BR_CKS #01 BR_CKS #01
The following is a conversation between Grey and Parker that took place in March 2019 in a coffee shop in Copenhagen.
Grey: Alright. So like, what do we see the ZINE being about? Like is it design? Or is it design and things related to it? Parker: I think it’s almost like from the WECOLAB1 conversations about work. That work is life. Like Søren2 was giving us a lot, he was telling us a lot similar to that. And he had some Yoko Ono quote that was like. . . Oh fuck, I don’t remember. It was something like that, like especially what the WECOLAB stuff was really about, these are these ways of talking about design but really it was also a class about. . . you know? G: Yeah, like philosophy was brought into it. . . P: Yeah, Right. It was a lot about how those things were related. About how you put care into those things, how you put love into those things. Søren was talking to us yesterday about how it would be miserable to be working for a job for money. That is a game you can lose. G: Yeah. P: But if you’re working something that you care about, something that you really love. Like you’re constantly trying and striving for that, that’s a game that you’re winning, no matter what. G: Exactly, yeah. 1 2
Studio at the UMN School of Architecture, we-co-lab.tumblr.com Søren Amsnæs, amsnes.dk
G: And I think that gets into how I’ve been thinking about how we approach this. . . Uh, like I’ve been thinking a lot about how we talked about stuff in WECOLAB. Like kinda, just putting things out there and letting things exist as part of the world. Just letting things go where they want to go. So I’m thinking definitely a lot more informal than a lot of other discussions about design. P: Yeah. P: Another thing I thought of, cause we keep talking about this being like we’re gonna talk about the same topics. Like if we publish a bunch of these, that we’re gonna be talking about the same topics just in another way. Søren was talking to us about how he doesn’t want to teach us like today we talk about this, and then tomorrow we talk about this. He just hammers home the same things, and I don’t even have a class with him but I know all of these things that he’s getting at. G: Yeah, and I think that’s definitely a valuable way for us to refer to it. Like I think the way that both of us look at design. Um. . . And what we value in design are these very simple concepts. . . P: Right G: . . .These ideas of emotion and experience and how it relates to the human as a being more so than the human as an object. Which is how a lot of design talks about humans. P: Yeah, yeah. Um. . . G: I think this is one of those cases that Matt3 would say, or even in like the Bruce Mau manifesto4, just start anywhere. Um. . . But I guess 3 4
Matt Olson, ooiee.me Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, manifestoproject.it/bruce-mau
I’m still struggling with how do you start something like this? Like there are just so many fragments I’m chasing after. P: Just start anywhere. G: [laughs] well, like yeah, that’s really easy to just say. P: Well I think we can. I think it’s one of those things where we can pick something, even if it doesn’t seem to relate to the things we just talked about right now or like doesn’t fall into the category. . . Like we say we’re gonna talk about memory, emotion, feeling and the human and. . . G: Yeah, those are like really broad, vague concepts. P: You’re not gonna sit down and start writing about that. But like, I’m thinking about writing about like the definition of comfort is really just the absence of discomfort. G: [laughs] P: Shut up. But, I was looking through some of Tom’s5 lectures again and he makes this point. He shows a bunch of people in super uncomfortable chairs but in really nice places - like Greek islands or like. . . G: Yeah, Yeah. P: Just super nice places. There’s no discomfort there, you know? That was like when I went to the park, the ground was cold, the sun hadn’t warmed the ground and it was super windy and there was a bunch of people out blasting music, so not like a pleasant place but people
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Tom Oliphant,thomasoliphant.com
