ict, a physical confrontation. This cannot happen on, or to, a surface. Surface is to territory what speculative capital is to gold. Surface may be multiplied without encountering the physical limitations imposed by someone else’s terrain, opinion, presence or personality. If surface is a kind of place, or site, the designer is its geographer. Communicative (active) surface, or screen, is classi ed by its capacity to reveal and open up doorways to virtual worlds. In the absence of message, it maintains a system of placeholders and default images. Mobile phones – which physically resemble minimalist jewellery – are inhabited by complex worlds appearing on the surface of their screens. In fact a phone is no longer a phone, as it performs the functions of an email tool, a web browser, an agenda, a calculator, an alarm clock, a video player, a camera and a game console. There is no principal difference between the ‘phone-as-surface’ with its inherent capacities to organize information and social relations, and the ‘credit card-as-surface’ with its capacity to order concierges and butlers. ‘Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui of cia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.’ (Text in placeholder Latin, 2008)
WHITE NIGHT BEFORE A MANIFESTO Software does precisely what its name spells out: it softens the relationship between man and manufacture. Writing, visiting friends, searching, finding, saving: what once required at least some physical activity becomes extremely light, pleasant and effortless. Such a soft regime presents itself as unconstrained and plural. While it seems to cross all territorial boundaries, software rather functions as escapism and synchronizes employment and pleasure over, and against, labour and life. It is because software presents itself as a neutral matter, as a non-directed and in finite open space, that the question of access and circulation in such an in finite void of potentiality arises. We embrace the realm of added or speculative value that is attached to objects. It is not the objects themselves, but the values inhabiting them that are fundamentally reshaped or reinvented. Objects are inhabited by values, and are at the same time, plastered or covered by them. While a laptop or a mobile phone may be ‘inhabited’ by new values through the actions that are performed with them, those values are not registered in the objects’ titanium shells. It is clear that design is not just political, but primarily geopolitical; the new shapes and forms may arise haphazardly and by chance, but they register (in a quite formidable way) the geopolitical forces of the globalizing world. Categories like ‘good design’ have become less valid as a way of speaking about objects which all have a hardware and a software aspect to them, an inside and an ourside, a modality of inhabitation and a modality of surface, which each obey different rules. Addressing these categories as the incoherent parts of a coherent whole means overcoming the contradistinction between form and content. Coherence in design today exists primarily in the recognition of large-scale incoherence. Surface is the reincarnation of neutrality. Default friends, default faces, default desktops, default writing. In the world of surface, the confrontation with harsh realities, such as having no face, or no friends, becomes mediated and softened by the presence of placeholders, which become the new symbols for absence. Placeholders also possess the surface capability of gradually overwriting original structures and original texts. We are not useful. Some example:
MY
LONGEST
NIGHT
IF YOU’
’RE GO
ING TO
O CHEAT
DON’T P
PUT OT
HERS A
AT RISK
I feel really detached from everything right now.
I’m struggling talking to people and relating to how they are feeling.
I don’t know how I feel or what to do.
What you really mean is; you want to talk to somebody, but there is no one there. So you have written a badly thought out note on your phone, that makes no sense so you can “vent” in some kind of fashion. You don’t know how you feel because, you are feeling a lot of things right now. On top of that you have no one to anchor your feelings, nor to validate them. But all of this is okay.
BOLD
STATEMENTS
My continuing obsession; how fewer words can we use to make the most profound statement?
ISSEY
MIYAKE
MOVES
2002
UNDERCOVER
S/S
2014
I wish I was going to say something hopeful and optimistic. Its unnerving to think I am so hopeless in the way I romantically hope for the future. The weight on my chest is becoming to heavy to even breathe. There is a weight on my shoulders. I feel angry all of the time, but I don’t want to be. I cannot forgive anyone for how they may of wronged me. I wont be able to trust you until you bear your soul to me. The next thing I say is probably going to be a lie. I don’t want to be in company. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to talk about it until I have to. I shall be everything but standard. I’m used to being alone, I don’t mean that in a negative sense. Thats the last way I see it. Yes it would have been wonderful to have a great support system, with people I could have grown to know everything about an vice versa. But the fact is; If i did have that I would never be as driven and determined as I am now. Having everyone tell me that I am destined for failure, due to my background, up brining, mental health and lifestyle. Just makes me want to become everything that I have been told I cant be. Or do things that I’m told are unattainable. You should believe in what you want to and talk loudly about it. But only if I agree with it. It’s not that I don’t care, I just don’t think I could listen to it. Your opinion is important, but in perspective it is just not relevant.