This is a
talk about printed media. I suppose I should begin by explaining
myself. The conference, after all, is called media in transition,
not media in regression. So let me say first that I do a good
deal of critical writing about digital culture and new media.
I also do applied research in humanities computing and informatics.
I consider myself an early adopter and enthusiastic proponent
of new media tools and technologies. Nonetheless I am interested
in print, but from a critical rather than a celebratory or nostalgic
point of view. Print, as well all know, is increasingly regarded
as culturally irrelevant, at least with respect to the global
media matrices fostered by advanced information technologies.
Michael Joyce, writing with his characteristic poise, puts it
this way: "What we whiff is not the smell of ink but, rather
the smell of loss: of burning towers or men’s cigars in the
drawing room. Hurry up, please--it’s time. We are in the late
age of print; the time of the book has passed. The book is an
obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes. The book is dead--long
live the book" (176). Joyce and many others of the digerati
have in turn provoked pundits like Sven Birkerts, whose so-called
Gutenberg elegies are thinly disguised jeremiads passed off
as thoughtful reflection on the status of the written word on
the eve of the electronic millennium. The end result is, it
seems to me, a lot of messy thinking about print in the present
moment, by which I mean print as both a medium of production
and a site of cultural consumption. Print, I want to argue,
does not exist separate and apart from other contemporary media
phenomena. Rather, I see print--and the publishing industry,
broadly construed -- as an integral part of the contemporary
media ecology. Therefore, I want to suggest that without an
adequate critical understanding of print--by which I mean a
fully historicized and relational understanding--we have failed
in our responsibilities as students of media. This talk today
seeks to illustrate some of those assertions by way of the graphic
design presented in a number of contemporary magazines, and
in particular the work of a designer named David Carson. Among
much else, Carson’s design practices furnish us--in print--with
premeditated and highly aestheticized representations of such
entities as "information" and "media."
That there
is a distinctive visual aesthetic associated with information
is plain to see. It is reflected in its most bastardized and
least interesting form in Wired’s teflon sheen, but its
visible spectrum extends from Wired to the grunge fonts
and multilayered letter-forms which have emerged as the signature
styles of the graphic design programs at such places Detroit’s
Cranbrook Academy of Arts and CalArts in Valencia. Since 1984,
the same year as the mass-market release of Apple’s Macintosh,
much of this design work has been associated with Emigre
magazine, founded by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko to showcase
the Mac-generated fonts created at their digital type foundry
in Berkeley. Influential designers such as Edward Fella, Neville
Brody, Anne Burdick, Steve Tomasula, Susan LaPorte, and Michael
Worthington, many of whom have Cranbrook or
CalArts affiliations, all gained early exposure through Emigre,
which offers itself as an alternative to the more mainstream
trade journals EYE and Print.[1]
Since the early nineties, the best-known practitioner of innovative
visual and graphic design-- whose work is often described as
the new typography, deconstructive typography, or digital typography
-- has been David Carson. A former surf-celebrity with little
formal design training, Carson has attracted an international
following for the layouts and experimental fonts which first
appeared in the six-issue run of a magazine called Beach
Culture; in 1992 Carson became the art director at the music
magazine Ray Gun, founded by publisher Marvin Jarrett
as an underground competitor to Rolling Stone,
Creem, and Spin. Today Carson commutes to art-school
workshops and seminars around the globe, while designing dissonance
for the likes of Coca-Cola, Swatch, and Hardees. Carson, as
the most closely watched designer of the decade, has done as
much as Template Gothic to consolidate the look of the nineties.[2]
In his
forward to a hardbound Ray Gun retrospective--a coffee-table
book-- entitled Out of Control, William Gibson describes
the work collected there, much of which belongs to Carson, as:
"The event horizon of futurity, as close as any windshield,
its textures mapped in channel-zap and the sequential decay
of images faxed and refaxed into illegibility . . . brave new
worlds abraded onto the concrete of the now. . . . This is design
pushing back against the onslaught of an unthinkable present"
(13). In what follows, I want to suggest that this aesthetic--which
is sometimes called a post-alphabetic
aesthetic -- is one that appears precisely at the point of print
media’s imperative to formalize a representation of its own
putative demise.[3] That is, it is an aesthetic
that is intensely self-reflexive in its attempt to depict, and
at some level iconify, the material conditions of print’s communicative
exhaustion[4]. The body of graphic design
work associated with Carson, Ray Gun, Emigre,
Cranbrook and CalArts therefore bears close scrutiny by students
of the new medias, for it dramatizes that aspect of the relationship
between print and electronic textualities driven by the need
of the former to assimilate and contain the ruptures of the
latter.
