There’s a book, called “Lange Liste”; it’s one of those things that never quite leaves our mind — because it’s a kind of paradigm; a “founder” of a certain technical, typographic fetishistic “discursivity.” (It’s wonderfulness is no real wonder, as it was designed by Spector Books).

This zone is, apparently, one of our deepest loves, this technical, typographic fetishism — the mode goes beyond the mere joy of graphic order and points to like a design fantasy of transcendentally exhaustive textual codification. Our In Use pick this week, the work and site of designer Brandon Francis Wilson, exemplifies this obsession with notational, schematical, alphanumerics. Peruse his “archive” page and you will see what we mean.

An architectural practice focusing on something like privileged structural bias making a site that contests expected configuration. Yes.

In his 1970 poem, The New Spirit, John Ashbery leaves out a section of writing. That is, in an attempt to get at something another way, he feels omitting words would serve the effort better.


It is not dissimilar to the graphic work of Simon Grunert. His pages and layouts are often breathtaking rhythms of poetic omissions and blank areas.

It is deeply satisfying that the long chain of (what might be called) Dutch Modernism keeps adding fresh, strong links: Sasha Tielbeke

It will likely sound odd but looking at the Our Special Support site the writer Paul Curran keeps coming to mind — particularly his book The Left Hand. The book is sweaty, very chic in structure, violent, ravishing and often, exotically banal. We hope no one minds the connection.

Looking at the lovely, distanced cleanliness of much of the work of designer Alex Foster two quotes keep bouncing around our head:

“The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction.” (from J. G. Ballard’s introduction to the 1995 reissue of Crash)

and

“The future of the future is the present.”
(Marshall McLuhan from a 1967 television interview)

Sometimes you can feel that a photograph is a photograph. That is, not an image of something, only, but that the medium (the process of capturing a subject) is as significant or even, perfectly balanced with the subject. Perhaps when this happens, the marriage of medium and subject, something like the love of photography and photographing comes through, as it is with the work of photographer Samuel Fabia.

Perhaps the “Problem” the “Crisis,” in the first place, was a lack of imagination. 

It is certain that imagination is where relief comes from — that is, the ability to consider, to explore options (as well, of course, to be elsewhere).

And, it is certain, that the imagination must be open or it is not imagination, but petty expectation, or worse, overt capitulation to existing power. 

Further, Art is the open imagination formalized. Perhaps the best place to start on the road to “solutions” — a fully dilated place, allowing beautiful, committed, trial and error — as it is with artist Marcel Rickli. 

A questing, ruminative, vulnerable, textual download — is also what a site can be → madonnapopstar12.com

The list. The serial accumulation of data for orientation. What a lovely thing a list is (a kind of metaphysical practicality), as it is with the site of artist, musican, and graphic designer Matthew Vlach.

Some good ones from Downtown Critic’s (“obvious”) answers to the question, “What does art need right now?”:

...Eliminate that critical position that begins with “that’s nice” and ends at “that’s okay” seemingly without anything to snag on in between...

...An understanding of the misplaced gravity onto coyness. There are derivative forms of silence...

...To correct the touchingly naïve conviction amongst younger painters that they must do a busker’s rendition of Vuillard in order to have a career...

more here

I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.
(Fernando Pessoa, from The Tobacco Shop, 1928)

Such thoughts come to mind when being led around the darkly soft, clean but sensual, site environs of Josu Larrea.

A dark gray space within a larger black space; the latter functioning as a separator from the browser window — with simple info and pointings to work (and related). What else could one want for a space that speaks in their absence — or on their behalf? (andrewculp.org)

There are two necessary but contrary aspects to life: economy and novelty. The latter creates dimension whilst the former regularizes. If the former (economy) was left on its own it would domesticate the world into illegible sameness. Similarly, but oppositely, if the latter (novelty) was left to its own devices it would create a world disastrously defamiliarized. Some people embody a high order of the proper frictioning, those like Elise By Olsen.

A small structural gesture for rich implication(s), that is, elegance. That is, conceptual economy, that is, “What can be said at all can be said clearly.”  See ac-ca.cl.

Biology is technology. All is nature. All is code. Even methods of interpretation (which seem like mere overlay) are hard code. All is fluid dynamics that inter-cause the Situation. Check williamhandley.net.

There is a subtle jauntiness that pervades the designs of Jonas Gerber — often a simple disruption of the grid. It isn’t mathematical and it doesn’t feel overly proud. Seems simply a sophisticated move to give the general (often beautiful) rigidity of the graphic design more dimension, power, and legibility via small tension(s) — maybe micro-tensions or small displacements.

Related, from Nathalie Sarraute, “A slight imbalance, a hesitation in the sentence, allows the underlying tension to appear.”

The inky moat separating the Cult Pictures project from the browser is transcendentally satisfying. Not to mention the nesting calm within calm graphic placing and pacing.

Exuberance can’t always be contained in a single site. The bursting design work of Mexico City based designer Carlo Canun can be found here and here.

Artful furniture speaks on one’s behalf. It meets a visitor of a space in advance of the owner; needing no word to be spoken. Its language is mood and atmosphere; planting aspirational and dreamy implications. Artful furniture is a great and wonderful elevator out of the status quo.

If one seeks such helpful domestic colleagues visit A1043 Stéphanie and Didier Courbot’s furniture gallery — there, will be found top level, silent helpers: Bauchet(!), Starck(!), Kawakubo(!).

A necessity of art is its separation from everything else, that is, the demarcation of something as art. There’s a secondary (outer) art contextualizer, the gallery — a sort of protector of the demarcations.

When a gallery breaks out of fixed white wall typicality (as it is with the Hugo Alcantara project) a great Shklovskian defamiliarizing discourse about Context (writ large) emerges. A push to see the propositions of Art in non-art.

Spacing, placing, pacing and tension — design in a nutshell — the zone that Madrid-based designer Isabella Machado navigates so adroitly.

Noise like black snow or half-tone slush. Pulpy people in inverted streets. Day as night; night as light. No need for color. Medium creation and relinquishment to it — control by a lack of control: lucabailey.com

A beautiful array of concrete spleens for todestriebian filtrations (and other survival tact) also, plastic tarp upholsterizing for bioporting hopeful abjection tendencies like, perhaps, a renovation of Marinetti’s “abolition of syntax” — not literally though.