gradshow24/stephen/thesis.md

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title: ⊞
author: Stephen

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# ⊞

  

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#### To de-sign design, I will assign a sign: ⊞

  
This symbol represents design in this writing in an attempt to avoid the
assumed meaning of the word and examine it as something unknown, to
mystify it, to examine its structure. The label ⊞ is a functional part
of a belief system involving order, structure, and rationality and I
want to break it. Removing the label is part of loosening the object,
making it avilable to transition (Berlant, 2022).  

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![The Cadaster of Orange, unknown ⊞er, c. 100 CE.](orange.jpg){.image-45}

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![Grid Systems in Graphic ⊞, Josef Muller-Brockmann, 1981](Niggli-Grid-systems-in-graphic-design-7.jpg){.image-95}

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![Shams al-Ma'arif, Ahmad al-Buni Almalki, circa 1200.](albuni2.jpg){.image-95}

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![Cartesian Geometry, Rene Descartes, 1637.](Simple_carthesian_coordinate_system.svg){.image-95}

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![Homage to the Square, Josef Albers, 1954.](art-josef-albers-study-for-homage-to-the-square-69.1917.jpg){.image-95}

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![Counter Composition VI, Theo Van Doesburg, 1925.](TheoVAnDoesburgCounterCompositionVI.jpg){.image-45}

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![The Po Valley, The Roman Empire, 268 BCE.](po-valley2.png){.image-95}

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![Monogram, Piet Zwart, c. 1968.](pietzwart.jpg){.image-45}

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#### Introduction

  
This document is a collection of fragments exploring beliefs about
labour in the creative industries, in particular graphic ⊞. Each
fragment focusses on the social, cultural, political, spiritual or
religious aspects of these beliefs through an ethnographic lens. They
record, celebrate and question the meaning that ⊞ers give to their
actions and how those meanings affect the world they live in. And it's
about how ⊞ers feel when we live with these beliefs: we feel a bit funny
and I want to talk about it.   
  
I use various modes of address and different lenses to further fragment
the definition of ⊞. The origin of the word thesis is to set or to put,
but I am trying to show you something liquid that can't be placed but
shimmers and disappears through the sand. I document some ⊞ activities,
in my own work and the work and writings of others who identify with the
label of ⊞er. The writing dissolves and reintegrates definitions of ⊞
from different voices to show the multiplicity of beliefs from
practitioners, and to explore what it means to acknowledge these beliefs
beside eachother: the tensions and harmonies, some lineages and some
breaks. What is going on here in this thing we call ⊞?   
  
This is a collection of stories about living life with particular
working conditions, located at certain points in social, economic and
cultural webs. In my practice-based research I gather and tell these
stories through (auto)ethnographic methods: documenting how ⊞er's work,
conducting interviews, improvising communal performances and exploratory
tool-making. This document collates and reflects on this research.   
  
---

#### What is a ⊞er?

  

1.  *A ⊞er is a person who wakes up at 5am but refuses to open their
    eyes. There are birds talking outside, it's probably getting bright
    already. Something is wrong, not sure what. They finally open their
    eyes and there's the ceiling again. When the light comes in sideways
    over the curtains this early you can see all the little ripples and
    imperfections in it. Nothing. Ribcage. Stomach. The front of the
    ⊞er's legs ache. It would be better to sleep again. Have to pay
    taxes again next week. A ⊞er is someone who wonders if that invoice
    will come through I need to follow up on it. The birds are so
    loud. *
2.  *The role of the ⊞er is to count back from five to two and realise
    that was only three hours same as yesterday. They use ⊞ thinking to
    never get back to sleep. They need excellent time management skills
    to make this short moment feel like an eternity, several times a
    week. ⊞ers have an acute spatial awareness and an eye for detail:
    although the ceiling seems miles away they focus on each tiny ripple
    for hours. A ⊞er is someone who will work the whole waking day
    today, but it's better than last week when there was no work. ⊞ers
    look at their phone and see their alarm is going to go off in ten
    minutes, so they switch it off and get up.*

  

---
  
The precarity of working in the creative industries, in particular as a
freelancer or within a small studio, induces anxiety. There is a belief
that the ⊞er as freelancer is empowered by their autonomy, but in fact
the ⊞er as worker is trapped by it. ⊞ is work and this work is believed
to be inherently good. Work in our society is understood as “an
individual moral practice and collective ethical obligation” which
shapes the worker's identity in positive ways (Weeks, 2011). The ⊞er
believes they are a skilled or talented worker, someone who possesses
spatial awareness, time management skills, and the capacity to carry out
work effectively and efficiently.   
  
⊞ers are entangled in the Protestant religious underpinnings of the
European work ethic (Pater, 2022). ⊞ is seen as a vocation which
expresses and creates the ⊞er's identity, and the process or its results
make a valuable contribution to society. People understand the world and
interact with it smoothly, thanks to the work of ⊞ers. ⊞ers pick the
right materials to save the planet and increase efficiency and whatever
else it is people find important. But the ⊞er becomes anxious despite
meeting these goals and becoming this person. In reality, the ⊞er is a
bot, the ⊞er is software. Value is extracted from their time, creativity
and expertise which makes them stressed. ⊞ers are a creative cloud, a
service to be tapped into, a cpu being run too hot. There is something
to be learnt from the revelation that being replaced by machines proves
we were being treated as machines all along.   
  