"The Other
End of Print," my title for today’s paper, is a reference to
a second compendium of Carson’s work entitled The End of
Print (this same tag-line often appeared on the covers of
Ray Gun). The "end of print" is also, of course, a phrase
routinely invoked in the context of electronic media and media
in transition. It repays our attention here because, beyond
occasional references to Wired’s skewed pages, the import
of contemporary graphic design is rarely considered in discussions
of being digital. Yet even a cursory glance through the pages
of Ray Gun or Emigre leaves little doubt that
Carson, VanderLans and Licko, and the many designers associated
with them either by style or by patronage are engaged in as
rigorous and profound an investigation of alphabetic consciousness
in the face of radical technological upheaval as, say, the growing
circle of critics and writers who have devoted themselves to
interactive fiction. This other end of print, the end of print
manifested in the discourses and practices of graphic design--"abraded
onto the concrete of the now" -- therefore furnishes us with
limit cases of what Jerome McGann has called the "textual condition."
A few words
of additional context. There has been relatively little work
on graphic design from the perspectives of cultural studies
and media studies; instead, most commentary on graphic design
originates from within the more cloistered recesses of applied
design curricula. That graphic design at large has been under-explored
by those not engaged in its practice for their professional
livelihood is perhaps not surprising, for the field would seem
to vacillate continually between form and function, art and
industry, expression and vocation. This is reflected, as design
critic Andrew Blauvelt notes, "in the shifting terminology of
the academy as educational programs have changed titles from
‘ commercial and applied art’ to ‘visual communication’ and
eventually ‘graphic design’" (207). But there are also some
additional grounds for the lack of attention from scholars engaged
in more traditional literary and artistic pursuits. Johanna
Drucker, one of the few art historians to give extended consideration
to graphic design, has argued that, "There is perhaps no more
perverse (and successful) transformation of the formal radicality
of early modernism into the seamless instrument of corporate
capitalist enterprise than this progression from radical graphic
aesthetics into Swiss-style modern design" (238). Drucker is
referring here to the cancellation (for it was essentially that)
of the typographic experiments of such figures as Marinetti,
Apollinaire, and Tzara-- artists conspicuous for their intensive
engagement with the graphical technologies of their own day
-- by the subsequent streamlined elegance of Jan Tschichold’s
New Typography and by Bauhaus. Graphic design, Drucker goes
on to suggest, is "not only the sign par excellence of [capitalist]
surplus, but is the very site in which it comes into being and
is itself consumed as spectacle through the formal mechanics
of display" (242).
If we accept
this view of mainstream graphic design as an instrument devoted
to conspicuously displaying the consumption of the cultural
capital invested in print as a medium, then the aesthetics of
the other end of print becomes a crucial site at which to engage
with emerging digital economies, propelled as they are by the
commodification of information. Perhaps nothing illustrates
this last thesis so well as a casual inspection of the advertising
in a magazine such as Wired or, for that matter, PC
World. We’d find, for example, an ad for Microsoft Windows
NT, which adopts the graphical format of the software’s sliding
menu trays to explicate its features, while the accompanying
text marks off words for emphasis by coloring and underlining
them in the now-familiar manner of HTML links. Or else we’d
find a full-page ad for the investment banking firm of Hambrecht
and Quist that is presented using the faux visual metaphor of
a Netscape browser (the monolithic "N" anchors the top right-hand
corner of the layout as though it were not itself an icon of
an active corporate interest). In the browser’s main window
the firm’s high-tech clients are listed, several dozen of them,
with names that include Technomatrix Technologies Ltd., Ac/net
Inc., and, inscrutably, PostModern Computing. At the very bottom
of the page is a line of copy that reads "Financing the New
Economy." These are, of course, classic examples of what Jay
Bolter and Richard Grusin have lately taught us to call remediations.
