Who are the semionauts?

Interesting.

In my experience, ‘graphic’ design is increasingly becoming ‘communication’ design. That is, the role of the designer is changing from being someone who dresses a message to becoming someone who creates a means of, or space for, dialogue. In this sense, there seems to be a tension between the still rather traditional sense of the artist as someone with something to say, and the emerging role of the designer as someone who enables something - as yet unknown - to come to be.

My sense is that the visual arts have become a relatively stale paradigm in this respect, because of their inability to challenge the centrality of the artist. I’d suggest that ideas - themselves not new - like ‘appreciative enquiry’ and ‘Bohmian dialogue’ offer much more fruitful lines of enquiry for communication designers. Coupled with developing ’social networking’ technologies - the fabled Web 2.0 - we’re witnessing the emergence of really exciting new possibilities for design. Opportunities for ‘readers’ or ‘participants’ to become co-creators of the experience, and for the creation of environments where we can suspend judgment and expectations and, through unconditional attention, allow each other to come to be. And there is a possibility for this to become part of the normative experience for a majority of humankind, not a rather ‘precious’ gallery experience for a tiny minority of cognoscienti.

/james souttar 18/05/2007

This kind of typeface and designer as mediator (between whatever spheres of the world) reminds of Paul Elliman’s on-going ‘Bits’ typeface. In this case he is the mediator, listening to the system of the city and its (discarded) elements of material production that somewhat produce their own language (letter-shapes), turning them into a useable and endlessly extendable typeface to ‘talk back’ to the world.

Is the term ‘knowing’ audience a Bourriaud term? What does it mean?

“In my experience, ‘graphic’ design is increasingly becoming ‘communication’ design. That is, the role of the designer is changing from being someone who dresses a message to becoming someone who creates a means of, or space for, dialogue.”
Do you have examples of where this is happening/designers who attempt at creating spaces for dialogue? I’m very interested in this, yet often find that a space for dialogue merely opens up as a by-product, though that might not be altogether bad either..

/adriana 21/05/2007

I think the designer as ’semionaut’ is often lost to the designer as sledgehammer vis a vis the London Olympic logo - which over the last few days has been defended by the designers as a logo which is meant to be ‘edgy’ and ‘provocative’. When designers use a methodology of confrontation for something like a banal, corporate public event like the Olympics, i think it is a example of how designers largely do not think beyond simple stereotypes: graffiti = edgy. We could make a list of examples as long 100 meters long. Sites like this - and a few enlightened books - provide a discussion which is way, way on the periphery of everyday graphic - or communication - designers.

/Nicky 20/06/2007

re Nicky’s comment. Semionaut and semionaught then..?

/Jess 25/06/2007

I think this stream has exposed a problem with some of the discussion on communication design – at least in its contemporary manifestation. The semionaut ( a great term by the way) really works well at the level of material design – things – like posters and packaging. Any snapshot of packaging over the years will give some good representation of the cultural mores and concerns of any given time – from the gloss of the 70s and 80s, to some of the more faux environmental concerns of the 90s – packaging made to look as if it was recycled – but not in actuality. This said, I am not sure if designers really ever capture – or point towards – something completely new – they never represent the zeitgeist. And in this sense, they are making, or mapping links which, already exist; but has design not always done this?

Like Adriana, I would like practical examples of the /reflective dialogue/ in design – yes it exists in Art but in design? What we see is an increasingly sophisticated language – or appropriation of language – to discuss communication design BUT I feel the connection to subject is often frail – if not totally missing. If you want to discuss Design, surely, you need to start from concrete examples? The language needs to fixed to something otherwise you reduce it to simple floating naut in space!