---

#### Geestelijk

  
There was a belief that ⊞ could be a crystal goblet (Warde, 1913),
something unbiased, clear and, in more recent versions of the theory,
serving the context it fits within. But the foundations of this belief
in functionality and rationality dont seem to come themselves from
something functional or rational.   
  
De Stijl members, such as Piet Mondriaan and Theo van Doesburg (Figure
6), in their 1917 manifesto described a “new consciousness of the age
\[…\] directed towards the universal”. There was a drive towards
universal standardisation or pureness of culture from the rich white
men. Purity is a concept that turns up a lot in Mondriaan's writings, eg
*Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art* (1917). They claimed a shared spirit
was driving this universalisation. A later paragraph of the manifesto is
translated into english as:  
  

>   “The artists of to-day have been driven the whole world over by the
>   same consciousness and therefore have taken part from an
>   intellectual point of view in this war against the domination of
>   individual despotism. They therefore sympathize with all who work
>   for the formation of an international unity in Life, Art, Culture,
>   either intellectually or materially.”

In this translation it appears the authors believed in an emerging
consciousness of the age, something collective which would bring an
international unity. The members of De Stijl were neither aligning
themselves with the capitalists or socialists but believed in an inner
connection between those who were joined in the spiritual body of the
new world (De Stijl, Manifesto III, 1921). The word intellectual, or
geestelijk in the original Dutch, can also be translated as “spiritual,
mental, ecclesiastical, clerical, sacred, ghostly, pneumatic”. The
choice to translate as intellectual seems to be the most rational
interpretation of this sentence, an effort to make the theories of De
Stijl appear more materialist without the spiritual element. Compare
with this translation:  
  

>   “The artists of today, all over the world, impelled by one and the
>   same consciousness, have taken part on the spiritual plane in the
>   world war against the domination of individualism, of arbitrariness.
>   They therefore sympathise with all who are fighting spiritually or
>   materially for the formation of an international unity in life, art
>   and culture.”

In this translation it is clearer that the members of De Stijl saw a
link between the effects of what they made materially and their attempts
to be fighting spiritually against the domination of individualism. I
care about this story because of how it contextualises contemporary ⊞
practice. Is contemporary ⊞ practice still involved in this spiritual
battle? Did the new consciousness of 1917 survive the past century, did
it procreate? Can aesthetics have generational trauma? William Morris,
Constructivism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, International Style, International
Typographic Style, Swiss Style, then what happened. Modernist artists
had spiritual beliefs, and again I care about these people from a
hundred years ago because of the effect they have on the present.   
  
Imagine I could trace this thought from Mondriaan all the way to myself,
wow, cool thesis. Swiss style became corporate identity ⊞ and encouraged
minimalism in ⊞. 21st century Flat ⊞, such as Metro ⊞ language from
Microsoft and Material ⊞ (Google, 2014), claim direct descendance from
the International Typographic Style and that pretty much brings us up to
date. I wonder about the use of the word Material in Google's ⊞
strategy, I wonder about the ghostly absence of the geestelijk fight of
De Stijl. Is Google's choice of name another example, as with the subtle
change in the translation above, that the spiritual element is no longer
as important a part of the ⊞er's worldview as it was a hundred years
ago?   
  
#### Excerpt from an interview with Conor Clarke, 1st December 2023

  
*Conor Clarke is a Director of ⊞ Factory, independent Irish ⊞ agency
based in Dublin. His work has featured in international publications
such as Who’s Who in Graphic ⊞*, *Graphis, Novum Gebrauchsgrafik, and
the New York Art Directors Club Annual. He was the recipient of the
Catherine Donnelly Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to ⊞
in Ireland and is the Course Director of ⊞ West, an international summer
⊞ school located in the beautiful village of Letterfrack on the West
Coast of Ireland*. (⊞west.eu, 2023)  



-   SK: What do you think is the best shape?
-   CC: Oh yeah, good god. square.
-   SK: Square? how come?
-   CC: Dunno, it just, it just seems resolved. I don't like spheres.
    Circles I sometimes like.
-   SK: Yeah, squares, do you use grids?
-   CC: Sometimes. Not always.
-   SK: Once you have grids squares make sense. But you like squares
    maybe because you like logos?
-   CC: If I'm in an art gallery and I see, you know Joseph Albers
    (Figure 5) or something I just kind of feel, I just like, or
    Malevich i just like that stuff. If I see a Kandinsky and all those
    squiggles and circles it just, that just kind of upsets me a little
    bit.
-   SK: That's a bit chaotic?
-   CC: Yeah. And even if I'm looking at Vermeer I can see some kind of
    square structure and logic, for some reason that always appeals to
    me.
-   SK: Things are a bit organised when there's squares around?
-   CC: Yeah. And really great artists who don't work that way I look at
    their stuff and think well that's just beyond me.
-   SK: Its something else?
-   CC: Yeah. so yeah.
-   SK: At least you didn't say triangle.
-   CC: Oh good god. Good god no.