But remediation alone does not, I think, do justice to the complexity
of these visual transactions. That the graphical signatures
of the Web’s predomiant MicroScape interface have been so effortlessly
assimilated by the advertising regime of the
post-industrial global economy underscores the extent to which
we can expect to see graphic design take up its position as
the preeminent agency for commodifying and consolidating the
visual spectacle of the information age. [5]
So with this
in mind, I now turn toward David Carson’s design work, particularly
the material he produced during his two-and-a-half year tenure
as Art Director for Ray Gun. This was the venue where his
style and approach first gained broad recognition outside of the
design community, and where he has done some of his most significant
work. The most lucid discussion of Ray Gun I have found
comes from EYE’s editor Rick Poynor. His brief essay "Alternative
by Design?" appears at the close of the Out of Control
volume. (Ray Gun’s first issue included a tripartite manifesto
from editorial director Neil Feineman who had previously worked
with Carson on Beach Culture: "Raw by choice. Immediate
by necessity. Alternative by design.") Poynor begins by dispelling
the notion that Ray Gun was an isolated phenomenon, pointing
not only to precursors such as designer Neville Brody’s deconstructive
style at The Face, but most tellingly to the influence
of MTV’s ascend ancy during the eighties (the music television
channel went on the air in 1981 with a pop jingle by the Buggles
that is itself a condensed lesson in comparative media: "Video
Killed the Radio Star"). Poynor sees Carson’s style as essentially
the "transportation of a televisual atmosphere to the static medium
of print," and goes on to note that Ray Gun is also the
quintessential Avant-Pop artifact, pointing out that many of the
formal features of Avant Pop as observed by Larry McCaffery --
collage, improvisation, high-impact visuals, a kinetic look and
feel -- have long been staple’s of Ray Gun’s design (233-4).
Poynor is skeptical of assigning any de facto progressive agency
to such traits, noting the ease with which they have been co-opted
by Madison Avenue and the corporate mainstream (his piece opens
with a description of a Ray Gunesque ad used by the British
army’s recruitment office). Poynor further maintains that even
in the magazine’s own pages the graphic design in Ray Gun
"was never used . . .as an instrument of opposition
or critique" (234). (Carson, for his part, will readily concede
that, "There certainly have been pages in Ray Gun that
have no deep meaning, that are simply fun. But I think rock and
roll should be fun" [VanderLans 17].) [6]
Such debates
about the progressive or conservative orientation of Carson’s
style, while important, seem to me to occlude certain key aspects
of post-alphabetic texts as media phenomena. Most significantly,
I would contend that the primary significance of Carson’s work
in Ray Gun and elsewhere does not lie simply in its aesthetic
friction. To mistake Ray Gun’s visual field for this,
to see the magazine as solely an experiment in mixed media --
hot live-wire content grafted to the static halftone pages of
a newsstand magazine -- is to fail to see that the "deconstructive"
graphics are trading not on print’s receding communicative horizon,
but rather on the multi-channel high-bandwidth mass-media spectacle
of print’s endangered commodity status. To put this distinction
another way, to the extent that it is shocking, controversial,
and disruptive, Ray Gun shocks and disrupts not merely
or even mainly because it recapitulates the tenuous state of
printed media’s hold on the cultural imagination; rather,
Ray Gun shocks and disrupts because it is drawing on the
massive reserves of economic power and material attraction still
vested in print as a medium -- a messy apotheosis rather than
anything so tidy as an end of print. In short, Ray
Gun is the most powerful demonstration I know of print’s
capacity not only to emulate certain stylistic aspects of digital
media, but to consolidate and disseminate a particular
aesthetic identity for digital media across a variety of cultural
channels and representational surfaces.
I want
to say a few more words about the idea of "communication" because
communication forms the central valance for discussions of Carson’s
work. Dubbed "the master of non-communication" by detractors
such as Massimo Vignelli, Carson has repeatedly countered charges
of "you cannot communicate" with the statement "you cannot not
communicate" or "don’t mistake legibility for communication."
Especially in the earliest issues of Ray Gun, it can
be difficult to tell the difference between planned design elements
and random production mistakes. In the magazine’s first issue,
for example, a photograph of Evan Dando from the Lemonheads
was cropped incorrectly, resulting in a his black boot obscuring
a large block of text. Typos are commonplace in Ray Gun.
Carson used no page numbers. Titles and headings and pull-quotes
have occasionally been left off of or out of articles. It didn’t
take much of this, Carson notes, before writers would become
upset if the layout of their piece proved unexceptional:
"They were concerned that a plain layout indicated that we somehow
didn’t think their article was that great" (24). In the same
interview, Carson continues: "I don’t think you can be neutral.
You cannot not communicate. If you say nothing, that says something.
If you don’t respond, that’s your response. If you don’t have
a religion, that’s your religion." (25).
No profound
sociological insight that, to be sure, but this passage illustrates
that despite his millennial identification with the end of print,
Carson’s own conception of his work is fundamentally conservative.
He frequently points out just how few places there are in Ray
Gun or Beach Culture that are genuinely illegible,
for example, and thus seems unable or unwilling to conceive
of design practices that operate beyond the traditional expectations.
