Dear Design,
What happened?
You used to be dangerous.
You used to scare the shit out of people.
Then you forgot how to play.
You chose to stick with the straight lines and rounded corners… Polishing and glossing your cynic clean typography, editing out the mess real life is.
You alone can shift the foundations of this failed system – conjure up new tones, new ambiences & new aesthetics for the planetary endgame we’re in.
You hold Prometheus’ holy fire in your hands.
Now use it!
Extract from Earthbound 1, by Sportsbanger, Self-published, 2024
Thinking about the student’s potential future space on the catwalk as an experimental space for ‘publishing’ ideas, this blog post presents 3 extracts on publishing as practice. I was a bit apprehensive about scanning at first, as these are all from small publishers/artists who really need the money, but Emma Warren’s last line[…]: ’pass this on to someone who needs it’ offered a bit of good faith!
These pieces of reading have not only inspired my research methods, but each represent active+approachable practitioners/spaces that I can see students involving themselves with now/after graduation, should this project resonate with a social purpose within their practice. Sportsbanger offers courage and reason towards originality, Emma Warren bolsters confidence in the meaningfulness of sharing even the most quotidian of ‘culture’, and Guglielmo Rossi offers the [May Day Rooms] archive[s] as a space for finding each of the above: firstly, courage; secondly, methodologies for publishing… and with both: solidarity.
Reading of this nature has been a repeating facet of the Action Research Project in its latter form — research and resources with dual purpose — a use for me as a researcher, and a use for the students as practitioners.