Other Forms is a research and design collective founded by graphic designer Jack Henrie Fisher and architect Alan Smart in New York City in 2013. Currently based in Chicago, its research is focused on the ways design reflects its surrounding social conditions in semi-autonomous spaces. Self-publishing this research has grown to become a central part of its collaborative practice.
Fisher and Smart initially met in the Netherlands at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, which they describe as “a place (once upon a time) in which design could encounter Marx and Lacan and other critical vocabularies.” Their design publication, Counter-Signals, can be seen both as a direct line to this heritage and as a desire to extend these types of encounters into a magazine form.
In the introduction to “Against Communication,” Counter-Signals’s first issue, Other Forms addresses the role of digital communication; how likes, messages, and posts have become abstract economic commodities in the current state of Late Capitalism, becoming “ever more instantaneous, accessible, individualized and disposable—while authoring platforms discourages any types of collective settings, and references to the past are made difficult.” The writings in this first issue of Counter-Signals function as a direct response to this text—and is a relevant entry point to all three issues—which takes the reader on a journey through alternative attempts of transmission, from thoughts on how CGI will change our visual culture to meticulous descriptions of the self-responsive nature of the “feedback section” in Radical Software, a ’70s newsletter for an “alternative television movement” to looking at capitalism through 19th century frock coats. The three issues contain literal reproductions of, and writings on, countless little-known political publications, human beings, co-ops, and self-organized networks, attempting to make this material “legible in new ways and to new people.”
I recently connected with Fisher and Smart to take a look back at all three issues and reflect on the project of Counter-Signals journal as a whole. In this interview we talk about the importance of trying to “live politically.” We also talk about problematics of design histories at large—the rise in popularity of zines and art book fairs, the impossibility of building communist archives, how frustrated designers makes genius writers, the current status of the punk aesthetic, and how the magazine itself circulates.
Marie Hoejlund (MH)
Can you describe the need/necessity that your publication Counter-Signals is born out of and what it aims to do?
Jack Henrie Fisher (JHF)
I don’t think there was any need for Counter-Signals to exist. We didn’t begin by answering a specific demand from the world. Often designers talk in this way—“I’m only doing this project because someone asked me to, because of some real need in the world”—in order to distinguish themselves from artists, who just do things because they feel like doing them. I actually like this idea of the negative vocation of design a lot, but maybe it makes more sense in a world with different requirements than the one we live in. Literally no one asked us to do this. I just decided to do it anyway. If design can only respond to the requirements of its particular given situation, it is limited by the economy of that situation, and it’s bound in some way to reproduce its logic; it can’t think outside of it. To make Counter-Signals happen, some sort of break had to be made with “what the world was asking for.” Really, the world wasn’t asking us for anything, besides, I guess, to keep doing design work.
Alan Smart (AS)
Other Forms as a whole was something we started out of a desire—perhaps a “need”—for both a space for discourse and for a practical project that was “political” in the sense of content, but which more importantly worked to complicate dichotomies between form and content in which design ends up on the side of form and politics on the side of content, walled off from design. For us there is always a dialectic where politics is baked into any design work, and there is always form and materiality to any political project that can be activated or engaged with as a site of design intervention.
MH
Your publication doesn’t have very obvious single-theme issues, and the design of the magazine feels very organically composed, rather than pressed into a template. I am curious to hear about your editorial and design process?
JHF
The editing of Counter-Signals is indeed, for lack of a better word, organic. Serial publications often have an organizing theme for each issue and begin with open “calls for submission,” detailing format and content constraints. On first glance this seems like the most open and democratic way to proceed. However, we think it more often reproduces a marketplace logic in which individuals are competitively judged against each other. We don’t do this. We might begin by inviting people we know, or people we don’t know but whom we’ve been reading, to contribute a text related to what they’re currently working on, whatever that might be. We don’t begin with a precise theme or format. So far, we’ve begun with short texts that we offer as invitations, as optional starting points, as provocations. The first issue started with an invitation revolving around an anecdote about the informal circulation of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a set of mimeographs, prior to its official publication. The second issue began with a passage from Rancière’s Proletarian Nights, about the sort of writing and printing done in off hours between work days by typographers, tailors, furniture joiners, and other artisanal workers in 19th-century France. For the third one, Alan wrote a short text about an endless stack of contemporary platforms. In each issue, these texts might get taken up, often indirectly, by the various people we offer them to, but just as often the text stays in the background or gets forgotten. We’re more interested in how ideas and forms of writing might connect and take shape, or disconnect, in the course of gathering and editing materials—and also in the sort of non-unitary arrangements of content that might follow from this way of working.