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---

#### Maths and grids

  
Why not choose a spiral or a circle if you dream of ⊞ers as shamans? Why
the grid of squares? There are strong links beween ⊞ and mathematics,
Josef Muller-Brockmann's *Grid Systems* (Figure 2) for example or Karl
Gerstner's *⊞ing Programmes* (1964). I read these ⊞ theorists as you
might comparatively read religious texts. What were or are the beliefs
of the authors and their audiences?  
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      

>   “To describe the problem is part of the solution. This implies: not
>   to make creative decisions as prompted by feeling but by
>   intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria
>   are, the more creative the work becomes.”
>   (Gerstner, 1964)

---

>   “This is the expression of a professional ethos: the ⊞er's work
>   should have the clearly intelligible, objective, functional and
>   aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking.”
>   (Muller-Brockman, 1981)

These texts present a worldview where ⊞ can be mathematical, objective
or problem-solving. In Muller-Brockman's text the focus is on the formal
qualities of the ⊞ in particular the use of grids and typographic
systems. Gerstner's focus is more on the effect of the ⊞, and the
ability of ⊞ to solve a problem. Rationality and creativity are
presented as proportional to eachother. He makes space for the
intellectual by pushing aside feelings.   
  
The graphic ⊞er is presented as a functional actor in society who makes
the world better. Gerstner seems to be implying that creative ⊞ comes
from following the intellect and some rational cause and effect process.
I find it interesting that ⊞ claims this rational basis in the same
historical period when science and mathematics, its supposed
foundations, became much less rational and predictable, for example in
chaos theory. It makes me think that the rationality serves some other
purpose.  
  
---

#### The ⊞ grid and the written word

  
Why do ⊞ers believe in using a grid to present the written word, and
where did this belief come from and how did it develop? It can be
materially traced back to Guthenberg and metal type but that's boring.
Magic squares have been used in astrology books and grimoires throughout
history (Figure 3). French poet Stéphane Mallarmé is sometimes quoted as
a precursor to modernist typography (Muller-Brockmann, 1981). Why did
Steve McCaffrey include the manifesto of De Stijl with *CARNIVAL*
(1973)? De Stijl is best known for its painters and architects, and
theories from both of these fields affected later ⊞ theories. But they
also were poets and had literary theories similar to the german
expressionists. Man's attempt to find oneness with the whole of creation
through a cosmic hybris.   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

>   “An artists’ book featuring a series of typewriter concrete poems
>   printed on perforated pages meant to be torn out and arranged into a
>   square of four. Complete with instructions, a reproduction of a de
>   Stijl manifesto from 1920, an errata slip, and publisher’s
>   promotional postcard.”
>   Description of Steve McCaffrey's *CARNIVAL*  
>   (The Idea of the Book, 2024)

---

  
The developments of the written word and its relationship to form in the
20th century is very much a part of the history of ⊞. I care about this
story because it affects contemporary practitioners. I believe there is
something magical in graphic composition and the layout of typography,
something that can't be grasped in the words alone. They're
non-canonical for ⊞ers but how have people who put words on pages like
Mallarmé and McCaffrey influenced my beliefs about the written word?
What makes one thing fit in the category of art, another ⊞ and yet
another concrete poetry?  
  
---

#### Mystically assigning or finding meanings in ⊞

  
This autoethnographic annotation attempts to really miss as many
cultural and technical cues as possible. It's watching the ⊞er, me, and
being totally mystified by their behaviour.   



1.  *A rhythm exists and I wonder why. There is music and there are
    voices, and my fingers press the keys and the colours of the screen
    flicker and morph. There appears to be a life or energy flowing
    somewhere between these things and I am curious about it.*
2.  *The screen shimmers between different symbols, letters, images. The
    colours are symbolic. White means the ground, although sometimes it
    switches to white symbols on a dark ground. They are full of meaning
    and relationship. I press two buttons to the left of the keyboard
    and the screen answers with a flicker.*
3.  *I count out loud to 40. It symbolises both the number of pages to
    be made and the enormity of the task. It represents a period in the
    desert, long but with an end in sight. What is the relationship of
    the desert to the stars? If the screen can flicker from a dark to a
    light ground, is it possible for the sky to also switch from day to
    night?*
4.  *I have taken three of the forty steps.*
5.  *I have taken seven of the forty steps.*
6.  *⊞ is a series of movements and reconfigurations. It is a creative
    act and one of elision. I use the keyboard to communicate my will to
    the machine with commands such as “Ctrl+C” and “Ctrl+V”. I firstly
    inform the computer that I wish to control it. Each letter has a
    deep and layered meaning. CVCVCVCVCVCVCVCVCV. “Alt+Tab” asks the
    screen to flicker. The computer must match my multithreading. It
    must be prepared to follow my changing demands in our shared focus.
    FAVCV. F is to seek, but it is optimistically labelled to find. I
    enter the incorrect combination of symbols (“samle”) the incantation
    is useless and I will not find what I seek. I try again “sample” and
    the computer gives me what I desire. Why does the machine demand
    perfection? Why does it value perfection in me, what is it trying to
    teach me? Why wont it leave me alone?*
7.  *I have taken eleven of the forty steps. I will rest.*

