Speculative text (in progress), full of mistakes and generalisations; part horrible rant.

PART 1. A production ain't no thing, baby. Introduction to a disappointed notebook.
Operating in the left field and also in the midst of processes – they are unrealised (as yet) in terms of their potential. Alternative ideas of production might offer possibilities only if they can fulfill a requirement [however abstract] that will circumvent or replace another one. Production in graphic design, in this case, might be re-thought; in terms of paradox, exercise, reception and exchange. Because now it operates, mostly, as something rather defensive and clearly ambivalent. Simply showing processes is not enough. Have you seen the film? You might propose a halt to production, or a subversion of the means and outcomes of production that goes beyond that [wildly relied on] 'outcome is not important, the process is the product' paradigm; the outcome is important. How stopping or subverting production fits into language, personal and civil, is as important as it is complicated. Voice can be easily stripped of voice: stripped of talking; word; of thing; of act – facts. But for the utterance of individual and the choir (filter, container, shelter and sign), no objects are required. But outcomes are still, eventually, produced ... upset upon each other. You must but you may not at all. Paper / folded / archived.
So then, are you going to relinquish distance? Might as well. Towns are being replaced by clusters; coupled with easy access to a means of creating a surrounding culture, one without too much detail [or attention to it] for that matter. An example of this: Towns have websites. This might be a part of a point. A point to begin with. Things packed up and put against the wall soon relinquish spirit and access. It is then the plugs – the ones that give the juice to the lights – that have a strong part to play. They provide the means for these things to be made found again. This re-discovered matter eventually winds-up more removed, rough and general; like snacks becoming more nourishing than meals, projection suddenly becomes more powerful than print. All these packed up things might really need is the appearance to bleed colours and light! While the other sort is still – and simply absorbs. Then: What becomes the neutral thing here? What is speaking to what? Without much practice! The following becomes force-fed: composition, exchange, resonance, maintenance, material, this font – all acting nimble and itchy. And all this irritation so you can finally wear your voice on the outside. These things play to your voice like insects. Reminding us that, sometimes, in our bodies (that will never be worth it), there are parts that can be heard – not listened to – but heard. Restricted by the tongue lapping on the inside of the mouth. And some cramped fingers. The acquired parts for making seem – essentially – each time the same and yet the process is always very different, so backwards ... Maybe you must act in-kind to the matter in the outset. This must be how it becomes activated and finally able to transmit clearly back inside? Apparent, maybe, but not obvious.

PART 2. In not an entirely pleasing way all software has started communicating, don't worry, it just happens in the background. You might be happy about it! In this place backgrounds and skeletons become very important. Not there to be fully-noticed, just fully-functional. These things that seemingly aren't even 'made', they simply (nowadays at-least) exist. Inside wood, inside stone, inside friends, inside bone, inside paper (& even ink); just inside – structures we have for all the creeping messages – mine and also yours. Makeable additions, always mutable, transforming, communicative, anesthetised [vice-versa]. Acting with a thing. Acting with anything. Being told and (op-)positioned in a forceful way towards it, from influence to subject. There is the dialogue which takes the outcome back to influence again. There is the dialogue repeated. Adding all this up, these seem to be the possibilities available for now – maybe the most overlooked.

PART 3. Typedesigners and linguists. Now that might be a meeting! Either it will be: hands around your neck, like this necklace, OR, a way to move ahead. Here [ • <– right here] we find a careless environment. Tied up with gossip and copies [constant messages], causing (along older, familiar, places of access) walls to form. Feeding off rotting corpses, hoping for visions; or even connections, that will – that must – eventually occur. Not readily sacrificing the positions and circumstances of the upper eschelon. Endorsements, precariously connected to output and vice-versa. Safe and (weirdly) able to move it on down the chain. Not a bad deal there. Sadly, these are not supporters of independent thinking but only of a perceived audience. Watching from the distance to which we are always placed, this exterior:
Fields of paradox, but of inspiration.
Ambivalence, that of choice.
Fallacious, like the melody.
Method, familiar, all wound-up; strangled.
An instance of Memory, that might cause chaos.

