My thanks to Gerard Byrne, Tom dePaor, and Gavin Duffy for the work we have produced together, and for allowing me the space to view it through the particular lens of this thesis. Thanks to Maeve Connolly and Dennis McNulty (for putting me on to this PhD pathway); Sarah Browne; Brenda Dermody (fellow traveller); David Donohoe (no-input sounding board); Kevin Donovan (critical critical friend), and to all the participant and inadvertant contributors mentioned in the publications. Thanks to Marcel Meesters for so brilliantly printing all of the books included in this thesis (with the exception of Reservoir, printed at Impress Printing Works, Dublin); and to Neil Creagh for developing the browser-based presentation. This printed version of the written document was produced at Newspaper Club, Glasgow, and the boxes and inserts were supplied by the Cardboard Box Company, Co. Wicklow and customised by hand with the assistance of Anthony Collins, Angie Hogan, Andrew Horan, and Louise Reddy. Additional thanks to all of the cohort of PhD candidates and supervisors at the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research, Technological University Dublin, for their engagement and input. I am especially grateful to Paul Clarke for his support, consideration, and vision throughout, and to my supervisors Alan Grossman and Anthony Haughey for their patience, rigour, and enthusiasm.

This thesis reflects critically and reflexively on five publications which characterise the breadth of my longitudinal, iterative, practice-based enquiry into modes of communication of artistic knowledge. My practice though, has its origins in graphic design training, and I write at some length in 6/7 ‘1968’ / ‘1969’ / ‘Discipline’ / ‘1981’ about its formation. While I have struggled for many years with ‘graphic design’ as a description of my practice, I have, latterly, with the writing of this thesis, come to acknowledge its productivity. Kenneth FitzGerald, when considering graphic design in an interdisciplinary educational context, asks if it is indeed a discipline. Perhaps graphic design can help to define itself through reflecting on its relationship to other (inter)disciplines? (FitzGerald, 2010). When I reflect on my practice it is often most fully realised when considered within (another) disciplinary discourse. I am in dialogue with graphic design language, and its styles, techniques, and processes form the outputs, but my primary concern is where this is made productive through dialogue with the context and subject matter with which I am working.

I exploit the graphic designer’s toolkit, and draw on much of its formal precedents, but as needs and opportunities arise, I use these tools and forms to renegotiate the limits of graphic design practice to encompass film, photography, publishing, writing, editing, curating, and teaching. In conjunction with this, I am a music-maker. In various bands since my teens, it was in my late twenties, with the affordability of recording technologies, that I recorded solo, and my music was released on labels in Ireland, the UK, and North America. Later I recorded and toured extensively as one half of the band Thread Pulls, and it was these formative experiences that brought together the practices of music and graphic design. In both there is, for me, a considerable degree of ‘making things up’. Just as I found my own ways to use and exploit available technologies and processes of graphic design, in music-making I took to recording and production untrained, as did many at the time. This is commonly recognised in music, as in self-publishing, as a DIY approach. The learning process, and consequent use and misuse of equipment over time determined for me both an approach and a characteristic timbre, or distinctiveness in my work. Equally, a reflexive foldback from one pursuit to another (music to film or the printed page, for example) informed this process further. All of this was based on contingency, but in reflecting on it through writing this thesis, a cogent theoretical framing and methodology has become visible, through which I can make transferable insights from my practice. This thesis then, through its page-by-page encounter with my book Make Ready (2015), performs an enquiry into the constituencies, and mutual-constituencies of my practice as it navigates through and at the interstices of disciplines and discourses, including graphic design.

The expectation of graphic design is that of honouring, and objectively presenting material, while the realities of my practice are to violate, not just the informing text but the means and materials of its transmission. Dick Hebdige describes as central to the ‘signifying practice’ of the Tel Quel group the ‘“productivity” of language... as an active, transitive force which shapes and positions the “subject” (as speaker, writer, reader) while always itself remaining “in process” capable of infinite adaptation’ (Hebdige, 2010: 119). In combining the language, timbre, and forms which have emerged from my DIY approach as tools and instruments with which to exploit this productivity through a bricolage methodology, a range of strategies and tactics become available to me, through which to bring a ‘particular transformation of reality, a version of reality, an account of reality’ (ibid: 118, emphasis in original), in opposition to notions of fixity. 

Below I outline my bricolage methodology, moving through its constituent parts, and its surrounding theoretical framing. These parts are instantiated and elaborated upon in the subsequent page-by-page encounter using the existing structure of Make Ready on which this thesis is built. Throughout this the viewer-reader plays the decisive role in activating the transformation through their engagement with the material. The mechanisms chosen to deliver this thesis – digital and physical – have virtues and shortcomings. In not fixing on one definitive format, the thesis performs a deferment of fixed reading or meaning. Equally by insisting on an iterative approach where the presence of the ‘data’ – the actual outputs, or the various representations of these – is tied to the writing and to the modes of presentation, I am asserting the view that the writing can only be fully understood in relation to it. The writing reveals underlying theoretical and methodological paradigms but this is only fully legible in parallel with the outputs. The abstraction of theory and methodology has relevance and transferability as knowledge outside of this practice-based research but a practice-theory nexus is intrinsic to a deeper understanding of my practice.

Against Boredom^{7 7.} ‘Against boredom’ references Barthes’ view that the reader ‘produces’ the text: ‘to be bored means one cannot produce the text’ (Barthes, 1978: 163).

In my thesis I refer to the ‘viewer-reader’ – where ‘audience’, ‘visitor’, ‘viewer’, or spectator is often used – in acknowledgement of the productivity of this role. As audience (viewer-reader), we view and from this construct a reading over time. The term reflexively acknowledges the reader-writer – that the author too is always a reader first, writing into the always already written. From an already written text and web of associations in the mind of the reader, ‘associations, contiguities, carryings-over’ release or liberate [symbolic] energy (Roland Barthes, 1978: 158). Its opposite, ‘the reduction of reading to a consumption’ (ibid: 163) could indeed be seen to characterise much of graphic design and it is against this that my practice position is framed. My ‘viewer-reader’ term has affinities too with Julia Kristeva for whom ‘the only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this abstraction [the linear or diachronic] through a process of reading-writing; that is, through the practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to another structure’ (Kristeva, 1980: 65, see 113 ‘9 March 2012’ / ‘Silence’). In my ‘energy transfer’ construct I identify the reader–writer as the start of a circular process where material, having been arranged and published, is produced as text by the reader, who emerges through this as viewer–reader, determining their own version of the text. This would not be unusual in the context of an art practice. Umberto Eco refers to a ‘standard situation’ regarding the reception of a work of art, where ‘we see it as the end product of an author’s effort to arrange a sequence of communicative effects in such a way that each individual addressee can refashion the original composition devised by the author’ (Eco, 1989: 3). Eco continues, ‘the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices’ (ibid.). I refer to this in relation to a ‘political intertextuality’ (see here). Graphic design, however, more often takes an ‘honorary’ approach, focussing on formal arrangement, whilst reserving authorship for others. The success of a publication for me though is in the ability of the viewer-reader to open out meaning from this process. Importantly, we are always reader and writer at the same time.

In my practice one project overlaps and informs the next; there is a continuity both to practice discovery and to encounters with other material and experiences. In reading this thesis you might move non-sequentially according to your interests (we often operate books in a non-linear fashion, and this browser-based version invites non-linear ‘browsing’). Since the methodological and theoretical are threaded through the page structure of Make Ready, the material can be encountered in any order as the effect is cumulative and not reliant on sequence. Using the Make Ready book as the organisational device or armature for the thesis emerges from these intentions. The encounter can be non-linear, as is the development of practice, where events or ideas move into and out of focus, or have significance and bearing on each other.^{8 8.} Maybury, P. (2015) A Study is a Gall film commissioned for the exhibition Book for Architects presented by gta Ausstellungen, at ETH, Zürich. Serving the campus library at ETH is a subterranean storage facility (HDB) containing c.1.6 million titles, alongside many samples of materials, maps, models etc. relating to architectural and pedagogical practice. The film is thought of as a diagrammatic enactment of the way in which knowledge bases are accumulated and embody knowledge, how that knowledge is accessed, and how texts move in and out of favour. As the originator of this material, I am of course uniquely aware of these interconnections but the thesis construction contrives to simulate this.

Synchrony, the V-Effect ^{9 9.} As explained in the editors’ introduction to the 2021 edition of Brecht on Theatre, the intention of the V-Effect is to allow the viewer to perceive things afresh, revealing underling social rules which govern our actions. (Silberman, Giles & Kuhn, 2021: 5), Rupture, Cutting-into, Disrupting the Communicative Order

Performing this idea of chronology and sequence has correlation with my films Landfall (2020), and On Being There (2022), both of which follow a similar architecture to Make Ready in that they are broadly chronological but with vertical disruptions. While the Make Ready book is linear due to its physical characteristics, any book can be operated in a non-linear way. The Make Ready exhibition although bound (like a book) by the skeletal grid structure of the shelving, invites aleatoric access based on the viewer-reader’s movement and interaction. The films are linear (although when presented on a loop in a gallery the viewer-reader might join at any point), yet within them, chronology is disrupted, adjusted, and sequences reappear. 

In Landfall (2020) (Fig. 5) (view full film here), the sequencing of the film broadly follows the chronology of filming, but segments or episodes (the drummer in particular) recur as motifs throughout its duration. Events are paced such that the intensity is cumulative, with busy moments of marches and demonstrations punctured by quieter moments which expand the thematic concerns, while establishing a rhythm of tension and release through each episode.

In On Being There (Fig. 6) (view full film here), a broad chronology derives from the originating material (spanning 1990–2022), but this is frequently disrupted or ruptured. In the segment on Dysart for example, I combine footage from my previous film Dysart 050920-120920 with new footage, making pronounced the change of seasons, while through montage we jump back and forth such that the built becomes unbuilt and built again; and growth or flowering is absent then present then absent again.^{10 10.} Dysart is an address in Co. Wicklow, Ireland at which since 2005 Tom dePaor has been developing an acre of land in a series of walls, gardens and buildings.  While it would be unusual to shoot a narrative/fictional film in chronological sequence, most films choose to conceal what would commonly be regarded as a continuity error. In documentary film-making the chronology of events is often manipulated, and this device alludes to this.^{11 11}. Dysart 050920-120920 was commissioned by the Irish Architecture Foundation for Open House 2020. Chronology is ruptured too for example when drawing, model and exhibition view are superimposed in the segment Delay/Relayer (2008) – itself a model for a future cinema building. The completed view (2019) is presented synchronically with the view of the work in prospect (2008).

The Make Ready book introduces my outputs in a broadly chronological order, bookended by entry and exit points of a figure in repose, but this sequence is interrupted by ‘vertical’ insertion of thematic and reflective writing which disrupts the chronology. This is at its most exaggerated on page three, where the first essay conflates material spanning 1854–2013, and this synchronic device reoccurs throughout the book. While any book is physically bound by a beginning and an end, books of this kind are seldom read front to back, with the reader choosing not to follow page order, thus making their own edit, and contributing to the act of writing into the text. It is perhaps in the encounter with the Make Ready exhibition though that the work is best understood as a simultaneous conjunction of elements in an on-going enquiry. On the shelves everything is arranged in bays (similar to a book this provides an ordering structure and grid imposed by the mechanics of the delivery medium), but it is the viewer-reader who determines the sequence of their encounter with the material. The shelving makes subdivisions, but since the shelves are skeletal and the material can be viewed from both sides and is available to handle, use and play, the encounter is led by the viewer-reader, and through their choices different strands can operate in conjunction with each other.>>>

Decentring (through the V-Effect) Methods of the Bricolage

In the Make Ready exhibition a performative element is played out in the gallery where the space, with its shop window, is arranged as a set with props. Through the act of viewing, the visitor brings to it their own reading and response, but also becomes performer, activating the space, and can be observed as an actor within this; thus, a ‘media’ amongst all the other media – artefacts, arrangement, cultural space – at play. In this sense, Make Ready traverses the threshold or ‘fourth wall’ between performer and audience, observer and observed, redolent of devices found in Brecht’s Epic Theatre, which distance ‘the spectator from the spectacle and, theoretically at least, making him or her reflect on the social relations depicted... and on his or her position on (rather than “in”) the text’ (Dick Hebdige, 2010: 163–4). This was further enacted in my conference talk where I employed various media – purpose-made film clips enacting aspects of the ‘script’, sound effects and voice over in conjunction with a live, semi-improvised spoken text (the metatext). Repetition, sound-clashes, overlaps, and juxtaposition (the hypertext), played out embedded themes of mastery and anti-mastery, with apparent errors disrupting the audience’s expectation, bringing to the fore the mode (the storage or carrier) of presentation at the moment of ‘release’.

Ordering Through Bricolage>>>

Multiple accounts splinter the dogmatism of a single tale., If they undermine the authority of the teller, they also free her from being captured by the reflection provided in a single narrative.

(Madeleine R. Grumet, 1987: 324)

My field of study is the communicative order and instrumentalisation of ideas and material/media in diverse artistic and cultural contexts across multiple mediums, framed by my practice formation in graphic design. Vignettes in this thesis (comprising text only, or text and image) are employed to reach inside my practice, situating the reader within the practice enquiry. Through these I draw out theoretical undercurrents, cognisant always that there are multiple interlocking strands; materiality (as a reflection of the material world it is attempting to engage with), and encounter explored through timbre, sign, and language, all in dialogue. Implicit in my bricoleur perspective is the relative position of the observer, and in a practice context my positionality and its bearing on that which is communicated and from where it is communicated, particularly with regard to my access to privileged sites or platforms from which to speak. A longitudinal perspective on this enquiry enables practice activity and encounter across prolonged periods of time to have a bearing on later and future outcomes. The formation of practice is constantly emergent, and in line with the bricoleur’s mode of enquiry, is never fixed, but is an ‘infinite deferment of the signified’ (Barthes, 1878: 158). Indeed, it is always cognisant of the provisionality of both practice position and of the flux of the interrelationships that are implicated in the material under discussion, and of a dynamic relationship with the viewer-reader. The performative is embedded across mediums and context in the outputs (Make Ready as performative talk, exhibition, and book for example), and equally the viewer-reader is actively engaged in that performative aspect (they turn the pages of a book thus determining sequence, timing and ‘reading’; in a venue as receivers – physically, emotionally and intellectually – of sound energy, they ‘perform’ the  subsequent completion of a loop in feeding back energy into the room and consequently back to the ‘performers’). This is described by my ‘energy transfer’ construct of ‘capture, storage, and release’.

Kincheloe delineates some of the complexity of everyday life for the bricoleur in the following long list. I recognise many of these as embedded perspectives in my practice:

explicate and implicate orders of reality; the question of universalism; polysemy; the living process in which cultural entities are situated; the ontology of relationships and connections; intersecting contexts; multiple epistemologies; intertextuality; discursive construction; the interpretative act of all knowledge; the fictive dimension of research findings; the cultural assumptions within all research methods; the relationship between power and knowledge. 

(Kincheloe, 2005: 328)

The implicate order is a much deeper structure of the world. It is the level at which ostensible separateness disappears and all things seem to become a part of a larger unified process. Implicate orders are marked by the simultaneous presence of a sequence of many levels of enfoldment with similar dissimilarities existing among them.

(Bohm and Peat cited in Kincheloe, 2005: 327)

This implicate order in the real world resonates with the enmeshing or enfoldment of form with sign, and timbre. The bricolage is founded on an array of tools, tactics, and techniques acquired on an on-going basis and applied through the sagacity of the operation of my practice. I can thread connections through my practice, and the implicate order then connects these elements, building not a monological view but one of multiplicity. As Kincheloe describes:

[B]ricoleurs seek multiple perspectives not to provide the truth about reality but to avoid the monological knowledge that emerges from unquestioned frames of reference and the dismissal of the numerous relationships and connections that link various forms of knowledge together... bricoleurs plan their escape from the limitations of monological knowledge.

(Kincheloe, 2005: 326–7)

In What Ways am I a Bricoleur?

[S/]he ‘speaks’, not only with the things... but also, through the things: relating, through the choices [s/]he makes among the limited possibilities, the character and the life of the creator. Without ever accomplishing [her/]his project, the bricoleur always puts into it something of [her/]himself.

(Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 21)

Rather than disappearing into the ‘text’, the bricoleur as author is present through his/her choices, legible as a ‘text’ within the ‘text’. These are the choices that define my practice – its heterogeneity, reflexive foldback or ‘spill’, its interstitial siting, timbre, and techniques, and the setting-going of a productive text.>>> Many characteristics of this approach are identified in Make Ready: Adapting to limited technical ability); availing of opportunity; resourcefulness with budget constraints, using to-hand tools; restrictions, making-do, technicity; improvised studio, recording, and composition; cross-disciplinary ‘foldback’, >>> design, curation, exhibition design; appropriation of discourses. This thesis gives these theoretical framing.

If the bricolage is one of ‘signs and concepts’, tools and materials, this ‘instrumental set’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 17) is reliant on a technicity, a mutual constituency of human being and technology. Were it simply a matter of choosing tools and materials the results would be bland. I am looking for means to bring about a productivity – the ‘literary’ in place of the ‘linear’; the text as ‘a process of demonstration’ (Barthes, 1978: 157)  – and this engages not only sign and concept but timbre and technicity, and the ‘aesthetic function’ (Jan Mukařovský, 1995). 

The tools of the bricoleur are ‘specialised up to a point, sufficiently for the ‘bricoleur’ not to need the equipment and knowledge of all trades and professions. (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 18) >>> With software applications many tools are available to use or misuse, while many remain unexplored.^{12 12.} ‘Musical instruments are not forever conceptually defined after the stages of design, manufacture, and marketing are completed. Rather, they are “made-over” by musicians in the process of making music.’ (Paul Théberge, 1997: 160).  Proprietary software share various metaphors including toolboxes, and timelines, and these working environments and their operation carry sufficient similarities that it is relatively easy to work with tools of many professions (graphic design, photography, music, film, architecture).+ With persistence, and some trial and error, this suits my working methods, as encountering an obstacle can often result in workarounds – solutions determined by technical restrictions, yielding unexpected results which amplify content. Though this may not be ‘best practice’ or amount to an ‘efficient workflow’, it cumulatively contributes to the formation of a distinctive language. While the software developer may seek to offer ‘seamless’ and ‘transparent’ effects or ‘transparent immediacy’ (Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, 2000: 30), in transferring knowledge or understanding from one field or working environment to another, I often encounter unintended operation and usage. These mistakes or workarounds bring a dimension of self-reflexivity – producing conspicuous artifacts, or editing decisions, which disrupt the viewer-reader (Bertolt Brecht’s V-Effect). While some of these are radical and others slight, they become part of my bricoleur toolkit to which I can often and easily return. They contribute to the ‘treasury’ of objects which, for Lévi-Strauss, the bricoleur interrogates each time a new project is undertaken (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 18). Formulated as ‘tactics’ which may ‘divert these spaces’ (de Certeau, 1988: 30) – the spaces or paradigms in which I am working, or the professed ‘transparency’ of these spaces – they make explicit the bricolage. Turning back to what is available to him/her the bricoleur is in dialogue with his/her tools and materials, discovering what each could ‘signify’, and thus formulating a distinct set for each project but always drawing on what has previously been used (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 18). In the actuality of my practice I have over time formed many biases and agendas (and taste preferences), and my work has consistent lines of enquiry into the communicative order of cultural knowledge, out of which theoretical framing emerges. As a result, rather than freshly indexing available resources as I commence each project, I gravitate towards methods (tools and effects) that will achieve my intended biases, within or amongst the specific requirements of a given project. I exercise my will over them, even as they are always ‘limited by the particular history of each piece’ (ibid.: 19). It is through this limitation that their language as placeholder or shorthand for something becomes activated. Each particular history is an additive force in the construction of the project. ‘Pre-constrained’ by their history, they become productive precisely because ‘they already possess a sense which sets a limit on their freedom of manoeuvre’ (ibid.). For me this gives them critical purchase, while for Lévi-Strauss’ engineer, through limitations s/he meets resistance in a negative form. The position of the bricoleur is the inverse of the engineer whose concepts aim to be wholly transparent. The bricoleur addresses only a ‘subset of the culture’, and this work requires ‘the interposing and incorporation of a certain amount of human culture’ (ibid.: 20). Part of the bricoleur’s message has been ‘transmitted in advance’ (ibid.: 20); thus, in each project I am relying on the viewer-reader to actively engage with the material and through this to formulate ideas and opinions from that experience. In what could serve as a definition of ‘bricolage’, Lévi-Strauss observes the ‘continual reconstruction from the same materials... the signified changes into the signifying and visa versa’. (ibid.: 21). It is in this thought that each of my ‘tools’ or methods (which I have represented in a diagram as parameters [Fig. 7 below]) resides. Each calls on prior understanding, perception or signification, each redeployed where required. The bricoleur ‘derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he “speaks” not only with things, but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes.’ (ibid.).

^{13 13.} ‘Hypermediacy’, as described in Bolter and Grusin (2000: 33–4) ‘acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible’. >>>

Timbre and the Ineliminable Grain

FitzGerald credits Brian Eno with identifying timbre as ‘the true innovation of contemporary music’, describing timbre as ‘the sonic attributes and qualities of recorded music, separate from the notes’ (FitzGerald, 1997: 22). FitzGerald suggests that through this and a traditional concern for musicians with ‘fidelity’ in reproduction, an analogy between music and graphic design can be construed. ‘Fidelity, clarity, noise suppression’ rather than being necessarily desirable, indicate polarities available for manipulation. Timbre operates on at least two levels: both for its inherent qualities, and for its ‘associative resonance’ (ibid.: 23). Together they become powerful tools of articulation in ‘performing the rhetoric of design’ (ibid.). ‘Capturing’ material (through origination or documentation) and ‘storage’ (where I am preparing and producing material for publication) are always inflected by the ‘grain’ of each technology. Alike with ‘timbre’ it informs the message or signal it is carrying. Its presence is ineliminable. In the analogue era we were familiar with this in its actual presence in photography, and any SLR (analogue) camera user will have ‘pushed’ 400 ASA to 1600 ASA to amplify the inherent grain in 35mm film; we are further familiar with the lines of video, and the pixels of early digital cameras especially. Filmmakers often exploit this to signify events of a previous era, and cameras such as the Pixelvision camera (see Glossary) were appropriated by filmmaker Richard Linklater (Slacker, 1990), and by artists including Sadie Benning. In The Bread and Butter Stone (1997) + I used the exaggerated imaging characteristics of the thermal fax machine to amplify the malleability and ambiguity of memory. Audio engineers will be highly sensitised to the particularities of microphones and their characteristics which (just like the timbre of any instrument) inform the recording. I make further reference to its application in recording in my ‘Notes on Energy Transfer and the Ineliminable Grain or Timbre of Recording.’+. However advanced we regard a contemporary technology (4K video for example can produce images of remarkable fidelity, and with each iteration of mobile phones we marvel at the improved image quality of their cameras), it always contains particular characteristics, with implications some of which might only become apparent to us in retrospect.

Intuitive Sagacity

Fig. 8: Make Ready, 11 ‘Pragmatic Decisions’
The material presents opportunities which you follow to a logical conclusion, with some co-incidence along the way

[The bricoleur] interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed of to discover what each of them could ‘signify’ and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialise. 

      (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 18)

The bricolage is founded on an array of tools, tactics, and techniques acquired on an on-going basis, applied according to the intuitive sagacity of the operation of my practice.

Fig. 9: Make Ready, 127 ‘Vantage Point’
With each undertaking there seems to be a point of intuition I need to reach, from which understanding becomes embedded and I am able to respond without the undue interference of reason. From this point on, making work seems easy. Before that, it can be a struggle. I continually search for the right questions, or a way to formulate questions such that they draw out the subject.

‘Intuitive sagacity’ is being attuned to, keeping an eye out. In Daniel Liestman (1992), William Beveridge’s two distinct types of sagacity are outlined – subconscious and intuitive. The first draws upon ideas that have been in the subconscious and surface as a random juxtaposition brought about by external catalyst. The second type is a moment of revelation where a connection between things suddenly becomes evident. For either, ‘rigorous preparation’ is required, which Liestman suggests must be prior to the research. This ‘rigorous preparation’ in my practice is what develops as a consequence of longitudinal enquiry, in a sustained engagement in communication through media, since the learning from one project feeds into another in an ongoing process and internal dialogue with the material and tools of my bricolage.>>>

Hypotext and Hypertext

‘More than anything this is about practice. This is what is left of it – the artifacts, the evidence, the material – in dialogue and at odds with external reality’.^{14 14.} Maybury, P. , in conversation post-screening of On Being There, Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin, 16 October 2022 https://architecturefoundation.ie/event/on-being-there/ [Accessed 22 March 2025] This is how I opened a recent post-screening public conversation about my film On Being There. The film is constructed from material remnants of Tom dePaor’s practice, pieced together to stage an incomplete telling of this work through my encounter with it. The material artifacts of this thesis too, the outputs, are the evidentiary material from my practice. Spatiotemporal events such as performance or exhibition reside now only as derivative fragments, separated from experience in their documentation, and in memory, as another form of text. If, for the purposes of this written thesis, the writing is hypertext to the outputs (the hypotext), then the text inhabits the entire of the practice, namely, not only the visible, manifested, published elements, but also the surrounding practice. This is revealed through descriptive and reflective writing, through vignettes, and collectively these are read through methodological and theoretical framing: an overarching strategy and rationale for research combining methods with theoretical underpinning.

There can be no doubt that this is a rehearsal situation.

(Pantenburg, 2011: 159) >>>

In On Being There, text, sketches, drawings, models, the place or event itself, photographs, film, documentation, all emerge from different temporal relationships with the subject matter and the evidentiary material. A sketch predates a model, a building, or a photograph of the building, yet each of these comes to exist on screen at the same moment, in synchronic dialogue. (Fig. 10) Accumulatively, as artifacts of the work form a ‘text’, intertexts to themselves and external reality. It is amongst this material that we as viewer-reader emerge as ‘texts’ ourselves (John Fiske, 2011: 119) meeting it with our own knowledge and experience. Asked by Tom to make a film which provided retrospective framing for the material in the main room of the I See Earth (2022) exhibition, the role I adopted as archivist and curator was in part to care for the material, but in presenting it I am actuating or performing it.^{15 15.} ‘The centrepiece of the [I See Earth] exhibition is an epic installation comprised of 2km of 6mm round bar steel which brings to life the familiar Willow Pattern – a house, a fence, a bridge, a hut, a boat and island with birds in flight – reconstituted as a 3D drawing of some of dePaor’s iconic works previously exhibited at the Venice Biennale and elsewhere. The linear form highlights architectural drawing as the primary communication and production of the architect. Hand painted in cobalt blue, the installation is suspended from the ceiling of the main gallery whose dimensions span 29m x 16m x 11m high. The sculpture is artificially lit and acoustically scored by a diptych of films recorded on Achill Island in 2013 and at Ballysadare Quarry in 2017. In addition to the main sculptural installation, the exhibition premieres a new documentary film by Peter Maybury, a long-term collaborator of dePaor’s, who has gathered and conserved notebooks, drawings, photos and films of the practice over 30 years. This film complements the main exhibition and includes content never seen before.’ Available at:  https://visualcarlow.ie/whats-on/i-see-earth [Accessed 22 March 2025] There is of course no alternative to this, as to present the material in any way or in any context is to frame it with the privilege of my field of operation, and for an audience with the opportunity to access this. The transtextual is always dialogic – a reflexive interaction of text, intertext (the ‘text-between’), and reader (Barthes, 1978: 160).

Writing this thesis is to produce a fiction – there is no single or complete reading of the material or its underlying framing; it is a performance of an archive. This, just like the outputs themselves is a perspective constructed from evidentiary material, driven through the actuality of the work or its artifacts, but available for revision or reinterpretation. Make Ready then has a transtextual relationship to all the outputs of the thesis.

In this reading of my practice I ‘borrow’ and ‘remove’ (Jeff Murray and Deborah Evers, 1989: 647) intertextual (transtextual) theory from several critical thinkers to form a composite, reflective of my approach. Central amongst these has been Genette’s transtextual framing through which to read the modalities of my practice within a larger ensemble, ‘at a point that has already been written on’ (de Certeau, 1988: 43). My practice relates to a ‘state of the question’ (ibid); namely, it sits both within existing discipline discourse(s); primarily that within which it speaks (for example, art, or architecture); and equally in relation to graphic design practice, and the thesis situates this in a critical context. In framing this transtextuality it is necessary to draw on Barthes’ distinction between ‘work’ and ‘text’. Not all works are ‘texts’; some have a functional or explanatory priority, and others do not multiply out and unfold in complexity in the mind of the viewer-reader, while ‘the Text is experienced only in an activity of production’ (Barthes, 1978: 157; emphasis in original). A distinction is also made by Riffaterre (cited in Genette, 1997: 2) between ‘linear reading’ of non-literary text which produces only meaning, and ‘intertextuality’ which is specific to ‘literary’ reading, and produces ‘significance’ (ibid).^{16 16.} Mukařovský makes this distinction as one between poetry and ‘information language’. ‘Poetic reference is primarily determined, then, not by its relationship to the reality indicated, but by the way it is set into the verbal context.’ (1984: 156) I am, then, taking this as a qualitative distinction and thus claiming my outputs to have this same ‘literary’, transtextual charge.+ The outputs of my thesis are ‘texts’, and as such all texts are intertexts.>>> I employ various intertextual modalities in each output, typically with a dominant modality, but alike with Genette’s observation, other modalities are always drawn upon in support of this. Through exemplars I am discussing each of these modalities as I apply them in my practice:

Here, therefore, it is a matter not of classification of transpositional practices, in which each individual, as in the taxonomies of the natural sciences, is necessarily inscribed within one group and one group only, but rather of an inventory of their basic procedures, which each work combines in its own way

      (Genette, 1997: 212)

Adapting Transtextuality

I have adapted Genette’s ‘transtextuality’ as the basis for a component of the theoretical framing of my practice. It is important to note that I am adapting these terms – which he applied in a literary context – to the context of my practice. As such (and even as Genette notes of his literary ‘transposition’ [1997: 213]), there is no exact fit. Elements of several transpositions are applicable, but none of them may be in the manner Genette had envisaged. I am adapting them to my context as a means to make knowledge of my practice transferable. Genette develops five principal components of what he terms ‘transtextuality’ as a framework, which subsumes ‘intertextuality’ in a delimited way as a relationship or copresence amongst two or more texts, an eidetic, or quoted presence. It’s difficult when speaking not to use ‘intertextual’ to refer to a broad sweep of characteristics, but for the purposes of achieving some precision in describing what I am doing, I have adapted Genette’s ‘transtextuality’ (the poetics of the text), and with this comes his narrower use of ‘intertextuality’. I am therefore adopting his usage of this term, since it is particular (to the eidetic), although I reserve the use of ‘intertextual’ for more specific terms such as ‘vertical’ and ‘political’ intertextuality, mentioned below.

These transtextual or intertextual modalities rarely manifest in only one form. For example the These Islands (2013/17) films appropriate a ‘text’, making certain use of ‘transposition’, while ‘foretext’ describes their iterative condition with no definitive version of the work, having been screened originally in a nearly 10 minute version; in a concise five minute version or ‘condensation’ (Genette) screened on rotation in conjunction with These Islands (Ballysadare) (2017); and most recently with both films edited into a dual-screen installation incorporating previously unscreened material – akin to Genette’s ‘augmentation’ (1997: 228) in I See Earth. 

Elaboration of Transtextual or Intertextual Modalities and Usage 

As Genette’s transtextual model is multi-part, and my practice relies on so many constituent parts I have found it necessary, for clarity, to outline each of these here in the introduction, and this serves as a primer for the subsequent encounter – through the Make Ready page structure – with the application of this borrowed framing to specific publications or aspects of my practice.

Modalities of Transtextuality:

1) Intertext (Eidetic Presence)
If we accept that we are writing into a text that is already written (de Certeau, 1998), or read (as suggested by Barthes, 1978), then all of my outputs are predicated on one or more transtextual modalities, one of which is the literal quote or eidetic presence, but more often the material derives from many sources or is situated within an already existent discourse. Outside of the written word on which Genette is basing his framing, it is difficult to define what constitutes an ‘actual presence’ (Genette, 1997: 1), since in the visual, spatiotemporal, or (lived) experience, this is constituted of so many parts, and any recording device brings with it an ineliminable grain, a timbre, character or language, which informs our reception of the material. A stronger link to what I produce then is to say that it is firstly ‘hypertextual’ – a text having a unity with one or more previous texts, upon which as Genette puts it, it is ‘grafted’ (Genette, 1997: 5)+  I like the use of this word as it conveys the idea of a transplant of living tissue, that it does not attempt to assimilate itself into the original but is both conspicuous, and responsive, open to an interplay with the viewer-reader.

The eidetic (for Genette, the ‘intertextual’, ibid.: 52) presence of material from one of my outputs within another recurs in my practice. The quotation in itself seldom has great weight, instead its significance comes from its new context and reuse, a juxtaposition or détournement.>>> While it may formally be the ‘actual presence’ of one text in another, the quoted material behaves differently in its new setting, disrupting or rerouting meaning through this collision, and bringing about its productivity beyond simple recall. They are each of course ‘authorised’ since I am drawing on my own outputs but are none the less appropriations in that the shift in context is to exploit for new purposes meaning held within the material. The idea of a (self-reflexive) transtextual facet in my practice is introduced to this thesis on the cover of the Make Ready book (Fig. 16), which not only makes visual reference to, but eidetically depicts the cover of another book (Gerard Byrne’s Images or Shadows [2011]). There is though another dimension to this, since it is not only an image of the actual cover but of the cover in production, and alongside this quotation must be read all of the signals of this setting. Additionally, the cover now has the presence of Byrne, or rather a fictional Byrne, since it confers on my book an association with Gerard’s artworld status. Bringing together discrete outputs through quotation grafts onto them my own authorial presence in a self-reflexive gesture that points to the longitudinal enquiry of my practice.+ This intertextuality continues on page 2 of Make Ready with the reproduction of a fragment of a make ready sheet from the publication Utopias (1999), which I designed for an exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, and for which I was both a contributing artist, and the publication designer. In the background of page 3 is an eidetic reproduction (it is reproduced from the original artwork file) of a page from An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, Volume 1 (2001). Here I am borrowing the page design (it is after all a monograph of sorts) but its quotation (if a slight-of-hand), is more so of the image (of a phonautograph) that it carries.