  
---

#### What does ⊞ do? What is the ⊞er trying to do by pressing all these buttons and making the screen vibrate?

  

>   *“*⊞ only generates longing”
>   (Van Der Velden, 2006)

I wasn't trying to generate longing, I was trying to make an annual
report. It was a corporate job I was working on, a nice one to have
because it's fairly well paid and not too complicated. A bit boring and
kinda repetitive, but you can just put your headphones on and get stuck
into it. I was pretty happy with the results in the end, but for sure
not the type of work you're supposed to be proud of as a ⊞er.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

>   *“*I found myself way over my head with, believe it or not, a
>   catalogue and price list for bathroom equipment. Nothing I’ve done
>   since has seemed as difficult.”
>   (Bierut, 2018)

And of course Piet Zwart's (Figure 8) famous electrical cable
catalogues. ⊞ is just work, chill. Is a ⊞er a user or a server? Maybe ⊞
is an example of our general belief in this dichotomy not quite making
sense or fitting reality. The ⊞er is working for whom? Themselves? Their
clients?  

---

  

>   *“*attempts to undo the privileged position of the agentive subject
>   can help us understand the strange status of repetitive and
>   quasi-robotic labour in today's digital age.”
>   (Hu, 2022)

This quote relates to freelancing generally in some way, and
deconstructing the work or worker. Are workers things? Yeah, kinda. ⊞ers
don't have super powers, contrary to some beliefs within the industry.
For example on what⊞cando.com it is suggested that we should “re⊞
everything!”. Let's actually not do that. ⊞ers are mostly just humans
working on computers like so many other bots. ⊞ers try to create
clarity, to assign meaning and understand: “Confusion and clutter are
failures of ⊞, not attributes of information” (Tufte, 1990, p.53). What
if the sounds of my fingers and my keyboard are not noise but music: we
are quasi-robots and maybe its good to listen to our little Taylorist
finger tappings and see what else is being said.  
  
---

#### Excerpt from an interview with the members of Distinctive Repetition.

  

Principal ⊞er Rossi McAuley is joined in this interview by ⊞ers
Jenny Leahy and Ben Nagle. This interview was carried out around a table
with the interviewer in the bottom right corner (◲) and the three
members of the studio in the other seats.  
  

-   ◲: whats your favourite colour?
-   ◰: red.
-   ◲: red.
-   ◱: really? thats it? are you fucking kidding me?
-   ◰: do i fill it in?
-   ◳: they're warm up questions obviously they're to get you
    comfortable answering questions.
-   ◳: yellow
-   ◲: if the seat of your consciousness was in your hands, like all of
    your feelings and your thoughts and your desires and your emotions
    come through your hands, can you describe to me the day that you've
    had so far please?
-   ◳: jelly that's not quite solid
-   ◳: not quite solidified in the fridge yet
-   ◳: and its just oozing through my fingers
-   (redacted sentence)
-   ◳: that's what today has been like but its my brain thats oozing out
    of me
-   ◲: yes. that's a good answer. ok will we keep going in a circle?
-   ◱: whatever you like bro.
-   ◲: do you ever dream about work?
-   ◱: all the time.
-   ◲: would you care to share one of those dreams?
-   ◱: they're always angst-ridden, never, they're never eh, they're
    never positive solution-solved things, we've always like lists and
    lists and lists of things to do they're never resolved they're
    always like shit we've, its, its always problematic, and its all the
    time.
-   ◳: weren't you taking grids out of drawers in a dream recently?
-   ◱: yeah yeah.
-   (obscured)
-   ◲: why were you taking grids out of drawers?
-   ◱: emm recently I had a dream where I was giving out to ◳ about not
    having things done, this ◳, participant two, about not having things
    done, and i was opening up drawers in my office and I was like, just
    use this grid and the drawers were full of grids and I was giving
    them to her and saying just fucking use those grids for fucks sake
    why don't we use those grids.

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---

#### About the interview

  
Before meeting them in person, I mailed a small booklet to the
interviewees entitled *Enthusiasm* to give context to the conversation.
The word enthusiasm originally meant inspiration or possession by a god.
The booklet recounted three mystical dreams René Descartes had which he
credited as a moment of inspiration or enthusiasm that influenced his
later work on rationalism, and related to his work on geometry and grids
(Figure 4). As well as the content of the dreams, the booklet described
their relevance:  
      
   “404 years ago on the night of the 10th November 1619, three dreams
   were dreamt. A 23-year old man is “filled with enthusiasm” and
   enters a feverish sleep in Ulm, Germany. In this process of
   enthusiasm and dreamwork, he discovers the foundations of a
   wonderful science. *The Method of Properly Guiding the Reason in the
   Search of Truth in the Sciences* will be suppressed by the churches,
   both Calvinist and Catholic. They are a threat to the world view,
   and a threat to religion. The cartesian grid uses measurements to
   estabish relationships. Cartesian geometry has let us fly spaceships
   and zone and divide land. Some things have happened. Some good
   things, some bad things. The link is broken or breaking or should be
   broken. It's rotting. Maybe there's a better way we can interpret
   these dreams now.”

