How a border is defined? How, as an entity, does it define? How is it performed? I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming from a country of the European South that constitutes a rigid, violent border that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees. In the following chapter, I will attempt to explore the terrain of material borders in relation to bureaucracy as another multi-layered filter.
[Front-facing camera at self-counter in LIDL]
![Front-facing camera at self-counter in LIDL]
What constitutes a border? Is it a wall, a line, a fence, a machine, a door, an armed body or a wound on the land? When somebody crosses a border are they consciously aware of the act of crossing? I am crossing the pedestrian street and walking on the white stripes to reach the pedestrian route right across. Are the white stripes a border or a territory to be crossed to reach another situation? Does the way I perform my walking when I step onto the white stripes change? Is there any embodied knowledge about what could be classified as border? Under which circumstances does this knowledge become canonical? I hop over a fence that separates one garden from another. What if instead of assuming that the fence is a device or a furniture or a material of enclosure, it is just part of the same land? The process or act of jumping a fence can be itself a moment of segregation and a moment of re-establishing or demonstrating the bordering function of it.
<p>Wink is a platform which contains a children’s story I wrote called Bee Within and am making into an interactive experience, in relation to my research. Throughout this year, I hosted three workshop with kids between the ages 6-8 where we read "Bee Within" and played improvisation games around this theme; games including sound, acting, drawing. The main aim is to make the reading experience more fun for children and to make them re-visit the text to read through the multiple narratives in the story. </p>
<divid="content"><h1id="title">Title</h1>
<p>Wink- A Prototype for Interactive Children’s Literature ### Grad
project Description Wink is a platform which contains a children’s story
I wrote called Bee Within and am making into an interactive experience,
in relation to my research. Throughout this year, I hosted three
workshop with kids between the ages 6-8 where we read “Bee Within” and
played improvisation games around this theme; games including sound,
acting, drawing. The main aim is to make the reading experience more fun
for children and to make them re-visit the text to read through the
<p>Another thing that came out of our first two sessions was the <em>One
Sentence Ritual</em>. Each week for six weeks in a row, we wrote down a
ritual of our own and took turns performing the ritual from the list.
Coffee fortune-telling, hard drive purifications, collective eating,
sound meditations, and talking to worry dolls made us reflect on the
content of the week and our lives.</p>
<p>:::::</p>
<divid="content"><h1id="console-special-issue-xx">Console: Special Issue XX</h1>
<p>Console is an oracle; an emotional first aid kit that helps you help
yourself. Console invites you to open the box and discover ways of
healing. Console provides shelter for your dreams, memories and worries.
Face the past and encounter your fortune. Console gives you a new
vantage point; a set of rituals and practices that help you cope and
care. Console asks everyday questions that give magical answers.</p>
<p>Special Issue XX was co-published by xpub and Page Not Found, Den
Haag. With guest editors Lídia Pereira ♈︎and Artemis Gryllaki ♐ we
unraveled games and rituals, mapping the common characteristics and the
differences between games and rituals in relation to ideology and
counter-hegemony. We practiced, performed and annotated rituals,
connected (or not) with our cultural backgrounds while we questioned the
magic circle. We dived into the worlds of text adventure games and
clicking games while drinking coffee. We talked about class, base,
superstructure, (counter)hegemony, ideology and materialism. We
discussed how games and rituals can function as reproductive
technologies of the culture industries. We annotated games, focusing on
the role of ideology and social reproduction. We reinterpreted bits of
the world and created stories from it (modding, fiction, narrative)
focusing on community, interaction, relationships, grief and
healing.</p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Console box with instruction book, games and ritual objects, produced in an edition of XX." />
<imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="SIXX Licence reading ceremony at Page Not Found. The copyleft licence for this object included (in additional permission 4b) a term specifying the ritual absorption of intellectual property." />
<imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Screenprinted book cover, from The Upside Down Oracolotto card." />
<imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Fiction Friction gameplay at Page Not Found" /></p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Oracolotto readings at Page Not Found." /> <imgsrc="imagename.jpg"
alt="Wheel of Fortune healing exercise at Page Not Found." /> <img
<p>Another thing that came out of our first two sessions was the <em>One
Sentence Ritual</em>. Each week for six weeks in a row, we wrote down a
ritual of our own and took turns performing the ritual from the list.
