Above: Donald Knuth, introduction to Fundamental Algorithms: The Art of Computer Programming, 1968.

BY ROB GIAMPIETRO & DAVID REINFURT

0 — May I speak now?

1 — Of course. I didn’t mean to get carried away, but…

0 — You mentioned typesetters. While preparing the second edition of The Art of Computer Programming in the early 1980s, Donald Knuth received the galley proofs and was quite upset by what he saw. His publisher had just switched to a digital typesetting system and the typographic quality of this edition was far below the first. Knuth realized that typesetting only meant arranging 0’s and 1’s (ink and no ink) in the proper pattern, and figured, as a computer programmer, he could do something about it. He spent the next ten years developing TeX as a language for writers to directly produce high-quality typesetting. As opposed to industry-standard page layout programs that implement a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) paradigm, TeX produces “What You See Is What You Mean” (WYSIWYM) by using plain text files and a semantic mark-up language compiled on-the-fly to produce final pages.

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Above, top: Internet Archive Headquarters, San Francisco. Above, bottom: Internet Archive Mirror Services, Bibliotheca Alexandria.

BY ROB GIAMPIETRO & DAVID REINFURT

0 — To begin let me ask straight out: are there any off-limit areas?

1 — I certainly can’t think of any, apart from the music, of course.

0 — I’ve recently been thinking about libraries, and I know this is a conversation we’ve shared off and on for a while. Perhaps I’ll pick it back up, now.

The first libraries were based on an Archive model, a safe place for important records. They housed mostly commercial transactions and inventories recorded on clay tablets. As the library developed, it retained this archival function, but on July 1, 1731, Benjamin Franklin and the Leather Apron Club of Philadelphia established the first public Circulating Library. Books were quite expensive at the time and by pooling resources, many volumes could be shared among contributing members. One was free to borrow any book for a length of time, return it, and borrow another. This new Library was built to expand and evolve, a shifting arrangement of ideas and objects constantly circulating in a concentrated community of committed readers.

In recent years yet another library model has materialized, specifically online, which might be called the Distributing Library. The Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg are perhaps examples, where a large collection of documents are collected together electronically and made available free for download. Instead of 50,000 books, one copy each, sealed in an Archive; or 15,000 books, a few copies each, all constantly circulating; the Distributing Library offers any number of “books,” with unlimited copies, all available free to be downloaded, digested, dispersed. Now, if the Archive Model essentially treats books as Capital, investing them back into the institution in order to reinforce and expand the reach of the library and the Circulating Library constitutes a gift economy by freely sharing the books in its collection through a network of benign strangers, then, what economic model corresponds to the Distributing Library?

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David Reinfurt, a coauthor of the sci-fi novel PHILIP, and I are sitting at Cakeshop, a bakery / concert hall / record store on Ludow Street in New York’s Lower East Side. We sit at separate but neighboring tables, our computers open and facing each other. Our interview will be conducted without exchanging any words, almost like telepathy, or possibly just a lazy afternoon of instant messaging. Behind us a rock band is having publicity photos taken. Math rock blares as I snag the coffees.

Rob: How did the idea for PHILIP come up, and how did you decide to organize the work?

David: It was a remnant of Manifesta 6. PHILIP was originally conceived as a science fiction writing workshop by Heman Chong, an artist who was participating in Manifesta. His project there was to convene a science fiction workshop as a way to both explore a genre but also to actually make a story together. So from the beginning it was focused on making a book. When Manifesta 6 was cancelled, then Heman wanted to conitinue the project. One of the curators, Mai Abu ElDahab found a place where it was possible: Project Arts Centre in Dublin.

I put on headphones to concentrate as David takes a moment to think.

David: I’m typing quite slowly—must be the proximity. In Dublin Mai proposed to take the budget…

Rob: How did Mai’s work as a curator function?

David: I just predicted your question! HOW’S THAT FOR SCIENCE?

Rob: AMAZING. You’re a mind reader. PHILIP would be proud.

David: He would attribute it to Precognition.

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The philosophical idea of Kant’s Spectacles, discussed by Adrian Moore on this episode of Philsophy Bites, is usefully summarized by interviewer Nigel Warburton this way: “[For] Kant, reality is not really accessible to us. What is accessible is the perceptual apparatus that we are endowed with, which is like a pair of spectacles. If the spectacles have a rose tint, everything we perceive necessarily has a rose tint. Space and time are like the colors we take to be out there because of our perceptual apparatus, rather than something independent of us.” A more in-depth explanation (including a reference to The Matrix) here.