Descartes felt that interpreting his dreams was an appropriate method to
develop a rational theory of skepticism, which led to some of the
philosophical foundations of modern scientific and mathematical
theories. The booklet also drew parallels with Martin Luther's
scrupulous doubt, “Only God and certain madmen have no doubts!”. Like
Descartes, Luther's new theories helped to give the basis for the
structure of thought for the following centuries. These stories were
presented together to direct the focus of the conversation towards
belief, rationalism and grids. The fact that rationalism is a belief
system, as pervasive as it may be, and suggestively hinting through its
<span style="letter-spacing: -0.2px">relationship with grids that there
is a relationship with ⊞.</span>  
  

>   ◳: jelly that's not quite solid, not quite solidified in the fridge
>   yet and its just oozing through my fingers

<!-- -->

They seem so sad it hurts to hear them talk about the oozing. Are you
supposed to put jelly in the fridge, it just needs time to settle right?
My nana used to put the jelly in the freezer. There's an instability in
how they talk in the interview for sure, or more a desire for stability.
Was it ever stable? Do you really want it to be? Its gooey and not the
way it should be but its still jelly and thats fun and its probably
delicious. Their hands are there as something that is for grasping and
jelly is there as something that can't be grasped. Is it terrifying, are
they resigned to it?   
  

>   ◱: they're always angst-ridden, never, they're never eh, they're
>   never positive solution-solved things, we've always like lists and
>   lists and lists of things to do they're never resolved they're
>   always like shit we've, its, its always problematic, and its all the
>   time.

I can't explain the angst they are feeling but I can describe it because
I've felt it too. It feels like I'm having a heart attack. It feels like
I'm about to black out. It got to a stage where I couldn't talk to other
people without being completely frozen jelly. It is the feeling of lists
and lists and lists. It's the feeling of never resolved, all the time.
We believe we are busy and under pressure and struggling to survive.
That makes us anxious and stressed.  
  

>   ◱: just fucking use those grids

<!-- -->

The grids are not being used, the grids are useless. Drawers full of
them, all useless. Whats the point of sitting here in this studio. They
dont fit, they dont make sense, they're trying to order something that
can't be ordered. Or possibly shouldnt be ordered, the ordering is
misplaced and there is a human urge to stop, just stop.  
  
#### Modern work

  
  

>   “A cause becomes unmodern at the moment when our feelings revolt,
>   and as soon as we feel ourselves becoming ridiculous”
>   Adolf Loos, *On Thrift,* 1924 (Loos, 2019)

  
  
Adolf Loos was a modernist architect whose writings such as *Ornament
and Crime* in 1910 influenced modernist ideals of functionalism and
minimalism. He rejected ornament and favoured the use of good materials
which showed “God's own wonder”. I wonder what is the relation of Loos'
ideas to Max Weber's *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*
(Weber, 1905) that was published five years earlier. Work as a duty
which benefits the individual and society as a whole, do ⊞ers still
believe this today? I like taking Loos' quote out of context here,
instead in the context of the feelings of the interviewees, revolting
the supposedly modern cause they are working with. But also Loos was found guilty of pedophelia and it feels kind of
aggressive to include his voice here at all. This is part of the point
of what I'm getting at: there's this tradition of ⊞ and so many parts of
it make me uncomfortable or really disgusted and I don't know what to do
with all that. I just wanted to go to art school and draw circles and
maybe thats the problem and sure simple materials are pretty, but yeah
jelly is exactly what it feels like, you're right.  
  
Graphic ⊞ is often performed by paid professionals in what is known as
the creative industry: as a profession and an activity, ⊞ is considered
to be creative. There are some positive preconceptions about the
creative industry and what it does, but I see it as an assimilation of
cultural activity into a neoliberal economic framework. Creativity in
this context is used to reproduce the status quo and and grow capital
(Mould, 2018). But maybe we can profit from examining the margins
created by this terminology: ⊞ is less functional than it seems. People
in creative jobs are stressed and this is reflected in their dreams.
Workers have rights and those rights are systemically undermined. Being
self employed or part of an independent studio brings anxiety and
challenges. Some ⊞ers try to structure the world around them and like
things to be neat and tidy, which makes us uncomfortable existing in
precarious work conditions.  
  
