The So-called Lookalike

A fan-letter to variability, transitioning, situated techno-creativity and multi-centered transformation

Dear Stuart,

My name is Manetta and I am writing you in the middle of a collaboration with Possible Bodies. Together we are turning theVolumetric Regimes research into a book. It will be published by Open Humanities Press (OHP) as part of the DATA browser series for which you designed a lay-out template a few years ago.

For Possible Bodies it was important to take design decisions and tools into account as part of the content of the book, but also to extend the conditions of openness provided by OHP, which would make it possible for readers to download the PDF, but also enables them to learn about and reuse the editing, production and design process itself.

The series editors insisted that we could take the design of the book into our own hands, as long as we would “follow the template”. They did not specify what this would mean exactly, but made clear that it was important for them that we honoured your original design. I realise now that I waited as long as I could, but today I could not postpone this part of the process any longer. The way the DATA browser books were produced so far is quite different from the way I work, so we needed to find a way to produce this lay-out otherwise, from scratch. This letter is my attempt to speak back to you, the template and xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

My design and research practice is shaped by (and shapes) free software and collective work. This practically translates into lay-outs being generated by scripts, books being rendered out of webpages and editorial workflows being transformed into collaborative environments. Working in this way allows me to stay with the complexities of technology, learn about the implications of lay-out software and approach the profession of design as an embedded networked practice, where learning and exchange is prioritized over competition and fame.

So today the strange game of sticking to our commitment to make this book look just like the other books in the series starts. But where to start? The InDesign files that were used for the other books in this series cannot be opened with any of my free software tools. Also the iterative workflow we have set up to collaborate on the design and the editing, does not match.

We’re working with a self-hosted MediaWiki platform, a “wiki” in short, that we as editors and designer can use to edit and structure the materials. From this wiki, we download and reformat everything into a single webpage, which becomes the main document that will be styled and turned into a lay-out using CSS3 paged media standards. We use the Javascript library Paged.js to paginate this lay-out in the browser and export it as the final PDF. Paged.js is a relatively new project developed by a group of people that closely work with the W3C consortium, which is the international organisation for web standards, such as HTML and CSS, and they decide which features will be supported by modern browsers and which not. I’ll end there, but the range of people, tools and environments that co-shape this design practice is much longer. The networks of people working with similar attitudes and sensibilities are actually indispensable for making this design practice possible and even viable. And who knows what will happen afterwards, once the material and documented code is published online and available for re-use thanks to the CC4r license. So besides the impossibility of trying to link up with a different and by now for me quite alien set of tools, I am wondering how to reconnect your pre-formatted aesthetics to the way this book is being made? And just now I realised that the script you used for generating the cover images is an iOS application that I can only access when I use my partner’s iPhone.

On the cover of Volumetric Regimes, we decided to use a response to Multi made by artist-researcher Winnie Soon, in which the face is not constructed out of typographic characters, but instead made out of variable geometric shapes using the Javascript library p5.js. The variable geometric face is published in the book Aesthetic Programming, where it is contextualised with a critical note on the face as a static technological symbolic object and “imperial machine”: The face is part of a surface that promotes sameness and ultimately rejects variations.

We found a font … and replicated the layout … etc. but how could this book actually ever pass as a lookalike of the so-called Stuart Bailey template, as an agile gesture of implementation for yet another bundle of content? What agency do design-interventions have once a template is set? How to design this book as part of a trans*feminist responsibility with the world-making praxis that design implies, shoulder to shoulder with companions that worked on editing this volume?

Of course these questions open up new and sharper ones, like for example the consideration of situated design, the implications of declutching content from form, the assumptions of agility and efficacy as editorial values... and so forth.

I decided to write you a letter as a way to reflect on this strangeness, and hopefully along the way I manage to describe how this book is radically different from the other books in the series. This is not a complaint, on the contrary. It is a way of making space to imagine different kinds of embedded design practices and to better understand how different ways of working are shaped by (and shape) different realities. As much as it is a letter to “you”, it is most of all a fan-letter to variability, transitioning, situated techno-creativity and multi-centered transformation; an attempt to bring in another kind of (surely crooked, interrupted, knotted and yet to be known) lineage or genealogy of worlding through design practices.

Manetta Berends