Two great shorts today featuring interviews with designer Peter Saville. The first, via the always great Bevel and Boss, features an interview with Saville by Arkitip magazine on the development of his designs for Factory records and the legendary Haçienda club. The second, from the always wonderful podcast Tate Shots via Tagbanger and perhaps even closer to my heart, is Saville on Richard Hamilton’s reworking of Dieter Rams’s Toaster for Braun. Quoting Saville: “It’s kind of like a blueprint to my own work.”

Above: The same post, before and after. Before, the post’s title was on-grid, but it did not align with either the left-hand margin or the descriptive header above. Now, metadata has been moved to the bottom of the post so the title can align properly. Yellow highlighting has been added to increase emphasis on the title and also to help direct readers that they are not on the homepage but on a sub-level post. The double header bars have been replaced with a single underline. Also, the three vertical links from version 1 have now been incorporated into a longer, chattier header that gives visitors full access to the content of the site.

I’d been admiring the work of designer Randy J. Hunt and his studio Citizen Scholar for quite awhile. I was really knocked out by the beauty and elegance of his work on the great designer goodies site Supermarket, and after that I was determined to find a way to work with him on something. During a break from my studio this summer that has since become permanent, I did a bit of travelling, cleaned house, and then turned my attention to some of those rainy-day jobs you always save for tomorrow. Highest on my list was taking a fresh look at Lined & Unlined, and I dropped Randy a note to see if he’d be interested in helping me out. A design writer himself, he has done a stellar job as our blogger at AIGA/NY for over a year, and I knew our conversation about reworking the site would inevitably take us into thoughtful critical territory as well. After a ton of hard work and a great deal of patience with his demanding client, Randy and I wrapped L&UL v2. A few weeks ago, we sat down to talk about what’s new. —RG

Randy J. Hunt: What interested me most when we first started working, other than the content of course, was the idea of “not changing much.”

Rob Giampietro: That’s a good place to start. I’m fond of this saying by Stewart Brand from his “How Buildings Learn” BBC series. He says, “the chief architect of buildings is time.” I think in a way L&UL was a house I’d lived in for 2 years, and it was just time to move some furniture around, paint a wall, add a new driveway, etc.

RJH: Absolutely. In all cases I try to realize a design in service of content approach, but sometimes that’s difficult. In this case, I don’t think it could have been any other way.

RG: Sometimes when you start a new design project, the temptation is to throw things away. But this can be akin to saving over a file, you lose the thread of your thinking. I think we weren’t looking to throw anything away or save over anything in this case, Renda had done an amazing job building the foundation. We only wanted to look at a site that had grown organically over a good period of time and try to make some specific adjustments that will help it receive more of that kind of content and, also, to endure.

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Little plug today: Justin Kropp did a little interview with me at his site A Structuralist Collective.

Artist Fritz Haeg was recently interviewed on his “Edible Estates” project for Studio 360, and I found his ideas on provocation in art very interesting. He said, “I’m ultimately just really interested in this contrast between taking something that’s really primitive and old-fashioned and almost kind of ‘grandma,’ like a vegetable garden, and making it provocative. Because I don’t think it’s interesting anymore to be provocative with violence and sex and all of those things that are very easy to turn off. We don’t respond to them any more because we see them so much, but I think there’s more subversive ways to be provocative. Today it seems like it’s with knitting and gardening and things like that. They go against our highly mediated and commercialized society.” As digital things become the norm in our culture, I wonder how this trend situates the analog things Haeg is interested in, the kitting, the vegetable gardens, etc, along a more subversive and provocative axis of activity.

Above: I ♥ NJ buttons as seen on Flickr, from Triborough’s photostream.

Eye Magazine editor-in-chief John Walters recently wrote to ask a few questions about the idea of a graphic design canon for Eye 68. Our dialogue follows below. —RG

EYE: What do you think is meant by “the canon of graphic design history?” For example: The Bauhaus? Beck’s Underground diagram? Alvin Lustig book covers? Swiss Modernism? George Lois’s Esquire covers? Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet? Glaser’s “I ♥ NY?” Barney Bubbles? Ray Gun? Do you ever think about it, or buy design history publications?

G+S: To be quite basic about it, the canon is a group of individual works generally agreed upon by practicioners and historians to be demonstrative of key concepts, techniques, or philosophical shifts in the profession. As a result, these works will be endlessly reproduced as the profession’s history is argued, augmented, and disseminated to new practicioners. These works suggest a kind of map for how the profession sees itself and invite those interested from the public to see its terrain in a similar fashion.

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“I am a critical spirit and an architect at the same time, and I do not feel obligated to constantly validate my own theories in my specific work. There are contradictions, and the possibilities we have at our disposal today provoke such contradictions.” Rem Koolhaas interviewed in Der Spiegel (via DO).