AS
I’m not sure Jack likes it when I say this, but I have remarked on a few occasions that we get most of our best contributions from intellectually frustrated designers and creatively frustrated intellectuals. More than thinking about being a “design magazine,” we have actually been talking a lot about how much of an academic journal we’d like to be and what that could mean. I was coming into this thinking about publications like Grey Room, or even October, back when it was more of an independent, oppositional thing. There is, of course, no shortage of people talking out of their depth and places where designers are either forced to, or allowed to, pose and posture as intellectuals, or academics end up trying to insert themselves in some instantiation of the “art world,” or whatever, so this isn’t so interesting. But I think with Counter-Signals we have been able to actually achieve something different, that really provides an outlet for the outtakes, left-overs, digressions and ill-fitting, off-topic, marooned fragments of discourse, that it is able to create a both/and condition where things can be in many worlds at once. Two of my favorite things about this project is when very serious academic scholars, who are used to publishing in very serious peer-reviewed journals that are mostly only read by specialists, see their work in Counter-Signals and say something like, “Oh my! It’s so beautiful!” and when super cool, punk-rock zinester kids we meet at fairs kind of snap out of their detached browsing, shopper mode when they see it and say, “Wow! I’m going to want to really sit and read this.”
MH
The writing in Counter-Signals says a lot about design without ever solely writing “about” design specifically. By focusing on the “surroundings, making, necessity, tools,” and “limitations” that publications are born out of, I think Counter-Signals takes on a different angle than more classical design history and its traditional focus on “the object and the creator.” What are your thoughts on talking about design through this lens?
JHF
There’s a great Stuart Bailey line about Dot Dot Dot coming out of graphic design but not being about graphic design. The thing about graphic design is that it’s incredibly boring as a professional discipline, as a specific bounded practice that one can theorize about. What’s far more interesting is what it can be made to do and what other worlds it can intervene in.
Design is always conditioned by politics. When we’re looking at historical publications (or architecture) we try to understand how the aesthetic and formal qualities demonstrably follow from both the urgencies of political struggle and the specific “affordances” of media technologies, rather than from a separate and professionalized sphere of design work. This material-political-aesthetic is totally obvious with zines that were composed on Xerox glass, like Maximum Rocknroll and a million others. In making these publications no one said, wouldn’t it look interesting to cut or tear pieces of paper and arrange them together with a black background? Rather, that was how it had to happen given the available means of production. But the aesthetic implications of this print production scenario extend beyond the “shadows” of graphic design form into “shapes” of content and even forms of political life, from hairstyles to explicit ideological orientations.
AS
In my own small, dark world of architecture, there has been this kind of vicious cycle of looking to fairly esoteric, “transhistorical” theory to escape from the historical contingencies of material practices and designed objects, and then when this isn’t satisfying, switching to a focus on objects or “making” that rejects theory and with it any history that is more than just a collection of eccentric facts and geeky minutiae. This is another two-sided, dead-end dichotomy that we would like to refuse. From my experience teaching, the problem of history and theory in design or architecture education is less about how much than it is about how it is taught, what its stakes are, and what its seen to be good for. We would like to be able to talk about things like industrial and post-industrial production, systems thinking, and the ever expanding field of media, and it doesn’t seem like there is much hope of doing this either as a melancholic conservative who is all bummed out because kids these days don’t care about the golden section or enlightenment humanism or whatever, or as part of an actually largely deskilled “maker culture” where you end up being some kind of uncritical happy warrior in the neoliberal conquest of everything. So, yes, historical materialism as well as dialectical materialism. I’m told it’s the only true science, really.