Eidetic Intertextuality in Landfall

As an example of more recent usage Hear the Drummer, my 2018 film is repurposed and intercuts Landfall.>>>^{18 18.} Maybury, P. (2018) Hear the Drummer can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/287508607 [Accessed 22 March 2025]. There are five instances of its inclusion in Landfall found at these times: 22:17; 30:38; 41:19; 49:52; 57:48. These excerpts are eidetic (unchanged from the original film), but the shift of context brings about a shift in their reading. Firstly, they function in a musical sense as a refrain – an identifiable point to return to during the course of Landfall. Secondly, their new context moves the focus away from a single event and towards a more symbolic reading – meanings forged by their placement (détournement) adjacent to thematic concerns of the other footage. This eidetic inclusion is an example of how across my outputs I repurpose available material to accommodate my evolving needs. A further example of eidetic usage in Landfall (37:28) is found in the photographs I made at the Occupy settlement (one of which is reproduced on page 113: ‘9 March 2012’), staged as images on a screen in my office. The footage blends these still images with filmed footage of the façade of the Central Bank shot on another occasion, thereby compositing images within a framing image as the camera pans across the screens in a low-lit room. The sound of mouse-clicks (as if an unseen viewer clicks through the images) overlays fragments from an Occupy march, and these clash with the sound emanating from the adjacent screen (Landfall is a dual-screen work), on which we see, in almost total darkness, an image of a bus passenger scrolling their phone screen while the light from passing traffic flairs intermittently.

2) Paratext

2a) Paratext contains many of the surrounding conventions of a book: title; foreword; footnotes; commentary; illustrations; marginalia; book cover; dust jacket. Often a simple adoption of this term applies in relation to the books I make, while for a film or an exhibition I make a translation with corresponding considerations. In film it can apply to titles, and intertitles, as well as to secondary ideas and imagery, or in exhibition this might be a wall text, exhibition checklist, posters, publicity, signage etc. Relating to the written component of this thesis the written typologies which surround the body text of this thesis (as noted in Rationale for Word Count) are Paratextual.>>>

2b) Foretext
In Genette’s construct, Foretext functions as a subset of Paratext, and may include drafts and iterations. This has considerable significance for me as it helps to decentre any distinction between practice and publication, supporting my assertion of practice as an ongoing condition of rehearsal, essentially an iterative process in which the publications are markers in a progressive enquiry.

3) Metatext
Genette’s third type, Metatext, or ‘commentary’ may not refer directly to the original. The suite of photographs that I produced for Irlanda, (the publication which accompanies the exhibition of de Blacam and Meagher [2010]), explores aspects of de Blacam and Meagher’s buildings as I encountered them, and as such are metatext. The photographs produce a subjective reading, amplified by the materiality of the exhibition armature which uses oak and paper as its primary materials – materials central to the practice and outputs of de Blacam and Meagher Architects. Of (2012) is fundamentally a metatext to this exhibition, in which we reflect on our design and curation. As with Genette’s metatext which ‘unites a given text to another, of which it speaks without necessarily naming it’ (Genette, 1997: 4), Of does not make direct reference to the work of de Blacam and Meagher but instead is substantially an exploration of the underlying concerns and methodology through which to interrogate the dilemma of exhibiting architecture. 

4) Hypertext

The writer is first a reader of cultural texts; writing is always rewriting in the ceaseless construction of  ‘history and society’s’ intersecting textual surfaces.
(Kristeva cited in Friedman, 1991: 147)

a) Transposition
For Genette, the ‘hypertext’ is ‘any text derived from a previous text [the hypotext] either through transformation or imitation’ (Genette, 1997: 7; emphasis in original). It is Genette’s hypertextual mode of ‘transposition’ (which he terms ‘serious transformation’, ibid.: 212) that has most significance in the production of publications which have their origins in other instantiations (such as an exhibition). Transposition is developed with sub-categories, and each transposition (‘transpositional works’) generally belongs to several of these in its transformation of the hypotext.>>>

Genette’s framing of hypertextual ‘transposition’ is removed and borrowed extensively in my thesis discussion of the underlying constructs in the publications I have made with artist Gerard Byrne, and two titles – Images or Shadows (2011), and A Late Evening in the Future (2018) – are looked at closely to reveal these theories as I apply them in my practice. Both are transpositions, but approached in radically different ways. Images or Shadows formulates the book as exhibitionary space through transposition of the material, while A Late Evening in the Future, in a process I characterise (by way of Genette) as ‘transmodalisation’ (1997: 277) – is a change in the mode of presentation. It has other transpositional characteristics but in particular I make a material and experiential translation of encounter from spatiotemporal exhibitionary encounter to a material encounter with the book, where light and movement are replaced by ink and paper. A Late Evening in the Future is hypertext to its hypotext; it is transpositional hypertext and sizeably then it is a modal shift or transmodalisation. Transmodalisation is also applied to These Islands (2013/17), as is ‘amplification’. Here a found object (an unauthorised development on Achill Island) is appropriated and repurposed within another discourse, while the authorship and intent of the built structure are put aside (reserved as intertext). There is a shift of mode as the built structure is translated into filmic encounter – dematerialised, to be rematerialised through camera, editing and sound superimposition. The original ‘text’ of the structure is amplified through various self-reflexive filmic devices, juxtaposition, and its subsequent publication context (the Irish Museum of Modern Art), and the accompanying text which operates in parallel (although only published as a discrete entity in architectural journal San Rocco).^{19 19.} The Everyday Experience, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013–14. Curator: Nathalie Weadick, Irish Architecture Foundation. These Islands, when exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, was displayed in a small room with a chair, a one person cinema. The chair was borrowed from the Venice Biennale, again raising issues of authorship. The sound from the film played in the room and was also relayed to the museum’s colonnades. Separated from the screen it is experienced as a series of dislocated field recordings, affected by the acoustics of the architecture in which it plays back, and merging with ambient noise. Cross reference The Everyday Experience, 112 ‘Undesigned’ This film is later substantially appropriated by me for use in the exhibition I See Earth, and the transtextual implications of this are also discussed.

b) ‘Transtylisation’ and c) ‘Amplification’ in Tuxedo Junction, 1960
Tuxedo Junction, 1960 (2010) includes the Alex Potts essay ‘The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image’ (1999). The book from which it was reproduced was photographed (by Gerard’s assistant) staged on a table, eidetic (a literal form of transtextuality which conforms with what Genette calls Intertextual [1997: 2]), but also transformed – the text now appearing as image, cohabiting the same visual and technical plain as any other photographic material reproduced in Tuxedo Junction, 1960, including the ‘artwork’ reproductions. This hypertext ‘transposition’ can be thought about as ‘transtylisation’ or ‘amplification’ (Genette, 1997: 226, 262), where its representation amplifies or foregrounds certain aspects of the original text. 

d) Condensation and e) Augmentation apply to the various published versions of These Islands subsequently discussed here.

5) Architextuality
While Genette’s ‘architextuality’ has limited function for me in discussing my outputs, I include it here for completeness. Genette describes it as a taxonomy, such as ‘poems’ or ‘essays’ which may go unstated, and I make reference to it only in the book Of.

Further ‘Intertextual’ Modalities:
6) Political Intertextuality
7) Vertical Intertextuality

Implicit in all of this productivity of the text are the ‘political intertextuality’ (Nancy K. Miller, Susan Stanford Friedman, 1991) of both the reader and the writer. Miller’s feminist critical positioning refuses the anonymity of the author proposed by Barthes and Kristeva, and reveals a subjectivity in the act of writing, a political intertextuality or positionality in relation to dominant ideologies. Friedman argues for an extension of its application to all writers regardless of gender, race or social background, and this informs how I understand both my own operative position and that of the viewer-reader.^{20 20.} ‘… I want to argue, for reading the political in the textual and the intertextual not only in women’s writing, but also in men’s writing; not only in white writing, but also in the writing of people of colour…’ (Friedman, 1991: 159) Fiske (2011) too has a multi-part formulation of Intertextuality – ‘horizontal’, ‘inescapable’, and ‘vertical’. For Fiske, in the context of television and cinema, ‘vertical intertextuality’ includes commentary and publicity (while Genette differentiates commentary as ‘metatextual’, and perhaps publicity might fit within ‘paratext’). Fiske describes the productivity of the text as an extreme conception of polysemy, where ‘textual devices admit a variety of readings’ (Fiske, 2011: 118). He observes of the television text that it has ‘leaky boundaries’. While the originating text may be polysemic, and may have a ‘preferred reading’ reproducing a dominant ideology, the viewer is ‘activating a set of meanings’, a sometimes-unconscious action which brings to bear a combination of social and cultural experience. For Fiske the viewer themselves becomes a text, or media ‘at the level of his/her social relations’ (ibid.: 119), and meanings that circulate through them have a relationship of ‘vertical intertexuality’ with the primary text. In approaching any of the bodies of work from which my outputs derive, I am inevitably meeting them with many conscious and subconscious perceptions and biases. Addressing them then as polysemic or discursive is one way of deflecting from unintended dogma or closure, and my approach here is in opposition to prevailing approaches in graphic design practice. Fiske further notes how the viewer-reader might shift between ‘involvement and detachment’ (ibid: 122) and this is surely interesting too, since we cannot assume the full attention of the audience at any time. Various tricks or devices are employed to disrupt the readers passive engagement (Brecht’s V-Effect is referred to here), but equally each output must trade on its material, haptic, or visceral qualities to immerse the reader or even to bring pleasure to the experience.

8) Appropriation 

In discussing the intertextual modality of appropriation, I use These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013) as an exemplar, in which a ‘readymade’, the concrete henge, conceived and built by others serves as text and subject of my film. This modality is not part of Genette’s Transtextual model but folds back on ideas of authorisation and authorship (since we appropriated the henge, say, as text), where the space of authorship is either seized or created through appropriation, and I subsequently ‘appropriate’ this material from my film in I See Earth. Landfall too is discussed for its appropriation of discourse, and of my own material, borrowed from my film Hear the Drummer (2018). As mentioned, this footage is eidetically intertextual (although reedited as part of the whole, the footage and sequences are largely unaltered), so is both appropriated from another of my works but critically too is ‘appropriated’, taken as readymade, raw material, claiming authorship of the footage even as the footage is dependent on the authorship of the spontaneously unfolding events and musical performances it comprises.

Existing Paradigms and Interstitial Sites

The book, the film and the exhibition are, predominantly, the existing paradigms into which I work, while the sites are often interstitial. The form may be familiar but is in each case reconstituted such that it performs in a different way. The site often disrupts conventions, and a clear instance of this is the book reconfigured as exhibitionary site. Images or Shadows. while outwardly resembling a monograph, substantially takes this notion apart reassembling the material in a way which introduces the affordances of exhibition within the book paradigm. Through ‘transposition’, this idea is expanded upon in the books made with Gerard. As an example in film, On Being There is reminiscent of documentary (it’s described as such on the VISUAL website [see footnote 15]), does much to unsettle this proposition.

The physical sites are often interstitial too – an oratory, repurposed as exhibition space, is situated within a Biennale; a record store basement repurposed as exhibition space; a room off a gallery is used as one person cinema with sound relayed to the colonnades outdoors (The Everyday Experience [2013]). Some sites are expressly interstitial as is the case with Landfall for which the commissioners Thisispopbaby particularly sought someone outside of Visual Art practice to produce a work for their gallery programme which paralleled the theatre events of the festival ‘Where we Live’.^{21 21.} Landfall is an hour long dual-screen, dual-stereo film installation, which I shot, edited, produced and directed. The film installation was originally commissioned in 2019 by acclaimed theatre production company ThisisPopBaby for Where We Live: Stories from the City (2020), a bi-annual theatre and arts festival presented in association with the St. Patrick’s Festival. Landfall was presented at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. Then there is the contrast of venues at which I played with Thread Pulls, which included the relatively mainstream setting of Vicar Street, Dublin, but is more typified by smaller venues including galleries, house parties and even squats, in which the setting and the normative hierarchy are disrupted or manipulated.>>> The sites are interstitial in another sense too: I make music, I play in a band, I make films, I curate, and all of this falls for me within a singular practice unified by its framing in relation to graphic design. My outputs are broadly cultural, but as I move from national representation on an international stage at the Venice Biennale to the subcultural activities of the Joinery, Dublin, and to our touring network in Thread Pulls, it can be seen that my practice is interstitial, in that I am not confined to a sector or sectors as is typical of graphic design practice.

Your Sound Position: Constellations in Practice>>>

In field recording, the sound recordist chooses where to position the microphone, and this is decisive in determining the resultant capture. (Fig. 11) I must ask this of each passage of writing – what is my ‘sound position’? Equally, I must ask this question of the act of writing. In writing into the already written of the practice I am enacting a position. 

What has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.
(Benjamin, 2002: 462)

Benjamin’s framing of the constellation sees text and history as continually being reconstituted, past and present intersecting to form a critical constellation (Graeme Gilloch, 2002: 234). Its ‘afterlife’ (‘the patient process of disintegration and ruination in which the object emerges from earlier contexts’ ibid.: 4), sees the ‘meaning of a text... determined by the critical constellation it enters into in and with the present’ (ibid.: 234). As Gilloch notes, ‘the cultural and political significance of a work of art is not specified in advance, but is subject to (mis)appropriation according to political and other struggles in the present (ibid.: 55).

Maria Muhle in her essay in Images or Shadows refers to Byrne’s filmic (re)enactments of texts as  ‘a constructed or artificial reality, a discursive constellation that is composed of a network of texts, performances, events, discussions, interviews’ (Muhle, 2011: 174). They bring together views of a time frozen in a (printed) text with contemporary reading, released through their reimaging and translation to a new medium and context.

Using Make Ready as a model I move around, in and out of the multiple constellations which give form to my practice; there is the constellation of those with whom I work; of where the work is sited and received (published); and there are constellations of effects (the tools of my bricolage) and their relationship with language and technology; the multiple operating structures which frame it; and the material itself always arranged in discursive constellation.>>> Each of these has their histories. This draws on the full timeframe of my practice (some 30 years now), that which contributed to my practice formation, and a much longer timeframe of emergent modes of communication. Across all of this, new and old ideas intersect, and bring new meaning in a new context. Each of the publications comprising the outputs of this thesis eschews a single privileged view in place of polyvocal, multivalent, transtextual ways of looking and reading.^{22 22.} On Smithson’s intent on photographing his work: ‘the “camera’s eye” was posited on the potential for generating a multiplicity of photographic images that would undo the framing closures of a single privileged view.’ (Potts, 1999: 184).  This is shaped further by my ‘political intertextuality’ and the biographies and political intertextuality of those with whom I work, and the context(s) and histories of the publications and their subject matter. Not just the (discursive) constellation of the elements, or fragments which make up the publication but the metaphor of constellation as ‘an intelligible, legible, though contingent and transient, pattern’ (Gilloch, 2002: 20) of (perhaps distant or disparate) points resonating with both the bricolage of my methodology and of intuitive sagacity. In always attempting to decentre the text, or any monological framing of it, each of the thesis publications attempts to put in dialogue this broad span of time and understanding, with past and present brushing up against one another. The text is constantly available for re-reading in relation to its present surroundings. As Gilloch notes of the constellation, each ‘must be recognized as only one permutation among an infinite number of possible configurations, conjunctions and correspondences’ (ibid.: 25).

Instrumentalising Practice Enquiry

Into what context or discourse am I speaking? With whom am I speaking? Why am I in the room? What is that constituency? From where am I speaking? This shapes the ‘capture’ of data, revealing a ‘political intertextuality’ (Miller, Friedman, 1991) through both inclusion and omission, and informs the ‘transmission’ and ‘reception’ (Barthes, 1978: 15) of the work. The theory and methodology outlined in this introduction locates my practice criticality. In revisiting the essay segments of Make Ready, aspects of the publications and my practice are explored in relation to this theory and methodology, bringing to light several further theoretical constructs including ‘energy transfer’, and various mutually constituent relationships which are central to my practice. The thesis structure, the writing and the modes of delivery combine to address the ways in which the methodological and theoretical framing can serve to articulate a non-normative role for the graphic designer. It asks if the assumed transparency in graphic design’s role in communication can be leveraged to expand both the role of the graphic design practitioner, and the discourses within which they operate. Through this emergent operative position how can the practitioner instrumentalise the inherent limitations of any technology, the contingencies of practice, and the ‘foldback’ from other disciplines and discourses? As a sustained enquiry into the relaying of phenomena (experience, and meaning derived from that experience) through communicative media, addressing social, cultural, and artistic knowledge through dialogic publication, what are the implications both within and outside of artistic practice? What does this new knowledge arising from my practice enquiry imply in the study and practice of graphic design? Finally, what implications does the structure and modalities of conveyance of this thesis have for further Prior Publication doctoral theses in this and related areas?

6 March 2015
I’m the opening speaker at Offset, a high-profile design conference in Dublin.>>> I hardly slept last night, up until three doing run-throughs to settle my nerves, but this has had the adverse affect and made me even hate the sound of my own voice. I’m something of a veteran of the stage having gigged so many times in recent years, but a change of context is tricky to deal with – and now I’m on the bill as a ‘professional’ and I feel anything but prepared. I arrive at the venue early and technicians are still rushing round trying to connect laptops to screen and sound, and it’s not working. Oddly their slight panic helps to settle my nerves. Eventually 11.00am comes and I stand on stage behind the podium, with my laptop and paper printouts of a loose script. Everything looks different now with the lights dimmed but I can feel the auditorium is full.

I hit the space bar. 

To the amplified sound of someone typing, I shuffle paper as if reviewing my notes, occasionally feigning to tap the keys. As I glance around I can see the organiser and technicians looking anxious – there is no image on screen and I am saying nothing, and they reasonably suspect the projector is not working. Nervous glances. The audience are becoming palpably uncomfortable and I can hear shuffling and mumbling – this sequence with only the sound of typing, is a full 90 seconds!^{23 23.} Silvermilk @Silvermilk__ @weloveoffset ‘At Peter Maybury’s talk wondering if there’s some technical difficulties? Very interesting guy non the less [sic].’ Available at: https://twitter.com/Silvermilk__/status/573814642092425216?t=zPn0ZN-HUYjrfYvCtHUrew&s=03 [Accessed 28 March 2025] >>> Abruptly the sound stops: The title: ‘Make Ready’ flashes on screen, cutting almost violently to black and white footage and the immense sound of a printing press in operation. Subliminal flashes of the book cover are inserted into the video sequence as it shows a close up of sheets feeding through the press.>>> The video sequence ends. It’s 3 minutes and 13 seconds before I finally speak.^{24 24.} ‘OFFSET @weloveoffset Peter Maybury dusts off cobwebs with lots of sound effects. Whistles, typewriters, classical music & engines. We’re wide awake! #OFFSET2015’ Available at: https://www.iloveoffset.com/news/offset2015/ [ Accessed 28 March 2025]

^{Fig. 12 The Existing Communicative Order}

I am on the stage with Make Ready. In this ultra-professionalised setting delegates have paid to hear what I and others have to say: They are ‘ready to be inspired’.^{25 25.}‘Every year OFFSET brings thousands of people through the doors of The Bórd Gáis Energy Theatre to embrace a weekend of wisdom, creativity and discussion. Among the masses hide media members from many of our favourite publications and outlets. Each one offers a unique take on their experience of the event. It’s always enjoyable to see the culmination of their responses cover the totality of what we worked to put together. When the doors opened on Friday morning, delegates poured through for their first taste of what was sure to be an awe inspiring weekend.’  Available at: https://www.iloveoffset.com/news/offset2015/ [Accessed 28 March 2025] ‘DAY ONE Are you guys ready to be inspired? The doors are open – grab a seat, quick!’ Available at: http://t.co/7IxOUmsdKl  [Accessed 28 March 2025] ‘Here at OFFSET we always try to showcase the best of Irish design and talent alongside our international speakers on the main stage. Kicking off day one was Irish artist, graphic designer and musician, Peter Maybury. Peter took us through everything from publications for art clients to his audio-visual experiments.— OFFSET (@weloveoffset).’ March 6, 2015 Available at: https://twitter.com/weloveoffset/status/573798933937414144 [Accessed 28 March 2025]. I am in a large auditorium, performing a part-prepared, part-improvised account of my practice in a blend of spoken word with pre-recorded audio and 22 film components made for this retelling. There is a concurrent Make Ready exhibition in a gallery in Dublin’s Temple Bar, which opened last night. There, the material is arranged on shelves configured as library, exhibition, and reading room. The viewer-reader is free to handle and interact with the contents of the shelves. An inventory accompanies the display in which is included an entry for my Make Ready book which launched last night with a reception and informal panel discussion in the gallery (see Appendix I).

I am placing this Prologue here, before the pages of Make Ready, as it is a moment of looking forward and looking back – a departure point – the performance of a thesis in practice, now emerging in written form. The origins of each output in this thesis are embedded within the text of Make Ready (Maybury, 2015a). As a semi-abandoned structure it is what remains, and through the more-or-less ruins a practice enquiry is legible.^{26 26.} ‘If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. (Derrida, 1988: 115). Make Ready contains traces of formation: in the instant of performance or spontaneous composition; in exploring the durational timeframe of sound and moving image; in the intermediate and long-term span of printed matter; in the technical and structural concerns that run through everything; the now redundant technologies whose processes still leave an imprint on our understanding; the now redundant situations of the outputs – signage, leaflets, documents, mere records of past events, reread through the present.^{27 27.} In Theories and History of Architecture (1980) Manfredo Tarfuri speaks of ‘Operative Criticism’ where our perception of the past is necessarily informed by the present. The Make Ready conference talk and exhibition are spatiotemporal performances of practice; the Make Ready book is a synchronic convoking of past, present and future practice told through consecutive essays which might be read in linear or non-linear fashion. The thesis retraces this path, diving into the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of my practice read through and across the residue.

On the last page of the Make Ready book I set out my ‘energy transfer’ construct (outlined here in the Introduction). As this proves to be decisive in framing my practice I begin the page by page encounter with this last page, page 128. While not perhaps the obvious place to start, I hope that you as reader will soon see the logic as to why. The culmination of Make Ready is the starting point of this thesis, and while the Energy Transfer essay in the Make Ready book reflects on preceding pages as a kind of conclusion, in this thesis the construct offers a critical way in and a lens through which to view my practice.>>>

 

Fig. 13 Make Ready, 128/ ‘Energy Transfer (Slight Return)’
Recordings of all kinds exist as a sequence of capture, storage and release. The content is gathered and arranged, is charged or amplified through the physicality of the medium. Ink on paper, light emitting from a screen, speaker cones pushing air, an object in space later releases this delayed experience. In the process there is conversion, and some loss, and of course our perceptions will change over time.

The drum strike is the most literal and direct enactment of this. (Fig. 14).

Fig. 15 Make Ready, 8 ‘Unlearning’ >>>
I’ve become convinced that drumming is the transfer of energy: about how you hit the drum to push the air across the room so the listener feels some of that energy too.

Energy Transfer

This key construct in my practice emerges through the physicality of drumming. Each drum strike pushes air across the room, causing vibrations within the space and its structures, impacting physically on the listener. The air causes vibrations in the chest cavity, and in the eardrum, and these vibrations are interpreted as sound, affecting us emotionally and psychologically. It is an instantaneous transmission of ideas, emotion, and energy; ideas which have been captured through perhaps years of listening, and acquisition of the skills or language to translate this through composition (a storage mechanism) into a form available for immediate consumption, encounter and reaction (release). The music or performance may live on in the memory (in the minds of performer and receiver). In Make Ready, I outline recording or ‘energy transfer’ as a tripartite construct wherein each output in my practice is understood as a sequence of ‘capture, storage, and release’ over time. Publishing, as the unifying typology of the outputs, provides the public encounter (site) – and need or function of my practice – the moment when the ‘make ready’ (the practice enquiry, the capture, and storage or arrangement of material) meets an audience, and the material, or energy is released through this encounter of the viewer-reader. ‘Energy transfer’ is an attempt, a series of repeated utterances or iterations towards a relaying of phenomena (experience, and meaning derived from that experience), social, cultural, and artistic knowledge, through dialogic publication.

There are various multipart formulations that I have encountered in my reading and with which this construct has affinities: Barthes’ tripartite process of ‘filiation’ with its constituent parts ‘determination’, ‘consecution’ and ‘conformity’ (Barthes, 1978: 160); de Certeau’s framing of enunciation in ‘realisation’, ‘appropriation’, ‘the interlocutor’, and ‘the present’ (de Certeau, 1988: 33); Kristeva’s (1980: 66) tripartite ‘writing’, ‘subject’, and ‘addressee’, required for the dialogic. Pantenburg (in an essay in Images or Shadows on Gerard Byrne’s work), refers to the ‘ensemble of elements’ particular to film and video – the camera lens, filmstrip/videotape, and projection/presentation (Pantenburg, 2011: 165). This is a prosaic observation on one level, but the characteristics of each facet, the interdependence of the constituent parts and their collective capacity to either ‘pull toward reality’ or ‘amplify the infidel powers of deviating, altering and alienating’ (Pantenburg, 2011: 164–5) through our human relationships with technological processes, express ideas central to my framing. Equally relevant is the ‘message’ of the Press Photograph formed by its ‘emission’, ‘transmission’ and ‘reception’ (Barthes, 1980: 15). This is a prosaic observation on one level, but the characteristics of each facet, the interdependence of the constituent parts and their collective capacity to either ‘pull toward reality’ or ‘amplify the infidel powers of deviating, altering and alienating’ (ibid.: 164–5) through our human relationships with technological processes express ideas central to my framing. Equally relevant is the ‘message’ of the Press Photograph formed by its emission, transmission and reception (Barthes, 1980: 15). This tripartite structure describes the path and life of the photograph from its origination to its meeting with an audience. Karl Bühler’s model of communication is that of: ‘representation’ as ‘the capacity of a sign to refer to an external reality or referent’; ‘expression’ as ‘the capacity of a sign to express something about the sender of the message’; and ‘call’ as ‘the capacity of the sign to affect the receiver’.^{28 28.} Bühler cited in Mukařovský, J. (1984) ‘Poetic Reference’, Semiotics of Art. Cambridge: MIT Press. I draw here on Gérard Mermoz’s observations in his essay ‘On Typographic Reference (Part One)’, published in Emigre: Mouthpiece 36, n. pag. Sacramento: Emigre. It is easy to map these thoughts onto my own model of capture, storage, and release. To Bühler’s model Mukařovský (1984: 158) adds a fourth ‘aesthetic function’ where in a ‘reversal in the hierarchy of relations’ (ibid.: 157) we respond to the material object, the sign itself, before we read what it might signify. Poetic reference is made through appearance and context before we are able to consider representation.>>> While I arrived at my ‘energy transfer’ construct in advance of my thesis and prior to all of these readings, these formulations serve to frame a ‘state of the question’, through which I can situate my construct in a ‘larger ensemble’.>>>

As longitudinal enquiry, my practice is shaped by the unpublished (the rehearsal, the iterative, the make ready, the literature, the ‘foretext’ [Genette]); and evidenced in the published (the book, film, exhibition, or performance). Across these transtextual publications must be read my ‘political Intertextuality’ (Miller, Friedman, 1991), alongside the privilege or politics of the site (institutional, sub-cultural or otherwise) from which I speak. The work is made public through the publications (the outputs) which are essential to the ‘performing’ of each piece as conceived within the capture–storage–release framing, requiring the viewer-reader to activate or complete the energy transfer. As a practitioner engaged in a career-long enquiry, the process of rehearsal is of equal importance to the publications, and one publication is rehearsal for the next. Ends and beginnings are difficult to tell apart.

Bloom-Christen and Grunow in their discussion of the vignette – a device I use throughout this thesis – quote Michael Jackson: ‘sound ethnographic writing often involves a resistance to closure, a resolve to suggest meaning rather than spell it out’ (Bloom-Christen and Grunow, 2022: 10). Just as this resonates with the ambitions of the vignette – to provoke in the reader a questioning – my practice has this ambition, requiring the active engagement of the viewer-reader. Part of my enquiry, and part of the energy transfer is in deferred meaning: Avoiding fixity, leaving open possibility for the reader to ‘set it going’ (Barthes, 1978: 163).

Gillian Rose (2016) proposes that meaning in an image is made at the site of production; by the image itself; at the site of circulation; and at the site of audiencing. Again my construct emerged before I encountered this model but the similarities are evident, and in outlining here the constituent parts of energy transfer I borrow Rose’s term ‘sites’ which she uses to explore visual material. 

1) Capture

The ‘site of capture’ is that of the author (or producer) as reader. In ‘capturing’, I am first a reader, as is anyone in originating or preparing material for an audience (the photographer who ‘documents’ an event or place is first engaged in an act of reading the phenomena to which s/he must respond). In what ways am I affected by it and how does it meet my previously held views, my ‘political Intertextuality’? What is captured and by whom? What am I bringing to it? My perspective is informed by my past readings and experience, and with any selection there is always omission, both purposeful and subconscious. What technologies are available or have been used as a means of capture? What are the affordances and limitations of this? What meaning does the ineliminable grain of a technology produce? With each publication, recordings of all sorts – whether photographs, film footage, sound, writing, or archival material, generated by me and by others, must all be worked with or negotiated through an iterative process of editing and production.

My position in relation to the material, subject matter and context further shapes any reading (this applies to each part of my energy transfer construct): Am I looking from the outside in, or am I part of the culture in which the event, place, or phenomenon is situated (an emic position)? The graphic designer is widely thought about as outsider, as intruder, yet I am also insider, operating within a discourse, and within existing paradigms. The tension between these two positions is at the centre of the productivity of my practice. I am deeply invested in each output: As gallery goer I am both insider and outsider; Gerard’s practice enquiry has deep resonances for me, and I learn from it both as viewer-reader, and through working with the material and with him; the Gall works are framed by and received into architectural discourse yet I am the filmmaker and graphic designer, an outsider. Despite these productions being co-signed with Tom, the assumption persists – for instance with Of which was co-written – that my role is (merely) that of ‘graphic designer’. In each output that forms this thesis I am writing by not for (Duncombe, 1997: 187); in not as (Lupton/Blauvelt); from not about (the last is the perspective of this thesis, written from not about practice). I am curating, not graphic designer acting as curator. I am filmmaking, responding to the cultural conditions in which I am situated. I am operating ‘“within” the very conditions of the culture’ (Duncombe cited in Triggs, 2010: 13, see footnote ^{106 106.} ‘Fanzines are positioned “within the condition of the production of culture that constitutes an essential component of their politics”, but also “within” the very conditions of the culture in which they are produced.’ (Triggs citing Duncombe, 2010: 13).); I am operating within the discourse of which I speak. In Landfall ^{[project descriptor]} Landfall, a dual-screen, dual-stereo film installation of one hour duration ostensibly comprises documentary or observational footage shot in the Republic of Ireland over the period 2012–19. The material was recorded by me using a DSLR camera, in a Direct Cinema tradition (single camera, available light etc.). The footage consists primarily of tripod shots with panning, zooming and varying focus-points, and a small element of hand-held footage. Exceptionally, two sequences were recorded using a mobile phone camera. The camerawork intermittently makes itself conspicuous through abrupt movement, focus-finding etc., bringing a self-reflexive element. In contrast, much of the soundtrack is heavily processed in post-production using Ableton Live software – where I combined direct sound (recorded either in-camera or using an additional audio recorder); sound generated using analogue synthesizers; Foley techniques; and field recordings from non-contiguous sources.Often there is no actual correlation between sound and image as the sound has been entirely synthesized, but the viewer imposes one. The film is a succession of vignettes which combine to form interrelated observations on the island of Ireland as a set of conditions – geographical, political, ideological – with themes of contested ground, boundaries, containment, resources, energy, systems, and structures emerging. Chronology and geography are disrupted, thus correspondences across the material are explored through sequence and juxtaposition and recurring motifs or themes. I am drawn to and responding to what is around me. In the act of filming – by being there – I am taking a position, but in the act of recording I am also capturing the views of others, which I may later reshape, distort, or alter by context.

2) Storage 

The ‘sites of storage’ are: the discourse of graphic design; my activity and practice in a discipline or discourse to which I am contributing; and graphic design as it relates to that other discipline or field of enquiry. In contributing to a discourse from my perspective of graphic design there is a foldback and contribution too to graphic design discourse. Storage is the make-ready: editing the material; activating the text(s); shaping a discursive constellation; preparing material for the viewer-reader. I work within existing paradigms (the book, the film, the musical recording or performance, the exhibition etc.), but my methodology (the bricolage informed by its transdisciplinary foldback) allows me to break out of disciplinary or practice confinement. A ‘transformation’ (Clarke, 2003: 177–8) is made ready in the undoing of conventions of formal arrangement used to convey a singular message.>>> The transformation is brought about through various mechanisms of disruption, ‘abuse’(!) (Mukařovský, 1984: 158), and self-reflexivity (Brecht’s V-Effect), displacing the conventional reader relationship with the work, reminding them of the constructs at play in the presentation of the material, of the political intertextuality of the producer and their own, thereby actively engaging them in a process of meaning production. Polyphony and its formal interplay undoes the single privileged view (or framing closure). The tools of the bricolage – signs, timbre, structure enable this.

The dialogics of the bricolage, the ‘aesthetic function’ (Mukařovský), and the various modalities of transtextuality as outlined are put in service to appropriate the existing paradigms of book, film etc. in newly productive ways as exhibitionary space in preparation for the viewer-reader. In film this might be through the separation and recombination of sound and image, and the self-reflexive use of a single camera as exemplified in These Islands, or through appropriation, synchrony, and the production of a discursive text convoking multiple (appropriated) voices, as exemplified in Landfall.  In print this might be the undoing of institutional conventions (the monograph, the editor/artist-designer dynamic, assumptions of collaboration), or of conventions of arrangement, activating the material through discursive constellation, and through form and timbre. In music performance, the political intertextuality of producer and the vertical intertextuality of the viewer-reader collide with the release through sound.

3) Release 

This is the site of publishing and reception. The Site of Release is within the institutions, the culture of establishment galleries, museums, institutions, biennales, publishing mechanisms; in the independent structures, the subcultures of galleries, record labels, publishing, releases, venues, (subcultural activities); within the publication sites (within or combining existing paradigms of book, film, exhibition, etc.); within graphic design practice; and in the viewer-reader encounter with each output. All of these are constituent elements or actants in the productivity of the ‘stored’ material. 

From Where do I Speak? (The Productivity of the Viewer-Reader Through the Transformation)

I borrow Clarke’s use of ‘transformation’ (Clarke, 2003: 177–8) as a way to describe the productivity of my bricolage manipulation of tools and structures of conventional publication spaces. Existing paradigms, such as the book are decentred and reconfigured as discursive encounter and exhibitionary space. In acknowledging the site of privilege afforded and inherent in each publication – both site of transmission [publisher/ institution/ gallery] and the political intertextuality of the author/scriptor) – disturbances brought about through technical means (technicity), self-reflexive devices, and the discursive, transtextual arrangement of material, offer a resistance to closure and propose a shift towards the reader.