were out there enjoying the sun. They haven’t experienced that in a while, that’s purely about memory. G: Yeah, I think that may be something I struggle with for a while with this. Like I feel like, especially between the two of us, a lot of how we talk about stuff comes back to WECOLAB so much and you know that I struggled a lot in WECOLAB. Um. . . Even in talking to Matt recently, I’ve found that there’s still something. It’s almost like my frame of mind is still disconnected from that. . . So I think that might be something I try to dig into a little bit. Like yeah. . . I don’t know. . . P: Yeah, the other option is to like write to more towards the Søren version for now. Because. . . G: Because that’s something that resonates with me a lot. P: Yeah, because that resonates with you, so write about that. Like write based on some of those thoughts. I think we definitely have some of these things and if we start to put them down and get them out, then we can put one out, then another and these things will start to relate to each other. We know the broad things we wanna talk about so we know how we can position these things in relation. . . G: It becomes kind of like a collage. You have these different elements, and you can start amalgamating them together. P: Yeah. I think we need to just get a lot of stuff out, like on the table, and then we can start arranging it and seeing what these things are actually saying about the stuff we want to be talking about, and about each other. G: I think I’m also interested a lot in, like . . . not to say non-traditional media, because I don’t think we’re really going to be able to break a ton of new ground in the format of a zine - it’s a pretty, like, well-explored path - but I think exploring new media and
trying to explore these ideas in a way not strictly limited to writing. P: I think with that it’s like doing it - I don’t know, being true to the ways those ideas come up and just presenting them in the best way, or in the way that they come to us. But like, not just doing it just for the sake of. . . G: Just to be weird, yeah. P: Because when we were leaving Archival Studies6 we were talking about, like, “let’s just type it up and it doesn’t matter what the format looks like. Just like write it, you know?”. G: Yeah, like, the vernacular zine. P: I forget how we got on that topic but just writing just to like -- G: I think it was like almost exactly how we got back on to it just now. It’s like either Oli or I probably said something like “oh I want to do this as an aesthetic thing”. . . P: Yeah. Like what if we just don’t have graphics at all. G: What if it’s just like it is what it is. P: Or it’s not about that. G: Yeah, I think that’s going to be something that - I think definitely me, and I think us overall - are going to struggle with, is avoiding doing things for aesthetic reasons. 6
Archival Studies, archivalstudies.net
P: And that’s a way of avoiding ego. G: Yeah, cause I think aesthetic is definitely intertwined with ego pretty intensely. . . . Especially how people talk about it now. It’s like a thing that you identify with, it’s not like. . . P: Yeah, it’s one of those. The concept of aesthetic is one of the things I love the most, but I hate conversations about it - because they’re never talking about what I want to be talking about. G: Yeah exactly. P: It means you like “exposed brick veneer” -- G: [laughs] Real bricks only. P: -- it’s not like you care about all of the senses. G: So we’re thinking about this a lot as kind of amalgamation of ideas, where piece by piece by piece we’re building this archive, or whatever you want to refer to it as. Are we then just, in terms of length of each individual zine is it just like, we do whatever comes out of the work we’re doing in a certain. . ? Like are we constraining it by length or constraining issues by time period, where it’s like whatever work we come up with in this period of time, that’s what it is? P: That’s a good question. Because I feel like the way we’ve been talking about like, “we’re going to just talk about the same issues” and kind of as we just keep figuring them out or thinking them through in different ways - or in the same way - that time makes sense as a scale for that. But I think it’s also like, especially at first there’s a huge --
G: Getting over the hump of. . . P: -- yeah, there’s going to be a while where we need to just get a lot of stuff. G: Yeah. And I think I would prefer to do it based on time, just because then I think there’s an interesting breadth to the work. Because then it’s not like “oh each issue you get one article or whatever from Grey, you get one from Parker, you get one from Oli. . .” It can grow and expand based on how much -- P: Yeah like “there were a lot of thoughts this month”. G: But yeah I think you’re definitely right, the first “bit” is going to be, I think we’re going to just have to buckle down and just do it. P: And also figure out what the kind of general format of these is going to look like. How long is each essay going to be -- G: Find our voice. P: -- that’s a good way to say it, finding a tone. G: I think, I might actually spend some time looking at how zine has been used specifically in design. That feels very like. . . like I’m just going to do an archive of Matt Olson’s work [laughs]. But maybe that’s something I look into to a certain degree, I don’t know I don’t want to bind myself into any one avenue of exploration now but I think that’s something I definitely be looking at. Especially those RO/LU7 zines. 7
