When I image the earth, I imagine another
When I image the earth, I imagine another is a multiform image of the earth and its weather systems produced on the first day of the COP26 climate change conference held in Glasgow, Scotland in 2021. Compiling images and field notes contributed by numerous participants around the world, the eBook is an archive of changing planetary conditions. It is the joint project of the artist collaborative open-weather (Sasha Engelmann and Sophie Dyer) and the design studio Rectangle. This is the third eBook project in the NN Branch series of publications.
When I image the earth, I imagine another asks: What would it mean to collectively image, and in doing so, reimagine the planet? To see its details and patterns from many situated positions? If we could each take a photo of our home from space, could we build a patchwork, an impossible view, another whole earth? On the first day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, a network of people operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world captured a collective snapshot of the earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast’ for an undecided future. Tuning into transmissions from three National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites orbiting 800 km above Earth’s surface, members of the network collected imagery and submitted field notes from their different locations. Combined, these contributions create a fractal image of the earth: a record of weather at different scales in which alternative patterns and relations emerge.
When I image the earth, I imagine another continues the experimental digital publishing program of NN Contemporary and Library Stack, accessed through the NN Contemporary Art Public Branch, our joint lending library at <https://nn.librarystack.org>. In dialogue with NN’s own research and exhibition aims, this Library Stack branch contributes to a longer-term exploration of the infrastructure for the loaning and borrowing of digital objects, new definitions of ‘the local’, and alternative publishing models for the culture sector.
Designed by Rectangle and open-weather
With contributions from Alison Scott, Ankit Sharma, Aouefa Amoussouvi, Barfrost, Bill Liles, Carl Reineman, Catherine Fletcher, Cedrick Lukunku Tshimbalanga, Chonmapat Torasa, Dey Kim, Florent Leon Noel, George Ridgeway, Jasmin Schädler, Joaquin Ezcurra, Ketsia Kinsumba Muanakiese, L. Paul Verhage, Natasha Honey, Olivia Berkowicz, Pablo Cattaneo, Sofia Caferri, Steve Engelmann, Sybille Neumeyer, WXVids, Zefie, Yoshi Matsuoka, Zack Wettstein, Sasha Engelmann, Sophie Dyer, Lizzie Malcolm, Daniel Powers
Published in ePub form in 2023 by Library Stack and NN Contemporary Art, Northampton UK
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-737370024
Immutable: Designing History by Chris Lee
Immutable: Designing History explores the graphic genealogy of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a roughly 5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed blockchain ledgers. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering securitization techniques (material, technological, administrative) against the entropy of a document’s movement through space, time and the political.
This project is proposed as a counter-position to the imperatives of graphic design education, which foregrounds logos, books, websites and branding while passports, money and property deeds constitute the field’s more profoundly consequential genres.
As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures towards anthropologist Laura Nader’s call to “study up” on those in power, and the radical educator Paolo Freire’s recognition of the “limit situation” presented by documental forms as a generative condition for the study and creative exploration of emancipatory praxis. The book’s aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument, helping impose a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.
Designed by Chris Lee
Edited by Library Stack and Benjamin Tiven
Published in ePub form in 2022 by Library Stack and Onomatopee, with NN Contemporary Art, Northampton UK
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-737370017
Ming Romantic by Synoptic Office
Ming Romantic: Collected and Bound, vol. 2 folds together reproductions of historical documents with contemporary texts to examine how Chinese typography can evolve through the use of digital tools and manipulation of form. The ebook also illustrates the design process of Ming Romantic, a display face reinterpreting a style of printed type originating in China’s Song and Ming dynasties. The typeface is one of the first Didone-inspired Chinese typefaces, and it imagines how the character set could look when divorced from the effects of the brush.
Ming Romantic comprises three sections: “Possibilities: Typographic Speciation”; “Translations—Putting It Together: Conversations about Language & Form (Ming Romantic)”; and “Myths: Chinese Typography from Afar.”
With contributions by Chris Wu, Gabriela Carnabuci, Abby Chen, Jonathan Lee, and Dustin Tong
Designed by Synoptic Office (Caspar Lam and YuJune Park)
First published by Synoptic Office, 2017. Republished in ePub form in 2021 by Library Stack, with NN Contemporary Art, Northampton UK
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-7373700-0-0