The moment of release is in the engagement of the reader where the transformation is activated in the mind of the viewer-reader through the ruptures that have been produced. Self-reflexivity serves to reveal the construct, the weave of the ‘mediated display’ (van Toorn 2009: 103). Alienation and rupture produce ‘narrative discontinuities, authorial intrusions, essayistic digressions, stylistic virtuosities’ (Stam cited in van Toorn 2009: 106), towards a productivity of the reader as author, completing or performing the text physically (as in the case of Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher),^{[project descriptor]} of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) was Ireland’s participation at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2010, of which I was co-curator. We chose to address the built and unbuilt portfolio of de Blacam and Meagher, an award-winning Irish architectural practice established in 1976. The overarching subject of the curation however was the dilemma of exhibiting architecture, particularly when amplified by its setting in the built intensity of Venice, and the high-key charge of the Biennale. Amidst the complexities of creating an exhibition about architecture within another architectural space and context, the installation performed as an exhibition display, replica archive, repository and reading room. The exhibition in Venice took the form of an oversized (A2 approx.) unbound book Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher (2010), comprised of five discrete volumes, published in an edition of 9,000 copies for free distribution and arranged as paper stacks on five items of bespoke joinery in counterpoint with the architecture of the San Gallo oratory. The curation directly addresses the Biennale’s theme ‘People meet in architecture’. To visit the exhibition was to encounter and activate the artwork by moving through it, handling and removing copies of each volume. The viewer-reader was able to walk amongst the stacks, browse the publication inside the oratory, and take copies away. The space was transformed by the interaction of visitors who interrupted the grid by browsing, disturbing and removing copies, making a physical imprint on the space, collectively changing its form. If a visitor chose to take copies home, a second, slower, engagement of close reading might occur over time. emotionally and intellectually. The ‘author’ does not disappear but may be subsumed into the text. These disrupt the reproductive and communicative order, such that structure contrived as transtextual weave or discursive constellation, engages the viewer-reader in a creative act of opening out meaning: the material made ready for the viewer-reader to ‘set it going’ (Barthes, 1978: 163).

The Make Ready book enacts these disruptions. It is polyvocal, and multivalent due to its breadth of participant-contributors. Projects are placed in synchronic dialogue with reflections on technological developments, processes, theoretical constructs and reflections on practice. An amalgamation of fragmentary essays is presented in a fashion in which high production values conflict with ruptures in book-design convention. As a reader you might construe meaning across these essays, however, no explanation is provided other than the material itself. Images or Shadows is polyvocal too by nature of the number of author contributors and the ‘flow’ of influence is part of what is under discussion. Cursorily it conforms to the conventions of a monograph or exhibition publication, but closer engagement reveals a dialogical relationship between the visual material, the written essays, and the book form, that undermines this. Again the reader must navigate this. The Gall films provide mere strands, which require the reader to complete them. These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo, for example, confronts the viewer-reader with a partial encounter with the development, book-ended by footage of Gunnera tinctoria. By presenting a film of this place a value is conferred on it, but what that value is, and in what ways or context it is being considered, are not articulated. Landfall is a linear conflation of thematically linked material, and in common with the Gall films no cues are given in its presentation. It is in the mind of the viewer-reader that this either remains as episodic, or aggregates thematically. These works, therefore, inherently require speculation and authorship on the part of the reader.

There are different speeds of ‘release’: there is the immediacy of live music performance (sound travelling through air interpreted by the listener); the linear temporality of film; the staged release of reading/browsing; the fixity of print, whose meaning changes over time (‘Dialectics at a standstill’, Benjamin, 2002: 462);^{29 29.} Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it” each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognisability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present or what is present its light on what is past; rather, images is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In others words: images is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural… The image that is read – which is to say, the images in the now if its recognisability – bears to the hightest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.’ (Benjamin, The Arcades, 2002: 462) and the percolation and reshaping of ideas in the mind of the reader. This is at its most pronounced when we compare a Thread Pulls live music performance – a more or less immediate energy transfer – with the Irlanda exhibition whose immediacy of encounter in the room combines with the deferred and private reading of the printed matter for those who took copies away. Yet in each instance, ‘In the act of creation, a [wo]man brings together two facets of reality… the spectator… re-lives the same discovery; his appreciation also is a re-creation’. (Jacob Bronowski cited in Lisa Koonts, 1995: n. pag.)

Thread Pulls music is woven with musical and timbral references, an accumulation and brushing up against each other of Gavin’s and my lived experience of music listening.^{30 30.} ‘New Thoughts is a receptacle for all sorts of musical history, from 1960s psych to taut post-punk and elemental disco and funk, yet never succumbs to any one ideal enough to derail this singular expedition.’ The Irish Times. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/album-reviews/thread-pulls-1.658180 [Accessed 22 March 2025] Form, structure and timbre combine with the context in which we operate to situate it culturally and to release some of the many influences, conscious and unconscious, both for us as producers and in the mind(s) of the audience/listener.^{31 31.} ‘While in the past I have heard the echoes of Sonic Youth, Throbbing Gristle and PiL in the music of Thread Pulls but on New Thoughts these influences have been pulverised and converted into Peter Maybury and Duffy’s own vision.’ Brainwashed. No longer available at: http://brainwashed.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8609:thread-pulls-qnew-thoughtsq&catid=13:albums-and-singles&Itemid=133 [Accessed 17 November 2019] See Appendices for complete published review. I feel that it is particularly the case in music that this shared authorship occurs. As producers we transition the material from the ‘not-yet-written’ for its capacity to communicate is in its meeting with the productivity of the audience/listener.+ ^{32 32.} Friedman speaks of the writer who ‘makes the transition from the not-yet-written to the written happen. The writer is not just a figure, a trope as ideological construct.’(Friedman, 1991: 147)

 

The Paratext is the relationship between text ‘properly speaking’ and the elements that surround it to produce its totality (Genette, 1997: 3). Amongst these paratextual elements are the Colophon, which signals institutional framing. The publications that are part of my practice are defined by and cannot exist without these external publishing mechanisms – independent or established they determine reach and characterise the output. The institution – in this case the Offset design conference – provides a framework positioning me as insider and expert. Speaking from within, my book, and thereby my practice has the publishing impetus of an internationally renowned professional design conference, yet Make Ready challenges normative practice and many of the expectations of such a conference. Formally resembling a monograph and published in parallel with my conference presentation, and my exhibition, each modality punctures the expectations of its framing. Each has different encounters for their viewer/audience, and the mechanisms through which the material is arranged for each is specific to the context and means of delivery. Each operates independently and in conjunction with the others, but none relies on the other to be complete.

 

I put Gerard on the cover of my book. 

A cover too is a paratext; it accompanies the book within. On it the arrangement and presentation of photograph and text is legible as a ‘text’. Printed on the outside front cover of Make Ready is a view of a small room at a printers. To the side is a computer monitor, and curtains and a backboard and roof panel optimise lighting on an inclined table on which are two untrimmed printing sheets for the covers of Images or Shadows, showing colour bars and technical information along one edge. These elements combine to tell us this is an image of a book in production. My printer, Marcel has emailed me this photo in a friendly gesture to let me know Gerard’s book is on press (we’re both excited about this one). I later repurpose and transpose this image onto the cover of Make Ready as an illustration of the status of my practice – closely aligned with the producer, and occupying the status of the make ready – as procedural, emergent, and in ongoing flux.

Fig. 18 Make Ready: A Cover is a Paratext.

 

The cover of Images or Shadows (Fig. 19) is photographed during production. later to appear as the cover image of Make Ready. I chose a shop-window display (one of Byrne’s photographs commissioned by him but taken by another) for the cover of Images or Shadows, and Make Ready too is thought about as a display, and tableau of practice, with the Make Ready exhibition partly conceptualised as shop window. Images or Shadows as depicted on the Make Ready cover is an image appropriated and recontextualised within an image – a window onto a window. It is a photo from the process of preparation for publication, made public. It is a self-reflexive declaration of Make Ready as an engagement with practice and with process. An intermediate image, it points to my energy transfer construct, and to the circularity of production, where the writer is always firstly a reader. Quoting Byrne’s book on the cover of Make Ready is an effective ‘literary montage’ (Benjamin, 2002: 460);^{33 33.} ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show… the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.’ (Benjamin, 2002: 460) an image appropriation from Byrne’s outputs; an appropriation from my practice; and a photograph (taken by the printer) itself appropriated by me to make a cover image. Like the bricoleur whose presence is expressed in and through their tools and materials, Make Ready in its totality is the construction of a self-identity. It positions me amongst the processes, the outputs, the transtextuality of work and practice; within graphic design practice; and in relation to others and the entities (the constituencies of practice) through which the works are published. I am taking the already written of my practice and inventing a fictional image of self through book, film, exhibition, and talk (the entire Make Ready production).+

Fig. 20 Make Ready, 5
To ‘make ready’ is to be in preparation, making ideas ready for an audience. It is the work of rehearsal that goes unseen.

In this image on the cover of Make Ready the curtains suggest a theatricality, that of a staged image, and within it are the props of making: computer, desk, notes, and proofs. Its meaning and reading are transformed by its repurposing as the cover of my book. It is now an outward facing display image indicating the contents within the book, and read in conjunction with the title.>>>

The Make Ready book here is the stage, the exhibitionary site of my practice,  also staged in the exhibition, and in the performed talk at the Offset conference. If we take the exterior of the book as a whole it contributes to the paratext; to the ‘text’ and transtextuality (Genette) of the book, with logos, title, and ISBN providing institutional framing adhering to publishings conventions. In this example however, the cover reaches beyond the paratextual role of a cover in suggesting a tone for the book, and is legible itself as a text – and metatext – transtextually related to the content within. 

If we consider the staging of the cover – an image of another (and an other’s) publication cover, it is legible on several levels. Firstly, it positions the book as something transitional. We are placed within a process, alluding to the iterative, the interim, the in-progress. By putting the cover of Gerard’s book on the cover it locates others centrally in my practice, and equally situates others within my practice: a co-dependence is inferred. Additionally, it situates the authorship of Make Ready in the context of production, drawing on the critical reading of technical production processes. In combination with the overlaid title, the cover proposition is inherently transtextual, in a cumulative overlaying of ‘texts’. It speaks at least to the text of practice (design and production); the text of other practices; the text of my practice; the text of graphic design practice (as monograph); and to the text of typographic usage (font usage as a legible form of signification).+

 

Fig. 21 Make Ready, (Inside Front Cover)
(printing) Waste sheets fed through the press while preparing inks levels and blanket pressure to achieve the correct impression.

Ways and Means >>>

While studying at Central St. Martins in 1992 I made a small book as part of my Masters studies, printed at the University’s litho facility. I remember being greatly struck by the ‘make ready’ sheets used while setting up the press for the print run. On each was layer over layer of student projects haphazardly superimposed. The transparency of the ink made the layers meld into something dense and complicated. Nonsensical on one level, but this stayed with me as an image of potential energy. It appeared as if all these ideas had been compressed into the paper and trapped for storage. Sadly, it never occurred to me to keep any of these sheets, and their fate presumably was a skip. (We didn’t do much recycling then).

The thought first came to me through drumming, but now it seems clear that most of what I do is about Energy Transfer. In each undertaking there is a sequence of capture, storage and release. The content is gathered and arranged, is charged or amplified through the physicality of the medium. Ink on paper, light emitting from a screen, speaker cones pushing air, an object in space later releases this delayed experience. In the process there is conversion, and some loss, and of course our perceptions change over time.

The end result, what we make visible of our work, has been filtered through multiple iterations. And for the most part is better for it. There’s a moment though in the process of development that is filled with potential yet to be realised. It is of this moment that Make Ready speaks. In some ways this is closer to the actual experience, where everything is essentially in disarray, yet somehow a possible path emerges. 

Fig. 20. Ways and Means. 

 

 

On the first and last pages of Make Ready two photographs I took while travelling in China in 1999 are reprised from my Hardsleeper (Emigre Music, 2000) album cover. In the first a man lies on a bed, a folded sheet over his chest and he wears a wrist-watch. Without knowledge of the setting, it is uncertain from the image if he is alive or dead – consequently the timepiece plays a heightened role.

Fig. 23 Hardsleeper, 1999.

 

 

de Certeau speaks of ‘stratified places’ which take the form of ‘imbricated strata’ (1998: 200). The processes mentioned on these pages of Make Ready, and their implications and legacy underscore our contemporary encounter with mechanisms of recording and storage. This stratification can be read in techniques and processes, and meaning can be inferred which colours their representation. As de Certeau elaborates:

… beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology, opaque and stubborn places remain. The revolutions of history, economic mutations, and demographic mixtures lie in layers within it, and remain there, hidden in custom, rites, and spatial practices. The legible discourses that formerly articulated them have disappeared, or left only fragments in language.

(ibid.: 201)

 

 

This page printed. Yours will too.^{34 34}The title of this vignette is taken from the Gonz Graphics ad copy which appears in Emigré 16 (1990).  >>>

1990: ‘This page printed, yours will too’ reads the ad in Emigre magazine for Gonz Graphics, a repro house in California. The ad, designed by Barry Deck, is a showcase of image fragments of a nightlit California using multiple fonts, tints, layering and superimposition: all the things that cause ‘repro’ problems, or Postscript errors that result in unprintable pages, a frequent occurrence to contend with in the early days of imaging from an Apple Macintosh computer. I take the statement from Gonz Graphics’ ad as a challenge to make my pages ever more complex. I want to be part of this cutting-edge. When errors occur I assimilate them into my page designs. The errors add to the complexity, expressing the means of making.

Fig. 24 This Page Printed. Yours Will Too.

 

 

Maybe I’m Not a Graphic Designer Anymore? >>>
In a roundtable discussion Kristina from the cohort asks if Graphic Design is my ‘home’? In a way yes it is. I have been at pains for some time to situate my thesis within Graphic Design practice. The idea has often been raised that I don’t need to frame myself in this way, or that I perhaps no longer operate within these confines, but I feel my argument is weakened when I move away from it. I have seldom if ever felt comfortable with the graphic design label, even finding myself ashamed of or diminished by it, yet this is how others see me. Now, situated in the enquiry of this thesis I find myself defending it as I finally see ways in which it is productive. With exceptions, the pursuit of graphic design is shallow and commercial: it is after all a business. Having been educated in and artistically defined by graphic design I feel comfortable criticising it. I know and understand it in my bones; it’s instinctive, just like music is for me. It gives me a place from which to speak.

Fig. 25 Maybe I’m Not a Graphic Designer Anymore?

When I began teaching it was to make ends meet. Following the 2008 economic collapse, I had a few very busy and productive years in which I significantly diversified my practice, although this happened more by chance than strategy. I co-curated the Underground exhibition (2008)+; and the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2010); commenced a series of books with Gerard (which did much to develop my practice position in relation to the book); produced film, exhibition and sculptural works with Tom; and this also included the most active period of Thread Pulls before the band’s hiatus some time in 2014.>>> With shifts in perspective regarding digital and printed matter and a decline in funding for the arts, I was by 2015 producing less fee-paying work. Make Ready was meant to be a statement of intent – the beginning of something – but it in fact turned out to be an end or summation, though the origins of each output in this thesis (a later, unanticipated beginning) are embedded within the text of Make Ready.

What follows outlines the formation of my practice position, made emphatic in the call on the ‘Author as Producer’ as demanded by Benjamin (2005); problematised by widely-held perceptions of graphic design; and framed by graphic design’s ‘dearth of criticism’ (Andrew Blauvelt, 2003: 38). This position and what it affords is then developed as an ‘author function’ (Michel Foucault), and an emic operative position which I establish as an outsider/insider relationship cast by the ‘endowed’ (Foucault, 2020: 211) authorial position within discourses, from which graphic design is substantially excluded. Within graphic design discourse, this authorial role and positionality is ill-defined (see discussion on Rock et. al. below), and different aspects of this as they meet my practice are reflected upon through The Bread and Butter Stone 20–23, Huts 46–49, N3 28/29, Relayer 70/71, and These Islands 108–111 amongst others. The argument presented through Underground is that of an emic operator – I am musician and designer, editor and curator, framing a culture of which I am a part – and this leans into a ‘by not for’ position (Duncombe, 1997: 187) which situates the DIY operator as one who brings about transformation through a bricolage approach (Cross reference 64–69 ‘Acting As’). This approach enables me to enter into other discourses (both within and without), or even to navigate around disciplines (filmmaking, for example, bringing adaptability and malleability to my practice). My insider/outsider position with regard to a discourse such as architecture is exemplified through Relayer 70/71, and subsequently These Islands 108–111/ and The Everyday Experience 112 and an authorial or endowed position is challenged through the exhibitionary space of the book in A Late Evening in the Future.

Formative Practice/ Formation of Opinion

Fig. 26 Make Ready, 7 ‘Discipline’
Graphic design is not a good description. ‘Graphic’ seems to be only about surface, and, beside it ‘design’ sounds like superficial arrangement. 

In Make Ready I tangle with the ‘Graphic Design’ label, suggesting its implications are superficial. What unifies my practice is how it is situated, its underlying methodology, and overarching concerns. Writing in 2015 I remark of my practice: ‘What I’ve noticed in all of this is a more or less consistent thinking. For this to make sense it’s important to frame what you do. Description is increasingly relevant.’ (Make Ready, 7).

I became aware of many of the developments in graphic design in the twentieth century in retrospect, or at least in haphazard ways. My early references were limited and defined by an outdated college library resource and some otherwise extremely limited availability: Emigre magazine, i-D magazine, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse and Octavo loomed large for me, in part to do with their scarcity in Ireland. As a student and then practitioner in the late 1980s and early 1990s I was simultaneously engaged in discovering the possibilities and limitations of page design on the Apple Macintosh, and in an intuitive exploration of expressive forms of graphic communication. Luckily for me, this was, in the words of Steven Heller, ‘as close to a revolutionary graphic design period as there was’.>>>^{36  36.} (Heller, 2018), ‘Octavo: Eight Historic Issues’ Print. Available at: https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/octavo-eight-historic-issues-unit-editions/ [ Accessed 22 March 2025]

In i-D I was drawn to or understood it to be the tearing apart of surface, rupturing magazine conventions by production methods, treatment, hierarchy and the structural conventions of editorial design, in parallel with the culture it reflected. What was so striking for me beyond the structure and (dis)ordering of information was the communicative energy, the experiential charge these pages carried. Paper tears, clashing fonts, masking tape, images photographed off TV screens, faxed images (Paul Elliman, i-D 89, 1991), pages packed with abutted images, and shoots art directed by Judy Blame or Jean-Baptiste Mondino (i-D 80, 1990; i-D 93, 1991) were visceral thrills. As I studied and learned, I wasn’t making work from a critical, theoretical perspective, I was making ruptures and disruptions on the page surface to convey a similar energy. In this there was certainly an element of the vicarious – I was too young (or too naive) for punk, and while I had been in bands and felt some of that energy or immediacy I had yet to find a music-making outlet that I truly culturally identified with, as an expression of how I felt and how I positioned myself in the world.>>> My draw to this visual material surely benefitted from being at a distance (it was mostly coming from London and California), and like the record-buying culture I had grown up with, where the sleeve and the music coalesced as a hybrid space to invest and invent in, the distance increased the sense of mystery, and sharpened my observation so that the material I could find, I knew intimately. My visual work gave me my opportunity to express this energy and investment on the page. 

Piecing Together a Subjective Image of the Field of Graphic Design

Steven Heller in his 1996 essay, ‘The Man Who Invented Graphic Design’ notes that W.A. Dwiggins was the first to actively describe his work as ‘graphic design’.^{37 37.} Heller, S. (1996) ‘The Man who Invented Graphic Design’, Eye issue 23, London: Eye Magazine Limited. The term was used earlier by Frederick H. Meyer in an advertisement of 1917 for a course of study in ‘Graphic Design and Lettering’ at California School of Arts and Crafts, accompanied by a note: ‘Graphic Design deals with the principles of lettering and commercial work and the various processes of reproducing the drawings.’ Paul Shaw, in his essay, ‘The Definitive Dwiggins no. 81 – Who Coined the Term “Graphic Design”?’ attributes the term to Meyer, although the scope of Dwiggins’ work seems more reflective and even pre-emptive of the practice of Graphic Design, and brings the issue of description to the fore:^{38 38.} Available at: https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2018/01/the-definitive-dwiggins-no-81-who-coined-the-term-graphic-design/  [Accessed 21 March 2025] Dwiggins worked ‘as typographer, type designer, calligrapher, ornament designer, illustrator, advertising designer, book-jacket and book designer… he also designed magazine formats and covers, commercial catalogues and a wealth of printed ephemera’… he was a ‘mural painter, marionette maker and puppeteer, set designer and interior designer.’ (Heller, 1996: 26). Shaw notes though that from 1922–34 Dwiggins listed himself in the Boston city directory as an artist.^{39 39.} Shaw, P. (2020) Available at: ‘The Definitive Dwiggins no. 81A—W.A. Dwiggins and “Graphic Design”: A Brief Rejoinder to Steven Heller and Bruce Kennett’ [Accessed 21 March 2025] That the origins of the term are contested seems fitting. In the arts it’s a relatively new term, and one that has consistently resisted easy categorisation. We see many variations of the term in undergraduate programme offerings as educational institutions struggle to encompass or carve up its scope and evolution. Blauvelt (2013) characterises the graphic design discipline at the beginning of the 21st century as a ‘fur-ball’ encompassing many practices.^{40 40.} Available at:https://walkerart.org/magazine/the-center-for-sensibility-towards-critical-graphic-design-practice [Accessed 21 March 2025] Johanna Drucker (2014: 34) writes of graphic design’s ‘murky origins’ in the terrain of draughtsman and the printing industry, a lineage of craft and trade. In the early twentieth century, writings by Jan Tschichold, Frederic Goudy, Bruce Rogers, and Stanley Morison emerged, and their writing Drucker notes, while varying greatly, began to articulate emergent methods beyond decorative or aesthetic preference.

The International Style, or Swiss Style is characterised by clarity of typography, composition, and colour and has had enduring bearing on the language of graphic design. First though, I encountered work produced under its influence, notably that of London-based practice 8vo. I discovered Octavo magazine while studying at St. Martins, and this is indicative of a pre-internet world where so much material was inaccessible, and particular to the condition of living in Ireland. At the edge of Europe so much of my youthful sub-cultural encounters were at a remove. 8vo’s work was technically demanding – they ‘assumed that if something was technically conceivable then it was pragmatically possible’ (Julia Thrift, 2000).^{41 41.} Available at: https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/8vo-type-and-structure [Accessed 21 March 2025] Although their magazine Octavo (1986–1992) covered influential Swiss designers, it was the form, precision, and production values of the magazine itself, and the material realisation of the values it espoused, that held a fascination for me. I was (I suspect like many designers just then) most unlikely to read the full text. Although Swiss rationalism is substantially subverted in Emigre magazine, I only became aware retrospectively of this underpinning. Of this school, Josef Müller-Brockmann has been widely influential, but once again it was much later that I encountered his writing. Characteristic of this approach, Müller-Brockmann:

sought an absolute and universal form of graphic expression through objective and impersonal presentation, communicating to the audience without the interference of the designer’s subjective feelings or propagandistic techniques of persuasion. 
(Meggs and Purvis, 2012: 381).

Oblivious to this, his work had no direct impact on my learning or work, only that it set some of the scene into which I was operating as a graphic designer. His belief was that a systematic approach to graphic design could reveal a ‘truth’, suggesting as Rock (1996) notes that the designer ‘submits to the will of the system, forgoes personality, withholds interpretation.’^{42 42}. Rock, M. (1996) ‘The Designer as Author’. Eye 20. London: Eye Magazine Limited. Available at: http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-designer-as-author [Accessed 22 March 2025] While the Swiss Style provides a powerful model for organising material, many of its embedded views represent the antithesis of my practice perspective. 

In the famed ‘Debate’ in 1972 between Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn, Crouwel states that ‘graphic design consists of a process of ordering for the benefit of the clarity and transparency of information.’^{43 43.} Available at: https://designobserver.com/the-debate/ and https://designobserver.com/feature/the-debate-part-2/38884 [Accessed 21 March 2025] Crouwel contends that museum publications (he worked with Stedelijk Museum during the same period that Van Toorn worked with the Van Abbe Museum) should locate the museum and their curatorial policy, while reproductions of the artwork present the artist, for whom Crouwel claims ‘I have nothing to add to his story’.>>> van Toorn by contrast regards the attitudes of the Swiss Style as a ‘patriarchal fixation on reproductive ordering’, stating that ‘Symbolic productions represent the social position and mentality of the elites that create and disseminate them’ (van Toorn, 2009: 103). More recently, writers such as Darin Buzon (2020) have claimed that the assumed neutrality of the International Typographic Style or Swiss Style, in which Crouwel’s argument has its origins, emerges from Western imperialism and indeed white supremacy.^{44 44.} Available at: https://dabuzon.medium.com/design-thinking-is-a-rebrand-for-white-supremacy-b3d31aa55831 [Accessed 21 March 2025] van Toorn’s writing in 1994 about his practice is the nearest I have found to a perspective with which mine aligns. He offers that we must ‘break through the existing communicative order’ (van Toorn, 2009: 104). There is surely an echo here of Benjamin’s call for the producer to be ‘instrumental in challenging the structures, not appeasing them through production to be consumed’ (Benjamin, 2005: 777) and equally ‘to reflect on his/her position in the process of production.’ (ibid.: 779). From this I could say that my field of enquiry is the communicative order and instrumentalisation of ideas and material/mediums in diverse artistic and cultural contexts, framed by my practice formation in graphic design. Rather than being confined to discipline specifics: ‘Graphic design as a project of legibility of the world little by little extends to all aspects of the environment.’ (Abraham Moles cited in FitzGerald, 2010: 191; emphasis in original)

Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, published in 1990 and collating work produced at the college of art through the 1980s was the next publication to have significant influence on me (and on design practice internationally). Again, I was viewing this only from a distance, through the fictionalised account provided by the book. Cranbrook graphic design of the early 70s was ‘based on a rational, systematic approach to visual-communications problem solving and a minimalist vocabulary of forms heavily influenced by Swiss Modernist graphic design’ (McCoy, 1990: 15), and through to the early 1980s these limitations were comprehensively brought into question at Cranbrook. Despite this new work centring around post-structuralist French literary theory and postmodern art criticism – an approach emphasising ‘the construction of meaning between the audience and the graphic design piece, a visual translation that parallels verbal communication’ (McCoy, 1990: 15) – the impact of the book and its widespread exposure in Europe was ironically to contribute to the adoption of this approach merely as a formalistic style, and this was quickly met and subsumed by the technological developments of the 1990s and the possibilities of the Apple Macintosh. Through the capabilities suggested by software (and its often unintended uses and results), the idea of ‘deconstruction’ was taken literally, where designers often disassembled, reassembled and layered elements of text and image in a formal exploration of the material. 8vo referred to these as ‘the stupid tricks of instant gratification that early encounters with the software tempted you to try’.^{45 45.} Heller, S. (2018), ‘Octavo: Eight Historic Issues’, Print. Available at: https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/octavo-eight-historic-issues-unit-editions/ [ Accessed 22 March 2025] Some of this visually thrilling work is reproduced in the book Typography Now: The Next Wave (1991), and there are many profound examples amongst them.>>> Rock (ibid.) was dismissive of this work in which he felt designers ‘illustrated Barthes’ image of a reader-based text – “a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture” – by scattering fragments of quotations across the surface of their “authored” posters and book covers’.^{46 46.} Rock, M. (1996) ‘The Designer as Author’. Eye 20. London: Eye Magazine Limited. Available at: http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-designer-as-author [Accessed 21 March 2025]; emphasis in original.

Later, Dutch designer Joost Grootens in a 2010 interview stated: ‘I hate layering. You’re fooling yourself if you do it. Superimposing graphic information on to something else is based on the misconception that visual complexity can visualise a plurality of meaning’.^{46 46.} Walters, J. (2010) ‘Joost Grootens: Paper planet’, Eye 78, 70. London: Eye Magazine Limited. For me there is a much more profound, immersive, reciprocal process of discovery, expression and understanding facilitated by both digital and analogue technologies.>>> Layering in particular still holds the same thrill for me, and it performs the simple task of allowing me to fit more images on a page while affording more complex artificial (page-bound) spaces built from multiple viewpoints, and the design of A Late Evening in the Future ^{[project descriptor]} A Late Evening in the Future: Signal Spectre System was published in 2018 by Verlag für moderne Kunst, and relates to a series of three exhibitions by Gerard Byrne, at Frac des Pays de la Loire; Carquefou, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. The book was published in German/English and French/English editions and is distributed internationally by Verlag für moderne Kunst. I designed and supervised production of the book, and it was edited by me with Gerard Byrne and Sven Anderson. This large-format (‘coffee table’-sized) book in hardcover and dust-jacket has extensive colour reproductions and high production values, and contains written texts by five authors. is based around this productivity.

In Rock’s ‘notorious’ essay ‘The Designer as Author’ (1996), he takes apart contemporary claims of graphic authorship, amongst those that ‘the amplification of the personal voice legitimises design as equal to more traditional privileged forms of authorship,’ stressing that ‘the primary concern of both the viewer and the critic is not who made it, but rather what it does and how it does it.’^{47 47.} Rock, M. (1996) ‘The Designer as Author’ Eye 20. London: Eye Magazine Limited. Available at: https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-designer-as-author [Accessed 28 March 2025]. Rubin Pater observes the added market value of ‘a clearly authored visual language’ but that designers produce monographs ‘lacking any serious criticism or self-reflection’ (Pater, 2021: 300). It is evident that this type of ‘authorship’ has a commercial foothold – ‘a condition of economic success’ (ibid.), but this authorship seems to me to be about differentiation in a competitive market, and while we all must compete, it is far removed from the authorial space that I am contesting as central to my thesis.^{48 48.} Pater, R. (2021) CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It. Amsterdam: Valiz. Rock’s follow up essay ‘Fuck Content’ (2009, 2013) sought to clarify misreading, advocating for treatment ‘as a kind of text itself’ suggesting that what designers ‘must master are not the content narratives but the devices of the telling’.^{49 49.} Rock, M (2009, 2013) ‘Fuck Content’, Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users. New York: Rizzoli International. Available at: https://2x4.org/ideas/2009/fuck-content/ [Accessed 21 March 2025] I came to Rock’s articles late (as usual). At the time of the first essay’s publication I was not troubled by terms of authorship, but more simply by trying to create unique and innovative work through an exploration of content, and graphic design let me in on discourses of interest to me. His later clarification seems curious to me. Surely the treatment is a text too, but one that has a mutual constituency with the ‘narrative’ it carries. How can I be concerned by one and not the other? FitzGerald was critical of Rock’s initial essay in that it never strays far from traditional conceptions of design activity, suggesting instead that ‘as design is inextricably linked to other cultural productions, it’s meaningful to look to other disciplines for insight on how those cultural products come about and are perceived.’ FitzGerald, (1997: 21–22) proposes music as a model through which to perceive design’s cultural role, and my parallel engagement with graphic design and independent music, anchored in the reciprocal knowledge bases or ‘operational fields’ of these two fields is reflective of this framing.

Emigre magazine has had the most significant effect on my practice, and again its scarcity contributed to its pull. The independent publishing model they invented allowed constant transformation and its quarterly publication was a literal performance of its arguments. On its oversized pages almost every rule was upturned, and each issue was a testbed for what was being realised through the capabilities of the Apple Mac. In Rock’s survey of graphic design authorship he says of Emigré:

Rudy VanderLans is perhaps the purest of the entrepreneurial authors, since in Emigre all three activities blend into a continuous whole. In Emigre the content is deeply embedded in the form – that is, the formal exploration is as much the content of the magazine as the writing. VanderLans expresses his message through the selection of the material (as an editor), the content of the writing (as a writer) and the form of the pages and typography (as a form-giver).
(Rock, 1996)

What gave Emigre its persuasive power for me was that its pages were a visual articulation of what was being written about. Leafing through back issues it is striking how every issue is radically different, some of it ugly, some beautiful, some successful and some failing, yet there is a coherence to this project that leaves a deep impression on me. Graphic design can in a wholly integrated way amplify and develop a discourse, through a dialogical relationship between form and words and images. 

Insider/Outsider

Designer and writer James Goggin claims that graphic design has always occupied a unique position between reading, writing, editing, and distribution, and as a discipline is nuanced and expansive enough in its everyday activities and processes to make renaming unnecessary. (2012: 55)^{50 50.} ‘Attempts at new definitions often betray an assumption that “graphic design” itself is too limited, merely the term means the simple service-oriented industry that many still see it as. Insteand I would argue that graphic design has always occupied a unique position between reading, writing, editing, and distribution and as a discipline nuanced and expansive enough in it’s everyday activities and processes to make renaming unnecessary. Rather than seeing “graphic design” as too narrow for the multidisciplinarity of contemporary practice, designers, design critics, and historians might instead widen their own perceptions of what exactly the term can logically encompass.’ (Goggin, 2012: 55). While I agree there is little point in changing the name, in practice I find that few see beyond the ‘graphic design’ tag as other than decoration and preoccupation with aesthetic choices. I have often found my role to be undervalued or considered effectively ‘invisible’ but have learned to either accept this and work within its tolerances or to productively work against this constraint.^{51 51.} ‘The title of ‘designer’ is not specifically defined, but negatively defined. The title of designer exists by way of what it excludes. Designers have an enormous vocabulary at their disposal, all to describe what they are not, what they do not do and what they cannot do… Add to this, the long-term obsession with invisibility and absence.’ (Paul Bailey, 2018: 19). For Blauvelt (2013) graphic design’s role in exhibitions seems ‘fugitive… everything but the main event itself.’^{52 52.} The 2013 D-Crit Conference: A. ‘Graphic Design: Discipline, Medium, Practice, Tool, or Other?’ Available at: https://vimeo.com/showcase/2359892/video/66385792 [Accessed 28 March 2025] So at the heart of this is a dichotomy – the space of much of my work is only made available through describing my input as graphic design, and through which I can expand an operational site and exhibitionary space, yet this description is inherently not ‘endowed’ with the status of authorship (Foucault 2020: 211), and thus may undermine or diminish my role.>>> If it is though ‘on design’s terms that most visual production is interpreted by the public’ (FitzGerald, 2010: 165), then I have authorial implication in everything I produce. FitzGerald’s contention that graphic design is an outsider production, one that ‘art firmly holds to be nonart and bans from its marketplace’ rings true to my experience, but this outsider status has also been the lever opening up relationships and productions – spaces that would be otherwise unavailable (ibid.). Curiously I find myself to be both outsider (as graphic design practitioner, and as spectator/observer) and insider (within a culture, and operating within various cultural discourses, appropriating and reframing material for further discourse), and I return to both of these conditions within the thesis. This emerging breadth of my operative is mirrored in this observation by Fiske:

Like all categorisations, our division of the constructors of subjectivity into the social, the linguistic, and the psychological is useful for analysis only: in practice the categorisations leak into each other, so that language and society are remarkably hard to separate out.
(Fiske, 2011: 52)

In FitzGerald we read that graphic design is ‘the dominant visual medium of our culture’ (1997: 23) yet graphic designers largely assume only a supporting role to industry and commerce.^{53 53.} ‘Design is the dominant visual medium of our culture. It is on design’s terms that most visual production is interpreted by the public. Designers, therefore, should recognise a unique opportunity to define their own terms.’ (FitzGerald, 1997: 23) Education often desires to feed industry and terms such as ‘the creative industries’. the ‘creative economy’, and the ‘creative class’, have become synonymous with economic growth’ (Pater, 2021: 354). We now see graphic design co-opted into Neo-Liberal notions of ‘Creativity’, where ‘the stabilisation of conflicting, politically charged and contesting processes into a coherent and unproblematic norm characterises contemporary articulations of creativity (Oli Mould, 2020: 60). I teach that with the acquisition of powerful tools of communication the graphic designer must look to and question their role in this. 