/Stephen 03/07/2007

Ji Lee’s Bubble Project is quite a useful example because, although mostly publicised in the press, it was actually played out in the public realm. In the summer of 2005, New York artist Ji Lee plastered 50,000 of the city’s billboards with empty speech bubbles and then waited for New Yorkers to do the rest. This is a step away from the now infamous ‘culture jamming’ of the 1990s that aimed to replace the ‘bad’ prescriptive language of advertising with ‘good’ - but equally prescriptive - language of alternative forms of consumption. The Ji Lee Bubble Project operates in a more relational, less combative mode – not jamming but deflecting the corporate monologue into a dialogue. In essence, this deflects what Bourriaud would call the ‘looped communication’ of the original space. Ji Lee doesn’t direct the outcome of his project, he simply sets up a structure for the citizen to use as they will – and further bubbles are still downloadable from his website, www.thebubbleproject.com/ The result being that, while some of the bubbles are filled with protest speak, many simply give people a voice – their own, not the ‘collective’ voice of just another cause. Dialogue, here, opens up to the more nuanced, less entrenched sense found in the term ‘discussion’. Whereas a bikini-clad cartoon woman in a street ad for Grand Theft Auto said ‘Fuck the Hummer’, elsewhere, a film-poster ‘babe’ confided ‘I know my husband wakes next to my sister.’

Such poignancy is reminiscent of the website PostSecret.com of which we have talked else where on the Limited Language site. http://postsecret.blogspot.com/, which started like as a community art project instigated by Frank Warren, asks you to give up your secrets to be posted on the site. One, a series of images breast cancer ribbons, says “I always want to ask if they do more than wear a ribbon.” In another, on an illustration of three people awkwardly juxtaposed, “I think we all would have been happier if I had married you instead. I’m sorry.” The idea is not a new one as there are many confessional sites which lend themselves to a more instant outlet of emotion (“xxx is a shit” etc.). But, here you are asked to produce a card, 6”x 4”, and to post it in. We argued in the post ‘Slow times’ that it’s the act of ‘design’ which makes this reflective, rather than reactive. Over a year and a half later, it seems these images have become iconic of our times and are re-printed everywhere – including a weekly spot in the British Guardian newspaper. They are offered up as examples of twenty-first century confession culture and yet, these postcards do so much more than obsess about, expose or construct the self a la reality TV. Arguably, they use intimacy as a structural device for generating human relations. In their printed format, what is so often overlooked it that on the site itself readers can email a response. On Monday July 9th 2007 at 12.52, re: Wrong Marriage Secret: “If my dad had married the right woman, I wouldn’t exist.”

Elsewhere, Blinkenlights is a project set up in Berlin by a group of hackers from 2001-2. It is quite old now but worth re-visiting. The hackers took over a building in Alexander Platz and rigged up a light behind each of the tower block’s windows and collectively these were controlled by a computer – thus turning the building’s modernist façade into a huge computer - a monochrome matrix 8 windows high and 14 wide. Through the website, people could download software to create their own animations to upload on to the building’s façade, join in on a game of ‘Pong’ with other players – whether connected via computer screen around the world, or mobile phone and standing in the city square below, looking up. People could also activate personal messages on the facade by texting.

Like the Ji Lee project’s relationship to culture-jamming, this might be conceived of as a move away from the stereotype of hacking of nineties Hollywood films – manipulating the medium as an anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian message. Here, voice of the hackers themselves is not evident – they use their’tools’ to set up a structure that facilitates the exchanges of others.

Kai Design, interaction designers from Korean, have said that ‘Interaction design is designing a conversation’. Although we wouldn’t argue that all interaction design works in this way, what we notice is that increasingly the structural intention is open to spontaneity in the way than a conversation is. It’s not really important whether these are artists or designers or even ‘interaction’ designers in a formal sense, as such, but maybe they all go some way to explore the notion of the semionaut who, as we suggested in the original post, initiates a starting point, a trajectory – creating work which drip feeds into the consciousness and is not snared by its own finitude.

p.s. Adriana - ‘knowing audience’ is our term, not Bourriaud’s. I guess that we were trying to suggest an audience that is already ‘primed’, so that in some senses they experience meaning as pre-packaged – making possible what’s often referred to as post-modern or post-consumer irony and so forth - rather than responding to the incongruousness of the moment in which a communicated meaning is situated.

/Monika and Colin 10/07/2007

Who are the semionauts?
Are they the spectral agents engaged in the production of Manuals and Maps?