PART 4. It is difficult to believe things work in this way. Work seems fake. From the top, the middle and the bottom, through and in-between each instance (of work) there must be possibilities, outs. Keep working, please keep going. Only wish that the fear of time all collapsing won't happen, again. Making information is, as it seems (at this point in time at least), at it's most flexible. Image the bastion and text full of contranyms. Just try to justify your own now-a-days when going it alone. When did this change? You don't have your own work – you have someone else's. Tell them "It's over!" It's over. Not to be too calculated. To forget how – or even the moment – it was made. "The first word spoken, then the message itself."

REPETITION
to the effect of eating itself
& forgetting how
it might begin to differentiate itself, again
like the head that vomits itself
like necromancy
parculiarities
never to be,
when ornamental, again, becomes organic, again, when ornamental becomes, again, organic.

INTENTION
to risk and to find it's vocabulary
by decipherment
to find lost details, obliterated because of the limitations and needs of design software
(find a place called context)
re-visit the consequences of roles changing, and instigation of said new-roles
in accordance: speaking will change, spelling will change, recognition will be altered
mistakes, built in, visible, penetrable
erasures
and disconnected to commerce, at all costs!
knowing that it is not the technology that will change it.

RELAPSE
inevitable
on all sides
always
metaphors
call that rearranging
and a word is erased

PART 5. Begun in process, then becoming outside of it. Development - is this why all the performances? The human printing press, I finally saw it. After years of producing he finally became. The process, the transformation, are to easy to compare. The starting point is clear enough: first material is eaten, this material that is exchanged mostly by a group of insiders. Then material is then added a level of aesthetics and arrangement (layout, formal decisions). BUT, suddenly something is missing! Output is the usual design object - a contrivance. Expected, worn, dishonest. Like they ate the ink, but only with the intention to please others, this failed. The printing failed. Did it take courage? NO! Repetitious drawing of curves to makes forms will eventually result in [as a set of] sensible patterns. The light was sucked back in!

PART 6. Sucked out of the air. The material tested, from the shelter, out the back, 50% (only). [Frontage is the thing that only moves around]. Eating form. Not critically! Saw a child's bicycle parked out the front called 'Snake-King'. Impossible to describe what that looks like. The spit drips off the pencil, missing the page but only just. "Briefly", it will say. The way it's written, signed. Never a way with words. Keep an eye out for the too prolific – they are bound to be completely dogmatic, y'know?

PART 7. Graphic designers are generally mis-using the word research in two ways. The first is that conclusions that might result from an editing process are rarely offered, facts remain facts, only beautified. The second is that the word 'research' becomes conjuntional: 'my-research'. The appearance that that would be of any help, or use, to anyone else is whimsical and produces enormous amounts of waste. Maybe these things, instead, could be called 'exercises', 'investigations' or 'collections' - their graphic form is usually not translating the content but only formalising it. Can graphic designers only answer questions that are given to them? What does this mean?

PART 8. A watch viewed as a demon. A demon viewed as a watch. All children float. All children fall flat. 'I'm in the O, that stands for ocean', can you say this? You just say anything. How, can, you, say, anything. Why put this in public? The dog could see the park. The dog, on the leash, could see the park. My friend told me: "Book market –> Reading market." Book market –> Reading market.

PART 9. All our formal properties are transferred to the creation of objects. The hair on the porcelain fallen, a letter. Meddeling with ideas that he stored in his lover. Bursting out the thighs. She. The female dance-music voice, also a type. A stylised representation, a mimetic object, used like a typeface. Pale, can't get comfy in this seat. Massive. Next to me playing card-hands. Out the window, a void. The neck: An outlet. Standing outside is always anticipation. Like the cover, annexed.

PART 10. I can feel these people. I can hear the ones that will speak. The anticipation is complicated. During the typing I know there have been thoughts erased. Not presumed as important, or neccesary. The room is cold. The air is thick with sandwiches and mumbling. If only it adds to the content!

PART 11. The allure of business is violent, a sport. The structure of this society a super-imposed series of mixed and hierarchical messages, a sport. I can see and feel them.

PART 12. It's quite funny that guys, about my age, begin to write like this, these kinds of things. Kind of sad in a way. Already in a year I've seen most of my opinions change. That's what seems to happen. What follows, is usually contradiction and prospective grappling with materials. The gamble begins, the big ape. When in doubt, use reggae colours.