The Author Function, False Alibies, Mutual Constituencies, Opportunity, and the Insider-Outsider.+

 

No Thanks.^{54 54.} ‘Authors, Editor and Contributors: Edited by Pablo LaFuente. Texts by Enrique Juncosa, Sven Lütticken, Tom McDonagh, Maeve Connolly, Jeremy Miller, Bettina Funcke, Volker Pantenburg, Maria Muhle and Ian White’. Available at: https://www.theimmashop.com/en-gb/products/gerard-byrne-images-or-shadows [Accessed 19 May 2024]>>> Even as I write this thesis I am designing a book for a museum with whom I have worked for many years. I receive a draft of the Director’s Foreword in which I’m thanked for my insightful book design. On receiving the final copy-edited text my thanks is gone, while all other acknowledgements down to museum technical staff remain in place. I’m at this long enough not to care, but it does serve to (once again) illustrate the persistent perception that graphic design is transparent; that it simply delivers the ideas of others.

Fig. 27 No Thanks

For Foucault, the ‘author function’ is ‘characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.’ (2010: 211). This issue as it surrounds graphic design is highlighted in this ‘No Thanks’ vignette above. Of the four characteristics Foucault assigns the author function, he first notes that although all discourses are objects of appropriation (ibid.), literary discourse requires validation through the assignation of author: we must know who wrote the text, where, and when, and in what circumstances (ibid.: 213), and through this and our reading of the text (shaped by our own political intertextuality perhaps), we construct or project a ‘being of reason’. Deprived as a discourse, graphic design’s communicative capacity generally goes unnoticed.^{55 55.} ‘Even the design by Peter Maybury, I began to appreciate as both simple and functional – as an object directed towards reading and viewing purposes.’ Ingrid Lyons reviews Everything is Somewhere Else. Available at: https://visualartistsireland.com/book-review-everything-is-somewhere-else. [Accessed 28 March 2025]. There are of course exceptions – graphic designers who attain celebrity or cult of personality which precedes reception of their work – ‘beings of reason’ for whom critics discern “‘deep” motive’, and ‘“creative” power’ (ibid.).^{56 56.} ‘The world that their company, Sagmeister & Walsh, occupies is one entirely of their own making. They are showmen in a world they have placed themselves firmly at the centre of, through the strength of their convictions and considerable design talent. There follows a cult of personality that divides opinion but never fails to get a reaction. The duo trade in sensation and together have built a business and following that has evolved in tandem with the accelerated pace with which design is produced and consumed.’ Available at: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/stefan-sagmeister-jessica-walsh-graphic-design-040618 [Accessed 21 March 2025]. 

Pablo Lafuente’s Foreword to Images or Shadows ^{[project descriptor]} Images or Shadows (2011) was published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art to accompany Byrne’s survey show Gerard Byrne: Through the Eyes. Images or Shadows is stylistically modelled on an educational textbook such as those by Folens publishers. Throughout, the book interweaves material from the making or staging of artworks by Byrne, their staging for installation and exhibition, and the making or staging of the book. The nine essays, many of which refer to the same works by Byrne, are exploited as a framing device through which to present multiple pictorial representations of the works. All image typologies are given equal emphasis, and artwork images, film stills, production stills, archival and reference images, staged images, and installation views are arranged in various combinations throughout the book to prompt multiple readings and associations.  is useful in drawing this out further. It is written self-reflexively, and he draws our attention both in its title – ‘Texts, Paratexts, Hypertexts’ – and in the text itself to its function as paratext, alongside the colophon, title, afterword, or acknowledgements, in providing framing and contributing to the institutional requirements of the museum; this in turn draws our attention to the transtextual nature of Byrne’s work (2011: 3). Lafuente sees that through the book the works, the texts and the images might offer a ‘transtextual range of articulations that show not only how a work can explicitly refer to another, but how it can also elaborate, expand, modify or transform the grounds where it stands.’ (ibid.). Using this Foreword then I can problematise my authorial role in the book. While acknowledging many layered possibilities of the book – the text from which Byrne’s works originate; the works themselves; the texts which frame and recontextualise them – the Foreword does not reference the design of the book – the ‘book art’ through which all of these elements are carried and reshaped. This unseen work – a further transtextual and authorial formation or weave – sits outside of this editorial framing of the book, emerging as it did through my exchanges with Gerard and our mutually constitutive interests.

‘The space of a tactic is the space of the other.’  
(de Certeau, 1988: 37)

I Work in the Space of the ‘Other’.

As graphic-designer-outsider I am visible only in the make-ready. I insert myself into the discourse, the iterative process, the production, before disappearing into paratext or colophon. I become (para)textual. If my name is not on the cover and (sometimes even if it is) my presence goes unnoticed, as my work as ‘outsider producer’ (FitzGerald) does not sit within any convenient disciplinary framing.^{57 57.} Architect and writer Emmett Scanlon in his presentation at a day-long event in VISUAL, a subsidiary event to Tom’s i See Earth exhibition (2022) describes Gall, my work with Tom thus:  ‘His long-term partnership with Peter Maybury is as productive and influential as any other pairing you could point to in recent Irish architecture. It just takes a little more effort to describe.’ This was subsequently made available as a podcast, available at: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/whatbuildingsdo/episodes/BONUS-Review-I-see-earth--an-exhibition-by-Tom-dePaor-e1inbjd/a-a7uvbuh [Accessed 21 March 2025]. An extract from this is also found on Scanlon’s website available at: https://www.emmettscanlon.ie/diary/iseeearthreview [Accessed 21 March 2025].’ Not art, not film, not architecture, yet within familiar paradigms of these fields, my role is problematic, and frequently overlooked.>>> Mine is an interstitial practice enabled through the facility of my role as graphic designer. This practice (enquiry) would be otherwise unavailable, as it requires a blending of inputs, the composition and constituency of which varies from one output to the next, but invariably involves others either as participants or facilitators.

But there exists an actual outsider production that art firmly holds to be nonart and bans from its marketplace: graphic design. What eventually attracted me to [this] was what professionals in the field lamented: it [is] culturally marginalised, difficult to define, and wide open to intruders.
(FitzGerald, 2010: 165–6)

A series of museum and gallery-published books made with artist Gerard Byrne (2010–18): A Late Evening in the Future: Signal Spectre System (2018); Gestalt Forms of Loch Ness, Grid, Site, Sequence (2012); Images or Shadows (2011); and Tuxedo Junction, 1960 (2010). 

This output presents my ongoing work with lens/exhibition-based artist Gerard Byrne, focussing on four gallery-published books that I produced between 2010–18. In recognising the limitations of documentary material, these books are outcomes in my longitudinal enquiry into the potential of the book as exhibitionary site. My role in these publications is within the functions of book designer and editor. Through a discursive, iterative process each publication develops and resolves a unique approach in response to specific variables, while cumulatively forming an interrelated body of work. The four titles which comprise this output are used as exemplars of various propositions within my thesis. I make use of these with regard to collaboration (which I am characterising as a process of mutual constituency); the exhibitionary space of the book; and various transtextual modalities.

 

 

With each of the Gerard Byrne books the diagram is one of artist, editor, curator, and graphic designer, framed by the institution(s), with Byrne as the locus and catalyst for this activity. As part of the programme of dissemination around an exhibition, a book is often required. Its promotional efficacy is uncertain, but its reach over time can be significant, and its existence conveys status for subject and institution, as well as providing an enduring record of the gallery or museum’s programme. While there is clear curatorial intent behind an exhibition, the need for a book is often only understood as an adjunct to this, and an editorial function (although occasionally outsourced) is often not considered as distinct from the curation, nor as a specialised task; and there is often no clear expectation for a book to accompany an exhibition. In the absence of an editor, the curator acts. Writers are assembled to substantiate various aspects of the artist’s work, and these are accompanied by reproductions and installation views. The gallery is understood as the curated space (itself a modality of publication), but the book is not recognised as exhibitionary space.+

The relationship between curator/editor and artist is seen as central, and the graphic designer is recruited to facilitate production, often kept at a distance, and ultimately seen as someone to bring together other peoples’ ideas. Yet it is within these confines that I have managed to operate productively establishing other dynamics. This is the opportunity of the quasi-invisible space of the graphic designer.^{58 58.} ‘Rather than aspiring to a perceived higher level of “authorship” in the cultural hierarchy (be it art, literature, architecture), we can instead take advantage of the discipline’s invisibility, its spectral qualities… enabling us to infiltrate and use the systems of other disciplines when desired and where relevant.’ Goggin, J. (2012) ‘2009: Practice from Everyday Life: Defining Graphic Design’s Expansive Scope by Its Quotidian Activities’, Graphic Design: Now in Production. Blauvelt, A. and Lupton, E. (eds.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center.  Kostelanetz (1985: 28) refers to presenting an artist’s work in book form  as ‘honorific’; effectively, a retrospective collection of reproductions, while there is also available what he terms ‘book art’: ‘books that are works of art, as well as books.’ He makes the space here for book art as a typology distinct from ‘artists’ books’, which he sees as a ‘false term’ describing the author rather than the enquiry. ‘The art at hand is books, no matter who did them’ he goes on to argue (ibid.). My conception of the ‘exhibitionary space’ of the book seems to have commonalities with this position. The books I make with Gerard eschew the honorific, instead configuring an enquiry using the language of books (structure, arrangement, juxtaposition, pacing, materiality), to amplify this through the operation by and encounter of the reader. The art at hand is books, used to create a new exhibitionary space in which a discourse is expanded, and with this I develop my own practice enquiry in dialogue with Gerard. Works which have been achieved in the gallery space are reconsidered within the affordances of the book paradigm, and in dialogue with their original form: often a spatiotemporal blend of sound, screen and projected image, objects and the movement and engagement through this of the visitor-viewer; or the restaging and enactment of cultural and art-historical accounts derived from previously published texts. Since this book space is rarely recognised and the task of making it little understood, I can operate here quite freely. Space opens up for me to work directly with Gerard while the curator or institution is happy to let the process evolve.

Fig. 29 Make Ready, 7
Graphic Design is a joint venture.

Outlining a Mutual Constituency

Collaboration as a term has always seemed to me to be troubled by compromise, and I prefer to describe my practice position as one of ‘mutual constituency’. This describes a relationship with others with whom I work, and equally a dialogue between the ideas being conveyed, a technicity or human relationship between ideas and technological processes, and the bricolage of their construction. >>> Where I take on the nominal role of ‘graphic designer’, this title description is often the key to enabling a space in which to operate. I enjoy the many terms I have gathered in my research to describe the perceived presence (or absence) of the graphic designer, and to add to this I borrow the idea of ‘quasi-invisibility’, a turn of phrase from de Certeau referring to the production of the ‘consumer’, who, rather than reacting as mere receiver makes use of what is imposed upon her/him in a response to given conditions.^{59 59.} (de Certeau, 1988: 31) The ‘spectral qualities’ (Goggin) and the ‘fugitive’ (Blauvelt, 2013) nature of graphic design allow me to ‘operate as a paradoxically ubiquitous yet overlooked system’ (Goggin, 2012: 55) making available a mutually constitutive enquiry with others through, for example the exhibitionary space of the book, in situations where the commissioner (unknowingly or willingly) often leaves this space open and available for appropriation. While I also appropriate by taking/ montaging existing and ‘found’ texts, I refer to ‘appropriation’ here in the sense that the book (the exhibition publication) has its own established language or conventions which can be ruptured through the methods of my bricolage. In this space the ‘transposition’ (Genette) of work can be performed, and through this space the transformation by the viewer-reader of ‘work’ to text (Barthes). As Barthes writes: ‘What [the reader] perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogenous variety of substances and perspectives.’ 
(Barthes, 1978: 159)

Exploring Authorship and Relationships of Mutual Constituency

 

A Late Evening in March
A late evening in March, I join Sven and Gerard in a studio in Temple Bar to review the design of the book. It’s at a relatively advanced stage in its development, and final texts and selection of images are in place (I am on my 14th iteration but our last book took 22!).>>> Gerard has printed out the spreads at actual size and we arrange them in sequence on the floor. Since the pages are large (600 x 290 mm when open) it takes up the width of the studio and more than half its depth. We move amongst the lanes of spreads, shuffling them around, trying things out, and we eventually settle on a new sequence. The book is technically complex and this rejig brings with it lots of headaches I’ll have to sort out tomorrow. Normally I’d hate this kind of ‘interference’ at such a late stage in the process, but with Gerard this has always been our mode of operating – everything remains a conversation: until the last minute everything gets interrogated.

Fig. 30 A Late Evening in March. Sven and I consider page permutations while Gerard looks on through the lens of his camera. (Photograph: Byrne, G.)

Gerard and I were initially brought together through circumstance – he was the exhibiting artist and I was the preferred designer for the gallery (Lismore Castle Arts). Gerard was reticened to have me also work on the The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) book (Images or Shadows), which was about to start production, for fear that there would be a doubling-up in approach, but the potential of our mutual constituency was quickly apparent, extending the scope of both our practice enquiries through the exhibitionary space of the book.

Of the publications I made with Gerard, A Late Evening in the Future has the least institutional (paratextual) siting. Aside from the publishers name on the half-title page and a logo on the spine, the reader waits until page 78 of 80 to read a brief ‘Afterword’ representing the three institutions who have commissioned and funded the book. Gerard’s name is on the front cover, with the three editors (Anderson, Byrne, Maybury) credited on the spine and half-title page. When I reflect on this now, encountering the book at a remove from its making, these choices, made lightly at the time, seem more significant. Books circulate without the framing and mediation of text panels, gallery talks, guided tours, or supporting video material that a gallery or museum setting would provide. While you may pick up a copy in the gallery bookstore it is often encountered without this contextualisation and the reader is faced with a hermetic entity into which they must read themselves. With A Late Evening in the Future, the framing conventions of book and institution are being undone. From my unacknowledged editorial input in Tuxedo Junction, 1960,^{[projector descriptor]} Tuxedo Junction, 1960 was published retrospectively in relation to the solo show ‘Gerard Byrne’ (2010) at Lismore Castle. Comprising new and existing video and photographic works, including the first exhibition of A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not, a work with the Minimalists and their critics as its central focus, and in which several key events or accounts of Minimalist art history are reenacted. The book comprises installation views; reference material and documentation including archival exhibition views of Minimalist works; photographs of practitioners; typographic treatments of seminal Minimalist artwork titles; restaged photographs of photographs from in the exhibition; and a facsimile reproduction of Alexander Potts essay ‘The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image’. A newly commissioned essay and an interview between the artist and the exhibition curator are presented as photographic depictions of typewritten documents. The dustjacket presents in miniature a facsimile of the Michael Fried essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, first published in Artforum. (‘Assembled and edited by Gerard Byrne upon the achievements of the Minimalists and their critics’), and the undifferentiated ‘Design’ credit for my role in Images or Shadows, the books begin incorporating credits as part of a fictionalised narrative construct across the series. Where roles or titles are routinely assigned to contributors, this becomes part of the book’s premise: the title page of Gestalt Forms of Loch Ness, specifies Gerard Byrne who produces a ‘Field Survey’; writer Brian Dillon as contributor of an ‘Analysis’, and I am credited with ‘Information Design’. Rather than being paratextual, these credits, shift from a ‘more distant relationship that binds the text properly speaking’ (Genette, 1997: 3) to become textual as fictionalised accounts of our roles. One-line biographies of the contributors are provided on the inside of the dust jacket: ‘Gerard Byrne is an artist, and teacher’; ‘Peter Maybury designs books’. (Fig. 31)>>> In their terse humour, the use of this space normally reserved for ‘authors’ effectively acknowledges and challenges the ‘Author Function’, making explicit the book as an amalgamation of contributing roles. 

As evident throughout the ‘Loch Ness’ book, humour plays an important role in the absurdity of any serious pursuit of a fictitious creature, used here as backdrop to interrogate the integrity and evidentiary nature of the photographic image. This framing explicitly designates the book as a productive site in which research material – ‘information’ – is gathered for consideration. This is quite distinct from a typical gallery publication or artist’s monograph, which might frame the book as a collection of critical texts and reproductions of work by an artist. Drawing on material gathered and exhibited from a 15 year enquiry, the book was published to coincide with exhibitions in the UK and Italy, but its contents draws heavily on material not included in the exhibitions. This material can be thought about within Genette’s transtextual framing as ‘foretext’; work that came into being as part of the process, which may have been known to others – friends, other artists, gallerists, etc. but prior to this was not considered or intended for publication. The book space brings this material into circulation expanding the discursivity of the work in unique ways.

A Late Evening in the Future concludes the conceit of identifying roles, with Gerard, Sven Anderson, and I given billing as editors (I am additionally credited as graphic designer). This is generous on Gerard’s part, but also a concretisation of the endeavours of the books made with him to derive something foremostly from a practice perspective, rather than anchored in or solely substantiated by (external) critical perspectives on his practice as would be more typical of art publications. The book is text-heavy, with five contributing writers in English/French and English/German bilingual editions.>>>

Notably one text is by Sven – generous again from Gerard, but also a further move to destabilise both notions of authorship within practice and perspectives on critical writing. Entitled ‘Notes on Signals, Spectres, and Systems’, Sven, who works independently as an artist and researcher, reflects on the experience of his embedded presence in making exhibitions with Gerard. Gerard’s exhibited work comes about through working with Sven, and in book form through me, and yet within these pairings each of us is able to operate from our practice perspective, contributing to a whole, signed by Byrne. In one sense then, it makes more explicit Byrne’s textual presence – as an artist who produces work through working with others  – a conceptual presence distinct from that of his persona as originator of an artwork, and this aspect is further decentred through our co-editing of A Late Evening in the Future.>>>

If the Author’s Presence is that of ‘Guest’ (Barthes), and the Graphic Designer’s that of ‘Intruder’

In making these books the typical exchange/relationship of client/designer is subverted because 1) the ‘client/commissioner’ is not participant in the ‘artistic’ exchanges of the book-making process 2) the exchange is directly between artist and designer 3) the artist, rather than the designer liaises with the editor/publisher/institution on matters of permission 4) there may be a nominal ‘editor’ but this role is confined to commissioning and editing written contributions, while arrangement and presentation and its implicate authorial concerns of transtextual modalities are seen as outside of this 5) the artist and the designer are exploring the exhibitionary possibilities of the book as site of transposition, and 6) the editor/ institution may be unaware of the intentions and potential of the book, namely, the book as exhibitionary space.

With the ‘author function’ certain discourses are ‘endowed’, while others are ‘deprived’ (Foucault, 2020: 211). These two words are evocative as they convey privilege and exclusion, an insider and an outsider, which defines the space and nature of my activity. This outsider-insider status is one of many dualities in my field of operation. The author’s name provides ‘narrative discourse’ as well as classification (ibid.: 210). This is evident for example in the Byrne books, where Gerard’s name on the cover frames and contextualises the enquiry, but also ultimately presents a fictional Byrne, as artist within an already existing context and framework.>>> Barthes might refer to him as ‘paper author’, inscribed in his work (text) but appearing as a constituent character, or ‘guest’ (1977: 161). Muhle (2011: 176) indeed observes this of Byrne’s reenactments – that they are ‘a constructed or artificial reality, a discursive constellation that is composed of a network of texts, performances, events, discussions, interviews – it is, to quote Tony Smith’s words, an “artificial landscape”’. Presenting Gerard’s practice in Images or Shadows is to present an ‘artificial landscape’ – a network of artworks, exhibitions, institutions, writers, texts, foretexts, where the books are not addendum or cataloguing of works in existence. Instead, they are an exploration of the concerns of Byrne’s practice instrumentalised by and meeting with my practice enquiry. It is Gerard and his works that are obviously understood to be under discussion, yet there is a parallel authorship which brings the publication into being, even if this authorship of this goes unseen. The assumption appears to be that the role of the graphic designer is confined to one that ‘submits a single verbal message to a series of formal arrangements’ (Ellen Lupton, 1991: 45), and logically, then, the task would be to formally arrange a number of written texts (nine in this case), alongside an appropriate selection of representative images. We know from Barthes, however, ‘that a text is not a line of words releasing a single meaning... but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (Barthes, 1978: 146).

 

Fig. 32 Make Ready, 9
Amplifying the presence of the medium can trigger the senses, prompting the reader to draw on a composite of memories and experience.

Misuse (Origins)
October 1990. I am sitting at a Macintosh computer in the bench-lined Mac Room of Dun Laoghaire School of Art & Design. The monitors (screens) are small and low resolution – 640 x 480 pixels and even 512 x 342 pixels, barely conceivable by today’s standards – and only capable of displaying black or white. Type appears on screen as a pixellated approximation of how it might print. File size too is an obstacle – the only storage we have are 800k and 1.4Mb floppy disks, so if a single file exceeds this you can’t save it! Kevin, the instructor, is teaching a class, but I’m not interested – I am fixed on finding out what I need to know in my own way. I am in thrall to Emigre magazine. Published in California by Dutch and Czech emigrés, it’s not available in Ireland, and in these pre-internet days I’ve only ever set eyes on two or three issues. Emigre is perhaps the first magazine produced entirely with the Mac, and with its oversized monotone pages and thrilling layouts filled with exotic-seeming letterforms the self-proclaimed ‘magazine that ignores boundaries’ seems to me the epicentre of graphic design, precisely where I hunger to be. As a strategy to mitigate for the appearance of type on these lo-res monitors, Emigre Fonts develop a range of bitmap typefaces that appear in print as they do on screen – as lo-resolution bitmap letterforms.^{60 60.} Initially these were sold individually as Emigre, Emperor, Oakland and Universal families, but are now synthesised into the ‘Lo-Res’ family which replaces these preexisting typefaces: Available at: https://www.emigre.com/Fonts/Lo-Res [ Accessed 21 March 2025] I am immediately drawn to this brilliant inversion of the original problem, and I love the way it looks, but the cost of these fonts for a student is prohibitive. Instead, I look for workarounds, putting the problems of screen resolution and file storage together. I notice that letterforms render differently at different magnifications in different applications, producing idiosyncratic, bitmapped letterforms, and with the screenshot function I can capture how this appears on screen and convert type into bitmap images. I can then cut this up, enlarge it, and combine it with other fragments to make complex multi-part compositions. Working this way is efficient for storage and gives me a visual language, clearly inspired by Emigre but, built on technical constraints, it quickly becomes the locus for my own enquiry with its own implications. I’m catching up.

Fig. 33 Misuse (Origins)

The Unthought of Technicity
With On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon suggests that we are alienated from technical objects, and that ‘culture fails to take into account that in technical reality there is a human reality’ (1980:1) In the relationship between humans and technical objects, he finds a mutual interdependence, ‘a sort of instinctive symbiosis of man and the technical object’ (Simondon, 2017:xvi), going on to say that:

Culture is unbalanced because, while it grants recognition to certain objects, for example to things aesthetic, and gives them their due place in the world of meanings, it banishes other objects, particularly things technical, into the unstructured world of things that have no meaning but do have a use, a utilitarian function.
(Simondon, 1980: 1)^{61 61.} This section draws on two translations of Simondon, G. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects: University of Western Ontario Simondon (1980), and Minneapolis, Univocal Publishing (2017). The 1980 edition includes a preface by Hart, J.

We place machines in opposition to us and thus there is an ‘absence of the machine from the world of meanings’ (ibid.: 2). Humans are, however, ‘the permanent organiser of a society of technical objects’ in the same way that orchestral musicians need a conductor, who’s ‘interpretative decisions are affected by the actual performance of the musicians’ (ibid.: 4). In this, Simondon is describing the true nature of machines, their interrelationships and relationship with humans: ‘He is among the machines that work with him.’ (ibid.: 4). It is the machine’s indermination, a sensitivity to information and freedom of functioning’ that makes them open and adaptable in human hands (ibid.: 6). To this I add that their constituency with humans also affords the aleatoric through misuse or error, or simply in an unanticipated response to a process, and being able to synthesise this with intention is at the heart of the technicity I am speaking of. Through exploring and understanding this relationship we can actuate non-verbal understanding of our environment or phenomena. We enter into a feedback loop where the technology responds to our intentions, yet often not in a way we expect. Simondson develops the relationship between humans and technical objects, even going so far as to say the technical objects are themselves human (Simondon, 2017). In my practice I have certainly found that the responses of technology set up a dialogic relationship with my exploration of meaning. Hart, in his introduction to On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, explains that ‘The human individual is not dominated by [the technical object]’, nor does he dominate it, ‘but enters into a kind of dialectic’ (Hart, 1980: xxi).

For me, this technicity is ongoing through the process of iteration and production and continues past the point of publication to the viewer-reader for whom information is available through material (tactile) and spatial (proprioceptive) encounter. The technology of a book or other object is in dialogue with the viewer, through aesthetic character, sign and symbol, but also through its material and technical characteristics. ‘Nonverbal knowledge articulated by the hands and feet is the body’s way of thinking’ (ibid.: xv).

‘Techniques involve both gestures and tools, sequentially organized by means of a “syntax” that imparts both fixity and flexibility to the series of operations involved’ (André Leroi-Gourhan 1993: 114). This ‘operating syntax’, is brought about through memory in the brain and the physical environment (ibid.: 115). Leroi-Gourhan hypothesises that language ‘sprang from the same source as technics’, wherin the ‘complexity and wealth of concepts corresponded approximately to the level of those techniques’ (ibid.).^{62 62.} Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993), Gesture and Speech. Cambridge/ London: The MIT Press.  Leroi-Gourhan observes that ‘symbolic functions enjoy preeminence over technology, although it is the latter that is the driving force behind all progress’ (ibid.: 184) Reflecting on a time in which production and consumption ratios are so distorted, is civilisation he asks ‘in the process of destroying the balance for which the human is physically constituted’ (ibid.). That the symbolic should have overtaken technicity is continued in Bernard Steigler who writes ‘philosophy has repressed technics as an object of thought. Technics is the unthought’, (1998: ix), continuing ‘technics has itself achieved a new opacity’ (ibid.: 14), and it is with a sense of urgency that he approaches the possible futures that are available to us as a result of this.^{63 63.} Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

While my practice to date is confined to what at this point could be regarded as traditional mediums and existing paradigms of book, film, music, and exhibition, it seems there is considerable urgency for all of us but particularly for the contemporary (graphic design) practitioner in reflecting on how recent acceleration in techological development is shaping how we communicate and form opinions, and how it is distancing us from our selves and technology. Where ‘Technics evolves more quickly than culture.’ (Steigler, 1998: 15; emphasis in original), it seems all the more pressing to always read into technological means of communication, both to interrogate its powers to manipulate opinion, and to develop its potential to both amplify and more densely communicate through image, text, and sound. Technicity in my practice is being attuned to its operative syntax, negotiating ideas and form through the fixity and flexibility that emerges through this. In another form of mutual constituency, the processes of image, text, and sound manipulation produce a foldback where technology speaks to us as we speak through it. 

 

Fig. 34 Make Ready, 10–11
1991, the interview ‘3… days at Cranbrook’ is set out across eight over-sized pages in issue #19 of Berkeley, California-based Emigre magazine. Designed by Rudy VanderLans, it maps an informal interview where people come and go. The large page and open leading convey the sense of a spacious studio, while the font, Template Gothic (used exclusively in this issue), captures the moment in its vernacular referencing. The text is laid out quite simply, with weight changes, some tabbed spacing and a ragged right edge. !Loud dog bark! or !Baby cries! are overlaid as clusters of type which partly obscure the sound of the conversation, and reverberate in the space. I can imagine being there. So much is conveyed with modest means.>>>

From the Nightclub to the Gallery
1994. Designing club flyers feels like an act of subversion. The turnover is rapid: printed on Tuesday, released on the streets by Thursday. I’m paid in cash and it pays my rent, and I only have one or two other small jobs on the go at any one time. I have high expectations of these flyers but it’s never long until you need to find the next idea.>>>

The Douglas Hyde Gallery in the early 1990s is one of the most prestigious art spaces nationally, but it operates on a meagre budget. They publish perfunctory exhibition leaflets and I know I can do better. I call the gallery to be told the Director is a very busy man. His interest though is evidently peaked and he agrees to meet me. I convince him that I can do something modern with these leaflets and still keep them within budget. The first leaflet I do is straightforward, but the artist complains. I’m left on my own to field a phonecall and defend what I have done. We do a couple more leaflets and then I hit my stride. Exploiting these budgetary constraints using cheap papers and single colour printing as ways of articulating thematics of the gallery programme comes to define an entire approach and visual language, and space opens up to respond to each exhibition. We get five years of ideas out of this strategy before it runs its course.

Fig. 35 From the Nightclub to the Gallery

 

 [Z]ines... a culture produced by people, not merely for people.

(Duncombe, 1997: 187)

CODE makes a link to Underground+, and to the emic/etic (insider-outsider), which I propose as the basis of a meaningful operative position for graphic design practice. My practice is written by not for – I am the nightclubber, I am the gallery-goer.>>> I gain my education in real time through my participation as audience (viewer-reader), and as author (producer as author or reader-writer). I am participant-spectator – I learn about art, the nightclub, and the bricolage of my practice all in parallel, and these three strands meet head-on in CODE magazine (1996). It is quite a surprise to revisit CODE (filtered here through the Make Ready book) and find it is still relevant. In the context of Make Ready, it represents one of my more acclaimed publications, while in the light of my thesis it is evidence of an emergent critical practice which draws freely on multiple discourses, blending and appropriating them to make new connections.^{64 64.} Available at: https://www.100archive.com/articles/code-magazine-issues-3-and-4 [Accessed 22 March 2025] Of course the distinctions are artificial, but CODE objectively observes no hierarchy between art in the gallery, the streets, the clubs, the clubbers, clothing, science fiction, or music. Elements of work by Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler whose then current exhibition Crios at the Douglas Hyde Gallery is reviewed elsewhere in the magazine, are woven into a feature on clothing designer Hussein Chalayan (Fig. 36). Mixed with this are fragments of clothing patterns and ephemera which make tangential reference to the writing, and this flow or mingling of elements persists throughout the issue.

Type usage, which I can now imagine as Robert Bringhurst’s idea of writing as ‘the solid form of language’, is almost without hierarchy, favouring instead letter forms which separate into particles and threads, and coalesce into ribbons, blocks or dynamic lines, each move a translation (a ‘typotranslation’ perhaps) of the written content.^{65 65.} Bringhurst, R. (2004) The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning. Kentville:Gaspereau Press.>>> As with each of my outputs in this thesis, my exchange with the editor is more one of mutual constituency than collaboration: Ian wants to make a radical, world-class magazine; I need the opportunity to make one. For both of us it is an exploration and articulation of our clashing and overlapping cultural and sub-cultural environments and their resultant transtextual collisions. 

The Dublin French Film Festival (1997) catalogue explores aspects of cinematic experience in its mode of presentation through multiple (photographic) views, multivalency, polyvocality and transtextual elements. Although this approach might be seen as antithetical to the function of a film festival catalogue, I wished to produce an holistic view of the programme’s mix of contemporary and repertory, short films and features, each a French production, but with complex cultural origins, coloured by the selection of the curator.^{66 66.} The Dublin French Film Festival was curated by Marie-Pierre Richard. The pages favour fragmentation, and multiple, rather than fixed (or single) views, underpinned by a grid layout which is both conformed to and disrupted (Fig. 37). Film stills, rather than affording equal representation of each film are exploited as material with which to convey the kinetic dynamism of cinema.^{67 67.} ‘Not even the French Film Festival programme design by Peter Maybury with a seeming disregard for the need to communicate, can cure my addiction to French movies. As if taking as his brief a requirement to find different ways to jumble the titles of movies, he turns each page into a decoding challenge in which the fragmented text is often so miniscule that it requires a magnifying class [sic] to reveal its secrets. My advice is not to be put off: the wonderful range of movies from 3–13 November is well worth the visual torture.’ Carty, C., Sunday Tribune, 2 November 1997. This publication prefigures my expanded use of transposition (Genette) as a framing device through which to translate spatiotemporal experience in print and serves as precursor to A Late Evening in the Future.>>>

 

 

 

Fig. 38 Make Ready, 128/ ‘Energy transfer (slight return)’
Recordings of all kinds exist as a sequence of capture, storage and release. The content is gathered and arranged, is charged or amplified through the physicality of the medium. Ink on paper, light emitting from a screen, speaker cones pushing air, an object in space later releases this delayed experience. In the process there is conversion, and some loss, and of course our perceptions will change over time.

Bricolage/Technicity

Technological (mal)functions or misuse can be diverted towards an amplification of thematic concerns, and a technology often proffers elements of indeterminacy or the unforeseen which I can shape as a visual language. This is a relationship of technicity where the process exists as a kind of foldback mechanism. The Bread and Butter Stone is the first thematically-lead publication I made for the Douglas Hyde Gallery+. Reflecting on five years of exhibition it contains a fragmented, diaristic text by Gallery Director John Hutchinson, interspersed with images from the gallery programme, and this is followed by artist projects from invited contributors. The appearance of the book, now especially, seems radical, upsetting any notion of an honorific reproduction of artworks or images from a gallery. The book has no title on the cover, no preliminary pages, and is unpaginated. It is printed more-or-less monotone (there are two pages with yellow ink flourishes), a pragmatic solution to the then much higher costs of full-colour printing, and a tactic (or workaround) to avoid costly high-resolution scans. In place of these I scanned pages from previously printed catalogues, reused or reworked image files I already had, or further treated images (for example using a photocopier to degenerate an image by copying and recopying) to distance any expectation of fidelity.^{68 68.} ‘Fidelity, clarity and noise suppression have all been historic concerns of graphic design.’ (FitzGerald, 1997: 23) In this and other ways, I found possibilities through mechanical processes I could respond to, in turn shaping my next step, in an input-output exchange. Using a thermal fax machine (a to-hand tool in the office of the 1990s) as an imaging tool rather than for image transmission, I could distort images and text by dragging the input sheet, or by rewinding the paper roll to re-image, producing multiple layers.>>> This was akin to improvising, or to spontaneous composition in music, and was a time-based event – reacting in real to time to the results being produced. The machine’s characteristics – significant distortion of the original – when in the usual context of office usage were understood as part of the transmission language and were habitually disregarded, yet when reproduced in a book the reading and meaning of the material are dramatically affected by this treatment.

