micro poems
These Micro Poems focus acutely on the way a word or phrase sounds, sequences and syllables which feel like they could be proverbs, aphorisms or sayings. Second, it’s about the way a word looks, the visual shape of the sound; language that speaks bluntly to our intuition and gut instinct.
caution caution
spit nails
lamplight
paper plane
lost again
wrongdoings
flick
misty fiend
metallic maybes
anyway
all the kisses I gave you
seething
clipped wings
sting of lemon
oily dermis
sad tonight
and freckles too
oh! for the love of material.
1. for the love of stuff.
introduction: materiality and second-hand cultures.
2. for the love of
wonky. chance and oxymorons, object
4. for the love of
juxtapositions. unit 6: experience and environment/in praise of london. words. concrete poetry. text-image-language
3. for the love of
dynamics. image. virtuality, the ‘plastic’ nature of the
5. for the love of material.
internet; print and publishing. unit 6: information and systems/bikini bandits conclusion: object, image, language. data darlings and internet it* girls. always object first.
The phrase: “oh! for the love of _______________.” [Blank, insert emotional attachment here].
This is a person who is charmed by objects, fancied by old things, things of times past and been before, things seen before eyes other than mine. A designer, but also a lover of lost and found. I flirt with markets, car boots and fleas, forever mesmerised by the sensorial practice of rummaging, scavenging, unearthing, uplifting, uncovering, encountering, exchanging, assembling and ultimately, archiving.
As noted by professor Rebecca R. Falkoff in her book Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding, there has been a surge in scholarly dialogue concerning new materialism, thing theory, object-oriented ontology, and vital materialism since the advent of the twenty-first century (Falkoff, 2021, p.10). Capitalist, consumerist, material indulgence. While her overarching emphasis on “Hoarding” is not my focus, Chapter Two: Economies, The Flea Market unpacks the ontological relationship between marketplace culture and photography, two major driving forces within my practice as a Communicator and a fundamental reference for this Critical Report.
To put it plainly, in the words of journalist and social science specialist Francine Russo, our human minds truly perceive “objects as an extension of ourselves” (Russo, 2018). Writing for Scientific American, she sheds light “on how and why we anthropomorphise our things”; our subconscious “belief that through physical contact, our things actually become imbued with our essence” (Russo, 2018).
Whether in-situ or online, the marketplace “enmesh[es] political and psychic economies, modernity and obsolescence, intentionality and contingency, and art and abjection” (Falkoff, 2021, p.55). It’s like wading through time, guided by the keen, sensitive hands of fellow searchers—others who also look, find, keep, give, and tell. I ask myself: why do I relentlessly seek out the stories innately carried within the materiality of objects? Why does this process constitute the anchor of my practice?
To tell you the truth, our increasingly digital “realities” threaten my—and our—ability to feel present and connected to our bodily collectivity (Fig. 5). The boundaries between material and immaterial, virtual and real, are increasingly indistinct. I worry about humanity’s tendency to lose touch with ourselves, each other, and our earth, as we do so incessantly, endlessly, each time in new, never-before ways. Yet, as stated in The Extreme Self: Age of You, co-written by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, this time it feels indescribably different, with the advent of Social Media and AI: “Now we are turning into something else. / We all feel it. / We all know it.” (Basar, Coupland, Ulrich Obrist, 2021, p.35).
So maybe my willful materialism is not a guilty pleasure but instead some sort of anti-something? As a Communicator, I hope to adopt and redefine an alternative, social, collective, environmental, materialist approach to design—one of defiance, fuel for unruly practices: anti-capitalist disobedience not just for the sake of it but for the sake of feeling present and together again.
My practice as a Graphic Communication Designer directly addresses modernity’s devaluation of the material in resistance to the artificial (Fig. 3). Researching is akin to scavenging, a kind of ideological archaeology. Things get gathered and assembled, intentionally or unintentionally. As described by Falkoff, markets are “places where chance seems to rule”; they are the “antithetical relationship between the odds and ends” (Falkoff, 2021, p.56), in essence, “…an event with no author and no intention beyond chance” (Falkoff, 2021, p.61). Inspired, my design practice embraces this sense of chance, coincidence and arbitrariness—qualities inherent to a circular engagement with our material design history (Fig. 6).
The prefix Re- is almost the only way to describe this sensibility: rediscover, reread, reflect, rearrange, reduce, reuse, redeem, remake, reconnect, recycle, redistribute, repurpose. Things get misplaced, lost and found, mixed up. Unexpected or unusual oxymorons occur: how can one thing which belonged to one person so many years ago end up in the hands of somebody totally different, next to something totally different?
These object-people-place-time juxtapositions form the foundations of the Surrealist Movement of the early 20th century and their practice of Assemblage, objets trouvés (Fig. 7/8). Assemblage is also a core component of the Fluxus vocabulary, an avant-garde group founded by George Maciunas, a Lithuanian-American graphic designer, photographer and conceptual artist (Fig. 11). As defined by MOMA curator Danielle Johnson, the Fluxus group “create[ed] scores that celebrated the familiar sounds and materials of the everyday. Many embraced indeterminacy—opportunities for performers to take liberties during the performance, making each iteration of the work singular” (Johnson, 2020).