PART 13. Finding your way with a new language. A photograph of a well-kept hedge, a metaphor, obligatory and universal - we get it! Little flies wandering around the stainless suface. People chatting about porno on the left, not really being able to hear the right. Are you little flies out of control when you fly? It seems that way. Weak shapes, quick from the hand. Un-accumulative, self-confident, ironic. Especially – conceptually – weak. Vunerable. Busy indexing. Doubt eyes the hopeless.

PART 14. In the bedroom the little peg lying on the ground looked like a mistake. I wondered, it being small, then all of a sudden looking bigger and slightly fierce-ish – not pretending because a peg can't pretend – what was it doing there? Close to the floor everything looks longer. Cramped conditions, dampered with soft-card forms, recording in, leaving. My desk, a game of piles, annoying to me. Conversion! Sanding an object older than an average life-expectancy, restoring and preparing the surface: removing previous registrations, information, memories. The object's history manifest as a distribution channel of passing, periodical and elementary thoughts within a family system. On three separate occasions now i've seen women writing in foolscap note books in Amsterdam Central station. Always the lines are filled up to the brim; justified: Breathless, continuous, steady, text. They looked urgent. This was exciting to see, this was quite inspiring. Should we write more in public this way? Drug-addicts imitating architecture, yes; becoming the shape of the archways, roofs and screens – they are also their shelters. Supporting the spaces they occupy; themselves. Without them these spaces would also be empty.
Endearingly rendered flat composition.
Sunday if [it was] a full daisy.
A generation of Dutch Designers is slowly dying.

PART 15. (poem)

3 layers needed
to serenade the first leg,
to whine
whine at a distance
to yearn,
like a sequin
and be witness to the afternoon
when farina was less well known
for me-yeah-nee-jaa-ah-aiyja

colophon is sad
don't mar me again
marked by the fact that i
that i saw my body
if all was sincere
maybe
i would fall comfortably into the day
maybe
all of the waste
will raise itself up
ooh-aay-ahh-ahh

something special that will never end
i fell up
to get up
maybe, or long
maybe, or too long
too old, too tight
first, second, third
a base
nah!
protect me from advantages, and then, from ambition.

PART 16. It don't take much to say "Alright!"
Especially if it's via-via.

PART 17. Is design always to be about the expected? Out of your parents bedroom, a flat, a hotel room: What flows, rather than the object? That would be a sort of historical ephemera [sentiment] paradoxically remaining in the present; our written articulations of success and failure are still clearly templated...

PART 18. The DVD logo looks like a tribal mask. The mouth of the sock, looking for the other. Publications looking through cracks. Towards the unspecific. Soft, brittle, feeble, fragile, unsure: The forms I prefer. Tracing can be an incredibly fruitful exercise, but where precisely does it lead to? I know it has an effect on thought. I know that it also leads to a type of development. Someone always asks "what is critical?" at a given moment. Then there is a quiet lack of time, so, we wait.

PART 19. That this LED light is related to falling snow is a nice metaphor. It looks like it is merely something to trace over to make words. An exercise that was related back to the diagram (the first thing he saw that made sense on his arrival in the big city) as well as his own-versions off-shoot. The possibility of creating an awareness of spaces. Do these readings have a right to turn themselves back on the world? For a slight second I saw his wrinkled, coloured hand suctioned onto the cold bench-top. It seemed to mimick the relentless downloading of me and my peers. He was more worried about being trapped in the airport. Outside, the wind went through their teeth. This note will eventually snake-over into an earlier one.

PART 20. What if the alphabet was comprised of more dis-connected elements, more 'satellites'? Would this open up the possibility for more juxtapositions, more meanings? Or, would it just be a pain. The feeling of being in a room with content where nobody is watching you and the mmmmmaterials are open, accumulating [physical/formal] thoughts and circumstances. Hoping the message will be seen before the knowing of who did it. There is one, built in, repeat.