This technical process acts as a filter and flattening device such that image and text are rendered the same way (text becomes image), and thus registers as image first.+ In the ‘aesthetic function’, we are drawn to the sign itself (Mukařovský). Even before we read the words as text we perceive them through their timbral and visual characteristics. By ‘flattening’ the material through these processes I produced a visual field subverting normative categorisation, in an enactment of the thematic framing of the The bread and butter stone. As Hutchinson observes: ‘Memory and imagination are ultimately indistinguishable, for memory depends on the selection from an original multiplicity of events.’ (Hutchinson, 1997: n. pag.). The clarity and authority that might be offered by conventional type usage, image reproduction, and information hierarchy are eroded by technological processes, and form and meaning become entangled, producing uncertainty and lack of fixity.

 

I Fashion a Studio in a Victorian Living Room.
In my twenties it seems important to have a city centre studio. I find a concrete box above an alteration centre, in a building with a distinctive zig-zag façade I’ve admired for years. Rumoured to have had a dubious past, the space on the top floor is partitioned into several small rooms which I rip out, filling a skip with the spoil. I paint the concrete floor grey and bring up studio equipment, and repair and adapt furniture scavenged from skips. Over time the studio is home to bicycles, a sofa, music recording equipment, a photo darkroom, and is used as meeting space, gallery, rehearsal room, and recording studio. There’s music playing all the time. We make a lot of graphic design, art projects, video editing; we record albums, and host events. The studio becomes a place where people drop by when they’re in town. By 2003 we’re effectively in the studio all the time, relying on the microwave, rent is rising fast, and it seems obvious to combine working and living. We move out of the city centre and I fashion a studio in a Victorian house which I renovate while we live in it. I mix modern and old things. A wall-filling aluminium shelving system is packed with books, artifacts and printed samples converging storage and usage. There’s lots of equipment for more music, film, and graphic design. It is the place in which people work with me, legible as intertext to my practice.>>> The studio becomes part of my visual identity. In 2015 I take the shelving system to the Library Project as the armature for my Make Ready exhibition in a restaging of this internalised private studio space, turning it public as gallery, library, and reading room.

Fig. 39 I Fashion a Studio in a Victorian Living Room.

Why am I in the Room?

Across the publications that make up this thesis the question of why I am in the room is answered differently. My first two books with Gerard came about through my ongoing work with galleries in which Gerard was to exhibit, and it was this luck of being brought together that prompted the rich series of exchanges and resultant books over a nine year period. For the Venice Biennale, although we cast ourselves as a team of curators at the Culture Ireland selection panel presentation, I was the non-architect, and inevitably fielded questions regarding print and publicity, while through the curation process my interstitial role took shape.>>> Landfall came about when I was invited to make an exhibition for Thisispopbaby’s festival ‘Where we Live’. As a theatre company, Thisispopbaby operate outside of Visual Art, and were specifically interested in finding a practitioner peripheral to this. It suited their needs that I was an established name in graphic design, and working across disciplines.>>> Thread Pulls was a band first, but this naturally led to affinities with my graphic design outputs. The mutually constituent relationships (shared here with Gavin) of composition, timbre, technicity, and performance resonate with other modes of publication, and our gigs and releases provided a visual space in which to expand aspects of the various ‘texts’ of our music.

Fig. 40. Make Ready, 27
‘Most of the time we’re not there. I miss things all the time – exhibitions, sunsets, opportunities, moments. Being there is difficult to achieve.>>>

As I note in 28/29 ‘Being There’, I did not see N3 and only came to know it through documentation and various accounts, but this gave me a distinct position from which to approach the task of making the N3 book.^{69 69.} N3 was Ireland’s first National representation at La Biennale di Venezia in 2000. The pavilion was designed by Tom dePaor. Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/modern-ireland-in-100-artworks-2000-n3-by-tom-de-paor-1.2702933 [Accessed 22 March 2025] This happened more or less by accident, or rather with an ease; the book was made through a combination of intuitive sagacity and spontaneous composition in an iterative process. Positioned as outsider I could construct an account of place through the remaining fragments (Derrida’s more or less ruins), and through ‘augmentation’ (Genette) – things such as adding my own photographs – a transposition (Genette) of sorts using the bricolaged tools of my practice and the affordances of book technology.^{70 70.} Derrida, J. (1978) ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Writing & Difference. Chicago, University of Chicago Press; London and Henley, Routledge and Keegan Paul Ltd. Through its making, I came to understand this process and its value for future projects. By the time of On Being There, I had identified this as a strategy and operative position from which I could make an account of an encounter with Tom’s practice.

 

Freeze>>>
1998. There’s a skip outside Film House just round the corner from my office. It’s full of – mostly broken – grey and brown 1960s office furniture, but amongst this are some short rolls of 16 and 35mm film. I take all I can find and head back to the studio. At the lightbox with a loom I take a look at what I’ve scavenged. The 16mm film is monotone but with a strong blue cast, and the image quality is grainy, with lots of scratches on the surface. The 35mm film rolls include some of that familiar ‘film leader’ (a countdown from ‘9’ to ‘START’), and parts of the title sequence to Touched by Love. I don’t know the film and don’t bother to find out about it. Not long after this my friend Niall is curating a show at Arthouse, and he’s looking for submissions.^{71 71.} Freeze ’98 (A Winter Projection Festival), Arthouse, Dublin, 1998 was curated by Niall Sweeney.>>> I contrive two installation pieces I will make with this film material, and another piece, Somebody Else’s Holiday (1964), using slides I came by in a London market in the early 1990s. I edit the 16mm film digitally into Gucci/ Trash/ Canvas/ Points (1998), a four segment silent, slow-motion film, with each of these four words used as an intertitle directing our attention to an element within the frame that was incidental or extraneous to the original scene. Dramatically slowed down, the scratches dance and dart across the screen. From the Touched by Love footage, I make six lightboxes with ‘Duratrans’ enlargements of single frames, providing a title for each frame in an interplay between what is depicted in the image and the materiality of the film stock. The series is wall mounted in a row and they each glow in the darkened gallery like colourful boiled sweets.

Fig. 41 Freeze (Touched by Love)

This vignette provides a snapshot of my practice taking shape, while these works for exhibition were made in parallel with fee-based work. I am using filmic elements (film, light, projection, display) as part of my enquiry. When paired with the ‘Misuse (Origins)’ vignette where I am finding ways to subvert and make productive the strictures of software, we see a bricolage forming through technicity and transdisciplinary foldback. I am working with found images, appropriating them and, through technological processes repurposing them as commentary on the nature of encounter with communication mediums. Each of these pieces is about revealing the mechanisms that support the image illusion they carry.

We could trace a path then from these early markers; N3 is a book which creates a fictional account of the construction and staging of the first Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, assembled from research and process fragments, and from video stills to an uncompleted film. Made shortly after this, Circlebook + (Fig. 42) comprises a public art poster-frieze and subsequent book made from videograbs. The interference pattern or timbre of these images clearly signifies that they are extracted from video, but the footage was shot only for the purpose of producing these still images. Relayer (2008) was played on a continuous loop within the Delay armature, presented at The Lives of Spaces.^{72 72.} The Lives of Spaces, Irish Pavilion, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, 11th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2008. Exhibition curated by Weadick, N and Campbell, H. Conceived as a research piece for the Picture Palace (Pálas) cinema in Galway, Ireland, the film is an exploration of the viewer encounter and experience of cinema-going which parallels that of the building itself.^{73 73.} Smith, D. (2008: 142) ‘Delayed Departures: Cinema/Venice Architecture’, Campbell, H., Martin-McAuliffe, S., Ward, B., Weadick, N. (eds.). The Lives of Spaces. Dublin: Irish Architecture Foundation/ UCD.

In Relayer (Fig. 43), constituent parts of sound and image are articulated as separate entities (the image is of a woman supposedly watching a film) and through synchresis the viewer-reader is led to believe that the sound correlates with what the woman must be viewing.^{74 74.} Synchresis suggests ‘the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time’. Chion, M. (2017: 64) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press. The These Islands films (2013 & 2017) and their iterations, employ the V-Effect, disrupting the reader through making explicit the presence and subjectivity of the camera, calling into question the verisimilitude of the material and any singular interpretation of it. Both of these films are thought about as discursive constellation and catalyst for viewer-reader enquiry.

A Study (2015) (Fig. 44), filmed at the HDB depot library at ETH Zürich, makes use of the rolling-stack shelving system which orders the space. Fixing the camera between bays we rolled the shelving forwards and backwards in a kind of physical zoom simulation where the camera lens remains static but the space within the image frame is physically altered. This expression of the room as aperture makes direct correlation between the camera’s view (itself a record) and the changes in interest or relevance in the books of a library collection over time. Equally it is an articulation and operation of an architecture (a mini-architecture which recalls the design of the of de Blacam and Meagher ^{[project descriptor]} of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) was Ireland’s participation at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2010, of which I was co-curator. We chose to address the built and unbuilt portfolio of de Blacam and Meagher, an award-winning Irish architectural practice established in 1976. The overarching subject of the curation however was the dilemma of exhibiting architecture, particularly when amplified by its setting in the built intensity of Venice, and the high-key charge of the Biennale. Amidst the complexities of creating an exhibition about architecture within another architectural space and context, the installation performed as an exhibition display, replica archive, repository and reading room. The exhibition in Venice took the form of an oversized (A2 approx.) unbound book Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher (2010), comprised of five discrete volumes, published in an edition of 9,000 copies for free distribution and arranged as paper stacks on five items of bespoke joinery in counterpoint with the architecture of the San Gallo oratory. The curation directly addresses the Biennale’s theme ‘People meet in architecture’. To visit the exhibition was to encounter and activate the artwork by moving through it, handling and removing copies of each volume. The viewer-reader was able to walk amongst the stacks, browse the publication inside the oratory, and take copies away. The space was transformed by the interaction of visitors who interrupted the grid by browsing, disturbing and removing copies, making a physical imprint on the space, collectively changing its form. If a visitor chose to take copies home, a second, slower, engagement of close reading might occur over timeexhibition+, in which as filmmaker I perform the space. I make a similar gesture in These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013) ^{[project descriptor]} These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013/7) is a single channel HD video with stereo sound, of 9:46 duration, filmed, directed, and edited by Peter Maybury. These Islands was first exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This is a filmed response to the unauthorised development on commonage at Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo. A concrete structure 4.5m in height and 30m in diameter comprising 26 piers and lintels and recalling a henge, it was the subject of controversy having been erected over a weekend without planning permission, and was, after appeal, declared an unauthorised development with orders for its demolition and the return of the land to its prior condition. This ‘unauthorised development’ is appropriated as a found image or ‘text’ embodying issues of land ownership, boundary, public and private, community, authority and description. These Islands, when exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art at The Everyday Experience exhibition (2013), was displayed in a small room with a chair, a one person cinema. The chair was borrowed from the Venice Biennale (2010), again raising issues of authorship. The sound from the film played in the room and was also relayed to the museum’s colonnades. Separated from the screen it is experienced as a series of dislocated field recordings, affected by the acoustics of the architecture in which it plays back, and merging with ambient noise.where I record the sound of stones which I throw at the structure to ‘sound it’, performing the space by resonating the hollow concrete piers.

Drape (2018) (Fig 45), as a pair with Relayer bookends Tom’s Picture Palace (Pálas). Just as Relayer played back within the Delay armature, Drape – a reflection again on the cinema-going experience, and on the bespoke nature of the cinema’s construction – was made to play inside the cinema.>>>

Finally Dysart 050920–120920, a filmic encounter at Dysart, was made for Open House Dublin, 2020 (Fig.46).^{75 75.} Available at: https: //openhousedublin.com/about-open-house-dublin/ [Accessed 15 August 2024]. The film is a circumnavigation of the place and offers multi-point perspectives. While objects and buildings within one shot may be recognisable in another, the film eschews any obligation to describe the space, and does not make clear to the viewer-reader how the space is organised. In opposition to any image fixity, the slight movement within the frame of the often static camera position undoes any definitive reading, underscoring the temporal nature of filmed footage. Elements from all of this material are subsequently appropriated, and repurposed in On Being There (2022). ^{[project descriptor]} On Being There is a filmic encounter with the material and outputs of the office of Tom dePaor, drawing on 30 years of practice. There is the place itself, notebooks, drawings, prints, scale models, 35mm slides, photographs, films, files, books, writing, a diversity of materials and media evidencing significant technological changes in production and reproduction. This is the raw material. The film is a rerecording, or sampling of this material, where scale, media, and modes of presentation and realisation merge. The linear transition from drawing to model to built landscape and documentation is disrupted. The film explores the permeability of the image. Animated or activated through movement and operation, everything can be superimposed, overlaid, or cut into. An audio-visual encounter with place, within the space of the screen and the loudspeaker. These are all mutual constituencies of subject matter, human being and medium, or technicity, explored through making and evidenced in the outcomes.

On Going There
It’s a rainy Thursday morning in November and we are driving in dull light across Wicklow to a second site visit in VISUAL, Carlow, in preparation for Tom’s exhibition which will open in February. We talk about all sorts of unrelated things before sliding into conversation about the work we are making for the show. As usual I am in this by stealth – ‘guerilla authorship’ as Tom once put it.^{76 76.} This is a remark made by Tom in interview (4: 05) for the film deBMgallo dir. Magan, R. (2011) Dublin: Irish Architecture Foundation.  Everyone agrees I am intrinsic to the exhibition, but my name won’t appear on the poster: it’s Tom’s show, and Nathalie is the curator.^{77 77.} Nathalie Weadick, as Director of the Irish Architecture Foundation was co-curator of The Lives of Spaces (2008), and commissioner of of de Blacam and Meagher (2010). She curated The Everyday Experience, (Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014), for which I was graphic designer and exhibitor. I’m comfortable with this. Nathalie understands how Tom and I work, and leaves us room to operate, and, well, it’s a thrill and a joy to work with Tom. As we continue along winding roads making sharp turns through small villages we’re talking about On Being There, the film I have yet to make. Screening in an anteroom the film is conceived as integral but peripheral to the main exhibition space, performing as reader to Tom’s practice and to the other pieces that are exhibited. At this stage I don’t have a clear idea what I will actually make, I just have confidence that I will make it and that it will be what we need it to be. It’s a curious position – I am to make a film from the material of Tom’s practice, but I will do this on my own, without his input, aside as usual from our conversations, and it will form part of his show. In the course of the conversation he says that he has come to realise that I am part of his practice, but he’s not sure if he is part of mine.

~ 

On Not Being There
It’s Sunday morning at the Lighthouse Cinema in Dublin, a subterranean warren of plush red interiors. The room is more than half-full for a screening of On Being There as part of the Open House Dublin festival – not bad for a Sunday morning – presumably Tom is the draw? This is the second outing of my film outside the framing of the I See Earth exhibition. At VISUAL, the viewer either stood, or sat uncomfortably amongst a cluster of rocks, but in the Lighthouse everything is optimised for comfort and immersion. We’re supposed to do a public conversation with Nathalie after the screening but Tom hasn’t shown up. Some time has passed since I made the film so the screening is a chance to look in at it: to reflect on what I did, and at what it actually does, and here in the cinema I can witness live audience response. To my surprise, no one shuffles in their seat, no one leaves, no one seems bored. As I rewatch it, ideas of what I might say after the screening come hurtling towards me and I note these on my phone which glows in the darkness. When the talk starts I’m surprised by the ease with which I’m able to speak. It’s the first major work that I have made with the new criticality that this thesis enquiry brings to my outputs, and the conversation and the questions, interestingly, fix on the film rather than on Tom’s practice.>>> That Tom didn’t show (he mixed up the dates) concentrates the discussion on the film itself – while made from Tom’s work the film is not that work but instead a discursive space around documentation, representation and place – the film stands up on its own.

Fig. 47 On Going There/ On Not Being There

More on the Nature of Mutual Constituency, and Conversation

The publication accompanying the exhibition The Everyday Experience (2013: 10) describes Gall as ‘the outcomes of conversation between Tom dePaor and Peter Maybury.’^{78 78.} Record of the exhibition is available at: https://imma.ie/whats-on/iaf-imma-the-everyday-experience/ [Accessed 22 March 2025] To make N3 Tom delivered a carboard box of material and I arranged its contents in a book account told from the perspective of someone who has not witnessed it, and this is somewhat true also of On Being There.>>> One of the findings of my thesis is in articulating the idea of mutual constituencies: amongst people, through materials, and through technological processes. On Being There was made fast  – in about 10 days – and there was no process of drafts and edits. I made the film, then travelled out to Greystones with a computer and a large screen and played the film for Tom, who asked for one small change, correcting a misplaced image. Unlike many projects where my authorial role becomes defined almost as a byproduct, my positionality here determined my approach – one where I was consciously curating and deriving a wholly new work from this source material. This positioning had two purposes: firstly it freed me to singularly pursue my practice enquiry into the communicative ordering of cultural knowledge through a given archive; and secondly, it articulated a distance between the film and Tom’s practice. Although the film was made from material relating to Tom’s practice, it is clearly legible as a reading or interpretation through engagement.>>> These two purposes form a mutual constituency, serving both our individual and collective needs. The outcome was at a remove from Tom such that he could be critically distanced from this interpretation, while it was at the same time a handy way to contextualise the exhibition in the main space which, while nominally a retrospective, in fact comprised only new works and reworkings of past outputs.^{79 79.}  I See Earth presents an ambitious large-scale installation of sculptural work by one of Ireland’s foremost architects, Tom dePaor. The exhibition spans his practice from 1991-2021 through the media of sculpture, objects, film and drawing, painting and writing. Curated and commissioned by Nathalie Weadick and including new documentary work by Peter Maybury, I See Earth is produced by VISUAL Carlow and the Irish Architecture Foundation. Available at: https://visualcarlow.ie/whats-on/i-see-earth [Accessed 22 March 2025]>>>

Description, Documentary, Context, Productive Framing: How is On Being There situated, and how do this and the various transtextual devices serve our mutual constituencies?

On Being There conforms with elements of the documentary paradigm, thus situating it amongst or in opposition to the genre.^{80 80.} The VISUAL website describes the work as a documentary https: //visualcarlow.ie/whats-on/i-see-earth [Accessed 28 March 2025] It’s the easiest way to describe it: it is linear, and provides evidentiary material organised in loose chronology, arranged into five chapter typologies, with projects identified by date and address.^{81 81.} The five typologies originate from the Willow Pattern, and the collective name for the group of structures in the main room of the I See Earth exhibition is: An island, a ship, a house, a hut, the fence (2022) As viewers however, we quickly become aware (as with Landfall) that it also disrupts many documentary conventions. There is no introduction, framing, or narrative structure, and the chapter typologies are abstract, each signalled only by a line-drawing on a blue screen. There is no voice-over, but we hear Tom speak twice, both instances excerpted from Drawing on Life (2014). In one of these, Tom says ‘the places are not fictional; the fiction is how we see them’, something which stuck with me from when I first heard it in 2014, and I quote this in Make Ready.+ His voice emerges out of a reverie of images, movement, text, and environmental sound, and almost inadvertently Tom’s remark serves as a summation of my film.>>>

Further, the film exists within different totalities: firstly the gallery; secondly the retrospective (of the work of another); and subsequently it is transposed (again) to the cinema, a space for which it was not initially conceived (On Being There has had a number of cinema screenings since the exhibition).^{82 82.} On Being There was screened at Architecture at the Edge, Palas Cinema, Galway; Open House, Dublin, Lighthouse Cinema (2022), and at Rencontre Internationale Paris Berlin, in Paris (2023), and Berlin (2024). In displaying the film in cinemas there is a shift in context – from the site specific presentation for which to was intended, to a more generic encounter. At VISUAL the film was looped – available to dip into – with viewers unlikely to view it in its entirety, while in the cinema we watch a linear film from start to end. Although the cinema might appear a natural home, this repositioning in the plush red interior of the cinema brings to it the expectations of narrative cinema, in the form of it’s pacing, ordering structure, authorship, and expectation of spectacle. On Being There though demands something different of the viewer: that they yield to its slow pace; its scale from the handheld to the landscape, in which human presence is as much for reference, context, or to demonstrate something for the viewer, as for any narrative purpose. Artifacts such as the five drawings on blue screens and the tree imagery have direct correlation with the main room in the exhibition, but in a cinema these are isolated reminders (if you have seen the exhibition), and otherwise abstract puncturing of the dimensional space of the imagery.

In relation to graphic design practice, the discourse around this film might focus on my transdisciplinary approach, and the foldback of various mediums and processes. There are obvious correlations to make between these chapter dividers, and the pacing of sections of a book. The use of layering and transparency is typical of my handling of images and type in printed matter. The film also contributes to architectural discourse, both in its subject and in relation to how to present and represent architecture, and what indeed the scope of that is. Further, the film might be thought about as architectural practice, since it shares many processes and media – drawing, photography, models for example – and is speculative and synchronic in ways that much of architecture is a speculative projection into either future or past.

Menon and Patteeuw make a case for ‘magazine architecture’ where the graphic strategies which bring together multiple voices on the page serve as ‘critical editorial devices’ (2018: 84).^{83 83.} Menon, C. & Patteeuw, V. (2018) ‘Magazine Architecture’, Karel Martens and The Architecture of the Journal, OASE, (100), NAi Publishers. Available at: https://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/100 [Accessed 22 March 2025] Coincidentally, they draw on Genette’s ‘paratext’ as a conceptual referent but their framing differs from mine. Firstly, the paratextual writing within this thesis as outlined in my Introduction retains the more literary sense of paratext, to refer to the surrounding and framing elements of any publication. Genette’s paratextual elements (which might include ‘a title, a subtitle, intertitles; prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords.; marginal, infrapaginal, terminal notes; epigraphs; illustrations; blurbs, book covers, dust jackets, and many other kinds of secondary signals’) have a ‘more distant’ or ‘binding’ relationship to the totality of the text, performing as accompanying elements (1997: 3). Paratextual elements surround the text. Beyond this, however, my graphic strategies are performed by the bricolage of my practice, and intrinsic to this are the bricolage of sign, timbre, and technicity, each of which is applied in a performance and enactment of the subject matter and my enquiry into communicative mechanisms: they form part of the text, and hence my application of other transtextual modalities to more precisely characterise my practice. The distinction is important for me in that this is ‘performative’ rather than applied from a suite of strategies and confined to supporting the ‘text’. The bricolage is malleable, allowing both interdisciplinary foldback and technicity to shape meaning. Despite this distinction, and in common with Menon and Patteuw these elements which surround the writing (and in my practice enact or embody it) are ‘critical’, serving ‘to present it, in the usual sense of the verb, but also in its strongest sense this is: to make it present, to ensure its presence in the world, its ‘reception’ and its consumption.’ (Genette cited in Menon and Patteeuw, 2018: 85). Where for Menon and Patteeuw ‘magazine architecture could designate a form of architectural practice that invests the journal as its privileged site’ (2018: 86), these components (if these are the bricolage of processes, techniques, timbres, signs) of On Being There constitute a privileged site for an enquiry into in architecture discourse. It hardly makes me an architect but I am part of the discourse and with this, Tom’s practice is inserted back into that discourse both through his practice outputs, and through the proposition of presenting his (architectural) practice in this interstitial way.

On Being There is also transpositional. In this instantiation, the archive is the informing text (or hypotext) to the film (or hypertext) which is a wholly new account told from the perspective of my encounter. This category of transposition Genette refers to as ‘overtly and deliberately thematic, in which transformation of meaning is manifestly, indeed officially, part of the purpose’ (1997: 214; emphasis in original). Its purpose initially was to bridge gaps in the retrospective framing of the exhibition, providing access for the visitor via a sort of reader to the exhibition. The transformation in meaning arrives in that while the material is from Tom’s practice (including our Gall practice), it is here consciously removed from that framing. The film, rather than offering the viewer the work of a practice, offers instead a recording of an encounter with a practice through a fictional or proxy-caretaker. The presence of the curator-caretaker is signalled by disembodied hands, which stand-in for the hands of the viewer. Throughout, the presence of the caretaker (either in hand movements, or, at a remove, in the viewpoint of the camera) is signalled through multiple self-reflexive devices. The objects of the practice – drawing rolls, models, and maquettes – are handled, turned, operated, played with, while the mechanisms of the office required to investigate this archive – slides, lightbox, scanners, and screens – each bound by time through use or obsolesence, are depicted as we sit in the dark and the material is brought to the light.

 

Fig. 49 Make Ready, 30
Although the sounds are uniquely generated, the music has a bricolage quality.>>> Each track is constructed from a beat or pulse, onto which successive layers are added to and subtracted from. The album is made on a hard disk recorder, a piece of digital equipment which employs the analogue tape machine as metaphor. It has a physical mixing desk with pots and faders, but there’s a very small screen and the interface resembles 16 strands of cassette tape running in parallel. Working visually is awkward; it’s best when you work without a grid, scrubbing through the sound to find precise entry or exit points, creating loops and refrains as if cutting and splicing magnetic tape. Without exact maths behind this method of assemblage, there’s some slight slippage that belies the digital making.

The above extract written from a music-making perspective, begins to identify the bricolage of my practice in terms of engagement with technology and a responsiveness to this. As someone who was as a student and practitioner during the transition from analogue to digital, I bring with me a paradigmatic understanding from analogue processes to the digital realm. For the Hard Sleeper album I approach the interface of this Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) from a tape-recording perspective – so that what I produce lacks the digital precision attainable through other methods, and this becomes part of my instrumental set. I am drawn to this personal relationship with technology which produces slippage and allows tolerances, in a move away from digital precision (or mastery) towards something more provisional, reflective of both my experience and practice.

The Practical Bricolage, Technique, Mastery (Surpassing the Unfruitful Antithesis of Form and Content)

 

[T]he concept of technique provides the dialectical starting point from which the unfruitful antithesis of form and content can be surpassed.
(Benjamin, 2005: 770)

Derrida’s footnote to the bricoleur is slightly denigrating: ‘jack-of-all-trades, someone who potters about with odds-and-ends, who puts things together out of bits and pieces’ (Derrida, 1970: 7). In critiquing Lévi-Strauss, he notes that ‘borrowing concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined’ could almost be said of every discourse, but it is this borrowing that gives purchase to my bricolage, establishing a familiarity with which to produce a transformation that alienates the viewer through a combination of recognition and disruption, thus provoking an active reading (ibid.: 6). The bricolage is threaded through everything – it is all shards and fragments from undifferentiated plains of origin, in a collective acknowledgement of the complexity of cultural knowledge and experience of the lived world (Denzin and Lincoln, 2013: 350). The tricks of the bricoleur are operations within the doxa.^{85 85.} ‘The Text is always paradoxical.’ (Barthes, 1978: 158) It is certainly true that I adapt methods, techniques, and material processes that are available to me, rarely seeking outside expertise.>>> 

Fig. 50 Make Ready, 8
Over time it became apparent that this was to do with a suspicion of mastery, and the value (or purity is it?) of the untrained sound. 

From music to print, or from one software package to another, I apply the same tactics of resourcefulness, improvisation, repurposing and, often, misuse: I am ‘adept at performing a large number of tasks’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 17). Firstly it’s pragmatic to make things myself. It enables a process of thinking and making, where materials and technological processes are intrinsically linked with and inform the production of meaning in a feedback loop  (or foldback) of signal and response. Were I to work with a film director for example, it would distance me from this, introducing so many layers of complexity (and cost) that I would most likely lose the impetus to make a film. Additionally, from a critical point of view, if I make a filmic work it sits outside of normative practice and its framing and evaluation (I’m not recognised as a filmmaker) while, if a director were involved, it would be viewed through the critical lens of film, thus shifting its meaning. 

Lévi-Strauss’ bricoleur works from an instrumental set that ‘bears no relation to the current project’ (1966: 17), and perhaps here I differ. Any given medium – a book, a film, a piece of music, an exhibition – is simply a means of transmission, and to be confined by only one would seem arbitrary. My practice has naturally led me towards the correlations and affinities across mediums, for their capabilities and differences as communicative modes, and for the continuity of enquiry that this offers. 

Mine is an Everyday Practice

 

‘Everyday practices depend on a vast ensemble which is difficult to delimit but which we may provisionally designate as an ensemble of procedures.’ 
(de Certeau, 1988: 43, emphasis in original)

My instrumental set empowers me. I have predefined ways of working or ‘making do’ (and this is bricoleur), starting points which I can bring with some confidence to each project, and these meet with the various technical and practical resistances and affordances of medium and space.^{88 88.} ‘There are countless ways of “making do”’ (de Certeau, 1988: 29). In this meeting my available ‘instrumental set’ bears close relation to all projects, since I am borrowing, or bringing with me processes and an understanding from one medium to another, and these commonalities are often integral to the subject. One effect of this is that it produces a transformation within the normative language of the medium, legible to the viewer as self-reflexivity, producing a V-Effect that engages the viewer-reader in a criticality..This productivity is described by de Certeau: ‘[W]ays of using the constraining order of the place or of the language... by an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from his situation.’ (ibid.: 30, emphasis in original).

This approach brings an outsider perspective; I operate as a non-expert and can distance myself from mastery, of which I remain suspicious. Levels of technical accomplishment and expertise are legible as a text. If the level is productive, it is mutually constitutive, expressing, amplifying and complexifying authorial enquiry, but technique and proficiency inevitably lead to the pursuit of mastery. If the pursuit and therefore the goal is mastery this is certain to introduce a voice in conflict with authorial intent: it is vying for attention. Problematic for me in this is that it makes conspicuous the presence and positioning of the expert, establishing a hierarchy of author above reader. Additionally, mastery of technique suggests accomplishment within a predetermined and confined set of parameters, and I see this as a trap. Here I would like to make analogies in music in which this becomes evident and is problematised. Making use of and subverting technologies has clearly emerged as a communicative strategy:

20th century music has become one of the principal aesthetic zones where humans have used innovative gadgetry to make sense – and nonsense – of their own increasingly technologised souls. Musicians and composers both highbrow and pop have twiddled and tweaked electronic and electrical instruments, as well as electromagnetic recording and broadcasting technologies, in order to tune into new sonic, compositional and expressive possibilities.
(Davis, 2002: 23)^{89 89.} Davis, E. (2002) ‘Recording Angels: The esoteric origins of the phonograph’, Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. London: Bloomsbury.

Goodwin (1992)^{88 88.} ‘… Western music also creates a network of rules for music making. This is a universal notational system and the precise measurement of tonal and rhythmic differences comes to define what music is. Indeed, the attempt to write music down at all suggests that the variables of its performance can be reduced to something more orderly. Goodwin, A. (1992) ‘Rationalisation and Democratization’ in Lull, J. (ed). Popular Music and Communication. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. observes that musical notation (‘mastery’ of which in classical music at least is a prerequisite) is more than just a system for conveying information – it is fundamentally a controlling device which comes to delimit what music can be. What is annotated must conform to the system of annotation, and what cannot be annotated cannot be stored. van Toorn’s (1993) criticism of the Swiss Style, and Buzon’s claims of western imperialism, come to mind here +. This has further resonance with Friedrich Kittler, who refers to the controlling mechanisms in the written word as an ‘alphabetic monopoly’, and ‘the bottleneck of the signifier’ (Kittler, 1999: 3).^{89 89.} Kittler, F. A. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Théberge instead ‘demands that all sounds ... be made available for musical purposes’ (1997: 213). This means exceeding notation to encompass contemporary use and misuse of instruments themselves, and as such: ‘[M]usical instruments are not forever conceptually defined after the stages of design, manufacture, and marketing are completed... Rather, they are ‘made-over’ by musicians in the process of making music.’ (ibid: 160).^{90 90.}  Théberge, P. (1997) Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press.

Despite the particular intentions of their designers, instruments will be used and misused freely by musicmakers, offering a paradoxical liberation through the constraints of these instruments, as there is something to react ‘against’. Counter to the assumption that ‘mistakes’ are something to be avoided or eliminated, they are in fact (at least for certain electronic and rock musicians) essential to creativity (Goodwin, 1992: 82). de Certeau points to styles or ‘ways of operating’ within the constraining order of a system: 

These styles of action intervene in a field which regulates them at a first level, ... but they introduce into it a way of turning it to their advantage that obeys other rules and constitutes something like a second level interwoven into the first.
(de Certeau. 1988: 30) 

By allowing the mistake, and the misuse of instruments, we can think of a way of operating in which technique rather than limiting the operator – who may lack expertise – transforms this into part of the productive vocabulary of communication through  technological processes held in tension between strategy and tactic, expertise and ‘making do’.

 

More on Mastery and Anti-Mastery

At the time of making The bread and butter stone, I had been working on a self-published book entitled The White Book, which comprises a series of formal and structural manipulations made by hand to the pages of a paperback book. I had shown some of this to John and he suggested I incorporate this material into our book. I took text fragments imprecisely cut with a scalpel to use on the cover, and inside interspersed John’s writing (itself subjected to technological processes to disintegrate the letterforms) with further text fragments, to amplify the thematic throughline of the malleability of memory. Alongside strike-throughs, handwritten marks, and what looks like large ink smudges and misprints these pages appear provisional or even ineptly arranged. We might look at this treatment and be reminded of fanzines, but in this art gallery context and in a book format like this (paperback size), this sits outside of our expectations. I am drawing the reader towards a conventional, formality, and professionalism (or mastery) with which a book like this is normally designed, while disrupting its conventions to articulate thematics. The book, due to severe budget constraints is printed almost entirely in black on white and in combination these elements lend an impression that everything is subsumed and unified by a textural whole. In making this book I learned that this use of monotone can work as ‘flattening device’ to remove or decentre hierarchy. 

 

Fig. 51 Make Ready, 32
‘The complexity migrates to the materiality of the book. The object too becomes an expression of the content’

The production of PATMOS (2001) too is a consequence of costs, but this time round the print budget is more than six times that of The Bread and Butter Stone. Published five years later, we live in different times socio-culturally, and I am at the forefront of producing high-quality artbooks for Irish art institutions. In PATMOS, all the images are in colour, and the writing – a reflection on journeys towards enlightenment – is mirrored by a complex blend of papers and inks. The book is casebound, with debossed title, similarly austere to The Bread and Butter Stone, but in its material characteristics, PATMOS conveys a calm authority. We cannot but be struck by the exemplary production values. The text, set in blocks while recalling The Bread and Butter Stone is more recognisably conventional, and only on close-reading do we become aware of subtle breaks in convention – a shift from justified to range-left type signifying an undoing, or slippage; amplifying a particular segment of writing. The mastery here – the exemplary book production values of Dutch printing and binding – is both instrumentalised and subverted through an unorthodox sequencing of papers and ink modulations which bring the reader through a haptic, reflective reading experience as surfaces, textures, and tonalities shift with the turn of the page.

