Hot Rod Biology

... but Jonty (my co-editor) was paranoid about the negative connotations, so it's just going to be "A Peripheral Publication for Graphic Design". We'd struggled to write the editorial together, and it's ended up as a bunch of personal/anecdotal 'observations'. So I subtitled it "More Paranoid-Critical Map than Manifesto", with the following footnote...

1. Salvador Dali was interested in the ability of the paranoid mind to see and/or invent links and associations between things that are not obviously or rationally connected. He described his 'Paranoid-Critical Method' - essentially attempting to simulate clinical paranoid schizophrenia - as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena".

Dali was interested how 'paranoia' enabled people to construct 'facts' that weren't necessarily true or discernable to others. More precisely he wanted to be able to enact the systematics of paranoia, where seemingly unrelated or disparate things could be put together to create new meanings, ideas, or 'facts'... untrue facts that had the potential to turn the world on its head. To 'prove' things that weren't true... to disrupt 'reality'. To be 'critical' involved being able to move in and out of the paranoid state so that it wasn't simply destructive but could be constructive.

There's an obvious link to my interest in the monster as metaphor there, and one that draws in my evolving intentions for the publication. I'm not just referring to the fact that both Jonty and I are deeply paranoid people(!)... more specifically I'm interested in that idea of unexpected 'loose' connections in relation to the content/voices... also I'd just say that, like John Ford, I'm generally more interested in fiction than fact. I guess I think all research is slightly 'paranoid' in the sense that it often becomes obsessive to a degree, and anything/everything begins to relate to your topic... that is 'paranoia' basically. So of course editing the first issue of TNG Jonty and I began to see all these 'connections'... actually that's where 'Peripheral' came from...

Despite Jonty's protests I'm still going to refer to TNG as 'Paranoid-peripheral'... I like that idea that of a kind of obsessive exploration of an edge, conspiracy theories, etc...

Also, in the background somewhere, I really like the idea of claiming Salvador Dali within your lineage. I like the fact that Le Corbusier hated him (and vice versa I believe). I like the spooky (intangible) romance of Surrealism as opposed to the functional romance of Modernism. I want to believe in magic,... I'm not interested in demystifying design, rather I'd like to re-mystify it... for myself anyway. I think as far as aspirations go that one can be called 'marginal' (peripheral)?

I'd like TNG to be a place where I can invite others to take part in that.

I also wrote this in the editorial:

I think it would be really interesting if graphic design could look at itself in relation to music, rather than architecture or industrial design. Then we wouldn't have to talk about problem solving, and we could talk about resonance instead.

and this:

I wanted to write something called 'Grid Theory' for this first issue. Something huge and evangelical, but ultimately compact and entirely self-contained (paranoid), like Manhattan. Anyway I ended up living in Brooklyn (peripheral) and obviously I never wrote it.

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