MH
You mention Xerox-printed zines as an example of available means of production. The aesthetics of lo-fi production methods like the risograph is still very present in graphic design. I am curious to hear your thoughts on the current relevance of this “punk ethos” and why it has stayed stuck in print media?
AS
The rather depressing answer might be that new media just doesn’t seem to offer that same low barrier-to-entry ease of access and openness to hijacking and experimentation that print and printing technologies did. Online “social media” seems to be increasingly colonized by these big cooperate platforms, and hacker culture has ended up being as much about horrible libertarian fascist types who hate people who don’t know how to “code” or have the same access to the infrastructures that they do, as it’s been about offering the kind of power and freedom that was hoped for in the cyber-punk ’80s. I’m hoping that the punk virus is just lying dormant in this independent publishing subculture because it knows that there isn’t a better host for it available yet, and that soon there will be one. We need other forms, or other formats; different forms, not just new ones in the perpetual churn of newness without difference that capitalism give us.
JHF
I think these terms—punk and print—are bound up together pretty tightly. The strain of punk I keep returning to is hardcore. The aesthetic form of hardcore is so rigorous, it’s an unrelenting formula. It’s not a style to choose in a marketplace of styles, it can’t really be eclectically combined with anything else. And it doesn’t develop historically, it just keeps repeating itself while everything else mutates and hybridizes. I imagine Counter-Signals in a similar relation to typographic modernism (and there are many affinities between modernism and punk as Mark Owens has noted). We practice an extreme fidelity to modernism, to its logic of abstraction and its flattening of hierarchies, sometimes in new relations to different technologies, but more in an unrelenting repetition.
MH
With Counter-Signals, you are giving stories and articles on politically engaged marginal publishing a place to exist together by collecting and republishing them. In my opinion, this collection becomes quite a precious source and archive. You are launching the third edition of the magazine: how do you look at, and reflect on this archive?
AS
It’s interesting to think of Counter-Signals as an archive and also to think about what aspects of it “don’t exist anywhere else.” Obviously, there are a lot of archives of militant or independent publications out there, and the archiving impulse is almost as strong and widely felt among people trying to do radical things or figure out how to “live politically” as the publishing impulse is. I think one thing we are doing with Counter-Signals, and Other Forms more generally, is to look for ways to make these things show up and become visible or legible in new ways and to new people—or even to the same people who are doing them and maybe don’t see what other significances they could have.
Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise)
JHF
There’s an amazing text written by Seth Siegelaub in the first Communication and Class Struggle anthology about the impossibility of building a stable archive of communist literature. (There’s a bunch of stuff about this in the second issue of Counter-Signals.) Siegelaub enumerates the many obstacles to securely building communist print archives—things we can totally relate to today, despite the vastly different political landscape: no money, no time, no space, no ISBNs, different editions of the same book, etc. But there may also be “necessary” reasons for this fugitivity. Nick Thoburn writes about this in Anti-Book (a fantastic book which helped inform a lot of thinking about Counter-Signals). Communist printed matter, as he expansively defines it, necessarily follows fugitive trails and errant circulations, partly because it is radically unconditioned and unsupported by any prior institutional network, whether a political party or an art-world or whatever. That is, it must help compose a network of production and circulation that doesn’t already exist, and this undertaking is always imperiled in capitalism.
In terms of archives, a huge part of the Counter-Signals project is documentation. We’re not just publishing essays about particular left-oriented publications, we’re trying to literally reproduce them, at least partially, and to give them new life. This distinction between representation and reproduction seems really important, and has endless technical and aesthetic consequences. The ideal of this documentary poetics is to minutely mark the conditions of production in the literal reproduction of the pages from the dispersed communist archives we’re reassembling, and we’re doing this in the immediate context of new writing and printing.
Counter-Signals 3
Counter-Signals 3
MH
Counter-Signals is focused on the topic of transmission. You don’t have an Instagram profile. In 2018, while trying to distribute any kind of ideas or project, this seems like a very conscious choice. What are your thoughts on how the magazine itself circulates?