Make Ready too is printed to the highest technical standards. Essentially black-and-white-looking (used again as flattening device), images are in fact reproduced in a complex blend of monotone, duotone, and tritone processes to articulate nuances. A gridded page structure is counterpointed by the quite crude (or again inept?) typesetting of the body text. Set in a ‘display’ font, the letterforms lend themselves uneasily to continuous reading, and line breaks and letter-spacing contribute to making this seem awkward or ‘unprofessional’. There is a tension between the readerly tone of the writing, and the ungiving setting of the type. Overlays, image ‘clashes’ and the constant modulation of the complex page grid further contribute to a lack of fixity or organisation. Balancing these technical and formal elements suggests a collision of mastery and anti-mastery is productive. Our expectation that a book by a graphic designer about graphic design would be expertly designed is confounded, causing us as readers to question why this would be otherwise, and how our expectations affect meaning.

In These Islands (2013, 2017) this anti-mastery is used as strategy. From the outset my bricoleur approach determines my technical constraints and limited expertise. What I make is defined by these, but this is an operative position and it does not necessarily reflect an inability. I could, for example, follow a more conventional art practice approach and seek funding, subsequently hiring equipment and employing a crew. This would require careful planning and logistics, and would bring with it its own visual language. By then though the moment would have passed, and more significantly this would preclude my making an intuitive response to the phenomena. Instead, I choose to shoot this myself with semi-professional equipment, and the only plan or shooting schedule I have is to encounter the place through the camera and the microphone, recording the results. I respond to the vagaries: of daylight (which in the filmed material disrupts chronology); the wind (which produces substantial ‘wind-thumps’ in the recordings and must later be addressed); and to the phenomena of place and landscape itself. In post-production I must (re)encounter (again with my limited expertise) this filmed material, and make a response to this. Without a shooting schedule, I am free to work intuitively, cutting and disrupting the material to (re)produce a filmic encounter for the viewer-reader. The resultant film in its ad-hoc, disruptive nature is reflective of the ‘unauthorised’ development or ‘henge’ itself, which while evidently carefully coordinated (but left incomplete), is roughly assembled, with scars left in the displaced earth which surrounds it. 

We are so acculturated to high production values in contemporary cinema that the tolerances are very narrow, and we are quickly aware of error if, for example, camera movement stutters. Conversely, for me at least, highly polished and orchestrated camera movements are jarring in themselves. They read as an attempt to mask or conceal, to smooth over – in a seamless use of technology where the camera (our viewpoint) magically glides through space offering otherwise unattainable viewpoints. But this seems to me only to amplify the effort to conceal its fiction.+ In my films I set out to register or record, to produce ‘a document’ from source origins, inflected by technology, translation, and the meaning or sense inferred through this process. My strategy has broad tolerances in production values, technical and formal expertise, and, in the tradition of Direct Cinema does not involve complex shooting (use of dolly shots, tracking). These tolerances introduce the productive use of technical artifacts to amplify the subject matter.+

 

 

 

 

 

+

 

 

Rehearsal as Foretext

Foucault (1979) questions the autobiographical material of the author, and the boundaries of what can be included in their outputs. Genette (1997: 3) discusses an aspect of this as ‘Foretext’ – giving the example of headings in early published serial episodes of Ulysses, later removed from the published book. The headings though remained in the minds of critics and carried ‘capital’ meaning (ibid.). Foretext can have a paratextual relationship to outputs in that it surrounds and informs any notion of a definitive version. The status of rehearsal characterises being in a band and this prompts me to think about Thread Pulls and the material of the rehearsal as foretext.

In discussing Thread Pulls in this thesis I am focusing on the releases and live performances I made between 2010–12 as a duo with musician Gavin Duffy. During this time we released material on several ‘independent’ labels in Ireland and the UK, including New Thoughts, the début album, (Osaka [IRL], 2010), released in CD, vinyl and digital formats; and Youmeltwords/5/8 Rhythm Here (C/F records [UK], 2012), released in vinyl and digital formats. These releases were supported by a series of mini-tours and live performances including concerts, festivals and showcases, tapping into a network of promoters and venues throughout Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands.^{92 92.} discogs.com (2010). Available at: https://www.discogs.com/label/820252-Osaka-Records-Limited; Available at: https://www.discogs.com/label/17493-CF-Records [Both accessed 22 March 2025].

Being in a band is an ongoing condition and much of the activity of Thread Pulls took place in the rehearsal room, performing and composing in private. Through this, a unique language of communication emerged between us, arriving at a method of ‘spontaneous composition’ as our preferred technique for generating new material.^{93 93.} Simon Rose (2017), The Lived Experience of Improvisation: In Music, Learning and Life. Chicago: Intellect Books. Having set up our gear at the start of a rehearsal we would, typically without discussion, start playing something new prompted by a sound, notes, or a phrase on either drums, synthesiser, trumpet, or bass. We would turn this around for perhaps thirty minutes, making a rough recording as it took shape, and this would form the basis from which to develop a new song. This method was nearly always productive – it seemed the perfect way to harness the potential of several elements: in its unthinking manner it is a form of sagacity – drawing on a subconscious repertoire to find a sound response appropriate to what we heard; trying out new figures, time signature, timbres, or effects processes; testing ideas that emerged in a live context; releasing and combining in an energy transfer (a form of conversation); and it blended our disparate listening experiences and tastes.^{94 94.} ’New Thoughts is a receptacle for all sorts of musical history, from 1960s psych to taut post-punk and elemental disco and funk, yet never succumbs to any one ideal enough to derail this singular expedition.’ O’Toole, L. (Irish Times, 1 October 2010). Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/album-reviews/thread-pulls-1.658180 [Accessed 22 March 2025]

Thread Pulls music is composed for live performance. Within this is a reciprocity or foldback between composition and performance, and between performer and receiver (our audience) which forms a methodological approach. There are some distinct phases that lead on from this. Exploratory/developmental phases are often interrupted by impending gigs which bring impetus to arrangement and compositional decisions, as well as introducing the additional demands of playability. We must be able to play pieces in their entirety and the instrumentation must be achievable in a live context. Performed in front of an audience any new material is at this moment ‘published’. These pragmatics then have a bearing on compositional development, where songs are subsequently altered or discarded. Playing live too informs how the music works with an audience; the long-form songs which we developed were a way to extend the immersive soundworld of later material, holding a mood through slight and subtle modulations informed by dub rhythms.^{95 95.} ‘Side A of the new 12" from Dublin’s Thread Pulls is a richly percussive and minimal new song You Melt Words, taking the idea of live dub rhythms into an art-rock context.’ Available at: https://nialler9.com/thread-pulls-you-melt-words/ [Accessed 22 March 2025]

The music is subsequently taken to the studio and adapted for recording. Thus, the ‘instrumental set’ changes, and the communication objectives too are changed in this shift. For a live performance, each sound is chosen in relation to the sound in a room, its acoustic qualities and how the sounds blend together. How each sound is played is affected by this, and we both respond to what we hear and to the audience. In the studio, further changes in arrangement and instrumentation are made, new elements are devised, and the recording studio is used as musical instrument.^{96 96.}As already noted in FitzGerald (1997: 22) timbre can be thought of as ‘the sonic attributes and qualities of recorded music, separate from the notes… spoken of as the use of the recording studio as instrument to sculpt sound.’ What is recorded forms the archive, but the practice, the activity, is in flux. The fixity of the recording is representative only of the recording itself and of what we were able to achieve with this process, while each subsequent performance is an incremental shift away from this. It would be fair to say that live performances made after the recording of the New Thoughts album were often the most achieved versions of many of these songs.

This is one of the instances of ‘foldback’ that has lead me to consider my practice as a whole as rehearsal, interspersed by publication and performance. The written component of this thesis is firstly hypertext to the practice (the hypotext). The text of the practice encompasses not only the visible, manifested, published elements, but the surrounding practice activity – rehearsals, iterations – the unpublished and unrealised elements sometimes confined to memory and recollection. This material, some of which is published in Make Ready, can be thought about as foretext. The practice is in a permanent state of flux and of making ready, while the publications punctuate this continuous enquiry, providing practice visibility for an audience, and the evidentiary material from which to evaluate what it performs, thereby advancing the practice enquiry. I am uniquely in a position to see the practice from this perspective, and the writing in this thesis constitutes the framing of this in ways that make this perspective transferable as knowledge, with theories and methodology drawn upon to make this legible outside of my emic research position.

Foretext equally is applicable to the These Islands films of which there are no definitive versions. These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013) was exhibited in a 10 minute version (Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2013); in a concise five minute version when screened back-to-back with These Islands, Ballysadare (Architecture at the Edge festival, 2017);^{97 97.} Available at: https://www.architectureattheedge.com/saturday2017/these-islands [Accessed 19 August 2024] and more recently both films were edited into a dual-screen installation for I See Earth which incorporated previously unused footage (Fig. 52). While in many ways they are recognisably the same films, these versions are hypertexts to their original form and display other transpositional modalities. Genette’s very direct sub-categorisations of this are easily applicable here. The short versions are ‘condensations’ in which the text is intact but retold and as he notes, ‘even the most emancipated concision can only produce a new version of the original text’ (Genette, 1997: 238). The addition of unused footage is an ‘augmentation’, within new shots help the flow or may make subtle shifts of emphasis, but the changes are essentially ‘without thematic incident’ (ibid.: 228). Additionally, short excerpts from both films are included in On Being There and in Genette’s transtextual, model these quotations can be seen are ‘intertexts’, one text literally and eidetically placed within another.

The intertextual modality of appropriation in These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013), is exploited through the film itself (see 108–111 ‘November 2011’ where this is discussed further), and also in regard to its iterative staging, which too becomes part of the text, or foretext to the film. Initially exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art as a Gall film, it was staged as a one person screening room (a reference to Relayer/ Delay) in a small room off the main exhibition space in the group exhibition The Everyday Experience (Fig. 53). Sound was simultaneously relayed to the room and to the adjacent colonnades, where, separated from the screen, it was experienced as dislocated field recordings, affected by the acoustics of the architecture and blending with ambient noise. A Gall chair was appropriated as seating (an intertextual quote from the Irlanda exhibition).^{98 98}. ‘A new chair was spliced from the Dining Hall chair, itself an iteration of an anonymous 19th century kitchen chair borrowed from the Casino, Marino in 1984. In the remake, all the section sizings and workings were kept, but cropped and edited, with the seat and gusset rethought and rescaled for conversation and short stays. The detail and proportion is of the language of the creepie and the milking stool. The chair was further adjusted and then put into production, its design life the length of two conversations with the joiner. It was drawn in retrospect—a minute. The Gall chair was made in an edition of six, each numbered in roman numerals on the oxter. The furniture was considered both illustrative of the archive and servant to it, allowing scale 1:1 models to act literally as figures and ground to the experience, their authorship a subterfuge.’ (dePaor and Maybury, 2012: 72). This reference to an external text (another architecture exhibition) combines with the appropriation of the film to amplify a collision of texts, particularly in that the structure at Achill sits outside of what might be framed as architecture, and amongst the other works in the group exhibition was incongruous.

The exhibition publication (which I designed) included a page from each contributor.+ We used this space to provide a short text on Gunnera tinctoria, and a URL to a text which Tom and I authored entitled ‘Inter Alia’, outlining the planning dispute surrounding the ‘henge’ structure. The viewer-reader was thus invited to cross-read the material to explore its complexities.^{99 99.} ‘Inter Alia’ (2013), co-authored by Tom dePaor and Peter Maybury, was presented as a parallel (intermedial) contextual text when the film first exhibited, and was subsequently published as a discrete text in San Rocco – What’s Wrong with the Primitive Hut? (8) Winter 2013. The text is an account of the incomplete construction of the unauthorised development; the ensuing dispute through the High Court; and the subsequent appeal and inspection on behalf of the Planning Board (An Board Pleanála) and the ensuing determination. Our position regarding the henge was left ambiguous, since our text concerned issues of property, boundaries, resources, and the sublime, although some viewers read the film as being in praise of (or honorific of) the structure. While our view of it is ultimately unimportant, this unintended reading was productive too since it further complexified the dialogue of our film with the exhibition.

These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013) was next screened in the Architecture at the Edge festival (2017) paired with the newly made These Islands, Ballysadare, Co. Sligo (2017) (Fig. 54). The new film was made in a similar way – we visited the site and I made a filmic response to my encounter – and since the site was of interest to us for its related concerns with land and landscape, property, ownership, resources, and construction, in convoking the two films, these commonalities could be read across them. The new film though was five minutes duration and the two were imbalanced. I therefore set about re-editing the Slievemore film, cutting it down to five minutes also, in a ‘condensation’ of the original, and this new version was screened under its original title thus extending the idea of foretext to the film, where previous published versions must now be taken into consideration of the total work. This was also an act of appropriation, and of bricolage, taking available material and refashioning it for new purposes. Both films were similarly appropriated in their most recent exhibition during I See Earth: Building and Ground (2022). The two These Islands films which take ‘found’ subjects (a ‘henge’ at Achill; an abbey situated within a quarry) as text for appropriation, and are radically transformed, and presented as a diptych. In taking either of these films in their totality, this foretext of previously published versions contributes to their meaning. It points to their iterative rather than definitive use and as such that they are valued not as artworks but as the material of a discourse, which can be reconfigured to suit arising needs.

In The Everyday Experience, a one-person cinema is staged, while sound is relayed to the colonnades outside; in I See Earth the colourised films are backdrop, context, and lighting for the objects in the room. Perhaps the manner of exhibition ultimately has greater bearing on the encounter with this material. Unlike films screened in a cinema where context exerts only moderate shift in meaning (for example when On Being There was screened in Paris there was not only the transition from gallery to cinema but also from Ireland to Paris, thus its cultural resonances are altered), each exhibition is radically different, shifting the weight of even the filmic material itself.

 

 

 

 

Convenience and Authorship

My work with John Hutchinson for the Douglas Hyde Gallery began in 1995, and was continuous for eight years, developing as a kind of co-dependency. The gallery programme gave me an ideal platform from which to develop my practice enquiry, and for John, I gave (I would argue an otherwise unavailable) form to the thematic pursuits of the exhibition programme extending them beyond the gallery. This arrangement perhaps prefigures my idea of mutual constituency outlined in 6/7 1968’ / ‘1969’ / ‘Discipline’ / ‘1981’.+ an idea that emerges at the interstices of the ‘author function’ (see also  6/7 1968’ / ‘1969’ / ‘Discipline’ / ‘1981’) – the endowed authorial voice resulting in the critical and cultural perception of the output, where ‘the author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture (Foucault, 1979: 211) – and of my operative position within a cultural enquiry or discourse (my emphasis). What is at stake is my role as cultural producer. The conventions and perceptions of disciplines are often rigid, casting the graphic designer as ‘outsider’ (FitzGerald, 2010: 165–6). My own practice problematizes this as it sits outside of normative discourse, particularly in a ‘collaborative’ setting (a term I resist in favour of ‘mutually constituency’). This has been articulated in relation to my partnership with Tom,  characterised by architect and curator Emmett Scanlon (2022) as being ‘as productive and influential as any other pairing you could point to in recent Irish architecture. It just takes a little more effort to describe...’  (^{see footnote 57} Architect and writer Emmett Scanlon in his presentation at a day-long event in VISUAL, a subsidiary event to Tom’s I See Earth exhibition (2022) describes Gall, my work with Tom thus:  ‘His long-term partnership with Peter Maybury is as productive and influential as any other pairing you could point to in recent Irish architecture. It just takes a little more effort to describe…’ This was subsequently made available as a podcast, available at: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/whatbuildingsdo/episodes/BONUS-Review-I-see-earth--an-exhibition-by-Tom-dePaor-e1inbjd/a-a7uvbuh [Accessed 21 March 2025]. An extract from this is also found on Scanlon’s website available at: https://www.emmettscanlon.ie/diary/iseeearthreview [Accessed 21 March 2025].’). Implicit in this statement is my insider-outsider status where I am working within or contributing to architectural discourse, yet my practice is framed by graphic design.

The space to translate always exists in the interface and exchange with graphic design. Only through the tools of the graphic designer do the words, images, and conception of the author(s) assume form. Commonly in book production this is not an ‘endowed’ authorial space for the graphic designer, whose task may be confined to one of formal arrangement aligning with, and articulating the preconceptions of a commissioner who reserves the right to final say. The space left over for graphic design in this case is decorative, and at best lends a contemporary flavour through fashionable choices which might make it more inviting or approachable: Graphic design as a superimposition.

As I have often found, my way to consolidate disparate elements in a book is to amplify difference rather than harmonise. Huts (2005) remains ‘bookish’, with casebound cover and endpapers providing a formal point of departure, but inside I push or rub up against book conventions. Only the section dividers are of a consistent format, while the written and visual essays which surround these are treated uniquely through varied papers (there are six different substrates), colour treatment (monotone, colourised, full-colour), typefaces and sizes (mixing classic serifs, typewriter and bitmap-derived typefaces, some of which are oversized). Each artist’s contribution is handled uniquely and almost casually, in an effort to avoid my superimposition of stylistic rigour upon the already strong visual character of the material. Although I am given editiorial acknowledgement in Huts (2005), an external framing persists:

Peter Maybury, who put everybody’s ideas together and added some of his own, has commented on how easily its curious character took shape. This is unusual, considering the variety of material it contains – and yet, of course, it is not unexpected, as independence is unquestionably a characteristic of any self-respecting hut’
(Hutchinson, 2005: 106)

In Huts, the standard copyright appears in the colophon for ‘the artists, the authors and The Douglas Hyde Gallery’. The book, and the exhibition are co-curated by gallery director John Hutchinson and artist Tal R. I am credited with design and production, and separately for photography, but it is the curators and invited artists, as part of art discourse, whose authorship is ‘endowed’ (Foucault, 2020: 211). In my role as graphic designer and through the working process that has evolved with John (where typically we talk at length and then I respond with a draft), I offer a number of my photographs which contribute to the thematic framing.^{100 100.} For The Bread and Butter Stone I integrated material from The White Book on which I had been working at the time, and in much the same way here, photographs that I had recently taken are loaned for Huts. +Cross reference 20–23 ‘Introduction’ / ‘1997’

That the images are mine is a matter of convenience rather than authorship, and a structural distance is preserved between me, the editors who may choose to appropriate any producer’s work for their needs, and the artists for whom it is acknowledged a certain control is relinquished (Hutchinson, 2005: 105). Huts did indeed come about easily and quickly, perhaps in part due to my delineated role and operative position distinct from curator and artists, the boundaries of which I could strain. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal anything about reality. 
(Brecht cited in Benjamin, 2005: 526)

2005
I first visit Dysart [^{see footnote 10} Dysart is an address in Co. Wicklow, Ireland at which since 2005 dePaor has been developing an acre of land in a series of walls, gardens and buildings] shortly after the site is purchased, but it doesn’t have a name yet. I take snaps, nothing special, just a record of being there. In subsequent years I return more purposefully to document the transformation, and over time and through conversation we realise the role this act of recording plays. 

Fig. 55. 2005

In the Dysart photos there is a sense of a relay, where I am picking up ideas, traces of which are present in the place, and translating them into the (my) realm of photos. What I include or exclude is an amplification of my particular reading, one that may differ from Tom’s. In assimilating a space we shift subtly and constantly such that our perception is a composite, where perimeters are not defined, yet with the camera I must frame what I see from fixed position – where edges and perimeter become critical. Each photograph I choose to stage is selected intuitively, and this moment of spontaneous insight is the moment to trust, as almost immediately after positioning the camera, pragmatics and rational evaluation take over. As I photograph I must constantly adjust to the feedback of the camera, as my (as yet unarticulated) intention is modified in response to its parameters. Akin with the ‘in-between’ frames in A Late Evening in the Future (2018), each photograph can be thought about as an ‘impossible view’ (see Make Ready, 96 ‘/’), shaped by the camera’s optics, as each is a fixed view of a reality we can only experience in constant flux, translated through the lens, and this is both their failure and their strength.  For Abbas Kiarostami:

‘The camera imposes stillness on the movement of things… on the movement in things… to get at what is concealed from the human eye by habits of thought and perception.’ ^{101 101.} Kiarostami in subtitles to Daly, F. (2021) The Mirror of Possible Worlds: Kiarostami on Aran. Available at: https://aemi.ie/works/fergus-daly-the-mirror-of-possible-worlds-2021/ [Accessed 22 March 2025]

Kiarostami’s observation here seems to refer to a stillness imposed both on the movement within the frame, and to the frame itself which is first articulated by the camera, and then fixed by the photographer. The image (if it is a good one) may indeed get at what is concealed by habit, but equally its frame precludes all other thoughts which are necessarily simultaneously available in the moment of being there. Thus, what it reveals is surely as much an assertion and affirmation of the photographer’s perception as it is a liberation from habit? This indeterminacy is part of what motivates me to return, repeatedly, to the same viewpoints. In doing so, not only does it track changes in the physical space, but it insists on an iterative reading of the photographs. In Desert (2016), ^{[project descriptor]} Desert (2016) is one book of an eight volume set Notations (Gall Editions), co-edited by me with Paul Clarke. Desert presents notebook pages by dePaor in parallel with a corresponding set of photographs which I made over a 10 year period. The publication gathers this material chronologically, and without hierarchy. It inherently questions our ideas of drawing and documentation, and their relationship to place. In this publication I occupied several roles; as series co-editor, as volume editor, and as contributor, photographer and book designer. Notations brings together in eight separate volumes, drawings, notes, collage, photographs and appropriated images taken from the notebooks of seven architects/practices who use them as both reflective and reflexive forms of thinking and practice, and a collection of texts by Clarke.  I assign only dates to the photographs by way of identification, forefronting their ephemerality and the mutability of place.

Our Gall publications make authorship ambiguous. For Desert, I am series editor with Paul Clarke, dePaor is the book’s author, and Gall (dePaor and I) are the publishers.^{102 102.} Desert is one book of an eight volume set Notations (2016), Clarke, P. and Maybury, P. (eds). Dublin: Gall Editions.  Alike with Reservoir, this book is a self-cover, with no standard paratextual framing. Series title, author, and book title appear on the front cover, and a colophon with imprint details appears on the last page, with notebooks attributed to Tom, and photographs to me.>>> The book is made up of two parts or essays; firstly, selected notebook spreads, then selected photographs, both arranged chronologically. Throughout, all images are reproduced in monotone, and allowed either a 1/4 page, or a double-page spread. Through this arrangement, although Tom is ‘author’ no distinction is made as to the relative values (or truths) of notebook and photograph, both of which appear to have parity as ‘notations’. Both draw from a common subject; the place Dysart. Both are projections and speculations – the former from a past into the future, the latter from a present past – and fixed now in a book are both pasts. My photographs are projections in another sense too; they appropriate the place, bringing into dialogue what photography achieves. While photographing Dysart, my anchoring thought is that the photographs that I will produce are hypertextual, ‘grafted’ (Genette) onto their previous (and dynamically evolving) text. No place is fixed in nature or signification but as my photographs of Dysart have tracked 18 years to date (almost the full lifespan of the project), their subject has radically transformed in appearance. Even while the text (the authorial intent) may remain largely consistent, my photographs are iterative, and with each attempt I am drawn towards the same things and to new things previously not legible to me. That is to say that through the photographs I am trying to negotiate my own understanding and experience of the place, and equally I am negotiating my own practice – what it is to photograph, to ‘capture’, how to ‘store’ and ‘release’, and to what ends. 

They are not attempts (transmutations) to capture the intent of Tom as author, nor the transtextual relationships of his practice, and the verisimilitude that is claimed by the photographs is challenged or undone throughout the framing of the Gall works and the manipulation in those works of the various paradigms (book, film, documentary, exhibition, object-place). Instead, I am preoccupied with making images which capture how the place makes me feel, and what I understand of it as a text. While I often talk with Tom about what he sees and intends, I can only relay my own experience. One ambition of Desert is to flatten this; that the building in prospect (here truly a foretext as the drawings are published even as the place is incomplete) is no more or less significant or true than the photograph that stands in for it; brought together in the book, the drawing and the photograph are in dialogue with each other and with the larger ‘text’ of architectural practice: The work of photography is part of the work and dissemination of architecture and architecture practice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[O]nly by transcending the specialisation in the process of intellectual production – a specialisation that, in the bourgeois view, constitutes its order – can one make this production politically useful.

(Benjamin, 2005: 775)

In a photograph taken at the opening of Underground, I am standing behind the counter in Road Records, Dublin, selling copies of the book Dennis and I have just published. Our film screening has just ended down the road at Film Base and Dennis and the filmmakers make it back to the record shop. In the basement people are viewing the exhibition we have co-curated, while upstairs the shop is packed and the crowd spills out onto the street. I stand behind the counter and sell 150 copies of the book.>>>

Fig. 56 Underground (2008), exhibition launch, ROAD Records, Dublin.

Acting As 

If I adapt Benjamin’s demand for the ‘Author as Producer’ for graphic design practice, the call can become one of the Producer as Author: S/he is already ‘in solidarity’ with the producer (we already produce!), and may easily avail of ‘technical progress’ for ‘the foundation of her/his political progress’ (2005: 775). ‘Independent and oppositional cultural production’, as van Toorn suggests, rather than forming a new dogma, requires an approach ‘that makes it possible for mediating intellectuals, like designers, to leave the beaten path, to organise their opposition, and to articulate that in the mediated display’ (van Toorn 2009: 104). By taking up the tools available and familiar to me I am able to speak of the culture within which I operate. Lupton (1998) goes some way towards this in observing: ‘Production is a concept embedded in the history of modernism. Avant-garde artists and designers treated the techniques of manufacture not as neutral, transparent means to an end but as devices equipped with cultural meaning and aesthetic character.’^{103 103.} Lupton, E. (2012: 13) ‘The Designer as Producer’, Graphic Design: Now in Production Minneapolis: Walker Arts Centre In Peio Aguirre’s interview with Experimental Jetset, he refers to the ‘technical image’ in which processes are expressly used in order to expose their ‘material base’ (Experimental Jetset).^{104 104.} Aguirre, P. (2022) ‘Writing on the Wall: Interview with Experimental Jetset’ Available at: https://www.academia.edu/73248498/Writingonthewall_Jet_Set_Peio_Aguirre_ENG [ Accessed 22 March 2025] For Experimental Jetset this type of usage is motivated by a mistrust in the image derived from their reading of Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’, and in an effort to demystify image representation in the production of a V-Effect. This ‘technical progress’ (Benjamin) then can equip the graphic designer with the means to move beyond the specialisation of intellectual production (2005: 775).

People need to derive income through practice (it’s a profession), and I fully recognise that I have been lucky, starting as I did at a time when it was possible to get by (mostly) making work in which I was culturally invested. During the course of writing this thesis, ideas have naturally spilled into my teaching, and I have put these to the test, running studio projects which ask the learner to produce from an insider (emic) perspective. If students see themselves within a culture, and are producing for that culture, they come to recognise the value of their insight, and are naturally invested in project outcomes. If we undo the assumption that a graphic design education must make graduates ready to enter professionalised practice, and instead ask of them what kind of practice they wish to enter into, we introduce the hope that they can in time change professionalised culture. While it may seem naive to suggest an undoing of a professional practice, Pater finds that ‘the profession is a form of protection and exclusion, limiting the access to knowledge, the access to the means of production, and the influence over discourse.’ (2021: 334). This limits not just what may be said, but by whom. Having arrived in this situation, it seems incumbent on me (as graphic designer and educator) to attempt its undoing. van Toorn asserts a ‘political approach’ ‘that, unlike the dominant neoliberal form of capitalism, is directed at real social problems’ (van Toorn 2009: 104), but I think this must be broadened in the sense that all actions are political, and visual communication in particular is capable of such impact that an understanding of these mechanisms is in itself a real social concern. 

It seems that there are two parallel aspects to the operative position of my practice that I must articulate here, problematising any notions that I may hold about independence and opposition. 

Independent

Firstly, in understanding every act as political, beginning with the privilege of being in a position to speak, I must addresses this in my outputs which are a manifestation of a lived social and cultural position. Not all of what I produce is ‘independent’, or perhaps the majority is not, as is even the case with Underground. While stemming from and reflecting independent culture, endorsement by the Irish Arts Council problematises any claim to being either independent or ‘underground’. It is, however, ‘oppositional’, in bringing to light a culture that exists (or survives and fails) despite mainstream dominance. Make Ready was an independent initiative – in that I took the Offset invitation as an opportunity to publicise my by then (financially) flagging independent practice, pitching my book idea to the organisers, and independently organising a gallery exhibition – but was ultimately reliant on the establishment nature of Offset to reach an audience. Landfall was as an ongoing and independent enquiry given the chance to exhibit as a result of a commission by Thisispopbaby, for a festival that could hardly be more mainstream (The St. Patrick’s Day Festival). Thread Pulls is perhaps the most resolutely independent, evolving in a network of independent venues, promoters, and labels, with each aspect independently curated by Gavin and me.

Oppositional

Secondly, accepting the privileged position from which I speak, my publications take established paradigms (book, film, music, exhibition) and in various ways destabilise or decentre their functionality, through an enquiry into the communicative order, expressed in their discursivity and transtextual modalities, and through materials, technicity, and self-reflexivity. Underground makes use of available mechanisms and structures – a record store as hub or locus for cultural activity; the disused basement repurposed as exhibition space; an ad hoc and independent sub-cultural network of music maker-, writer-, or artist-contributors – and through these decentres notions of exhibition and publication.^{105 105.} ‘Zines are speaking to and for an underground culture’ (Duncombe, 1997: 8) The book is ‘zine-like’, positioned ‘within the condition of the production of culture that constitutes an essential component of their politics’ but unlike a zine was produced with establishment funding.^{106 106.} ‘Fanzines are positioned “within the condition of the production of culture that constitutes an essential component of their politics”, but also “within” the very conditions of the culture in which they are produced.’ (Triggs citing Duncombe, 2010: 13).

Make Ready and Landfall can be understood as oppositional in the ways in which they eschew conventional graphic design practice. Make Ready stages an intermedial presentation of an interstitial practice, fundamentally in opposition to industry practice.^{[project descriptor] Make Ready is the title given to a body of publications comprising a semi-performative audio-visual conference presentation; a survey exhibition during which a number of gallery talks were hosted; and a book, all of which were authored by me. They were staged and published concurrently in 2015, prompted by an invitation to appear as opening speaker at Offset, Dublin, an established international design conference attended by industry practitioners, educators, and students. The exhibition was presented at the Library Project, Temple Bar, Dublin, and the book was co-published by Gall/Ways&Means. A copy of my book was given to each of the 2,500 delegates, and copies were on sale at the gallery and various online art and design resellers. At Offset I made a performative audio-visual presentation, combining a part-scripted/ part-improvised spoken component, intercut with pre-recorded voice segments, still images and 22 film and audio sequences which dramatise or reimagine aspects of my working practice. The exhibition made a single intervention – a press-folded aluminium shelving unit of 2.7M height – forming a 4M skeletal wall across the gallery. (Fig. 1). I reconfigured the space to function as window display, library, reading room and exhibition (Fig. 2). Aligning the shelving parallel with the glass shopfront and stepped back it functioned as sign and window display when viewed from the outside. A deep space inside, between the glazing and the shelf facilitated an intimate (yet in public view) ‘reading room’, while the gallery-facing side offered another browsing space and overview perspective of the installation. On the shelves were books, prototypes, posters, make-ready sheets, records, CDs, and several unique artifacts. An amplifier, speakers, turntable and CD player enabled visitors to select and listen to recordings, while an adjacent laptop played-out a number of film works on a loop. In the Make Ready book the written text commences with a succession of chronologically arranged observations, many illustrated in found photos or diagrams, discussing aspects of sound and image, the earliest of which dates to 1854. These merge into a succession of texts reflecting on aspects of (re)production, citing formative examples relating to my practice on the subjects of recording, drumming, film, typesetting, and reproduction. These are followed by illustrated accounts of early work from my practice. The book then provides further chronologically arranged output examples, disrupted by commentary and observations on artefact, archive, analogue recording techniques, posters, books, materiality, presence and absence, photography, economy, inter alia. Each of these forms an essay, and within these accounts reference to many other works and ideas are made.}  The conference presentation, book, and exhibition bring together my roles as writer, performer, author, editor, curator, musician, and book designer, each decentring practice enquiry away from graphic design convention towards an enquiry into communicative order activated by multiple imbricated discourses. By contrast my books with Gerard are financed by established cultural institutions that could be seen to form an elite, while it is our mutual affinities and artistic enquiries that sustain the relationship. The museum context facilitates the publication of the work, and within this the space is wide open to explore political and cultural resonances. One of the principle values for me in these books is the enquiry into communicative media and its implications both within and outside of artistic practice. 

Even as I operate at interstices, my actions are from within discourses rather than imposed upon them. In the exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production (2012), and in Steven McCarthy (2013), the graphic designer is framed ‘as’: author, editor, publisher, curator, producer, entrepreneur, activist, teacher, artist, as researcher, and as an enabler. Any of these may be activities demanded of me, but while operating at interstices, I am situated within discourses rather than imposed upon them. Rather than ‘act as’,  I am acting ‘within’.>>> 

Underground was an exhibition, a printed publication, and a series of film screenings and events staged in Road Records, an independent record store in Dublin, co-curated by Peter Maybury and Dennis McNulty with a publication designed and edited by Peter Maybury. The exhibition was supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. The show included work by artists, musicians, DJs, writers, film-makers, publishers, and designers. Four film screenings were presented in conjunction with the Darklight film festival at Filmbase, Dublin. A 192 page publication featuring wide-ranging contributions was published in an edition of 500 copies. A series of events in the exhibition space included an audio playback, a live-streamed band practice, and an online auction of Northern Soul records. The only online content produced was a single-page website with downloadable ‘Postscript’ PDF and a MySpace account, at the time (2008) one of the most popular online outlets for independent music producers.

Road Records became a hub for the Dublin independent music scene during the 2000s, selling and releasing locally produced music, hosting in-store gigs, and as a place for conversation. By 2008, Road like many independent record stores, was struggling to survive. Dennis McNulty approached me with a project for which he had received Arts Council funding, reflecting on a 15-year-period of largely undocumented culture of independent music; the dramatic changes in our relation to and consumption of music; and its impact on that culture.>>> Dennis is a visual artist and like me has been active in independent music production in various entities since the 1990s. At the time of Underground, we were working together on a number of projects including Serverproject, a four person networked electronic sound-performance ensemble. Dennis initially asked me to design the book, but from our earliest conversations my role was more holistic, and he generously suggested we share the curatorship. Visual art and music are two areas of activity which, while having obvious commonalities, operate quite distinctly, often with distinct audiences, and it was our intent to merge these perspectives, and this is reflected in the scope of participant-contributors.

The exhibition was presented in the disused basement of the shop, where I designed and built the display, working from what was there to repurpose CD bins as vitrines, shop counter as display case, with wall displays adapted to accommodate artworks; we added a turntable, cassette player, DVD players, projectors, headphones and speakers. The book was designed over a ten day period, so as a matter of expediency, I edited it as it came about. Dennis and I held a shared understanding of what we were trying to achieve, and much of this went unspoken. As effective insiders we knew the terrain of our enquiry but were allowing the material, and the contributors to shape this. I drew on the visual language of the shop – since everything was painted bright yellow I made the pages of the book yellow –  and I adapted the shop’s roadsign-style logo as a cover design. If additional photographs were needed, I took them or we commissioned them. The material in the book is arranged alphabetically, a structural imposition in keeping with record collecting which I used to emphasise the polyvocality of the contributions through resultant collisions and juxtapositions.