PART 21. Generally you begin to develop a working process by using forms and struggling with and through the development of them towards something meaningful. How is intuition to be included in this? 'My concept of a three dimensional language is the energizing of objects, relative to everything, and within a spatial sequence or configuration.' – A. C. McCoy, 1968

PART 22. Flock to the work like seagulls. Pick at it like seagulls. Or do little like frogs. Forced reading patterns on websites are completly irritating and formalise perhaps more interesting uses of hypertext. While we were waiting to see the doctor we heard Rod Stewart and Whitney Houston in the reception area & then, moving to the meeting room, a crisis fan [which was off] in the corner face two small hobby-style paintings of a coastline; this is where my mum cried the next part of her soul away, for the stupid doctors and nurses. Flecks of sugar on the table, dust on the balustrade, dog hair almost everywhere. These are details of the slightly unkempt home. Representative of the current psychological state of the occupant.

PART 23. Is this flickering cursor to be considered a glyph?

PART 24. It's been a while! Funny thing is that it is a hairbrush on my couch, from a welcome guest, that has inspired me to touch you again. We don't have a hairbrush in our house. We do have a comb, but it is never utilised. What did this brush represent as it sat there? [Bristles up] And, Why did it annoy me? Well the first thing is that it blended in, (it was pretty much the same colour as the couch) was it a chameleon? What if i sat on it? This thought gave me the shivers, not because it would hurt if i sat on it, but because it was a programmed and bland scenario; geared towards the foggy imagination of that morning-after. Yes, I was in the throws of a hangover. Slapstick. I was also faced with the realisation that i'm sub-conciously against combed hair, the combing of hair.

PART 25. As I scratch my back. Little pieces of text fall off. Or was that from the plaster cast? Which - i'm well aware - is not a poem, but a trophy.

PART 26. The footage of the open mouth is full of points, some waver & some differ. To the extent which is best decribed by the foot. The foot [without socks] is the open mouth.

PART 27. The file; the hand's thought's record. The file: The thoughts hands record.

PART 28. About a way of doing things. Yet, objects - especially typefaces - seem to acquire meaning over time [antecedant to their inception]; the original intention (if any) is distorted; due to conceptual and abstract circumstances (in the first place). So it is also about circumstances. But these seem to be surpassable, or superceeded i.e. through restoration. Full of possibilities and dead-ends. *TALENT*. So, Design, where do YOU come in?

PART 29. Describe going around the world by gesturing wildly with your hands, and then your place within that world with your body. While that goes on (in the lesson) – in the vacuum of a nervous gasp – the broken [grammatically incorrect] answer plops out. The right combination of chemicals towards acceptable behaviour, right? & how to deal with the world as a construct. As it commonly isn't.

PART 30. Death shave. The runt of the litter. The final seagull. Flame licks, as if affectionate. A suggestion of blackness outside the image. Fresher than flowers, fawner than fawns. For the process to be kept alive the means were collected and kept so we could use them again. He was in suddenly in a group – the receiver – his dream. He decided that we don't need to record them, they do it themselves; to send all over the place. An insect crawling on my neck, i'm ready. Nelly was a train, she rode the class in perfect noise! (see over).

PART 31. The images of the milky, perfect, kids were hung.

PART 32. A night in the 'F'. Like the reverb spring in The P Brothers' 'Outta Control' I went for the burn it in the ceiling behaviour.

PART 33. The haunted practitioners of letter-design live in the beautiful forest. She toils over his work, he toils over hers. The glasshouse next to the old bomb shelter (used for storage, but in a state of readiness) is covered in moss, faeces and plastic netting. Where they lay each other down and talk about function. About making signs and being signs. They make this joke to each other: "It's a long & lengthy process!"; indeed it is. Bent around the chair leg is a set of curves. Infact, curves cling to all furnitures in the covered-up glasshouse. In the night hours, when the internet connection is at rest, they work on the spacing. In the daytime they trawl and draw, on screens and on sheets and scraps of paper. Like one of thier colleagues, they sometimes use experimental methods to find forms. They often desire to describe something and are torn, because they have little contact with the people who will eventually use thier work. They also know that the world is somehow fucked, or was it always this way? How do you design that into a typeface? Was it the image of the devices they wanted to reflect or more to confirm their usefulness? Both seemed like rather finite options. (Like engineers, he dreams of an alphabet of essential forms, taken from the ordinary forms of nature and the social world.) Well, until the new one comes along, that is! One of the unique things they would do, that no-one would know about was, make things that they hated but knew would be acceptable. A kind of a definition for a service-practice! The name of the one they are working on at the moment is 'Mandy', she is their longest and most complicated project; because there is no intention, no projected ambition, no projected need – they are doing it because they want to. She is designed from pencils that lie in icecream containers on the floor, all over the glasshouse. She is also designed by feeling and intuition, rather than normative approaches to the process. She can't be traced because it is a life drawing [in mind]. She might be slighty illegible, poor thing! She is only intended for those who accept certain ideas and conditions for her use and will only be distributed with this intent. Maybe make a few dollars...