AS
We’ve been discussing whether to try to convince you that our failure to be on Instagram is some kind of conscious choice that takes an important ideological position. One of the great things about being subjects of (hopefully very) late capitalism is that we are always making and being asked to make choices even if we don’t know it or understand why and what the implications are. Right now, going to book fairs and talking to people feels good and feels important. Talking to people who are running interesting book stores and reading rooms feels like traction and being part of a community or some larger set of projects. We like our website, and people seem to find it. Other platforms and information streams just intuitively haven’t felt so good and there hasn’t been that feedback loop of affirmation where it seems like we are getting in touch with people who dig our stuff.
JHF
The demand to supply content to another corporate platform is pretty depressing. I mean, we have a website, where we can control how things appear and what we say about them. Why do we have to dissolve everything into these channels that are built to produce value ($ profit) for everyone except the actual producers? Plus, all the social media platforms totally suck as archives; you can’t really find things from the past on them or organize anything. But maybe the whole internet is a corporate platform at this point.
When we travel to book fairs and other events in the “real world,” we meet people who end up writing for the journal or help to distribute it. So it’s not just meeting our consumers and learning their names, it’s finding comrades and building a counter-public. We love this, and it’s totally true. The whole circuit of activity definitely supports Michael Warner’s idea that counter-publics must invent and discover their own networks of circulation and develop their own aesthetics of address. When a publication (or a political project for that matter) simply makes use of what’s already available and formalized as such to produce and circulate itself, it misses this crucial poetic aspect.
MH
The focus of Counter-Signals is design in self-organized/anti-capitalist spaces. Many of these stories the reader encounters come from the past, where print was one of the only mediums for simple and quick distribution of one’s own ideas. Where do you see similar spaces today, or where do you see possibilities for them to exist?
JHF
We were at the NY Art Book Fair recently and asking ourselves: what is going on with this event, with this spectacular presentation of so many independent publications? What are the stakes and politics of this (over)production? What is it contesting? What is it producing? In Paper Knowledge, Lisa Gitelman writes about different episodes of “amateur” publishing in the 20th century and asks similar questions, concluding that a double-edged “domain” gets set up in these practices. On the one hand, a space is constructed that is authentically suspended from whatever the prevailing capitalist spirit (managerial, entrepreneurial, cognitive) is at the moment. It’s a space for “inefficient” and useless production and, most importantly, a space in which to imagine different kinds of non-market–oriented exchanges and forms of belonging. On the other hand, these amateur spaces also seem to be built in order to prepare their subjects for emerging “value-producing” practices, usually in some class antagonism to another set of subjects. So I know this wasn’t your question, and no one is claiming this, but I don’t think we can call the NY Art Book Fair an anti-capitalist space. But while there is obviously a lot of petit bourgeois hustling going on at these book fairs, at the same time I don’t think anybody is really making any money. We definitely aren’t.
AS
Our first book project was Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces, which developed out of a community of activist researchers called the Squatting in Europe Research Kollective (SqEK), so that relates very directly to publishing, art as media production in spaces occupied by radical social movements or as specifically contestatory projects. Some of these are historical, some of them are still very much ongoing, and some exist now in one form that has somehow evolved from some other historical one.
I’m interested, however, in how these things tend to appear as always being “in the past,” “failed,” “over,” or somehow instantly antiquated throwbacks to a golden age when the fever dreams of heroic holy fools had real materiality and weight. This is something we would like to push back on a bit. Slavoj Žižek at one point said, “Utopia is something people do when they have no other choice.” There are certainly lots of these desperate, unintentional, or unasked-for utopias going on, from the jungle camp at Calais to le ZAD (which I just read is trying to reappear near Marseilles after being evicted recently) to any number of less visible instances of people tearing at, or trying to live within and survive the tearing of, the fabric of whatever reality they find themselves subjected to. In fact, if the question is one of “anti-capitalist” spaces then very often the radical proposition is less about being disruptive or violent or chaotic (capitalism has shown itself to actually thrive on these things) and instead to build some kind of stability or order. For design, I think a lot of the reason these things seem to be retroactive is that if you are searching for a new look or an aesthetic shift, you kind of have to wait until really radical things appear at all. Usually when things really are a break in the flow, or the cycle, or a real glitch in the simulation, they either look ugly or wrong, or else they are just invisible.
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