 

 

Being There¹⁰⁷ 107. Available at: https://architecturefoundation.ie/projects/the-lives-of-spaces/ [Accessed 22 March 2025]

Again here by stealth, we arrive just on time to hear the last of the opening speeches (we’ve travelled all night from our friends’ wedding in Tavira). We’re in the Palazzo Giustinian Lolin for the Venice Biennale and Tom has commissioned me to make Relayer, a film which is screened within Delay, a one person cinema for exhibition (Fig 57). While the film is essential to the exhibit, it seems to go unnoticed. Being late doesn’t help but I get a curious sense of not being here. In Relayer, we see a woman in close-up, and are lead to believe from the soundtrack and flickering light that she is watching a film. Using a periscope trick, as a visitor to the exhibition watching the film, you can be seen from the other side of the armature, watching the film. On a water taxi to the venue Hugh asks what I know of the Kiarostami film, Shirin, playing at the Venice Film Festival.^{108 108.} Available at: https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirin_(film) [Accessed 22 March 2025] It apparently comprises only close-up shots of women whom we are lead to believe are watching a film.>>>

Fig. 58. Being There

Relayer/ Delay was made as a research piece towards the completion of Pálas Cinema in Galway. The two strands – film and armature – were developed independently, and Tom had no sight of the film until it was completed, but this way of working through conversation by now characterises our mutually constituent practice as Gall. Together, film and armature create a neat diagram of this mutual constituency. On a screen a woman watches a film, while as viewer, you too are watching a film, but in fact you are looking at a two-way mirror, on which a reflection of the film is cast. From the other side, you can be seen framed in close-up as if on a screen, watching a film.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beginning on page 124, roughly in the middle and taking up almost a quarter of Vertical Thoughts, are 72 pages of beautifully reproduced pages from the catalogue to the exhibition Six Painters (1967), curated by Morton Feldman.^{109 109.} Available at: https://imma.ie/whats-on/vertical-thoughts-morton-feldman-and-the-visual-arts/  [Accessed 22 March 2025] When designing Vertical Thoughts, I was insistent that the catalogue should be reproduced in its entirety, and this meant covers, endpapers, frontispiece, foreword too (paratexts). Each page is reproduced at actual size in spreads placed on a black background, and since the hosting book is considerably larger than the catalogue, almost half of each page is black. In its eidetic intertextuality it is quite simple: the Six Painters exhibition, the catalogue and some of the artworks within it are referred to often in Vertical Thoughts so it serves to illustrate, but it has considerable further influence. The impact of the black across so many pages is to cause a complete break in the flow of Vertical Thoughts. This is a book within a book. We are looking at reproductions of texts (which in some ways thus become concretised as image objects), and reproductions of paintings, some of which are in black and white, and the warm-toned paper and its discoloured edges all provide additional signals for the viewer-reader.>>> The catalogue is as unaltered as possible (accepting that it is only a reproduction), yet the presentation causes subtle and dramatic shifts in its reading. It is transformed through such high-quality scanning and printing, elevating ephemera (a catalogue), to artwork status in this new context.

 

 

Temperance
Usually they make oil tanks but Adrian and his father have agreed to make Temperance for us, a sculpture in mild steel. We’ve a very modest budget which sets out an equation – four 6mm steel sheets, each 1,500 x 3,000 mm; fabrication; and transport to the site – all at a very friendly price. We go out to the workshop where Adrian has produced two 1:10 scale miniatures with slightly different geometries. Seeing these and the full-size sheets laid out on the floor it’s obvious which is going to be the better version. The language of the piece comes from the economy of the commission – the consensus is that 6mm in a 3 metre sheet will hold its form; we will use only cuts and welds; mild steel, not Corten, so we know it will weather almost immediately – but this is just a temporary sculpture. I’ve brought along a paper template for the lettering that is to circumscribe the piece, spelling out A R E T H U S A across its four inclined planes. The way I’ve designed this looks good on paper but you can’t make it like that in steel – it needs to be translated. Adrian looks at the lettering and decides he can cut it freehand, with an oxyacetylene torch. The next time we see Temperance it’s strapped to the deck of a six tonne truck being unloaded at the gates of the Hunt Museum in Limerick. It’s craned into place, much like you would a skip, and released from its harness. We adjust its orientation to north with a shove and the aid of a compass Tom buys from a camping shop. The truck-driver heads off.

Fig. 59. Maybury, P. and dePaor. T. (2010), Temperance, mild steel, 3000 x 3000 x 1000mm.

 

Temperance is a sculptural work I made with Tom dePaor at the invitation of Elizabeth Hatz, curator of EV+A for the 2010 edition of the exhibition. It is fabricated from four 6mm mild steel sheets each 3000 x 1500 mm, its scale and geometry derived from these commonly available sheet sizes. The four plates incline and are seam welded. Its form is a truncated, inverted pyramid. At the centre of each plate two stacked letterforms are inscribed by oxy-acetylene torch. Fabricated from mild steel, its rapid oxidation results in total discolouration, contaminating the rainwater which flows onto the courtyard. Temperance was installed on the forecourt of the Hunt Museum from 2010 until 2022 when it was re-sited at VISUAL, Carlow for inclusion in I See Earth: Building and Ground. It was subsequently moved to Dysart, Greystones, where it currently resides.

 

 

Reservoir (Maybury, P. and dePaor, T. [2010]) was published by Gall Editions as a reader to Temperance. It was co-authored by Peter Maybury and Tom dePaor, and restages or enacts some of the conversations through which Temperance came about, presenting images and pages from books, held open and photographed, and a brief description of the object including documentary photographs of its fabrication, it’s siting, and the work photographed in-situ from multiple perspectives on the day of its installation. These are followed by detail photographs showing initial effects of oxidation and water ponding. A short text by the museum curator is presented in calligrammatic form.^{110 110.} The calligrammatic form was chosen in reference to EV+A curator Elizabeth Hatz’s Calligrammatic essay reproduced in Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher (2010). Hatz was invited by us to contribute a text relating to the work of deBlacam & Meagher, which she proposed as three adjacent typographic units, to the left in the form of a circle, the central text as a square, and to the right a block divided into two columns expressing a line.

Mutual Constituency in the Practice of Gall

Exemplar: Temperance/Reservoir (first formal outing and hinge moment in establishing Gall entity).

(Temperance) Reservoir
Temperance is at an intersection of Tom’s and my discrete practices.>>> It is a lettered sheet of paper folded as maquette, then translated in miniature to steel, then realised at scale as place. If thought about diagrammatically, it articulates commonalities in our disciplines: speculative arrangement on a page prefigures three-dimensional realisation achieved through material and spatial translation, placed in a socio-cultural context. A book and a building both exist first in draft (‘on paper’) before meeting the contingencies of site, technological processes, and external influence. 

Thematically, Temperance is framed as a nymphaeum dedicated to Arethusa, and this framing (an archetype) intersects with its siting in overlapping concerns such as monument and memorial; rain; flooding (amplified by its siting at the confluence of the Shannon and Abbey rivers); and its name derives from the nearby Temperance Society on Lwr. Cecil Street. Temperance cuts across several discourses. As a temporary exhibition commission it was able to infiltrate or contaminate the established order of the museum collection. Both elegant and obtrusive in the entrance courtyard, it interrupted or disturbed the path and encounter of the museum visitor entering and leaving. What developed as a point of contention with change of museum Director (the former Director, Hugh Maguire, wrote in praise of Temperance for Reservoir), was the orange discharge onto the courtyard. As the mild steel corroded, contaminated rainwater wept through the cut-out lettering, staining the setts. Although designed and expected – both as metaphor for the perspiring Arethusa and functionally as drainage holes – this damage over time created a counter-hegemonic clash for the museum as a place of preservation, conservation, and propositional fixity against the impermanence of the visibly decaying object.

During its time at the Hunt Museum it acted as signpost and landmark from the street,>>> while in its later siting during I See Earth, elevated and placed on the roof of a walkway at the façade of VISUAL, it acted again as a sign, this time more redolent of rural water towers, while its geometry was in sympathy with the building itself, a contemporary arts space (Fig. 60).^{111 111.} I See Earth, Building and Ground 1991–2021, Tom dePaor, was a survey show and retrospective exhibition held in VISUAL, Carlow, 26 February – 22 May 2022. ‘The work defies an easy description; it encompasses poetry, prose, watercolours, vast three-dimensional wireframe drawings, films by Peter Maybury, light and shadow. Urgently present, and immersively beautiful, it is not a work ‘about’ architecture in any conventional sense.’ Clancy, A. Available at: https://drawingmatter.org/tom-depaor-i-see-earth/ [Accessed 22 March 2025] Thus Temperance is read within its own explicit discourse, and read against its setting, but any fixed meaning is always deferred. Both during I See Earth and in its current siting at Dysart, Co. Wicklow, the miniature co-exists with the full size.^{112 112.} As well as the full scale work outside, the 1:10 maquette was exhibited inside, near to the room where On Being There was screened, and Temperance is also represented in my film. Each re-siting brings a new context and a new reading. 

Reservoir (Temperance)
Although its primary enquiry is built around Temperance and its associations (or intertexts), Reservoir is also a quasi-enactment of a practice model, situating the convergences of both our practices in conversation and exchange, and articulating a version of what Gall is. In this sense it has a metatextual relationship, uniting a given text (Temperance), to another (Gall). Much of the usual paratextual material is absent from Reservoir. There is no introduction or contextual text, individual reproductions are attributed to their sources, and dePaor and I are credited as editors, but there is no hierarchy of authorship. Reservoir restages and dramatises (by hands Fig. 61 [plate 17] and by a stone thrown into water [Plates 2 & 22]) conversations that take place around the mutual constituency of our practice. Source and reference material is arranged side by side, often as images of open books offered as if in conversation. The task and discussion at hand is the productive convoking and arrangement of material, rather than ‘honorific’ presentation of an artwork (Kostelanetz, 1978: 28), with the reader expected to immerse themselves in the fragmentary material, piecing together a narrative or argument. As a model we can imagine other conversations (this one is a restaging of the kind of discussion and references that went into Temperance’s conception) that could have different inputs but would produce a similar diagram – an exchange across various fields filtered through a medium (here the book paradigm).

All of the photographs, books or films I make with Tom are contingent on the space that is made available through working with him – a space (a discourse and an audience) otherwise unavailable to me, and reciprocally, these outcomes (the book, the photograph, the film) extend or make new spaces or terrains available to Tom in which to extend his practice discourse. Gall firstly produces conversations informed by our distinct discipline perspectives, interests and insights, and from this we devise a brief to respond to. In all of this I am always testing/measuring the instrumental practice of graphic design against other (real world) discourses. Graphic design has inherent charge in its visual and material presence (even a type specimen catalogue can provide a visceral thrill), but its productivity is fleeting and superficial unless activating or in pursuit of an enquiry beyond its own formality. Then its processes, degree of mastery, its formal devices, and technicity can produce dimension or resonance; they put things in play.>>>

In Reservoir, the object is a ‘self-cover’ (Fig. 62), with visible glue strip along the spine, so presents both as a book without a cover, and an image of a book inside its cover.>>> The cover is an image of an endpaper, and title, authors, publisher, and date are overlaid. This brings the book space into dialogue with the content. It is already (and always) open, or exposed – it is showing us the inside of something, in this case a developmental process. Inside, dictionary definitions are shown as images of book pages so that we see a definition only in relation to others that surround it, alluding to the convocation of meaning. Contextual source material is woven into the themes of Temperance, locating Gall in the enquiry, thus articulating our practice as a contributory rather than sole authors. In subsequent pages (Fig. 8 of Reservoir onwards), references are mixed with process images, bringing iteration and technicity into the discourse – we see Temperance in the workshop prior to letter-cutting and weathering. Here its formal qualities (flat mild-steel sheets becoming volume) are redolent of other water carriers and industrial machinery. In subsequent pages its intrinsic nature (or value) as cultural object is challenged as we see the object lowered from a truck, resembling a skip. This perception is immediately challenged by the turn of the page and a full-bleed image of the freshly sited piece in full sun, its shadow occupying the same area as the object itself, its north indicator cast sharply on the setts (see Fig. 59 above). Chronology is then disrupted as we see subsequent weathering, before more reference images including a notebook sketch of a precedent to Temperance, and then further views pre-decay. In Reservoir, none of the themes or intentions of Temperance are explicitly stated. It is through their convoking that any reading might be made, and this remains unstable.

 

 

Books are always a negotiation, a performance, an event.

(Borsuk, 2018: 147)

of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) was Ireland’s participation at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, 2010, of which I was co-curator, addressing the built and unbuilt portfolio of de Blacam and Meagher, an award-winning Irish architectural practice established in 1976.^{113 113.} La Biennale di Venezia is a bi-annual international architecture exhibition which takes place in Venice. An invited director selects a theme for the biennale, and participating countries appoint a commissioner/curator(s) to respond to this theme. In 2010 the curator was Kazuyo Sejima and the theme was ‘People meet in architecture’. The curatorial team was Tom dePaor, Peter Maybury, Cian Deegan, Alice Casey. Commissioner: Irish Architecture Foundation under the directorship of Nathalie Weadick. The overarching subject of the curation however was the dilemma of exhibiting architecture, particularly when amplified by its setting in the built intensity of Venice, and the high-key charge of the Biennale. Amidst the complexities of creating an exhibition about architecture within another architectural space and context, the installation performed as an exhibition display, replica archive, repository and reading room. The exhibition in Venice took the form of an oversized (A2 approx.) unbound book Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher (2010), comprising five discrete volumes, published in an edition of 9,000 copies for free distribution and arranged as paper stacks on five items of bespoke joinery in counterpoint with the architecture of the San Gallo oratory. The curation directly addresses the Biennale’s theme ‘People meet in architecture’. To visit the exhibition was to encounter and activate the artwork by moving through it, handling and removing copies of each volume (Fig. 63). The viewer-reader was able to walk amongst the stacks, browse the publication inside the oratory, and take copies away. The space was transformed by the interaction of visitors who interrupted the grid by browsing, disturbing and removing copies, making a physical imprint on the space, collectively changing its form. If a visitor chose to take copies home, a second, slower, engagement of close reading might occur over time. 

Capture: Intertextual and Transtextual Resonances Throughout the Exhibition

Here I am writing about the mutual constituency of author-producer (who makes ready) and viewer-reader (who sets it going), releasing potential meaning through the transaction of Energy Transfer (an entelechy of the construct).+ Barthes argues that ‘the Text is a methodological field’ (1978: 157). What I am producing is the ‘text’ through a bricoleur methodology, one which draws on a repertoire of knowledge, technologies, observations, sagacity, expertise and techniques to convoke disciplines and discourses, in a multivalent, polyvocal, transtextual ensemble; a constellation, to be ‘experienced only in an activity of production’ (ibid.) of the reader – it is ‘radically symbolic’ (ibid.: 159).

I Am Sitting at a Table (1)
I am sitting at a table with pages 78 and 79 of the ‘Writing’ volume of Irlanda spread out in front of me. It’s the size of a newspaper, printed on paper resembling newsprint (just a little heavier), with text in full-length columns, six per page, peppered by inset images. Headings are slightly larger and bolder than the body text, and image captions are set in a small sans-serif type. The copy I am viewing has been roughly quarter-folded, and the sheets are discoloured. 

Beginning at the top of the left page in a single column is a photo of Campo San Gallo which I took on our first recci. Two people stand chatting on a corner, and there is a hard shadow across the Campo. The doors of the oratory are shut. Beneath this Nathalie’s introduction speaks of the perceived loss in locating a national pavilion outside of the confines of the Giardini, countering with how in this curation it has been decisive in shaping the outcome. The exhibition begins, she explains, as you enter the square, in dialogue with its setting. The curation grounds the work of de Blacam and Meagher in the people who use their buildings, and ‘the act of reading and observation, research and questioning… and public encounter’ are foregrounded. Below the introduction is a short essay charting the history and foundation of the Irish Architectural Archive, to which the physical archive of de Blacam and Meagher is to be donated. It’s tone is prosaic, concluding with contact information and opening hours. We’re at the top of the page again and a reproduction of the 9th century St. Gall plan with beneath a brief, potted history of St. Gall. Tom and I wrote this. The plan is too small to read fully, but as the earliest preserved building plan. Well known to architects, the reproduction stands in as placeholder for what it signifies. Adjacent to this is a marked-up photograph of the Dining Hall chair from Trinity College Dublin, a design by de Blacam and Meagher modelled on a chair found at the Casino, Marino, of which Tom has designed a new version (a copy of a copy) for the exhibition. Beneath this is the exhibition plan for our exhibition at San Gallo in Venice, and an essay by Sarah Pierce titled ‘The archive, becoming’ which I commissioned. I’ve worked with Sarah before, and much of her artistic practice is built around archive, so her perspective in this context seems important. Alongside her essay is a photo (by Sarah) of the Twin Towers, and a quote from Henri Lefebvre. The final third of this left hand page is completed by four items: A drawing of an Aer Lingus sign; a text by dancer Michael Keegan-Dolan, a text by photographer Peter Cook who made many of the photographs which form the archive, and a visual for the colour scheme of a Gulf Stream jet owned by businessman Denis O’Brien, at the top left corner of which the word ‘Yes’ is hand-written. On the opposite page are two articles written by former employees of the architects’ office, one speaking of the influence of Louis Kahn, the other of Celsing and Lewerentz. Beneath these are a poem by a barrister client, a poem by film producer Lelia Doolan, and a reflection by Hugh Campbell on his early years working at the architects’ practice. The page concludes with texts on drawing and archive written by the architects. In total the spread contains some 5,000 words and 11 images.

Fig. 64 I Am Sitting at a Table (1).

Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) comprises five volumes as an unbound book, of which ‘Writing’ is the last. The vignette above illustrates the multivalency and polyvocality of the project. As curators, we brought together many voices through artifacts and accounts within and around the practice of de Blacam and Meagher. Rather than overtly imposing a critical, curatorial reading, the arrangement of the material on the page and in the room is a physical and spatial manifestation of this idea. Compressed information is stored (in a depot or collection point) to meet the viewer-reader, who encounters the material at various speeds. Initially this is through the physical/proprioceptive encounter with the oratory, the materials (wood, paper), and their superimposition on the existing architecture of the oratory. Subsequently, the visitor may choose to take copies away, which now reside on a shelf as part of a library or collection (another depot), available for multiple (slower) readings over time.

In of de Blacam and Meagher (2010), the book and exhibition curation are understood as a publication. In the context of Venice, with high visitor numbers, and addressing our concern over spread and distribution (previous exhibition publications for Ireland’s pavilion have limited circulation due to unit cost and quantity), we agreed that there should be a high print run (9,000 copies). The amassing of so much paper for exhibition determines that the book en mass is of the scale of sculpture. In this holistic framing, the book also performs as a sculptural object, read against the (blanked) altars of the oratory. Indeed, the visitors’ experience of it is part sculptural, part architectural. They must move through the space, in effect through the pages of the book, immersed in its material presence. The physicality of the paper becomes legible as a sculptural component in dialogue with the timber of the pallets beneath, and the stone of the floors and alters. The visitor’s proprioception is heightened. The ‘Archive’ (Volumes 1–3) includes the designs of chapels and churches, so the setting in the San Gallo oratory has transtextual resonance, and offers further material context.  

The objects we insert into the space – the paper stacks; the oak joinery which forms floors or low tables on which the book is arranged; the Gall chairs which spill out onto the Campo – are material transpositions of encounter with the buildings of de Blacam and Meagher. The order of this arrangement – five volumes organised by typology, the grid structuring these page layouts, the consequent sizing and grid of the oak furniture and its placement in relation to the existing plan of the oratory – is considered as a whole, and the movement and interaction of the visitor in the space and with this material, through their removal of copies of the book is a performance of this transposition.

The Unbound Book
In another sense the venue and the staging of the material can be thought about as paratextual. They serve as covers to the unbound sections of the book and further  ‘bind’ the text (Genette, 1997: 3), providing surrounding context – the biennale, its theme ‘People meet in architecture’; the oratory itself, whose doors might stand in for the opening of the book (on the threshold is written ‘Irlanda’), while the timber on which the sections rest is its binding. To remove volumes from the space is to unbind or undo the book from this context. While this might sound fanciful, the framing of the entirety of the Irish Pavilion as a publication is played out even in the clothing of the invigilators, as actors on the set, whose t-shirts display the ISBN of the book (Fig. 65).

 

Storage and Release

I have set out my ‘energy transfer’ construct as a tripartite sequence of ‘capture, storage, and release’, an idea which emerged through the physicality of drumming.+ In performing music, this transaction is almost instantaneous, with the audience feeding back that energy directly to the performer. The Irish Pavilion delivers this same energy transfer in a more diagrammatic way and at a slower pace.

For Irlanda: of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) there is also a delay. The book is experienced first spatiotemporally, and subsequently as artifact and storage mechanism. In the exhibition the viewer is not only active reader, but visible participant, their corporeal presence both completing their reading of the text, and contributing to the intended choreography of the space through their participation. The visitor is an inadvertent actor on a staged set, amongst the props, while the room becomes theatrical with the presence of the viewer. In Magan’s film dBMgallo I am interviewed seated within the space (Fig. 66).^{114 114.} Magan, R. (dir.) (2011) dBMgallo. Dublin: Irish Architecture Foundation. I become an actor on the (available) set and what I say is coloured by my photographed presence contained as I am within the mass of paper. There is a latent energy in this accumulation of printed material, and an authority in its physicality. 

The book is unbound, contributing to a sense of the disposable and the precious held in tension through the context (a national pavilion publication); the material represented (a significant body of work by an established practice); and the materiality of the publication (its volume). Yet there are so many copies on display that the sense of uniqueness or preciousness is undone. Its resemblance to a newspaper implies that it is ephemera, the antithesis of an artist’s book or multiple. Yet once removed, the printed matter acquires a new-found preciousness. In the hands of the owner/ collector, it becomes rarity, bespoke, an artifact of/from an exhibition. These are the ‘two speeds’ of the exhibition thought about as book object. In the oratory, the visitor perceives the physicality of the book while interacting with the object and its content, turning the pages, or studiously reading. They may carefully move or carelessly dislodge the volumes, each time affecting the physical composition. They might remove a copy to read it seated on a chair in the Campo, or may fold or roll it and take it away. Once removed they are available as any portable, printed item is for later reading, or disposal. As Nicholas Bourriaud remarks of Felix Gonzales-Torres Stacks and piles of sweets, ‘the visitor had to understand that his gesture was contributing to the break-up of the work.’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 39). Tightly stacked, any disruption or removal signals to the visitor that they are ‘breaking-up’ this work, but in doing so are acquiring an artifact which by the passing of time would, and has become, a rarefied and sought-after object. This is often the fate of the low-cost multiple or volume, and something of which we were aware of in making it.^{115 115.} Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, originally published in short run sold for $3 a copy, but now sells for thousands of dollars if available at all. Individual copies of Sniffin’ Glue, at the time published in runs of up to 10,000 copies, now sell for hundreds of euro. Published in London by Mark Perry in 1976–77, by May 2022 the complete 12 issues was available online as a set, housed in a purpose-made cloth slipcase with leather label to the spine, with an asking price of STG£7,000.00.  

 

Energy Transfer: The ‘Capture, Storage, Release’ Chain of Recording Thread Pulls

Energy Transfer/ Aura
We travel to Gothenburg by train to play at Koloni, in a repurposed venue we played the previous year (at one time it was a school). Some people have seen us before and have come back for more, but on this scale the circuit of gigs is promoter-led and audiences form a community of people happy to take a chance on you. Just like at the Joinery there is no stage.+ The first act is a brass band, and as audience we encircle them as they play. The room is full of energy, and everyone is curious and hungry for new sounds. We play an explosive show despite a shambolic drumkit and some dreadful, inadequate amplifiers that produce sounds we’ve never heard before – it feels like a high-point. We are participant in a collective energy. At the end of the set we stand by the open windows as the long white curtains sway in the cool breeze. We are soaked in sweat.

The next day we are in Copenhagen to begin recording. The sessions do not go well. We’re recording onto multi-track tape through an analog desk with lots of beautiful vintage outboard effects and processors. There are shelves full of drums and amps to choose from, everyone is enthusiastic, everything is ideal, we just can’t get back out the sounds we’re putting in. We try different snare drums, different microphones, I even change stick-grip. Gavin and I put in all we’ve got only to sound lacklustre on tape. We leave with four songs tracked but we never listen back to the recordings.^{116 116.} Link to footage from recording sessions in Copenhagen, 2011] An edited version of this video forms one of the Make Ready films. Available at: https://youtu.be/R04ibCkr7xQ [Accessed 22 March 2025].>>> 

Fig. 67 Energy Transfer/Aura

Fig. 68 Make Ready, 86 (New Thoughts)
A microphone and a speaker are essentially the same. They are both transducers. They take acoustical energy and convert it into electrical energy or vice versa. 

2010, Thread Pulls has been a two-piece for three years by now and I’m playing drums and synthesizers; Gavin sings, plays the bass and the trumpet. We’ve played this music out live for some time, so the proposition is to capture our live energy but with ‘good’ production values. Stephen agrees to record us. Everything is close-mic’d and multitracked, but the drums go down in single takes. Stephen dismantles and rewires a loudspeaker to make a microphone (a sub-kick) to capture more sub-bass frequencies from the kick drum. These would have been my father’s speakers, the ones which, growing up, I’d have received my musical education through. I play one song too fast but we don’t spot it until after we strike the kit, so it has to be corrected digitally. There is a protracted period of overdubbing, editing and mixing. The remaining part of the speaker (the tweeter) forms part of the album cover art. I scan Gavin’s head and mine to make two front covers. In each image, the speaker (sound emitter) faces outward from the ear (the receiver) – the wires are recrossed.

 

The Gall films are propositions, iterations of an enquiry, and the material is generally reworked with each exhibition, undoing its fixity or notions of closure, and Thread Pulls more widely can be thought about as an iterative proposition: Gigs and recordings are adjustments to balances/ tolerances of audience engagement, palette, timbre, and structure. Each (series of) gigs is a version, with a developed or advancing iterative idea; and each recording has a new paradigm/ intention which is then inserted into the field using conventional (but subcultural) mechanisms: gigs, press/ media; interviews; touring; recording; labels; support slots with bigger bands in larger venues to grow audience. A gig is charged by the energy transfer between us (Gavin and me), the sound, the room, and the audience (Fig. 69). During a performance, arrangement and structure are substantially fixed but there are aleatoric elements, and there are mistakes and technical issues, with each sound is shaped by the sound of the room, and how we play is altered in response to this. 

When we take the music to the studio, decisions such as duration and repetition which make sense in front of an audience may lose momentum in recorded context. The timbre of instruments is more controlled in a studio and the particular characteristics of each instrument can be crafted to desired effect. Various processing techniques are applied, the most familiar is adding reverb to create an artificial space, but other processes are more radical (delays for example) reshaping the composition. In 2010 Gavin and I recorded the début Thread Pulls album. With Summer Songs and the Fluorescent series (in an earlier three-person line-up), we worked with spontaneous composition, with parts recorded simultaneously, but for New Thoughts, drums are recorded first with a guide track for bass and vocals, both of which are overdubbed separately later on. With New Thoughts though Gavin and I discuss at length the type of record we want and what the recording should reflect and achieve. The energy and sound of a live performance are not available, so must to be simulated or transposed. For New Thoughts,we focussed on the vinyl release, approaching the album as a distinct listening experience which takes place in the home or in headphones.^{117 117.} ‘.debut album New Thoughts, a pounding, percussion-dominated record... with its skeletal, sinister grooves’  drownedinsound.com (2011). Available at:  http://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4142085-drowned-in-dublin-2 [Accessed 22 March 2025].>>>

New Thoughts is a recording of material which had been performed to audiences for up to two years. Musically, it is an amalgamation of our listening and playing experience with its implicit cultural specificity and political intertextuality, technically and compositionally informed by playing live. The ad hoc studio, and borrowing and improvising (adapting) of equipment bring with them their own sub-cultural text, as does recording with friends from the scene rather than industry experts.^{118 118.} An example of this is the sub-kick microphone referred to in Make Ready , 86 which we rewired from an old loudspeaker. Thus, the ‘capture’ both attracts external influence inwards and projects a reader-writer perspective – a new text informed by existing texts, produced in relation to a complex existing ensemble.

The ‘storage’ here concerns a methodological bricolage of effects on which I draw to produce a transposition, from live to recorded sound. In acknowledging that the two are distinct, the conceptual parameters I set are that the album should reflect an energy while not necessarily being reflective of the live sound. Accepting the recording studio as a musical instrument as discernable as any other instrument, we make a translation from performance to recording. This process draws upon many aspects of my instrumental set: the mutual constituency between Gavin and me in our objectives; the technicity in recording, attuned to its parameters and adapting to chance; timbre and its cultural associations; and intuitive sagacity – being able to find, to hand, the right solution to any given situation, and attuned to possibilities that arise. A simple example of this is an overhead ribbon microphone which was placed on the drumkit. Ribbon mics are supposedly more neutral sounding and do not add ‘colour’ but in this instance, the mic provided an overloaded signal which we then used to shape the character of the drum sound for the record. In each case decisions and negotiations are informed, even subconsciously by our political intertextuality. These ‘effects’ then are put in service to affecting a transformation – producing an output that is open to the listener to interpret.

At the point of ‘release’, the artifact (the digital and physical album release) is coloured by its paratexts – the album cover, the label, the distribution network; and a vertical intertextuality – the response and peer review of the listener, which is in turn informed by their political intertextuality. This surrounding text, much of it beyond our control, becomes part of the overall text of the release.^{119 119.} ‘I scan Gavin’s head and mine to make two front covers. In each image, the speaker (sound emitter) faces outward from the ear (the receiver) – the wires are recrossed.’ (Maybury, 2015a: 86)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tuxedo Junction, 1960
We photograph texts to make them images. Text as image, image as text in an ‘amplification’ (Genette) of what is already there. The book as armature, and the surrounding architecture or super-structure of its coming into being (artist, curator, commissioner, profile, exhibition context, gallery, audience) already exist at the same time as text and image. The text cannot be published (seen) outside of these pragmatics of context. The effect of photographing the text changes the material presence, overtly signals ‘image’ since it is reproduced photographically, but through printing and reproduction it becomes, just like all other elements on the page, an arrangement of ink on substrate. It’s ‘signing’ as photograph relies on a notion of the photographic object, or the notion of an original document or artifact.

Fig. 70 Tuxedo Junction

Transposition and Mutual Constituency

‘The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image’, an essay by Alex Potts, is reproduced in its entirety in Tuxedo Junction, 1960, the first book I make with Gerard.^{121 121.} Potts, A. (1999) ‘The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image’, Sculpture and photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press We reproduce the entire essay as photographic images – the pages of the book laid open and photographed on a timber background, captioned as ‘Eighteen photographs depicting… an essay by Alex Potts’.>>> I was unaware of the Potts text until working with Gerard on this book, and its reference to Smithson’s views on photographing his work stayed with me, although the particular resonance it has for my practice only became evident while writing this thesis. The uncertainty that comes with presenting iterative versions of an image (multiple views) ‘diverts the[se] space[s]’ (de Certeau, 1998: 30) and can bring other types of information into view. Potts is speaking of Smithson’s concern as articulated in ‘Art Through the Camera’s Eye’ (1996) with undoing, through a multiplicity of images, ‘the framing closures of a single privileged view’ (1999: 184).^{122 122.} Smithson, R. (1996) ‘Art Through the Camera’s Eye’ 1971/1991’, Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press. Potts further notes ‘He (Smithson) was quite explicit that in photographing his environmental work, the photographer was not to represent it as object or image but to project an encounter with it...’ (ibid.) These two thoughts resonate with me as they encapsulate much of what I have learned through practice.>>> In Make Ready in what must have been a subconscious reference I write:

Fig. 71 Make Ready, 96
Multiple views can help to disrupt a fixed reading. Using all the available documentation material, the spreads in Obscure Flows Boil Underneath ISBN: 978-1-907020-82-7 are arranged to provide ‘impossible views’, actual experience as an amalgam of memory and the present. Two simultaneous perspectives of one object are shown, with inset views of a video projection in the preceding room of the gallery, alongside three frames from the video. Elsewhere, a sculpture photographed from two opposing views is sub-divided across four pages. We see one view split at its centre, turning the page once for its mirror image, and again to see the remaining half of the first image. We must manipulate the pages to complete the view, just as in the physical space we must move around the object.

The book Obscure Forms Boil Underneath (2011) which I made with Dennis McNulty, includes photographs taken at his exhibition Framework/Rupture staged at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin in 2008. My particular interest in this book was the rupture between experience and representation.^{123 123.} Available at: https://www.greenonredgallery.com/exhibitions-list/dennis-mcnulty-framework/rupture [ Accessed 22 March 2025]>>>  While I experienced this exhibition first hand, this was not always the case with the books I produced with Gerard; my encounter with Dennis’ exhibition helped to crystalise both my difficulties with or resistance to installation photographs as art book ‘currency’, and the reconceptualising of the book as exhibitionary space (see Make Ready, 104). A Late Evening in the Future presents documentary material from three exhibitions over an extended time-period. Bloom-Christen and Grunow (2022), in their discussion of the use and purpose of vignettes in an ethnographic context, refer to Lila Abu-Lughod’s observation that anthropologists produce ‘fictions’, although these are not necessarily ‘fictitious’ (Bloom-Christen and Grunow, 2022: 11).>>> In ‘Art Through the Camera’s Eye’, Smithson describes the ‘open landscape’, wherein multiple views ‘reveal a clash of angles and orders within a sense of simultaneity’ (Smithson, 1996: 374). I encounter this essay some time after making A Late Evening in the Future yet it reads as a hidden intent describing what the book achieves. 

A Late Evening in the Future: Signal Spectre System was published in 2018 by Verlag für moderne Kunst, and relates to a series of three exhibitions by Gerard Byrne, at Frac des Pays de la Loire; Carquefou, Kunstmuseum St.Gallen; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. The book was published in German/English and French/English editions and is distributed internationally by Verlag für moderne Kunst. I designed and supervised production of the book, and it was edited by me with Gerard Byrne and Sven Anderson. This large-format (‘coffee table’-sized) book in hardcover and dust-jacket has extensive colour reproductions and high production values, and contains written texts by five authors.

In the course of developing each book with Gerard, different strategies, and ways of working are employed, each challenging and increasing the tolerances of a publication of its sort. As a longitudinal practice enquiry read from within my practice, their development is legible as a linear progression, but viewed in isolation each book (and particularly A Late Evening in the Future), requires a significant effort on the part of the reader to enter the respective constellations they enact. Is this a reasonable expectation?