As a Graphic Communication Designer, I have fallen into a similar creative process, by chance, following only my own emotional and creative inclinations: away from the artificial, the Plastic, the single-use, valueless, dispensable product; away from the virtual, and towards the tactile, the material, the sensual, the bodily. In Unit 6, both my Platform projects have their roots in chance-encountered object-oxymorons, as I’ll call them from now on. Our Experience and Environments brief asked us to design a psychogeographic experience based on a dérive through London. Theoretically, the project was rooted in the ideology of The Situationists International, an anarchic socio-political movement born out of the student riots of ’68 in France.
With collecting as my primary research method, I gathered objects from a range of both intentionally selected and accidentally encountered sources: 1800s semaphore flags found at Kempton Market in South East London; Dr. Julius Neubronner’s aerial photographs taken by carrier pigeons, found on The Public Domain Review (Fig. 15/16) (Pennant-Rea, Green, 2011); books, articles, and photographs found in the university library; pigeon feathers found in the streets of London; typefaces found on The Letterform Archive https://oa.letterformarchive.org/; quotes, themes and poetic speech from Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Fig. 13/17) (Wenders, 1987); interviews and surveys I conducted with about 30 different Londoners.
Incited by these, I assembled a materially-minded narrative: I would conduct a pilgrimage through our city in search of London’s elusive Guardian Angel, a performance piece existing in the liminal space between realistic and escapist. Each pilgrim—each Londoner—would carry a hand-sewn flag bearing a poeticised manifesto/motto derived from the interviews, aesthetically and materially referencing the history of heraldic flag systems, banner making, and protest craft (Fig. 18-21).
As evidenced, this amalgamative process is integral to my practice. In his influential book Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users, Michael Rock asserts that “the act of design is, in essence, the clarification of material or the remodelling of content from one form to another. The ultimate goal is the expression of a given content rendered in a form that reaches a new audience” (Rock, 2013). It’s not necessarily all about newness—the compulsion to produce more and more and more. It’s about repositioning, remodelling, and reassembling the infinite constituent components of culture, art, design, history and language into a myriad of other infinitely different things, all with the hopes of just seeing things differently.
This is demonstrated by French New Wave feminist filmmaker Agnès Varda, in her documentary The Gleaners and I, an analogy of the creative’s role as collector. She “includes 19th century paintings of gleaners (depicting women walking the recently harvested fields gathering stray grains) as a metaphor for her own cinematic practice (travelling throughout France with her handheld digital camera, gleaning images for her documentary)” (Deroo, 2019) (Fig. 23/31/35). This mode of practice fosters emotionality, sensitivity, empathy and groundedness, as well as practical sociological, political, geographical and anthropological problem-solving. Maybe this design method could help us get unstuck and stop “doomscrolling, doomscreaming, doomshopping, doomsitting” and “doomtexting” (Basar, Coupland, Ulrich Obrist, 2021). We’re in a rut; it’s undeniable. So, let’s learn from history and intercept this endless feedback loop of desensitisation. Attention-deficit. Zoning out. Disassociating. Brain rotting. Time wasting. Connection—losing.
My Information and Systems project, titled Bikini Bandits, Data Darlings, Internet It Girls*, is also object-driven but digital by nature, a riff on the Plastic qualities of our online existences. It emerged out of a last-minute project U-turn. While shopping for something insignificant on eBay.com, one of the internet’s many virtual second-hand marketplaces, I stumbled upon a post selling a mannequin (Fig. 30). There was something strangely vulnerable about this naked piece of humanoid Plastic. It was photographed using strange, obscure angles intended to show details and design features, showing off the product—and there were millions more, all these fake people. The resemblance was uncanny.
In his seminal essay Plastic, written in 1957 as part of his Mythologies series, Roland Barthes describes how “Plastic is wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used: ultimately, objects will be invented for the sole pleasure of using them. The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticised, and even life itself” (Barthes, 1972). This was originally written over half a century ago, in 1954. I can’t imagine what he’d make of our contemporary environmental crisis—landfill, landfill, landfill—alongside the incomprehensibly immense carbon footprints of data centres tirelessly powering this doomscrolling.
How has it got to this? Our endless desire for newness—new digital content, new products to promote—fuels the plastic production line, as well as the online feed. Today, Social Media and AI are what Plastic was in the 1950s; it’s “more than a substance... the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible” (Barthes, 1972). The simple act of transferring and assembling images designed for the internet onto the page in the form of a publication is an act of Re-.
In his review of The Extreme Self for AIGA Eye on Design, George Kafka describes how “Transposing ‘digital matter’ onto a print publication can be a fraught move and one that doesn’t immediately appear aligned with McLuhan’s over-quoted maxim that the ‘medium is the message’. Yet for Basar and Daly, the book’s graphic designers, this displacement is crucial to communicate [their] central ideas”—as was the case with my Unit 6 Information and Systems publication (Kafka, 2021). Basar explains his design choices: “When you take material or content that you’re so used to seeing on a screen, then you re-format it, put it onto paper and put it on a white background, it’s as though you see it for the very first time.” (Kafka, 2021). This was the premise behind Bikini Bandits, Data Darlings, Internet It Girls* (Fig. 47-49).