---

#### The Roman grid

  
The Roman grid was a land measurement method used in the Roman colonies
for example in the Po Valley (Figure 7). With a surveying tool called
the groma, the colonisers would divide the land from north to south and
east to west, resulting in a square grid of roads and land. At Orange,
France, a cadaster has been found which shows the division of land in a
geometric way, helping the colonisers to privatise the land and allocate
it to roman veterans (Figure 1). The name groma, as well as referring to
the surveying tool, describes the central point of the grid, the origin.
Is making grids just a way to control and colonise? Do all grids have
origins? In Descartes' use of the grid there was also an attempt to
order and structure chaos:  
  

>   “the grid allowed an embrace of complexity: curved lines that could
>   be described by mathematical formulas, and thereby were not a sign
>   of chaos but an expression of the divine mathematical order assumed
>   to be underlying nature.”
>   (Driessen, 2020)

A part of the belief systems of ⊞ers is that the world is chaotic and
their role is to order it or even simplify it. This belief may be
inherited from a wider cultural belief of the same general drive: to
order and simplify. Humans try to make sense of the world. ⊞ers make
sense of ⊞ briefs and structure them into something understandable to an
audience or target market.   

---

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

>   ◱: for fucks sake why don't we use those grids

<!-- -->

Is there an answer to this question, do they know the answer to this
question? I get the impression they have a gut feeling about the answer
but are afraid of it.  
  
#### An analysis of a joke about ⊞ in the early 21st century

  
When reviewing the AIGA Next conference in Denver Colorado, 2008, ⊞
critic Adrian Shaughnessy tells a joke:  
  

>   “The venue was shared with a beer festival, but it was easy to tell
>   the ⊞ers from the beer fans. The beer fans were more serious.”
>   (Shaughnessy, 2013)

This joke is funny because in the setup where it is easy to tell them
apart, the reader should assume the beer fans are drunk and therefore
raucous, misbehaving or maybe just having a lot of fun. But then he
unexpectedly suggests that they were in fact more serious than the ⊞ers.
This gives the reader a problem to address: is he claiming the ⊞ers were
even more outrageous than what we assumed of the beer fans, or the beer
fans were in fact taking their own conference seriously? As both seem
unbelievable the true funniness of the joke hits home in it's implied
meaning: ⊞ers are boring as fuck.  


---

#### An annotation of my practices as a graphic ⊞er on a typical working day, 23rd October 2023

  

1.  *I read an email*
2.  *and*
3.  *I type*
4.  *Alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab alt tab ctrl c ctrl
    v ctrl c ctrl v ctrl c ctrl v ctrl c ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v
    ctrl v ctrl v ctrl v*

---

  
⊞ers interact with the computer through keyboard and mouse usage.
Compared to other computer users, my interaction involves lots of
pressing of function keys, something common with other technical
computer users and not so much with other creative workers. What is
creative in the repetitive and low level operation of a computer? Is a
pianist creative? What's the difference, I think they are being creative
in different ways. ⊞ers and other specialists like video editors or
photo colourists are using a computer as a tool, the musician is
performing on an instrument. Maybe this distinction doesn't have to be
so clear though. I am questioning this here because I think there is
some fairly complicated belief system about artists and their tools that
has had an effect on ⊞ers. ⊞ gives itself a history of conflict and
harmony between artisans and industrialisation, for example in Bauhaus
founder Walter Gropius claiming William Morris as a precursor (Bayer,
1975).   
  
I think it is important to show that ⊞ers are workers with tools, their
repetitive tasks are a form of labour as are their creative processes.
In the annotation opposite my aim is to mystify the manual and digital
labour, rather than demystify the creative ideation part.   
  
Following this annotation I made a digital tool to record all keystrokes
on my computer. Then I printed them out with a pen plotter to celebrate
the labour that had taken place. It took several hours to plot the
keylogging data from just a few minutes of the ⊞er's labour.   
  
---

#### LibreOffice

  

1.  *I have no idea what any of this structuring does. And I don't care.
    But I would like to remove the page title from the export. It is in
    another tab called User Interface. I also select only page 1 to save
    to PDF. Now I run into a software issue in this workflow: the best
    software for the next part of the job is Adobe Acrobat Pro. How
    aggressively do I want to remove this software from my workflow? Not
    aggressively enough I guess because here I am still using it. I
    don't know any other software that really gives me details of how a
    document will print or lets me edit PDFs on such a useful level.*
2.  *For example the title still exported (it always does, is this a
    LibreOffice bug or just I don't know what to do with the new
    software yet?). It takes two seconds to remove in edit mode in
    Acrobat. I also delete the page number, I don't even know how to
    turn that off from LibreOffice. The print dialogue in Acrobat is
    also so powerful, its so easy to print actual size which is
    important to me. It is structured and reliable. *

Like many other ⊞ers, I was trained to only use Adobe products. I try to
switch to open source alternatives because I believe in using software
developed and maintained by a community rather than a private company,
and as a worker believe I should be in control of my tools. In this
annotation, I was trying to ⊞ and export a single page document in
LibreOffice, an open source desktop publishing software. The
documentation reflects on my frustrations and struggles to switch to a
workflow that relies less on proprietary software for print ⊞.   
  
