Immutable: Designing History
Chris Lee
Onomatopee/Library stack
English
Softcover
126 pages
127 x 197 mm
2022
ISBN 9789493148420
Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitization against the entropy of a document’s movement through space/time, and the political.
This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being design’s most profoundly consequential forms.
As an alternative historiography, “Immutable” gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader’s call to “study up” (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire’s recognition of the “limit situation” as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book’s aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/immutable-designing-history-chris-lee)
About the Artist
Chris Lee is a graphic designer and Assistant Professor at Pratt Institue who is currently based in Buffalo and Brooklyn, New York.
https://www.chrisleephotographer.com/
(source: https://www.copyrightbookshop.be/en/shop/chris-lee-immutable-designing-history/)
About the Publisher
Onomatopee (founded and directed by Freek Lomme since 2006) is a curating and editorially led public gallery and publisher that is known for their self-initiated and transdisciplinary projects. Onomatopee also hosts the projects of artist-run and institutional organisations.
onomatopee.net
(source: https://www.onomatopee.net/about-us/)
Library Stack is a lending library and media archive for new digital materials across the art, architecture, design, philosophy, media studies, moving image, sound and visual culture fields. The collection includes eBooks, podcasts, journals, experimental fonts, software, exhibition materials, and artist writings that are not indexed in other databases or catalogs. Library Stack is also a publisher of its own eBooks, essays, videos and digital ephemera.
https://www.librarystack.org/
(source: https://www.librarystack.org/about/)