Coffee fortune-telling, hard drive purifications, collective eating,
sound meditations, and talking to worry dolls made us reflect on the
content of the week and our lives.</p>
<p>:::::</p>
<divid="content"><p>z— title: tty special issue 21 author: Stephen</p>
<hr/>
<h1id="tty-special-issue-21">TTY: Special Issue 21</h1>
<p>why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points
of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing
machine, an “expression-scriber,” if you will, then I would have a kind
of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang &
use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet,
head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps,
itches, I’d have magnetically recorded, at the same time, &
translated into word or perhaps even the final xpressed thought/feeling
wd not be merely word or sheet, but itself, the xpression, three
dimensional-able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard
or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm. A
typewriter is corny!!</p>
<p>Amiri Baraka, Technology & Ethos,
http://www.soulsista.com/titanic/baraka.html</p>
<p>This issue started from a single technical object: a Model 33
Teletype machine. The teletype is the meeting point between typewriters
and computer interfaces, a first automated translator of letters into
bits. Equipped with a keyboard, a transmitter and a punchcard
read-writer, it is a historical link between early transmission
technology such as the telegraph and the Internet of today. Under the
administration of our kubernētēs, Martino Morandi, each week hosted a
guest contributor who joined us in unfolding the many cultural and
technical layers that we found stratified in such a machine, reading
them as questions to our contemporary involvements with computing and
with networks.</p>
<p>The format of the issue consisted of on an on-going publishing
arrangement, constantly re-considered and escaping definition at every
point in spacetime, a sort of Exquisite Corpse Network. It evaded
naming, location, and explanation; the Briki, the Breadbrick, the Worm
Blob. A plan to release weekly bricks was wattled by a shared
understanding of time into something more complex in structure, less
structured in complexity.</p>
<p>Initially, the week’s caretakers were responsible for collecting
materials from our guest contributions, which included lectures,
collective readings, hands-on exercises, an excursion to the Houweling
Telecom Museum, Rotterdam and another to Constant, Brussels. The
caretakers were responsible for recording audio, editing notes,
transcribing code, taking pictures, and making lunch. Meanwhile the
week’s editors were responsible for coming up with a further step in how
the publishing progressed, by adding new connections and interfaces,
creating languages, plotting strikes and cherishing memories. This mode
of publishing made us develop our own collective understandings of
inter-operation, of networked care and access, backward- and
forward-compatibility, obsolence and futurability.</p>
<p>Teletypewriters ushered in a new mode of inscription of writing: if
the typewriter set up a grid of letters and voids of the same size,
turning the absence of a letter (the space) into a key itself (the
spacebar), the teletypewriter finished it by inscribing the space in the
very same material as all other letters: electrical zeros and ones, that
were to immediately leave the machine. The Teletype Model 33, one of the
most widely produced and distributed text-based terminals in the 1970s,
introduced multiple technological concretizations that are present in
the computers of today as a sort of legacy, such as the qwerty keyboard
with control keys, the ascii character encoding and the TTY terminal
capability. We have created short-circuits that allow us to remember
otherwise technical progress and computational genealogies.</p>
<p>TTY was produced in april-june 2023 as special issue 21 with guest
editor Martino Morandi, and contributors Andrea di Serego Alighieri,
Femke Snelting, Isabelle Sully, Jara Rocha, Roel Roscam Abbing, and
Zoumana Meïté.</p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="An inscription performance using the TeleType Model 33 and a 40m stairwell." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="A reading and writing of poetry using pedestrians and vinyl quotes." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Gesture Glossary (screenshot or gif? maybe several): how a body language is documented, how it expands, how it is capable of creating or enhancing identities." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"alt="It would have been better to fuck."/>
<imgsrc="imagename.png"alt="maybe an image at the telecom museum"/>
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Wiki strike screenshot: embedding hidden comments in a wiki to highlight the invisible labour, to provide comprehensive details about our intentions and the underlying ideas while maintaining the wiki’s regular functionality." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Hey Babe arduino based telephone experience. Callers can listen to love stories, excerpts from conversations at the Houweling Telecom Museum, Rotterdam, parts from the documentary The Phantom of the Operator and a collective reading experience on binary systems, time, worms and pebbles." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="I’ve fallen in love with you and I have no idea what to do about it. Phone cards inviting participation in “Hey Babe”. Someone holding it in the street?" />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Encoding Convertor: the wacky world of character en-coding." /></p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Overlap screenshot (or is there an image from when we were working on it in the MD room?) We have a bag full of planets, stars, our favorite moments, darkest fears, best intentions and worst feelings. Our bag is now in the middle, its ready for you to discover and see the networks of our minds, make knots in the middle or intervene with what we call is a collective memory of few xpubbers." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Hexalogue booklet. A conversation for six voices is encoded and documented in a script." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Hexalogue reading in Constant, Brussels." /> <img
do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and what does
“graphic design” even mean?!????!!1!?</h1>
<p>An investigation into the practices and ideologies of graphic design
in 2023–24 though practice-led artistic research and ethnographic
methods. I held graphic design in my hands using ethnography, toolmaking
and performance as research methods. I examined how a designer spends
