/ / / / / /VortexesAnd
TheClinamen
I’ve just surfaced from a fascinating two days delivering a ‘Hidden London’ brief down a bunker. Unfortunately, couldn’t access Cold War holes, but thanks to Nick Catford of Subterranean Britannica, we got into ‘Paddock’— Churchill’s alternative cabinet war room. The brief is standard ‘unknown city’ fodder, a mix of complexity, psychogeography, visualisation and spatial contestation. There is a particular emphasis on the agglomerations and voids that constantly appear and disappear within the urban fabric. The unpredictable scrawls of inorganic and organic materials— ‘nutrient flows’ and intensifications: ‘Viruses, sensors, celebratories, rodents, myths, cars, phobias, electromagnetic waves, money, CCTV, pollutants, terrorists, tornadoes and ASBO’s’. It’s an approach that hopefully locates graphic design practice within a wider set of circuits, flows and structures.
Below is one particular gem, a beautiful example of De Landa’s ‘mineralization’— petrified typography. Calcium carbonate was beginning to form around wax crayon directions left by builders.