Hot Rod Biology

here

Talks about coming from the Netherlands to New York partly because he felt there was no depth there... interesting because I've felt the other way, like coming here was a mistake and that I should have gone to Europe.

"I'm also looking for an escape route from graphic design, which I'm guessing I'm forcing myself into finding... an instinctive phrase; a reflex rather than a plan... sick of hearing myself saying it and trying to work out what it means in practical terms. It's exactly the same as spending two years complaining about wanting to leave Amsterdam. Eventually something gives way and you do it. Geography or work, it's the same thing. Again luckily, I have Dot Dot Dot to work this out with.... you can find a more defined mapping of this disenchantment with graphic design by observing how the magazine has changed."

"I've tried to explain elsewhere how I don't really see graphic design as deserving of being treated as an independent, navel-gazing discipline. It exists entirely in relation to other subjects.... I suspect what I'm really against is what that term "graphic design" has come to represent, i.e. synonymous with business cards, logos, identities and advertising, and, again simply put, those are things I'm just not interested in."

"I think what I do, and what the other people I work with do, is confusing, because it's difficult to place."

"So when I say I'm after an escape route from "graphic design", it's from a "graphic design" defined by those quotation marks, from the self-imposed limitations of what that implies (the self-important "industry" or "profession", its awards and profiles and self-justifying theories...) ... It doesn't start out being a big deal, it only becomes a big deal when a third party - it could equally be a student or a critic - turns it into a big deal."

"That's part of my problem with writing around graphic design: it uses such grand, revolutionary, pompous rhetoric, and in most cases they just don't fit the subject matter. I guess it's because that sort of rhetoric - ideologies, systems, strategies, which seems to ape the language of war and social change - comes from a particular sort of art or architecture writing. When it gets filtered to graphic design, which is mostly everyday and ephemeral, it just doesn't fit right. I find it a bit embarrassing..." [link to the manifesto and evangelism... The Rev. Holden Gunn]

"Although it's true that I've always collaborated on maybe 80% of the work, those collaborations were never planned. I think it's a combination of insecurity and boredom, or to turn those around, it's about the strength of working alongside someone, both confirming or criticizing each other.... You get to places you wouldn't on your own. Will wrote to me recently that a real conversation is one where you genuinely don't know what the other person is going to say next..."

"Well, "choose" is too strong. I know I keep picking at your questions like this, but I think it's important to convey the vagueness with which these things occur..." [I like his vagueness... one of the things that resonates]...
"The clarity only comes in retrospect. At the time they happen without anyone really noticing,..." [noticing in retrospect]

[on working with Will(?)]... "We spent an evening playing each other completely different kinds of music, then decided we should write something together precisely because we were so apparently incompatible"... "The two best pieces of work of anything we've both done are the ones we made together, for precisely the reason that they could have never been made individually. I'm a big believer in those “third ways”, in qualities you can't quite isolate."
..."In Dot Dot Dot 8, Kodwo Eshun wrote: "How fragile it is to form a group, any kind of group. How delicate the task of creating the conditions for a shared belief are." and so it's true: we're on the point of collapse most of the time. " [link to The Grand Saloon... into my enjoying The National Grid project]

"... it's always on the basis of friendships" ... "I made the book Appendix with Ryan Gander, for instance, because we met and got drunk... argued for about eighteen months... The key factor was the trust that all our arguing was leading to a better result."

[on teaching writing] "I'd decided to stop teaching graphic design, partly through feeling a bit uncomfortable teaching something I had doubts about, as expressed above. I realized that what I'd ended up doing after a few years was largely trying to teach writing—I mean in the sense of "designing writing"—disguised as graphic design. That’s fine in itself; I think it's a useful and relevant aspect, and everyone was always cetainly interested..."

"I always relate these things to music, so it's like thinking what's the second album going to be after the rough debut; more studio time, more pressure, bigger egos, drink problems, etc. "

"attempting to convey the more abstract qualities: the vibration, the after-effect, the unexplainable (rather than the inexplicable). In a way it's doomed to failure, but interesting failure. I anticipate ending up with something else altogether, nothing to do with what you were aiming for in the first place. It's about setting up certain conditions to make sure you get lost." [this could have been in my manifesto, re. peripheral!?]