Proprietary software from big mean tech corporations is based on a model
of society and economy where a few people own things and everybody else
has a hard time. I believe the internet gives an opportunity for
knowledge (including software code) to be shared. I like the idea of
modifying my tools, this is easier technically and legally with open
source software. I would prefer my tools to be developed by me and my
peers. These are some of my beliefs as a ⊞er about my work and my tools.
They're a bit idealistic but also optimistic in a good way.  
  

>   *my god im trying to use scribus to prepare a booklet*  
>   *im going crazy*  
>   *im going crazy*
>   (kamo, 2024)

Transitioning to open source software sucks. I spent years learning
other tools and its like starting all over again. There is a dual
commitment in my beliefs about how my tools should be built and my
desire to get things done in a reasonable amount of time. My action of
fumbling with open source programs reflects my belief that they are
worthwhile, and my action of still using Adobe Acrobat Pro reflects my
belief that there are better things to do with my time than restarting
software when it crashes again. Some parts of graphic ⊞ have become so
entangled in capitalist ways of working, it can be immobilising to try
to act without engaging with the icky parts. Our dependencies on
ecosystems of tools and workflows are not enforced, but it can be
difficult to exist outside them, or more specifically, beside them.  
  

>   *"And I don't care." *

It's so obviously not true. The conflict of wanting to change my
workflow with wanting to complete my work tasks efficiently doesn't keep
me up at night, but it is important to me and other ⊞ers. Open source ⊞
software is unreliable and unstandardised, it takes longer to do things
and then when they are nearly done the program crashes and I've lost all
my work. The standards of open source software have not been widely
embraced by the ⊞ community. To fit into a workflow with peers you have
to use Adobe products. Even web ⊞ers who engage with open standards can
find the need to work with proprietary software, because these tools are
deeply integrated into the workflows of their peers. Can you send me
that in a normal file format please, I can't open it.   
   

#### Work Sans

  

1.  *The font is Work Sans SemiBold and it is set in 10pt, colour
    "automatic". I think even if it wasn't automatic I would make it
    black, because I want to print it clearly and cheaply. I use Work
    Sans because I am trying to switch to using Open Font Licence and
    open source fonts more generally. Previously I would have used
    Helvetica Now or some other proprietary font. There is a visual
    difference between these fonts too which is also relevant buuuuut
    this description is getting very detailed maybe not right now.*


Similarly to the software changes, this documentation of my practice
sees me choosing open source fonts. I'm really ambivalent about this. I
do like the idea of being able to modify a font when needed, but I have
done so regardless of whether the font licence allows it. I'm more
comfortable ethically with a font being open source. Buying fonts is
expensive for freelancers and small studios, and open source fonts are
more commonly free of charge. Many ⊞ers pirate fonts rather than buy
them, or are locked into a font subscription. In Adobe software, Adobe
subscription fonts don't load unless a connection to the creative cloud
is verified.  
  
For my work, fonts are also a tool, one that I need to practice with and
one that needs to be suitable for the job. So changing font is a little
like a ceramicist changing clay. Work Sans is good for online use
because Google Fonts serves it as a web font for free, the open source
font I want to use is served most reliably by a large corporation I have
issues with. This balancing act of practical considerations and
idealistic beliefs is kind of ironic and reminds me again that my values
can be inconsistent and to me a bit funny.   
   
The use of fonts as tools is full of tensions from ⊞ers' belief systems.
Like many ⊞ers, I want to use open source fonts. I also want to use
fonts that will load quickly from a content delivery network for web
projects. I also want fonts to be cheap and well made and I am
interested in fonts that are free. The internet is full of illegal and
pirated copies of fonts that are not supposed to be free of charge. I
sometimes receive or am asked to send font files outside of their
licence. I dont have a huge amount of respect for some of these
licences. But at the same time font ⊞ers are my friends and colleagues,
I have ⊞ed fonts. What does a ⊞er's actual use of fonts say about their
beliefs around copyright? Do ⊞ers believe in intellectual property? What
value do ⊞ers, specifically typographers, see in their work and that of
their close peers, the font ⊞ers, and how does copyright relate to these
values?  

---

---

#### Follow up questions for Conor

  
Hey Conor, hope you're keeping well these days? I've been going through
the interview from back in December and was wondering if you would mind
me including this piece in my thesis:  
  
I guess the thesis has become a lot about ⊞ers and the beliefs they have
about their work, and its effect on the world around them. I was really
interested in your answer to this question because I think it shows
something a lot of other ⊞ers including me feel too; some desire to
structure the world around us, to have things be resolved, organised,
fitting together. And not just a desire but maybe even a belief that
this is really what our job is for? Maybe I'm reading too much into it,
but to me this maybe hints at part of the reason we're am drawn to a
field like graphic ⊞? Curious to know what you think.  
  
And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im totally
fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.    
  
Thanks,  
Stephen  

---

---  

#### Follow up questions for ◱

  
Yo ◱, hope all's good with you these days?   
  
