This presentation by Chris Lee is oriented towards rethinking graphic design’s historiography. 

It centers 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 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.

The project’s pedagogical significance is premised on 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, I contend, design’s most profoundly consequential forms. For instance, the catastrophe that is border politics — charged as a matter of having (or not having) the “right” papers — can figure as an urgent task for graphic designers to develop discourse and pedagogy to rethink the role and ontological conditions of the document, as an experimental, creative, and critical practice.

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 project’s aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining and naming 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.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based Buffalo and Brooklyn, NY, where he is an Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department. He is a graduate of OCADU (Toronto) and the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), and has worked for The Walrus Magazine, Metahaven and Bruce Mau Design.

He was the designer and an editorial board member of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy. Clients have included C magazine, Art Museum, Wendy’s Subway, Grunt Gallery, the Aga Khan Museum, The New York Times, and Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, among others. Chris’ research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards, and the document. He has contributed projects and writing to Neshan, Decolonising Design, the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, Graphic, Volume, and Counter Signals and has lectured and given workshops in the USA, Canada, Scotland, Germany, The Netherlands and Croatia.

He has exhibited his own research-based design work internationally and as a member of the working group Collective Question which coalesced around research about Tolstoy College, an anarchist educational community within University at Buffalo SUNY. He was a graphic design research fellow of Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2017/18), and a participant of the fifth edition of the Summer University of the Bibliotheque Kandinsky at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and his work is in the permanent collection of SFMOMA. He co-guest-edited issue 141 of C magazine on the theme of “Graphic Design” with Ali Shamas Qadeer.  cairolexicon.com

This presentation is part of the Master’s of Visual Studies Proseminar and will be moderated by the Director of Visual Studies Charles Stankievech.