Here are a few more projects which have set off semionaut thoughts for me:–

• From Copenhagen, Superflex with the projects on their website configured as ‘Tools’ not ‘work’ (an end point) and N55 whos site uses the concept of the ‘Manual’ as a structure to not only explain but distribute the construction and use of their work (as opposed to a portfolio which merely shows it…).
http://www.superflex.net/
http://www.n55.dk/

• ‘Mapping Graphic Design Now’: it is a student brief from Cal Arts (organised by Louise Sandhaus, Lorraine Wild and Michael Worthington http://lulu101.typepad.com/design_now_maps/

One of the assignment inspiration quotes was from Peter Turchi’s beautiful book ‘Maps of the Imagination’:
“We organize information on maps in order to see our knowledge in a new way. As a result, maps suggest explanations; and while explanations reassure us, the also inspire us to ask more questions, consider other possibilities.”

Although these projects can only be seen to begin an interrogation of this area, to me, maps are interesting because increasingly they are understood to operate in a space between the perceived objectivity of information design/topographical projections and the subjectivity of the individual view point. The term ‘situated knowledges’ (Donna Haraway) is useful here because it does not claim some totalising ability to ‘view, chart and know every thing’ nor does it allow things to dissolve into a mire of endless relativity in which there can be no facts, no objective knowledge. It is about the possibility of a feminist objectivity – where knowledge is acknowledged as always partial – from a point of view. Maps present an opportunity for the viewer(s) to locate them self(ves) within them – in multiple and fluctuating ways. In this sense maps are also inter-subjective.

What does this have to do with semionauts? The Cal Arts maps in particular are about graphic design - the role of the designer (or the audience) is not, as such, meant to be on view, but it is always there – both are implicit.

A key critique of Bourriaud’s ‘semionauts’ concept is that although there is the sense that the role of the artist, like the DJ or web-surfer, is to make connections, in actuality this has tended to loop back on it self and play into the cult of celebrity. In another blog, Digital Glass, on this site, Jon Wozencroft put it this way: “To make diverse work… that had a lack of desire to control what comes out of it” depends on a degree of invisibility that is anathema to Bourriaud’s position” (i.e. he is a ‘cult’ curator, his artists are international figures).

It’s the in/visibility of mappers that is interesting here. Perhaps, in the CalArts mapping project they are most present in the visual tropes that are used to present the information. Most of the maps draw on the mythical language of scientific and corporate projections (linear and axial projections, pie charts rendered in the colour palette of the PowerPoint) and also the language of ‘personal’ graphic style that emerged post- this kind of modernism (Stephanie Chen, Silas Monroe, Nikelle Orellana, Nate Schulman, Julie Mattei, Colleen Corcoran).

In Silas Monroe’s project, the words which constitute both the chart and its key, are projections – literally - stretched outwards in to space. His volumised words “define the territory and linkages between it’s inhabitants.” He continues, “I also find the grotesque extrusions oddly beautiful.” I would agree and this can’t help but remind me of some of the humour of the legendary charts of Chris Morris’ British TV current affairs spoof Brass Eye - this both spectacularised and deflated genuine the tendency of current affairs programmes to rely on all-singing, all-dancing digitalised mapping to bring the complexities of elections, wars etc. to the public.

Brass Eye’s mappings deliberately showed how spectacle can detract from a genuine engagement. Or, that the inter-subjectivity of reading maps – and locating your understanding within the information - is not a given, even if it gets the viewers’ attention has been arrested.

In contrast, the potential of mapping, in the CalArts project and elsewhere, is as methodology, not spectacle.

In Eileen Levinson’s ‘Analogue Wiki Map’, the short film of her project records the embodied actions of her somewhat anonymous mappers – what becomes important is their shifting, moving, linking. She writes: “Similarly, the trends in current technology have expanded these postmodern notions. With a boom in self-publishing and open source programming, designers are pushing the interactive capacity of their work. The agenda is not to concretize the singular statement of one author, but to find meaning, and occasionally consensus, in the nuances of a group dialogue.”

As for manuals, they are structures for situated knowledges to be passed on - to find their meaning in another way, elsewhere.