I've been piecing together the interviews from December and I'd love to
include this section about your dream if that's alright with you? It
seems to get at something I feel as well: this system that we've built
up and these drawers full of grids, sometimes there's an angst or
unresolved feeling that they're not going to work, they dont fit as an
answer to the problem.   
  
For me I think it might be something to do with order and chaos if that
doesn't seem too much of a stretch, I've this need to structure things
and fit them in a form, and the dream seems to get at that fear that
it's not going to work. The grid is solid but reality turns out to be
jelly at best, but very often custard and little bits of tinned
strawberry and soggy sponge.   
  
I assumed the dream is about the pressure or anxiety of running a
studio? I wonder for you, do you see it more relating to the work itself
or the management around that, or are these things that you consider
separate from eachother? I'm curious to know if you think of it the same
way, or maybe it's something else to you and I'm projecting :)  
  
And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im totally
fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.  
  
Thanks,  
Stephen  

---

---  

#### Follow up questions for ◳

  
Hey ◳, hope youre good!   
  
I'm thinking of putting this section of the interview we did back in
december in my thesis. Is that ok with you? I want to include it because
I think it really captures some emotions that ⊞ers feel quite often,
some stress or anxiety or an attempt to grab onto something more stable.
But I also find it really interesting that you were talking about jelly
slipping through your hands, any idea why you didn't say sand or mud or
gold but jelly? To me it seems like a fun and cute material to pick,
even though its a bit lumpy and maybe even kinda gross sometimes.   
  
I've been really interested in foods made of gelatin recently and
there's something so mesmerising about them even though they're never
the most appetising, and for sure unnatural or over-processed. Maybe you
just said it off hand, but it makes sense to me as well about being a
⊞er in some way? Something enjoyable and lovable about the jelly despite
its weird unnatural wiggliness. Really interested to know if you have
any thoughts or maybe you meant something completely different.  
  
And if youre uncomfortable with being included in this way, Im totally
fine with anonymising, removing, or editing.    
  
Thanks,  
Stephen  

---

#### Conclusion

  
The title of this document, ⊞, was borrowed from the mathematical theory
of free probability where it symbolises free additive convolution, a way
of relating terms that is more nuanced than traditional ideas of cause
and effect. In the fragmented look at ⊞ in this document, which we've
reached the end of now, I hope to have done something similar: a
convoluted addition, freely placing things together to be held for a
moment.   
  
⊞ involves a wide range of activities; typing, drawing grids,
communicating with other specialists, quoting, drinking coffee, working
out of office hours, having panic attacks, arguing, building myths,
personal expression, keyboard shortcuts, dreaming, rubbing paper and
exhaling, tilting your head and looking at the screen. We have examined
when and how these actions happen, and more importantly, why they do,
according to the ⊞ers carrying them out.   
  
These stories were gathered through various modes of describing,
listening and understanding. It is important that these are different
from conventional ways to frame the discipline, as I think a shift in
viewpoint is needed. So not “⊞er as Author” (Rock, 1996), “⊞er as
salesperson” (Pater, 2021) but instead ⊞er “sitting at the machine,
thinking” (Brodine, 1990) or “⊞er without qualities” (Lorusso, 2023).
The fragments have been situated and subjective rather than objective,
they have been outside of categories because the categories are broken
anyway.   
  
---

---

#### Conclusion

  
Last night I dreamt I was standing on a hill in the Swiss Alps and you
were there and all of our friends and the hill was covered in little
fields but not like a grid like lots of different shapes and sizes and
the sky opened in two and a ring of light so bright it nearly blinded me
came out of my chest and yours and they all merged into eachother and
everyone opened their mouths to sing and the air was filled with so many
sounds and one ⊞er walked up to me and smiled and said   


<br>  
<br>  
<br>  

<div class="stephen-conc">
  
-   “I dunno, I'm more confused than ever”

</div>

<br>  
<br>  
<br>  
 
<div class="stephen-conc">
 
-   and they said 
</div>
 
<br>  
<br>  
<br>  

<div class="stephen-conc">
-   and then you said
</div>

---  

<div class="stephen-conc">
-   “a funny feeling its a bit weird”
</div>

<br>  
<br>  
<br>  

<div class="stephen-conc">
-   “I'm just trying to touch it gently and acknowledge it” 

</div>
<br>  
<br>  
<br>  

<div class="stephen-conc">
-   “live the gap between where you are and where you could be” 
</div>

<br>
<br>
<br>  
and then I was them and you were me and we laughed and fell over and the
hill turned into a bright pink jelly ocean the whole sky was this sort
of green-blue and we all surfed wobbly waves and some people's
surfboards were Quiksilver and some they had built themselves from a git
repository but the sun was a walnut and it was definitely moving but I
couldnt tell was it rising or setting but it didn't matter to us the
surf was great and everything smelled like magnolias.  
  

<div class="bibliography">

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</div>

#### Acknowledgements


Thanks to Ada, Aglaia, Ben, Chae, Conor, Irmak, Jenny, Joseph, kamo,
Leslie, Manetta, Marloes, Michael, Rossi.