their time in everyday life, this designer, me, as well as you, what are
we doing? What are our worldviews, belief systems, mythologies and
ideologies?</p>
<p><em>What do graphic designers do all day and why do they do it and
what does “graphic design” even mean?!????!!1!?</em> is an assessment of
what the term “graphic design” means to its practitioners today. Through
experimental ethnographic research methods and the development of
reflexive tools, the project highlights and questions the boundaries
that exist around this apparent category. The research focuses on my own
practices as well as other people and groups that identify with “graphic
designer” as a label. The research was both conducted by and shared with
interested parties in the form of the tools themselves, as well as a
series of performances. There is no strict distinction between the
research and its publication. The tools were released in an iterative
cycle throughout the process of the project, and the research is
conducted through the performative use and development of these
tools.</p>
<p>This research is carried out in three intersecting methods:
experimental ethnographic research, reflexive tools, and performative
research. Keylogging, performance of personal work habits, interviews
about the manual work of “immaterial labourers”, and dream analysis are
combined in order to uncover less obvious and less discussed aspects of
what a designer is and does in their daily life, as entry points to
their worldviews, belief systems, mythologies or ideologies. The methods
were developed in an iterative process that reflected on findings from
the previous prototypes. The research took into account its own
publication as part of one process.</p>
<oltype="1">
<li><p>Experimental ethnographic research methods: I documented my own
practices as a graphic designer for nine months. Sometimes based on
technical observations of my interaction with my tools, primarily my
laptop computer and the software on it. I conducted interviews with
designers. I recorded the interviews. I had prompts to open the
discussion such as reading material and weird tools to try with them. I
will carry out auto-ethnographic research using experimental methods
such as mouse tracking and unusual annotation methods. I shared the
results of this research as a series of interactive publications (tools)
with a small but selected audience of people who are involved in these
processes and who would benefit from it.</p></li>
<li><p>Reflexive tools: Software and hardware tools that explore the
boundaries of “graphic design” as a category. For example at the
boundaries between graphic design and other disciplines. At the
boundaries between work and play, or between design and art. These tools
malfunction in order to explore what it even means to be working. The
tools aim to highlight what a graphic designer does by interacting with
their user in ways that the designers standard tools do not (for example
an interface to connect musical instruments to the designers workflow),
or conversely by amplifying how the designer usually interacts with
their tools (for example a keylogger to celebrate and focus on the use
of the keyboard). The tools are digital in nature and involve software
and hardware interventions into the graphic designers work.</p></li>
<li><p>Performative research: I see all the methods above as having a
performative element. For example the ethnographic-slash-performative
act of answering my emails on a large screen in front of an audience,
research which was carried out as part of this project at Leeszaal,
Rotterdam West on November 7th 2023. By showing directly the work
practices of graphic designers to an audience, or their interaction with
the tools mentioned above, I am publishing through performance the daily
activities of designers and my aim is to show these practices without
the conventional lenses they are seen through. To be contrasted for
example with how graphic design is presented on behance.net or in a
bookshop, this performative approach will highlight the mythologies and
practices of the graphic designer.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I made this to explore why designers make design, based on Clifford
Geertz’s ideas of why humans make culture: “to affirm it, defend it,
celebrate it, justify it and just plain bask in it” (Geertz, 1973). This
exploration will also involve less constructive actions like
participating, dissociating, questioning, protesting, destroying and
disregarding. There is a disconnect between the narratives about
“graphic design” and the effects it is known to have on its audiences,
practitioners, and society in more general terms. I am attempting to
“loosen the object” of graphic design (Berlant, 2022), to make the
definition less defined and maybe more useful or easier to engage with.
This shit could be better. Its urgent for the people being exploited by
it, to break the inequalities it serves to maintain, to expose what it
hides, to improve things that are definitely working but not in a good
way. Design can hide and reproduce inequalities in its output and also
dominate workers in its practices. This research starts primarily from
the bodies and actions of the practitioners so will primarily engage
with the effects on and by these bodies.</p>
<p><imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="The result of a tool that connects musical instruments to a pen plotter, using an arduino module. I created this tool to cross the boundary of “graphic design” as a discipline separate from music." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="A performative tool that measures the laziness of the designer as they work and graphs it on a pen plotter. The less the designer uses the mouse, the longer a line the pen plotter will draw." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="A performative autoethnographic research of graphic design practices, in this case answering emails using Google’s Gmail service. Leeszaal, Rotterdam West, November 7th 2023" />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Collective performative dream re-enactment at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, Netherlands. February 5th 2024." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Collective performative dream re-enactment at Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz, Austria. March 11th 2024." />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="Keyboard of things designers have said." /> <img
src="imagename.png"
alt="keylogging research, recording the buttons a graphic designer presses while working" />
<imgsrc="imagename.png"
alt="do you ever dream about work? online research" /></p>
Stephen Kerr
6 months ago