shelflife by visitor

I really don’t remember much about my time at college. I was at Boulder for Environmental Design. I swung by Cooper Union for Civil Engineering–walked out one day and decided to get a diploma from Parsons for design. At Parsons, I spent a lot of time absent from my classes. William Bevington was an incredible department Chair and gave me a lot of leeway to travel with clients, friends and collaborators while generating credits thru independent studies of my own design. I’m grateful for the freedom I had in school. I remember it fondly. One of the only other things I remember from my time at Parsons was the day Cecilia Dean came to hang out with one of my classes.

Zipped, pinned and coiffed to an immaculate T… this woman had class. She dropped by with a slideshow about VISIONAIRE. At some point in her discussion, she brought up heroin chic (it was 1995 or 6, after all). I told her she should do an issue of VISIONAIRE etched on the skin of a heroin sheep. She was not amused.

A few years later, I get this cryptic letter in a crimson envelope from VISIONAIRE. It references some work I’d done with Sonic Youth, includes a concept briefing about a Parisian future punctuated only by a finite palette of Pantone greys and includes an invitation to submit a project for inclusion in the Hedi Slimane edited VISIONAIRE 34. “Damn.” I thought aloud. “I guess she forgot about the sheep.”

I considered Paris. I imagined the future. I recollected the past. I spun my wheels on the palette of greys. I wrote an elegy for a grey Paris. It mourned the misinterpretation of the DNA of Jean Prouvé and pondered how digital chromosomes would look on a tactile, luminescence-free computer monitor as they scrolled on by–anonymously–lacking the context of a life’s work of sublime brilliance.

So, that’s what I drew–a single moment of scrolling, digital chromosomes. The thing was… the tactile display–that was important to me–as was this sound I created that went with the illustration. I tried to convince VISIONAIRE to let me use IC-chipcorders embeded in the spine of the edition to generate the sound I associated with my piece. They’d trigger as my spread was opened. Cecilia and Stephen seriously considered it. They even actually fought for it. Just in showing that sort of interest in preserving the context of concepts, they gained my undying respect. Ultimately, though–sound was not to be in Paris’ stark, grey future–so sad… No color. No sound. Pauvre Paris.

Anyway, VISIONAIRE *did* give me a 2-page, glossy, blind-embossed spread. I got my tactile terminal screen. It’s really hard to photograph the spread. It’s super-subtle, but the curves and angles are actually hyper-intricate. Below are a photo and an illustration of the same piece.

The coolest thing about the issue was that Hedi’s case for it mirrored my spread in a lot of ways. It was an awesome, injection-moulded contour map of vertebrae type of a thing set inside of powdercoated steel. I love that issue.