RO/LU, ro-lu.com
P: Those are really interesting. If we were in Minneapolis I would say we should go to The Walker8 library and look at those things. P: Actually that’s a good point, something we should keep in mind because I think to go to The Walker library you need - you set up an appointment and you tell the librarian what you’re interested in. Because this guy knows like everything. And he’ll pull these things. That’s what I’ve heard, that’s what Matt’s talked about - you go interested in a topic, you don’t just set up an appointment to wander around. You tell him what you’re interested in and he’ll bring you a bunch of stuff just because he knows the collection so well. So that could be an interesting thing, to be like “hey we’re interested in zines on art and design that talk about these topics”, - topics of memory, of emotion, of senses. Even zines on art and design might be a very broad topic. G: I’ve also been, in thinking about this the last couple days, I’ve been thinking a lot about Matt Olson’s work obviously, but also a lot of Tom Sachs’9 work, and the Boys Don’t Cry10 zine, of just, in each of those examples there’s an element of not necessarily explicit appropriation but like lifting of images and works of other people. Like Boys Don’t Cry explicitly copies frames from the Tom Sachs Colors documentary, and Tom Sachs is real big on “if it works, just steal it”. Bruce Mau even talks about that. Do we think that’s kind of a thing we have a place for? P: I think if we think about it from what we’re familiar with, it’s just like precedent, you know? That’s like what I do with all of my -- I just have a bunch of things pinned up on my board and it’s not like a “correct” citation but I put like what it is, when it was built, who it was by. G: Yeah I think that’s interesting, because I think the way that both of us set up our desks and our boards is purely a reflection of your thoughts and the way you’re organizing ideas in your own head. And I 8 9
Walker Art Center, walkerart.org Tom Sachs, tomsachs.org Boys Don’t Cry, zine by Frank Ocean
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think it’s valuable to see this zine - because of the way we’ve been talking maybe it’s just the same thing where it is just a pure one-to-one reflection of our head and it isn’t necessarily organized. P: So what if it’s just for now, a Google Drive folder that we just like dump images? I mean maybe, so that it’s a virtual collection of our desks, like I always put a bunch of images on one page, I don’t print each thing on a separate A4 but just upload a bunch of PDFs. G: And I think that gives us a good springboard into getting into talking about whatever. Kind of cold-cut into where we are in our projects right now. Like “this is where our head is at the moment” and everything from there is just referencing back or moving forward from that point. Not make a big ceremonious intro, cold open. P: Even, there are people that share things online through Google Drive, you know? G: True. Yeah. P: It’s not a very glamorous or the flashy way to do it -- G: But I think that’s what we’re into in a certain sense. It just kind of is. P: And that’s what a lot of the WECOLAB zines were. There is a paper version of -- G: But that’s not where that exists. It’s almost like a physical artifact of the website and the instagram and all the other. . . P: And I think it’s really interesting to have a physical object of that kind of stuff, but that there’s so much more behind it.
G: Yeah and I think the physical object definitely appeals to us as designers because of the tactility of it, but I think in a sense the physical zine is not what the zine is. The zine exists as an idea in the cloud, but then the instagram and the website and the actual physical object are just like these derivative side-thoughts about it or different expressions of that thing. P: Yeah. I follow. G: So I think that gives a good starting-off point, like I think transcribing this conversation. . . P: That would be really interesting. . . G: Honestly I think just like everything, like everything, even if stuff doesn’t have context or if we don’t finish sentences. I think that’s a kind of format I like where it’s got like weird extraneous artifacts -- P: I love that! G: [laughs] That’s like the most us-thing to be about P: Um, about everything? [laughs] G: Yeah. [laughs] P: I am so about everything. G: Yeah, so I think the first issue is, in the spirit of just getting shit out there, maybe the first issue is literally just this conversation transcribed.
BR_CKS zine is. . . the vernacular zine
insta: @br_cks