Alfred Hitchcock had an odd affection for rear projection, matte paintings, and composite shots—in short, an affection for cinematic artifice.1 In his early version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (Gaumont-British,…
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Issue 6: Midcentury Design Cultures, Peer Reviewed Articles
Issue 6: Midcentury Design Cultures, Peer Reviewed Articles
Crude Designs for an Oil-Built World
On the morning of November 30, 2015, observant Parisian commuters — yawning at bus stops, crowding onto subway platforms, or walking to their local cafes — could hardly have missed…
Issue 6: Midcentury Design Cultures, Peer Reviewed Articles
Introduction: Design Culture Studies: Between Infrastructure and Image
The essays in this special issue address their reckoning not to designers or designs but to design cultures, that is, to institutionalized and enmeshed modes of designing that sought or…
Issue 6: Midcentury Design Cultures, Peer Reviewed Articles
Container Culture: Film, Packaging, and the Design of Corporate Humanism at the CCA
To start, two Chicago-based designs on paper as material and medium (figure 1). In 1940, Hungarian multimedia artist, educator and Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy published a brief article, “Make a…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
Collected & Uncollected
In September, 2019, I was invited to speak at a symposium about archives. The premise of the gathering was to imagine new ways of translating archives and immaterial forms of…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
Misbegotten
And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel. — Seamus Heaney, transl. Beowulf (2000) This is an excerpt from a longer essay, framed from just before the 2016…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
On Less Convenient Histories
Every day, I look at the sepia-tinted photograph that hangs on my refrigerator, but I don’t often see it. The woman at the center of the image has long, coarse…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
A Lacuna Follows
“The Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a Story, but a History,” wrote Daniel Defoe at the beginning of The Fortunate…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
Math of the Non-visible
Siddhartha Lokanandi, who owns a bookstore and arts event space here in Kufürstenstrasse called Hopscotch, told me two things in our first meeting that he believes to be true about…
Contemporaries Essays, The After Archive
The After Archive: Introduction
After the end, or after the beginning, or after we started to write these essays everything changed. I wait for my ability to imagine a relationship with the past or…