/Monika 20/07/2007

I’d like to add to that:
Mark Amerika who I saw last week was part of London Tate Modern’s symposium ‘Disrupting Narratives’ and neatly called a “postproduction artist” and a “remixologist” with his trilogy of works: GRAMMATRON, PHON:E:ME, and FILMTEXT. Amongst other things the web tells me they bring live writing and video sampling and so on into the narrative mix….
http://www.markamerika.com/
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/8896.htm

/Gaby 20/07/2007

Although a long time reader of this site this is my first comment. Since reading this post I have been thinking about the role of design/art in programming our experience - how we feel and digest the world. Although the wordage can confuse - from semionaut o remixologist - and it is easy to be cynical and see it all as a clever word game or simply a byproduct of becoming a packaged product - feel the weight of the weekend supplements for instance! But, it has to be recognized that our daily dose of - whether through advertising or art gallery - influences how we see and interact with the world. Although i am skeptical of some of the examples given here, i do believe, as artists or designers we unearth new material - experience - in our work. The debate might be to the consciousness of the act? What the artist creates with conscious intent, the designer might produce as a simple rhetorical sermon of belief?

/Joseph 21/08/2007

“What the artist creates with conscious intent, the designer might produce as a simple rhetorical sermon of belief?”

There is a hollowness in the centre of this phrase about belief here - as if the designer’s belief isn’t an engagement (in their materials and tools and processes) so much as blind faith. I think part of the necessary project to rethink the designer’s potential is to move away from attempts to judge whether there is a more conscious/active engagement of the artist with media than there is with the designer. For one, designers are all too aware of the point at which the designer starts to become mac monkey (their own phrase) - even if the co-ordinates at which this fall in any particular job are elusive and contingent.

For me, the debate about consciousness isn’t about how much or how little - a judgement - but about far we are willing to cast our nets (spatially) and for how long (in time) - an exploration of sorts. ‘Unearthing new material’, ’seeing and interacting’ with the world - can only be fully realised if you also take into account and find some way to measure their effects - what use to which the new materials are put, how the interactions play out. I would say that the design industry largely has awarded intentions (there is always consciousness and thoughtfulness at play here) but found little way (or interest in?) measuring its effects. The Design Effectiveness Awards in Britain were always the least glamorous ones to win.

Sure, there are stats for sales, bums on seats, feet through doors and so on but these are only the tentative first steps in the life - and the impact that work might go on to have. Awards are given, photos are taken before the first grimy digits thumb the print. They cluster around the intentions of designers because this is easy and safe and elevates some to heroic status and allows others (those who blandly reproduce rhetoric) - always others - to be made scape goats of or become the exceptions that prove the rule, or the dumb majority that make that intelligent and conscious minority worthy of their award in the first place.

But supposing we ignore all this, because rather than defame the industry it makes it tick, and think about the effect that a design might have and all becomes less cut and dried, less safe, certainly not easy. An Award Winning Design might have little or negative affect. A design that starts out humbly, even shamefully, or unacknowledged as ‘design’, might be find in the run of things an interesting role to play. More likely any design’s effect will fork off on both these trajectories and many others.

A criticism of this might be that this is surely out of the control of the designer. Yes - and gloriously so, but it’s out there that design makes and re-makes the world. A consciousness that is generous enough to attempt to look beyond the self and the act/materials/tools of creation might take note of some of these ripples, to enlarge their possibilities for engaging/manoeuvering.

The Semionaut idea is more than about consciousness as i see it, its deliberate techno-slant is to bring to the fore the connections that are made going outwards. The term is horrible but I suppose the deliberate akwardness/wankiness is about making visible and audible that not just some person, but some process, is at work - like the way computers hum when they start up or when the internet icon spins and it says

/Gaby 28/08/2007

/Gaby 28/08/2007

…”connecting”…

/Gaby 28/08/2007

Just peel to reveal
the appeal and contentment
at servicing surface
ment for serving content

Semionaughty?
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/027474.html#62

/The Swarm 30/08/2007

Just saw your comment about our mapping projects. Thanks for mentioning us! It seems that we’re thinking about a lot of the same things. Would love to share more ideas soon.

Eileen Levinson (CalArts Grad Student)

eileenlevinson@yahoo.com

/Eileen Levinson 27/09/2007

In 2009 we released the book ‘Limited Language: Rewriting Design: Responding to a feedback culture’ which re-engaged with this original post.

For more on the book as a whole: http://bit.ly/bookcomments

//

/Colin + Monika 15/11/2009

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