Feminist writer and critic Susan Sontag explains how “photographs are, of course, artifacts... [they] have the status of found objects—unpremeditated slices of the world” (Falkoff, 2021, p.82). This sense of the “unpremeditated” is exceptionally true of internet images; it’s pure chaos. When this chaos gets extracted and imported into a new context, we see it differently. We are no longer too close to it, too enmeshed. To elaborate further on this idea, we can utilise anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards’ essay on Objects of Affect. She asks us to consider “under which material”—and I’ll add immaterial—“conditions are photographs seen?” (Edwards, 2012). She boils down her argument into two strands: Placing: “The idea of ‘placing... a photographic object in social space... materiality, adjacency, assemblage, and embodied relations frame the meaning of the image” (Edwards, 2012). Remediation: “The material conditions of photographs themselves, [she] consider[s] the remediation and repurposing of photographic images: the material translation of a photograph from one kind of object to another” (Edwards, 2012). As a Graphic Communication Designer, this “Place” and the eventual “Re-Media” of the images we create are required considerations. Bikini Bandits, Data Darlings, Internet It Girls* is a visual allegory, metaphorically prompting a symbolic realisation that “…photographs, especially in their global consumption, are often of people, thus blurring the distinction between person and thing, subject and object, photograph and referent” (Edwards, 2012).
Alongside photography, language—specifically poetry—is also a common output of these object-oxymorons. Ultimately, the outputs of my practice often constitute an interrelated text-image composition, a dual medium. The graphic-poetic practice of Concrete Poetry has been a significant influence on my work (Fig. 43/44). Author R.P. Draper defines Concrete Poetry as: “In its simplest definition, concrete poetry is the creation of verbal artefacts which exploit the possibilities, not only of sound, sense and rhythm—the traditional fields of poetry—but also of space, whether it be the flat, two-dimensional space of letters on the printed page or the three-dimensional space of words in relief and sculptured ideograms” (Draper, 1971).
As a designer, my practice asserts that “objects are a kind of material language, so the narratives into which they can be selected and organised are a kind of fiction”—in the words of Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1999). Concrete poetry is a conceptual and aesthetic intersection of material and language. In Praise of London exemplifies this ideology through the design decision to create hand-sewn flags adorned with poetic mottos, catchphrases and mantras derived from my surveys and interviews. These were applique letters: a custom typeface designed freehand, making reference to my material and oral research.
Throughout its steady emergence during the later 20th century, practised by poets and graphic designers alike—most notably Eugen Gomringer—the intentions behind this movement were stubbornly interrogated. What is the difference between a graphic composition of letters and a concrete poem? I would agree with R.P. Draper’s argument that “…it is through the application of a spatial principle to the semantic potential of words that concrete poetry becomes poetry rather than just graphics in the rudimentary sense of shape and colour” (Draper, 1971). The typographical layout and material context must share the text’s semiotic, semantic and syntactical meaning.
The work of Ed Ruscha became significant throughout Unit 6 (Fig. 33/46/50/51/53). His paintings are pure and pared back yet intensely emotive, all due to their communicative accuracy—the conceptual, material and verbal union of intention. In reference to his iconic publication Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, he said: “I’m not interested in books as such, but I am interested in unusual publications. The first book came out of a play on words. The title came before I even thought of the pictures. I like the word ‘gasoline’, and I like the specific quality of ‘twenty-six’.” (Tate). I was instantly captivated by this notion of verbal chance, accident and play—like verbal spillage. I allowed myself to feel the words (Fig. 52).
In the case of In Praise of London, the words felt like they should be carried with pride, marched with, held above the head, blowing in the wind. And in the case of this publication, the words should be read like speech is heard, handed down like objects from person to person. Under The Radar, Underground Zines and Self-Publications 1965-1975 demonstrates how this meticulously perceptive approach to object-image-language relationships has existed both deliberately and intuitively throughout the history of independent publishing: “the reflexive approach to perception regulating patterns of speech and imagery, a fascination for ‘sound, colour, feel’, which expresses itself in specific literary and design strategies” (Bandel, Gilbert, Prill 2019).
Researching the fundamentals of Concrete Poetry has been pivotal and instrumental in the development of my design practice—the throughline between my love for material, image and language, and the three Chapters of this Critical Report. Always object first. My practice as an image-maker is dedicated to the study of our material reality: objects and things, spaces and people. Recording the tactile and the real is primary. My process then opens up to consider notions of chance, coincidence and arbitrariness. I juxtapose things taken from here or there, anywhere, brought together to create object-people-place-image-text oxymorons. From this, I derive hypothetical poetic narratives and lyrical commentaries on our modern existence. This commentary—this advocation—is called: Oh! For the love of material.
Now, it’s your turn. “oh! for the love of _______________.” [Blank, insert emotional attachment here].