This point is important because, as Marilyn Crafton Smith has
argued in what is one of the more suggestive articles to date
on critical theory and graphic design, theoretical approaches
to visual communication have traditionally aligned themselves
with surprisingly simplistic sender-receiver models of message
transmission:
"Often
when designers and theorists speak of communication, what they
refer to is a mechanistic transmission model of communication
and attendant concerns about audience that are based on a long
line of mass media audience research. My concern is that a reductionist
model will unquestioningly be reproduced when communication
is defined solely in terms of imparting, sending, transmitting,
or giving information to others; perhaps more problematic is
the fact that central to the mission of transmitting messages
is the purpose of control." (300)
To close,
then, I’d like to offer a few thoughts about the relationship
between the kinds of images I have been showing today and the
communal fantasies of the information age: fantasies of absolute
access, total recall, and remote control. My basic contention
is that information has now assumed visible and material form
as a definable and even datable set of aesthetic practices;
a visible spectrum of tropes, icons, and graphic conventions
that collectively convey the notion of "information" to the
eye of the beholder. At stake is not whether any such conventions
for representing information are accurate or correct to the
formal ontology of information in an absolute sense, but rather
the important fact that Western consumer culture has evolved
sophisticated and compelling conceits for depicting information
as an essence sufficient unto itself, or more properly, information
as a synthetic, at times even haptic, commodity. Predictable
though these latest permutations of the culture industry might
be, understanding information as a token of aesthetic artifice
carries with it implications that can be pursued across a broad
array of contemporary artistic, social, and technological
Developments--from new media
artists who appropriate the look and feel of information to conduct
their own kind of inquiries into the phenomenology of digital
culture, to advertising and graphic design where the visible signs
of information are consolidated and set in circulation through
a variety of different media forms (printed matter not the least
of them), to scientific research centers investigating new techniques
in information design and visualization. There information itself
often becomes the explicit subject of representational technologies,
as in attempts to "map" electronic data structures or the nodes
and paths of computer networks. So in conclusion I want to say
these things:
- information,
circa 1999, is much more than just a binary token of messages
sent and received;
- Carson’s
work, and post-alphabetic design more generally, refashions
information as an aesthetic event;
- at this
moment, print is a powerful conductor of those events;
- and print
is a part of understanding media.
Notes
[1]
For Emigre's early history, see VanderLans's and Licko's
Emigre (the book): Graphic Design into the Digital Realm
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993); for more on the activity
at Cranbrook, see Hugh Aldersey-Williams, et al., Cranbrook
Design: The New Discourse (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). return
[2]
Even academic publishers have experimented with the new design
trends. Two of the more conspicuous examples are Mark C. Taylor
and Esa Saarinen's Imagologies (Routledge) and Avital
Ronell's Telephone Book (University of Nebraska Press).
Both use unconventional layouts and type settings to synthesize
what might be called a post-humanistic aura, and more importantly,
to offer a visual counterpoint to the discursive progression
of their texts -- indeed, in Ronell's volume designer Richard
Eckersley and compositor Michael Jensen share co-credit with
Ronell as the book's primary textual operators. return
[3]
The term post-alphabetic appears to have been first used by
hypertext theorists such as Michael Joyce and Don Byrd to describe
the marked visual dimension of electronic writing spaces. return
[4]
Shawn Wolfe, in the Fall 1997 issue of Emigre, opens
his review of the Wired compilation Mind Grenades
by quoting the prescient remarks of one Israeli Solo from Ray
Gun 28: The First World customer will discover new uses
for the printed page . . . and these may or may not have anything
to do with the conveyance of messages. In fact, the value of
printed matter may come to be measured solely by its uselessness,
or its obsolescence: that is, by its status as Perpetual Novelty
Item. That's why print will gladly undergo the painfully slow,
terminally stylish and irrelevant Presentation Of Its Own Demise.
A presentation of remains that are unburdened by content or
meaning. In this I would take issue only with Solo's explicit
divorce of content and meaning from the spectacle he describes;
by contrast, I argue that the post-alphabetic codes of the new
typography offer highly-effective means of sustaining both.
return
[5]
For one of the sharpest critiques of Wired I have read,
see Keith White's The Killer App: Wired Magazine, the
Voice of the Corporate Revolution, available online: <http://www.voyagerco.com/misc/killerapp/killerapp.html>.
return
[6]
In his interview with Lewis Blackwell in The End of Print,
Carson states, A Graphic wil save the owrld right after rock
and roll does. return