PART 34. Lunch time, waiting in the sun until an important delivery can be made. A reading on, not the final word. How was I supposed to know you were sick? It's more about the design, that's hard! A reality check [the club], even harder! Stealing from each other is exchange and a consequence of that is solidarity. It's not really following if you aren't involved and it's not really stalking unless you never meet. To put this back into forms... because i'm frustrated and eager. When was this exercise invented? It's time to make a break, you never! Why is everone into rocks and stones at the moment? Why doesn't social networking work? Why is my hairdresser asking me such private questions? Why are people who are now activists also classy artists? Why is cooking so important?

PART 35. The world operates, is awash, with blue blood and it's entrenched mechanics. They have the power to make the red flow and also active it's neurons – in their favour and for their productions. Perhaps the blue is the ocean? Once symbolic for discovery, or maybe even imagination (before it was commercialised). Yet, the lag of this idea permeates nearly everything we do or see. To be subjected to this, it's repetition, and the occasional utterances of dissent (like islands) seem the best we can hope for. Blue's dominance must be diluted. If I see another nice cotton shirt with a bad tie, jeans and shoes i'm gonna puke. This one goes out to the provocative Party Poker.com guy.

PART 36. Standing around in an exhibition listening to a practitioner describe themselves, quite funny. At exactly the same time I enjoyed the sense my hand makes patterns when employed. Or, When it had jobs that is. I felt this could only be figured out by tracing. Tracing spoiled and bored. Differences in approach and attention span. Interested in hand and decorative mystics (that you go through). Something is missing, which hurts. Some have the JOY, or a charasmatic set of approaches to things, some don't. What was DES again? [everybody seems to hate his work but he still wins prizes!] A proper dagger it seems to me...

PART 37. Design was the books dream. Design isn't thinking made visual, it is more like dart-board wires, unloved in the community – until now. A revival. Pub sports; Casino sports. Not healty, but connected to certain skills, which are now to be considered SPORTY (as they are sponsored and broadcast). A once hidden type of person is now on the screen, the bedroom, backroom, pub-type person. Like this development.

PART 38. If you think about it, concepts are still more valuable than work and objects. A concept is your pay packet. A concept is a trace and a cultish thing. It is equally elusive and strong. A reflection of the time we are in. This is why universities are cashing in, to the detrimant of the actual thing they are supposed to be doing. Which should be called experimenting. Instead the mandate is to hide things.

PART 39. Is the skeleton – the 'thin' – the noun that can help you truly question something, in an esoteric sense? As describing a fragile invariance.

PART 40. Is collage ruins? This will to steal from others, not own.

PART 41. Book competition dream: 1. Not necessarily successful, 2. Experiment, outside of commercial imperatives/structures; 3. Collabrative [not tacit, or 'socialised' talk], or at least collected; 4. Must inspire jealousy-magic (challenging and evasive, irritating); 5. Un-continuum; 6. More than usual; 7. Desparate and curious; 8. No type-wank; 9. Not imitative, in a fetish way; 10. Combinations; 11. Contributive to the field; 12. 'Useless as a possibility'; = C-A-S-H!

PART 42. Design is the thing that comes in. The hotel that i'm staying at sounds like they are dragging bodies around in the kitchen... In between button, screen and test. And that is not the thing that is eventually produced. But the production seems like the final thing. HOLLA / CACHET.

PART 43. The plane was no longer a flicker, but an tube-y object sucked onto a walking gate. It was old and the insides of its decals looked like prickels. Or more like chemical symbols - indicating their nature based both in visual representation and scientific observation. 'More fading, more discontinuity' he said.