24
"I first fell in love with design at CalArts. The walls of the school were covered in deliciously complex, even illegible posters printed by hand in tiny editions by the graphic design students. Crowd favorites were stolen right off the walls while less successful ones remained behind. The most appealing posters often disappeared before the event they were promoting even happened. I wanted Machine to produce the kind of posters I’d want to steal.
Machine developed at the same time the Internet became my main source of media and cultural information. Machine began almost at the same time as Wikipedia, and in early interviews I often explained we created our events to “do the Internet in person.” As networks and social media expanded, it has seemed more and more valuable to bring people together in an informal social space, an embodied environment based on ideas and shared experience.
Machine’s poster collection is a record of those experiences, but it also offers a window into what graphic designers in Los Angeles were doing in the first years of the twenty-first century, as digital, web, and device design expanded and changed at a breakneck pace. How did these shifts in screen-based design influence (or not influence) what might happen in a poster? Looking at a poster from San Francisco in the sixties, or a Xeroxed punk rock flier from L.A. in the eighties, or an invitation to an art exhibit in New York City in the seventies can tell you a lot about culture at the time.
Early Machine posters did what posters are supposed to do: advertise upcoming events. The first were made for two programs that Sara Roberts organized: You too can make difficult music and Everybody loves difficult music. Marci Boudreau and Vesna Petrovic of Picnic Design created a new variation each week, always featuring a different cactus, an appropriate choice for the dry, prickly, and austere music in the series.
The promotional function didn’t seem effective, but it was fun to have some evidence of the events afterward. We’ve kept it going and now have a couple hundred different designs in our archive. Most have been made by graphic design students from CalArts with additional contributions from students at Otis College of Art and Design, Art Center, and Pomona College and special guest appearances from famous, infamous, and anonymous designers in Los Angeles and beyond.
It seems the less guidance we provide to the designers the better the posters. We give them just enough to get started: a title, the time, the date, and maybe a sentence or two of description, none of which needs to appear on the final piece We don’t really have a conventional client/designer relationship, with pitches, an approval process, rounds of revisions, or even a firm deadline. I never give feedback, unless designers ask for it directly, and they never do. The only concrete restrictions we have are that the poster must be printed by hand (except when it isn’t) and the artists have to make more than one of them (except when they don’t).
The posters strongly tend to get printed at the absolute last minute, usually arriving the afternoon of an event, or right before an event, or during an event, or even the day after the event. Most individual posters are printed by the designer, with Paul Morgan printing larger series for us.
I like when poster designers convey the exact feel of an event and I like when they get confused and do something completely wrong. I like when designers obsessively research an artist’s project and I like when designers ignore the prompt and use the poster as an excuse to explore some crazy side alley in their brain or to scratch some aesthetic itch. Sometimes, looking at one of those posters, you can’t get much concrete information about what happened. You don’t know how long it was or who showed up; you might have no idea what the event was about. But other kinds of subjective information, or information about the culture, the time, are embedded in it. In place of a definitive record that pretends to stand for the whole from one point of view, we end up with a rich collection of fragments. The posters as a collection tell an alternative history of Machine Project, fragmentary and complex, a subjective archive of hundreds of different people imagining what an event might feel like."
"I first fell in love with design at CalArts. The walls of the school were covered in deliciously complex, even illegible posters printed by hand in tiny editions by the graphic design students. Crowd favorites were stolen right off the walls while less successful ones remained behind. The most appealing posters often disappeared before the event they were promoting even happened. I wanted Machine to produce the kind of posters I’d want to steal.
Machine developed at the same time the Internet became my main source of media and cultural information. Machine began almost at the same time as Wikipedia, and in early interviews I often explained we created our events to “do the Internet in person.” As networks and social media expanded, it has seemed more and more valuable to bring people together in an informal social space, an embodied environment based on ideas and shared experience.
Machine’s poster collection is a record of those experiences, but it also offers a window into what graphic designers in Los Angeles were doing in the first years of the twenty-first century, as digital, web, and device design expanded and changed at a breakneck pace. How did these shifts in screen-based design influence (or not influence) what might happen in a poster? Looking at a poster from San Francisco in the sixties, or a Xeroxed punk rock flier from L.A. in the eighties, or an invitation to an art exhibit in New York City in the seventies can tell you a lot about culture at the time.
Early Machine posters did what posters are supposed to do: advertise upcoming events. The first were made for two programs that Sara Roberts organized: You too can make difficult music and Everybody loves difficult music. Marci Boudreau and Vesna Petrovic of Picnic Design created a new variation each week, always featuring a different cactus, an appropriate choice for the dry, prickly, and austere music in the series.
The promotional function didn’t seem effective, but it was fun to have some evidence of the events afterward. We’ve kept it going and now have a couple hundred different designs in our archive. Most have been made by graphic design students from CalArts with additional contributions from students at Otis College of Art and Design, Art Center, and Pomona College and special guest appearances from famous, infamous, and anonymous designers in Los Angeles and beyond.
It seems the less guidance we provide to the designers the better the posters. We give them just enough to get started: a title, the time, the date, and maybe a sentence or two of description, none of which needs to appear on the final piece We don’t really have a conventional client/designer relationship, with pitches, an approval process, rounds of revisions, or even a firm deadline. I never give feedback, unless designers ask for it directly, and they never do. The only concrete restrictions we have are that the poster must be printed by hand (except when it isn’t) and the artists have to make more than one of them (except when they don’t).
The posters strongly tend to get printed at the absolute last minute, usually arriving the afternoon of an event, or right before an event, or during an event, or even the day after the event. Most individual posters are printed by the designer, with Paul Morgan printing larger series for us.
I like when poster designers convey the exact feel of an event and I like when they get confused and do something completely wrong. I like when designers obsessively research an artist’s project and I like when designers ignore the prompt and use the poster as an excuse to explore some crazy side alley in their brain or to scratch some aesthetic itch. Sometimes, looking at one of those posters, you can’t get much concrete information about what happened. You don’t know how long it was or who showed up; you might have no idea what the event was about. But other kinds of subjective information, or information about the culture, the time, are embedded in it. In place of a definitive record that pretends to stand for the whole from one point of view, we end up with a rich collection of fragments. The posters as a collection tell an alternative history of Machine Project, fragmentary and complex, a subjective archive of hundreds of different people imagining what an event might feel like."
excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION
By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN
No comments:
Post a Comment