No Way In
In conversation with Gerard (12 January 2023), he suggests that for all its achievements A Late Evening in the Future does not provide a way in for the reader. He’s laughingly recalling an instance from the making of the Loch Ness book where, to our mutual delight, words in the curator’s text became completely obscured and illegible – a result of the system or ‘dogma’ I have imposed on the book design. At the time we played out the argument – ‘Why should the book conform to the text’s assertion of authority over the page?’ I relish these moments when systems collide and failure is exposed. We later recant as it is the reasonable thing to do, but it somehow feels like a loss. For Gerard, with A Late Evening in the Future, this thinking goes too far. Ultimately I disagree, and this thesis goes some way to investigating why. The book, viewed afresh by me with the distance of five years since its making, seems the most extreme in the series, and perhaps an exhaustion of the potential of this approach, but only because it is so radical. It’s curious to see it this way now – at the time of making we were unaware of this, or that it would be the last in the series trajectory.

Fig. 72 No Way In

Transposition, or ‘serious Transformation’ (Hypertext to Hypotext)
Exemplar: A Late Evening in the Future: Signal Spectre System: Gerard Byrne (2018)

 

I Am Sitting at a Table (2)>>>

In front of me is A Late Evening in the Future, the most recent of the books I have produced with Gerard, and it starts at full tilt: On the cover, reproduced with high-gloss varnish is an ‘in-between’ (or transitional) film image of a face, degraded by the interference of the display monitor on which it has been rephotographed for the book. In fact there appears to be seven slightly differing profiles ghosted on top of one another. Echoing this layering, the words ‘Signal’, ‘Spectre’, ‘System’ are rhythmically spaced out above, and just offset from this in larger type the main title ‘A late evening in the future’. Below and centred is typeset ‘Gerard Byrne’. (Fig. 73A)

On opening the book the inside flap of the dust jacket carries a short, rather opaque written statement in two languages. The endpapers reproduce a score or ‘Permutations’ of an exhibition schedule which resemble pages of computer code, but there’s no reference to what this actually is. Precise timecodes are accompanied by informal references (‘16: 15: 41: 00: A Don Judd’; ‘16: 19: 43: 19: Annie’s Mum’). On turning the page, the book’s contents – information typically contained within the bookblock itself – is listed on the endpaper. The half-title page opposite overlays editor and publisher names on two montaged photographs of what look like A4 pages of a schedule pinned to a wall, but the photographs are almost bleached out and really this looks more like an abstract colour composition: You might make a connection with the preceding ‘Permutation’ (and somewhere later in the text this is referenced), but for now it probably remains obscure. (Fig. 73B)

Turning to page two we cut directly into the first of six consecutive spreads of complex photo-montages. The subject of the camera’s multiple gazes is ambiguous. The images depict elements of audio-visual equipment and gallery staging – chairs, screens, projectors, but the ‘works’ – the films projected in the space and which we might expect to see – are confined to fragments or echoes, oblique and through-views in the spaces, with only an overlaid or ghosted presence. Relative scale between the images is discontinuous, with the chairs, projector and stand on the left-hand side at a smaller scale than those on the right, and thus a distorted sense of perspective is conveyed. This composite image contains many of the formal elements that recur through the publication, in particular architectural spaces populated with prominent technical apparatus for the display and presentation of audio visual material. In this sense, the spread serves as ‘scene-setter’ for the rest of the books concerns. It is within these ‘theatrical’ confines or stage(d) set that all of the individual works are sequenced and presented, and modulations to this are effected through lighting and screening-sequence choreography, collectively forming the work of the exhibitions.

The next spread shows an installation view on the left, with the remaining two-thirds of the spread filled with black ink, effectively reading as a ‘blank’ space, and with such a large page size this creates a dramatic sense of absence. I turn the page and we are in close-up, with overlaid images of three projectors bathed in green light. It’s hard to make a correlation between the projectors and their projected images as things do not align, and the subject of this montage seems to be more so the projectors in the foreground than the middle distance images that they produce. On the following spread two main images seem to be slipping into the gutter at the centre of the book. It turns out there may be three, or even four images here, a mix of installation views and film stills, but it’s hard to tell them apart. The last spread in this segment is very low-lit, with green hues on the left, and purple hues on the right. A large room is depicted but we seem to see mostly the back of things: video screens, a wall maybe, and superimposed on each page are two ghostly profiles, on the left a woman and on the right a man. The pages are so ink-saturated here that it might seem like a printing error. (Fig. 73C–E)

Following this, the first written text begins; a title block and author’s name, then paragraphs of text (in this copy it’s in French although there is a German edition too). It feels cooler, thinner now. We have entered a different space: there’s no let-up in the ink coverage, but we have switched to monotone, and this accounts for the discernible switch in atmosphere or temperature. On turning the page again, we see another title block, author’s name and essay text, this time in English, but on the facing page the text continues in French. It takes a while to adjust to this with French and English on alternating pages, out of sync by one page. In fact I get tripped up by this as I work my way through the book. All the type is set white against black and amidst multiple, layered image fragments, and although care is taken to ensure legibility, I’m conscious of this interference as we read. Images accompany rather than illustrate the written text and they often relate only indirectly. (Fig. 73F)

Fig. 73 I Am Sitting at a Table (2)

A Late Evening in the Future enacts and is exemplar of two key aspects of my thesis enquiry. The first of these is in viewing it through the lens of ‘transposition’ (Genette), and the second is with regard to the ‘collaborative’ process which I characterise as a mutual constituency, one of several mutual constituencies that are evidenced by my outputs, and are discussed elsewhere in the thesis.+ ‘Transposition’, which Genette describes as ‘serious transformation’, is for him the most important hypertextual practice – itself part of his multi-part conceptualisation of transtextuality – in which a text is derived from a previous one by means of direct or indirect transformation. Properties of transposition as I have applied them to my practice are drawn out in Images or Shadows (2011) and A Late Evening in the Future (2018); the former as hypertext to a practice through various intertextual modalities arranged as discursive constellation (see 98–100 (Images or Shadows) / ‘Subject’); the latter a hypertext to the spatiotemporal event of exhibition. I will expand here upon how I have applied this theoretical framing, and how the books become metatext to Gerard’s practice. I contend that the subject matter of the books – while premised around the exhibitions or works to which they refer or for which they were commissioned – is equally the representation of a body of work within the book paradigm, or, the book as exhibitionary space. In this framing, Gerard’s wider practice is understood as the ‘text’, and as such affords the inclusion of material beyond the exhibitions or works: reference material; process work (foretext, Genette); transtextual reference; alongside material originated specifically for the books, and where the book is their primary exhibitionary site. Gerard’s practice is thereby enabled and extended through the book paradigm and the possibilities and conjunctions this produces. It fashions another discursive space and this transposition brings about transformation. In a generic sense this is one of the fundamental motivations of my practice. Roles of curator, editor, artist, producer, and institution are amalgamated in this interstitial form, one which comes about through my practice framing. The difference in approach here reflects the space of my authorship. In constructing a transposition I must work with and through the available material and its (re)presentation. The transposition occurs through the structuring and sequencing of the material for presentation, the processes through which it is subjected, and the discursive space created through which the viewer can bring their own transtextual references. The space of my work is in this remaking. It becomes productive through this transposition as it creates a new encounter with material derived from a source but referring transtextually to the original, rather than failing in any attempt to ‘reproduce’ a spatiotemporal phenomenon. It speaks to the potentiality of the medium where the book always outlives the exhibition – thus, its value is in its ability to recast material, availing of its affordances to complexify any reading.

A Late Evening in the Future reproduces material and texts relating to exhibitions by Gerard staged in three art institutions, and although much of the screening material is common to the three exhibitions, their arrangement and sequencing (physical and temporal) in the space is unique to each setting. The screening material draws on major bodies of work by Byrne spanning more than 15 years. My transposition from this material is firstly in forming an amalgamation of three built architectural spaces as a unified conceptual paper space, with spreads and page-turns serving as proxy for spatial navigation. The book makes material translation from light and surface to ink and paper, and the representation of spatiotemporal documentation is arranged as a (fictitious) simulation of multi-image, multi-view encounter.>>> In this sense the book is also a Transmodalisation (Genette, 1997: 277)  – a further type of transposition – in that the mode of presentation (the exhibition) has been changed to that of the book with its attendant affordances. Making no apology for the fact, the mechanisms of the book are exploited using differing inputs (documentation, still images, and text, rather than the spatiotemporal elements of film and sound) to produce another version of the work but with a change of mode.

The transposition then is multi-modal, and has unique characteristics over the exhibition experience in relating the material. It presents image fixity – although I may erode this through superimposition. Documentary images are fixed, and therefore propose fixed views of an object otherwise only perceived in a spatiotemporal and proprioceptive manner; it affords the possibility to show unseen or otherwise imperceptible images >>> for contemplation, in particular the in-between frame or single image (‘images that are quite simply beyond natural optics’  [Benjamin, 2008: 6]); it provides a fixed sequence/ navigation and thereby a partial, narrative sequence, which can be cut into by the reader in the way they access the pages; it produces a hypermedial space mixing images from multiple sources, and qualities, layered with various textual material; it creates a compression of temporality – synchronic views – multiple temporalities can be presented simultaneously; it is a compression of spatiality where multiple simultaneous views otherwise not available can be presented and this can create or navigate compositional space and juxtaposition; and as a flattening device where staged props, screens and space and viewer-participant-as-actor merge on a set depicted in images, revealing them as inadvertent participant in the work’s completion, reading and presentation. >>>

Page 198 of Images or Shadows shows a frame from Gerard’s film A Thing is a Hole in a Thing it is Not. To the right is the actor who plays Frank Stella, close-ups of whom appear on the cover of the French edition of A late evening in the future. Even though I have approached both books as transpositions, in comparing image usage we get a clear indication of two radically different approaches (Fig. 74). While it is clearly the same actor in both cases, the cover presentation is abstracted to such a degree that the original visual connection to the specific work is almost lost. In fact, all of the material in A Late Evening in the Future is homogenised within the specific visual language environment of that publication: It is as if the material of the films has been ingested. Specially made photographs (there are a few in the book) show film images on a screen transitioning between single frames such that movement and fidelity/ representation are stretched and abstracted. Since we cannot perceive single frames of a film nor those moments of transition (frames which capture not much more than a blur or spectre of an image), but only their effect which we perceive as continuous motion, this composite image on the cover is otherwise unseeable. A much more common image typology, the screenshot or single frame, is however equally unseeable. In Images or Shadows we can pore over this, read it in relation to the caption, and to the text; we can fixate on details. However, while watching the film, each of the 25 frames per second forms our perception of a continuous whole. Images or Shadows for the most part though not exclusively, ‘faithfully’ presents each still from a film framed in its entirety (without cropping), and reproduced to the best of the technical capabilities of the file and the reproductive possibilities of the paper, ink, printing press and its operator(s). It is here that we see a divergence in approaches: A Late Evening in the Future tries to create, through the affordances of the book, an experience: it is a re-enactment, a dramatisation, a restaging, a reversioning on paper of scenes from exhibitions in three distinct locations (and in this respect it has deep resonance with Gerard’s work, much of which re-enacts written accounts).^{124 124.} Muhle refers to Byrne’s ‘archival reconstructions’ as being at the intersection of two available strategies of re-enactment: The emotional involvement produced in an historical re-enactment on the one hand, and it’s antipode a ‘critical’ approach which through use of commentary or the V-Effect distances the spectator, drawing attention to the construct of spectacle. (2011: 184) It attempts to (re)create the experience of encounter with material in the space, with the implicit understanding that to do so is impossible. Hence it is also a presentation of the experience of a book. I draw on all the self-reflexive capabilities of the book form to simultaneously immerse the reader in an experience, and to repeatedly draw them out of this impression or illusion by reminding them of the artifice of the book as a reproductive mechanism. By contrast, in Images or Shadows I do not attempt to engage with impressions of the gallery or spatiotemporal experience. Within the book space I make use of its (transtextual) mechanisms and possibilities to create a discursivity amplifying the concerns of Gerard’s practice while giving space for them to develop in the mind of the reader. Here, the staging is that of book language yet with the same self-reflexivity and distancing strategies. Repetition, replacing, visual puns, rhymes, and parallels, extend or make connections visible across the material while drawing attention to the artifact of the book, puncturing its apparent homogeneity. This sets up (in book format) the ‘discursive situation’ (Muhle, 2011: 176) of the work itself for the viewer-reader. 

 

 

Images or Shadows (2011) was published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art to accompany Byrne’s survey show Gerard Byrne: Through the Eyes, and the entire practice is in the mix. For this Gerard has given me numerous hard-drives of material. It’s a publication for a major museum, accompanying a survey show, and with nine commissioned texts it suggests there is something definitive, exhaustive about this. As I work through the material though its clear to me that Gerard’s work is always set in relation to orthodoxies: found texts, sites, images, and the making of images are successively interrogated. 

I Am Sitting at a Table (3) (Slight Return)>>>
I page through the book now trying to recall and understand again its organising principles, and one of the more unusual structural devices is that the nine written texts are threaded throughout the publication. Each essay is accompanied by related imagery, and sometimes images which connect to that imagery, rather than the writing itself. I have drawn on research, and reference or supplementary material from Gerard’s archive in addition to film stills, production stills, and exhibition documentation to construct discourse. The initial effect is disorientating. The first essay appears sleeved in amongst production stills and reference material. There’s never more than a couple of columns of text on a spread and the text is stretched so thinly that it feels like footnotes to the images. In truth this came about by accident. While I’m working on the first draft, I read the texts, aligning images which I think are relevant. There are crossovers everywhere so I decide to illustrate the same works in each instance with different images in order of their occurrence. Each essay (each fresh perspective then) is supported by new views from these works in different configurations. In this process, I end up with too many images, so I cluster them between essays, making them into what feels almost like distinct visual essays in between, and these are threaded together by captions which Gerard writes in response to my first draft. To further divert the concreteness of the essays I thread the endnotes for each essay through these ‘visual essays’. McDonagh’s essay for example, the body of which ends on page 49, is concluded by its endnotes on page 58. In a way it activates these as a separate text forming with the images an array of reference material. Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon referenced on page 49 is only illustrated on page 64 amidst a sequence of photographs by Byrne titled A Country Road, A Tree. Evening, since both works make oblique reference to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The text on page 49 alludes to this, but the book relies on reader recall, counting on you to carry the thought and make the connection.

Maeve Connolly’s essay opens on pages 70–71 (Fig. 75A) with a three-sides-bleed image (a view of the campus on which Byrne’s Subject was shot), a title block, author’s name and a single column of text. The photograph might be an artwork, a production still, a research image, but we can’t tell as the caption from the previous page only identifies its location. Connolly is talking about Subject, but also about New Sexual Lifestyles, and 1984 and Beyond. On turning the page, we have another single column of text, and five inset images, and opposite this a full page photograph of an article in The Irish Times. Again the narrative captions help link the images to Connolly’s text but their status as artworks, stills, or reference material is unclear. On turning the page again is a full page photograph from a 1968 issue of Union News. It’s part of the material Byrne gathered while making Subject, but Connolly does not make reference to it. Anyway, the essay has momentarily disappeared. Opposite instead is an exhibition installation view, and beneath this a photo of a deer herd in the Phoenix Park. The deer again! – we’ve already seen them on page 61, opposite a photo of the site of a traffic accident. Connolly’s text resumes on page 76 in two short columns, the last sentence of which reads:

A quotation from the preface to Thompson’s book, largely written at Leeds, is also presented as a wall text: 

You would expect the quote referred to would follow within Connolly’s essay, but I remove it instead, and, taking a full page opposite present it in facsimile, set in Gill Sans as it would have appeared on the wall of Gerard’s exhibitions. This ‘image’ is then enveloped by Gerard’s caption narrative, intersecting and effectively becoming a shared image with Connolly’s essay.^{125 125.} This is discussed in Make Ready, 100 In an instance of the text becoming image, the separate plains of type and image are no longer distinct. (Fig. 75B)>>>

A similar device occurs later on. Really, it’s a reference to it. On page 101 is an installation view of 1984 and Beyond at the Kröller Müller museum. The black wall carries a quote, this time from Perry Millar’s study of Jonathan Edwards. Its place in the exhibition comes from Byrne’s fascination with Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’, which also contains this quote. Actually the quote has also become part of Byrne’s photo series Images or shadows of divine things. We’re many layers deep in references here. This is what I’m grappling with as I design the book. I enlarge a photograph of this text on the wall across the following two page spread – the image becoming text or type.^{126 126.} This is an inversion of what we do in Tuxedo Junction, 1960, where text becomes image On the following spread is a photograph of the book Tuxedo Junction, 1960 which I have just made with Gerard. A hand holds open the pages, and we can see the dustjacket on which is a reproduction of the entire ‘Art and Objecthood’ essay. (Fig. 75C)

In looking at pages 152-53 I am reminded, firstly, that although we’ve already made Tuxedo Junction, I am as yet to meet all of Gerard’s practice. The single image on the left-hand page is from the Loch Ness body of work, and we will make a separate book on this (Gestalt Forms of Loch Ness) two years later. In this photo is a tree on the banks of the loch. One of its main branches has been truncated – it’s cut off in a peculiar way, parallel to the horizon, while the rest of the tree is intact. The tree is in the mid-foreground but there’s nothing else remarkable aside from this graphic figure of the tree. On the opposite page are two more photos: above depicting an exhibition space – a room with walls painted black, and in the right foreground, a tree sculpture. On the wall to the left are three photos in a line. Left of these is a framed print of the tree photo I’ve just described, and the photo on the right is of a tree prop. We learn from the caption on this page that it is a reconstruction of Giacometti’s tree-prop designed for Waiting for Godot (the original, the caption tells us, was destroyed). Back to the tree sculpture. Maybe it’s a prop too, not a sculpture. It’s quite roughly made, and this photograph is over-exposed so it’s bleached out, presumably because of the spotlight we can see aimed towards it. Looking back to the black wall, the centre photo is of a filling-station from Gerard’s Images or Shadows of Divine Things series. The photo must be behind glass as across it is a distinct reflection of the tree sculpture/ prop. Beneath this on the page is another photograph, at similar scale but closer cropped. We understand it to be a view of the street from within the gallery. Outside it’s blue-grey, perhaps a late afternoon. Prominently in the centre of this image though is the reflection of the tree again. It’s all glowing and golden, and subtly fades out at its edges. It has a slightly ethereal quality. Seen from this side its form is not dissimilar to the tree I first spoke about, over on the other page. Even though this is one of the quieter spreads in the book there’s a lot going on now. The tree on the left is part of Gerard’s fifteen year enquiry into the Loch Ness myth, taking in the history of the photographic image and its assumed truth. The ‘gestalt form’ of the tree is a little bit like the form of the ‘monster’ that appears in some of the research; it’s a tree alright, but it looks like it could be something else. We pick up this idea and carry it to the opposite page, seeing in the tree reflection other possibilities. Below we see a reflection of the tree, not the thing itself, while in the photo above it’s over-exposed, and it’s different to the version in the photo on the black wall. Both photos combined give us a sense of what the room looked like, black (not white) walls, doorway, track lighting, the spotlight above, and from the photo of the street, we know there’s a floor to ceiling window in the room and we learn something of the surrounding area. Together, they describe the mechanisms of exhibition but give us no real sense of being there. We’re more inclined to read across the spread, and ponder different kinds of trees, different forms, in different places. We are trying to add things up.

Fig. 75 (A–C) Pages from Byrne, G. (2011) Images or Shadows. Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Various Intertextual Modalities Arranged as Discursive Constellation
Exemplar: Images or Shadows: Gerard Byrne (2011)

Unlike A Late Evening in the Future (2018), Images or Shadows does not engage with relaying (transposing) the gallery experience to the page. As exhibitionary space, its focus is the encounter, use and affordances of the book, and its (transtextual) mechanisms and possibilities, to create a discursive constellation in which the concerns of a double discourse (that of Gerard’s practice and my own) are amplified and given space to develop in the mind of the reader. Again, self-reflexive devices of repetition, replacing, visual puns, rhymes and parallels extend or make-visible connections across the material while drawing attention to the construct of the book, puncturing the assumed homogeneity of a book of this sort published in conjunction with a survey exhibition. The museum required a catalogue, but while there are overlaps there is no clear correlation between that which was exhibited in the galleries and the material presented in the book. The relatively prosaic task – making a book to accompany a survey show of works by Gerard Byrne – is opened up to areas of discourse around reproduction, commentary and (re)presentation. 

Each of Gerard’s works has multiple external references which I may or may not be familiar with. In the time during which I’m working with him on a book I am unlikely to become well versed in all of these, and may only acquire cursory knowledge. Additionally, each writer brings with them numerous references and framing with which I may be unfamiliar. The documentation and written components are at a remove from Byrne’s output – produced as they are by others each with their own separate intentions (although Gerard also makes documentary photographs himself), yet they add to the totality of Byrne’s (textual) work. Leaning again into Benjamin’s notion of ‘literary montage’, I see it as my task, and indeed the task of the book, not to say but only to show (Benjamin, 2002: 460). It is the task and the privilege of the reader to form meaning from this discursive constellation. 

Each writer’s text is presented broadly within the conventions of a book of this type. The type is clear and legible, and it follows the paratextual norms, of which Genette provides a long list including title, subtitle, marginal, infrapaginal, and terminal notes. As such, each is afforded importance within the publication. Their interweaving with images and captions however, while not undermining their integrity, creates a rupture in book convention, which although not necessarily apparent on first glance, has a cumulative and somewhat disorientating effect while reading. An essay text of 2,000 words can span 20 pages or more, thus diluting its density or sense of purchase within the totality of the book as the writing appears to be slipped in between image sequences and reading is discontinuous. Standard columns of text do not fill the page, but instead end mid-page to amplify breaks in an argument or to make pleasing compositions. The reader might easily assume an essay has reached a conclusion only for it to continue some pages later. This disrupts the narrative arc of the text, breaking it into fragments which are both supported and interrupted by the images – an inversion of the conventions of museum publications, where essays substantiate the visual material which is typically presented as a discrete component of ‘plates’. As a reader encountering the book, the arrangement has a tangible effect in dissolving the otherwise weighty presence of so many written texts in a book of its scale. In terms of page revenue each essay is broken down across multiple pages with sometimes isolated columns of text (see Images or Shadows, 176), but it also affectively challenges the conventional dynamics between writing and image.

In each of the books with Gerard I am suggesting that the written texts may be seen as one amongst many material typologies, and all are subjected to representation within the book paradigm and the transformation that this brings about. Each written presence is lessened, seen as typology rather than authority. Even aside from all this, presenting so many written framings of Byrne’s work has the effect of dispersing the importance of each, but there is a productivity in this: a constellation – a proposal of (many) ways of reading into and across the works.

 

 

In Economy
On the sliding axes of my bricolage (Fig. 7), economy is one pole, and by 2010 the economics of necessity is a firmly established principal for me: the appropriate level of production and no more (wherever that might be). This in turn informs and contributes to the shaping of the discourse within a publication. Alike with mastery, economy and excess are legible as intentions. The Though the Eyes (Fig. 76) exhibition guide is a large, single, folded, untrimmed sheet, one side of which was printed in the print run for a section of the Images or Shadows book. On the reverse of this the design for the cover of the guide mimics the design of the book cover, to which I add a written overview of the survey show, and this forms the exhibition guide, serving a dual purpose. The first is pragmatic; by adding copies to the print run of one signature of the book I was able to cost-effectively provide for the gallery visitor a more generous guide with high quality image reproductions than would otherwise have been possible.>>> The second is conceptual; by leaving the sheets untrimmed, the signs of the print production process (colour bars, trim marks, page imposition, perforated folds) remain, thus bringing the viewer into dialogue with a publication which is speaking not just of the images reproduced on the printed sheet, but of the reproduction process itself, and of the reproduction and representation of images. Abstracted from the book, the sheet are none the less part of the book. Folios (page numbers) are non-sequential due to the imposition – two pages from the book (85 and 89) reproduce essay text, here disembodied from the complete essay with no author acknowledgement. One page even ends with an incomplete sentence. The essay, although partly legible, thus becomes an image, a sample of itself. This is a reprieve or iteration of a device first employed in Tuxedo Junction, 1960,+ where texts become images of themselves, while as quotations they appear (eidetically) intertextual, one text within another, even as they have been commissioned specifically for the publication in which they appear. 

 

 

 

 

 

Gestalt Forms of Loch Ness, Grid, Site, Sequence (2012) was published by MK Gallery, UK/ Fondazione Galleria Civica Trento, and distributed by JRP|Ringier. This book draws on Byrne’s body of work relating to the myth of the Loch Ness monster, fuelled by the popular press of the 1930s, and the shift that developed, away from belief in the authority of the photographic image. As the viewer-reader progresses through the book the text and image layers become more entangled and a grid, normally employed as an organisational structure, serves as a means to interpolate images and text and introduce ambiguity. ‘Staged’ or contrived images: of populist literature spawned by the Loch Ness myth; material gathered from alleged sightings, remade sketches based on accounts of sightings; and photographs of newspaper accounts from the 1930s, are interwoven with photographic material from numerous site visits by the artist; and photographic material staging both artworks and reference material in the artists studio and darkroom. 

Of Metatext

For the Venice Biennale (2010), the practice of de Blacam and Meagher forms part of the text of an exhibition, itself a text on exhibiting, archive, and publishing, staged in the context of an international Biennale. The of de Blacam and Meagher exhibition and Irlanda publication are hypertext to these hypotextual concerns, and the ways that some of these are played out are discussed in 82–85 ‘Irlanda’, particularly in relation to the viewer-reader encounter and the transtextual modalities of the presentation. At the Venice Biennale the wider thematic concerns of publishing and exhibition are used to frame and explore how to present the work of an Irish practice in this context. Of was published two years after the Venice exhibition, on conclusion of its tour to four venues in Ireland, and its relationship to the exhibition of de Blacam and Meagher is firstly metatextual. Of is in a sense also an act of appropriation (a text is taken and put in service of another discourse), but appropriating a text is more explicitly discussed in the Gall film These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013), in which a ‘readymade’, the concrete henge, conceived and built by others serves as text and subject of my film – the space of authorship is either seized or created through appropriation. 

In Of we are appropriating (or commandeering) for Gall’s purposes, the discourse of the Biennale. Gall is essentially an independent venture performed through the borrowed stage of other events or institutions. Of, a Gall edition, is financially supported by the Irish Architecture Foundation, while Irlanda itself is state funded, yet published under the Gall imprint. These modest shifts put national representation in tension with the authorship of Gall.

Of (2012) was written and edited by me with Tom dePaor, funded by the Irish Architecture Foundation, and published by our Gall Editions imprint. Organised into a colophon and 25 essays after Francis Bacon, Of is a meta-book – a book about a book – while also a book which reflects on its own making.^{128 128.} Bacon, F. (1625) ‘Of Studies’ from Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. Oxford: Oxford University Press. It refers to the exhibition in Venice – dismantling the conceits and constructs of the exhibition, and of the book itself. Using elements of the exhibition’s mechanisms as prompt, issues of archive, copy, exhibition and distribution, presentation, representation, fact, truth, verisimilitude, authorship and authority are considered both through the text, and through the form and presentation of the book itself.

Genette’s ‘metatext’ ‘unites a given text to another, of which it speaks without necessarily naming it’ (1997: 4), and Of does not refer directly to the work of de Blacam and Meagher – discussion and representation of which is left aside as this can be found in the Irlanda publication. In this sense, we could see Of as a companion or reader to Irlanda, but it exists as a discrete enquiry. Where other outputs in this thesis such as A Late Evening in the Future transpose a spatiotemporal encounter into that of the book as an exhibitionary space, Of, in a set of 25 essays, takes apart constituent elements in the making and presentation of the Irish Pavilion and reconstitutes them as a playful reflection on exhibition-making. In forming a commentary on this, they make occasional reference to the work of de Blacam and Meagher but the primary ‘informing text’ is more oblique: Of takes as its subject the given conditions of national representation at an international biennale; the thematic framing of the biennale (‘People meet in architecture’); the dilemmas of exhibiting architecture; the privileged and rarefied setting of Venice; alongside reflections on paper, books, printing, the library, storage, and archive.^{130 130}. In 2010 the curator of La Biennale di Venezia was Kazuyo Sejima and she selected the theme ‘People meet in architecture’. As such, its informing texts are far-reaching chronologically and in subject matter, bringing together many disparate strands in discursive constellation. In a similar fashion to Reservoir (which serves as reader to Temperance), this builds up a surrounding (con)text of interweaving fragments combining writing, drawings, and photographs. As I did with the N3 book, exhibition views are augmented by found photographs which may illustrate or divert from the writing. Some of these images are captioned but the captions rather than explaining the images, are typically ‘at an angle’ to them and provide another level of commentary, the tone of which recalls Ong’s ‘give-and-take’ (2005: 130) of glosses or marginal comments found in manuscripts which I reference with regard to the structure of this written thesis. 

In Reservoir, authorial presence is overtly articulated in a singular appearance of a hand holding open a page – the reader is being shown a book (Fig. 61), while in Of, the writing implicates our spectral presence through its authorial tone, which by turns makes comment and proclamation rather than offering any kind of objective voice. The book then is also about Gall’s working practice, and an assertion of our authorial role, articulated through these opinions. Of’s writing is a composite of our conversations, and of our findings through this process, all framed slightly tongue-in-cheek, and this tone too brings the reader in contact with the presence of the ‘authors’. The text willfully strays into many transtextual references including typeface design, technical aspects of print reproduction, and more straightforwardly intertextual references to other publications including those of Gall Editions and the official Biennale publication, which includes photographs not shown in the exhibition.^{131 131.} Edited photographs of the country house, Ibiza, Spain, and church, Firhouse, Dublin are reproduced in People Meet in Architecture, Biennale Architettura 2010, Participating Countries/Collateral Events (2010). Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia and Marsilio Several of the illustrations are eidetically intertextual in that they are actual reproductions made from the source files of Irlanda, reduced to fit this new page size. These take on a curious presence as they are legible both as reproductions but also are readable as text, albeit it at a scale that might require a magnifying glass. 

In Genette’s ‘architextuality’ (1997: 4), the text is not supposed to declare its generic quality – that is for the reader to decide, but here much of the material is presented as archetype or template, as if taxonomic in nature.>>> To this effect two spreads from the ‘Photography’ volume are represented on page 54 as placeholder spreads – the photographs having been removed to support the evocation of a contact sheet in the writing on the page opposite. A similar presentation is used in later spreads (for example page 122 of Of), thus equating the arrangement of elements on the page with elements in the room. This type of device brings to the fore the carrier (the meta-discourse of presenting architecture), while the content (the practice examples and their surrounding discourse) shifts to the background. 

Of Mutual Constituency

2012. I am standing at the garden wall in full sun trying to get a mobile signal. It’s four in the afternoon and it’s still hot, a perfect dry heat filled up with the constant sound of cicadas. I’m on holidays in the mountains of the Ardèche and Tom is on the phone convincing me that I can write. He says I should just start, writing what I know about. About what is on the page. I’m unconvinced but decide to try anyway. We’ve had this idea to make a book about the curation of the Venice biennale, about all the underlying and unspoken ideas, what for us it was really about, and the holidays seems an ideal time to start work. I stay up late that night writing about type, about paper, finding a way in through small things first. I email a draft and we talk again early the next morning. Tom sees something in it. In fact he’s excited, it’s the start of something. We don’t have an editorial structure yet, or a methodology for how to (co-)write, but these will come about, as things usually do, through our conversations. I get into the habit of writing late into the night, and we review this in the mornings. Tom is now sending stuff my direction too. I’m hooked! It’s through writing Of that Make Ready later opens up to me as a possibility. We continue this process back in Dublin, and the pattern of early morning phonecalls scrutinising the writing goes on for a couple of months. Some parts come easy, while with others we discuss at length the structure of a sentence or the merits of one word over another. There is though an ease to it, and a lack of hierarchy or ownership, it is becoming a collective text. 

~

A Thursday evening in late summer, we’re upstairs in the Irish Architectural Archive, suits on for the launch of Of. I’ve made a film loop of hands turning through the pages of the book, and this projects upwards from an inclined floor-standing monitor, a leftover prop from the 2008 Biennale.^{132 132.} The Lives of Spaces was Ireland’s National Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 2008. It was curated by Nathalie Weadick and Hugh Campbell and included Delay, an armature and one person cinema, a study for Pálás Cinema in Galway by Tom dePaor, and Relayer, the film I made for Delay. Nathalie speaks first, giving an overview of our curation, before introducing us, and Tom and I by turns read passages from the book. We’ve picked out some favourite segments – I choose the one with the joke about page-turning, where you have to turn the page to read… ‘page–turning’, the last word in the sentence. I act this out. It’s a different thing to read a text aloud and I need to mark up the pages with pencil to be sure I phrase and pronounce things correctly.

Fig. 77 I Am Standing at the Garden Wall/ A Thursday Evening in Late Summer

Of was consciously co-written as an exercise in drawing out an experience and knowledge exchange. There are many commonalities at the interstices of each of our practices, and Of affords an enquiry into these overlaps, through which to communicate the discursivity of our work as Gall. Tom and I each contrived subjects that we could write about, and this naturally generated further research adding to existing knowledge. Each draft was then subjected to line by line discussion and revision, to achieve an evenness of tone and writing style, with each of us adopting tropes of the other in service to this. We sought a singular voice as an entity with no distinction made between us.>>> From early on, I began to design the pages of the book as part of this writing process. The typographic language informed the tone of the writing, and its scale and arrangement on the page supported the format of short essayistic passages.^{133 133.} ‘The writing, editing and making of the book were an integrated collaborative process. As co-authors we made a conscious decision early on to make the writing visual, to regard the writing of the text as part of the making of a book object. The authorship of design was not regarded. Instead of writing in isolation, and later considering its visual form, the visual presentation was developed in conjunction with the writing, and images were considered as part of this process. Image and text are given equal weighting.’ Peter Maybury interviewed by Eamon Spelman, 19 August 2024. Available at: https://www.100archive.com/articles/code-magazine-issues-3-and-4 [Accessed 22 March 2025] This also forced the issue early on of the ‘page spread’. Rather than writing in an environment of undifferentiated single pages as would be the case in Microsoft Word, writing in spreads proposes the opposite page, one which can be more dominant than the other, and invites the possibility of illustration and caption. This means the writing develops alongside imagery, with captions acting as a bridge between them, and across the book this serves as a unifying device. Just as with the writing, each image selection was an outcome of conversation, and this simultaneous writing-designing mechanism serves to disturb the conventions of exchange between writer and designer. By shifting this into the writing space, it diverts hierarchies of control, either that of writer dictating outcomes and/or of graphic designer imposing their will on appearance. Decision-making instead is born out of the productivity of both. The imagery added to this a multivalency as the images (by multiple authors) dilute any singularity and allude to a broader discourse, with material reaching back as far as a 9th century CE manuscript. 

 

[A]ppropriation frequently effects a more decisive journey away from the informing text into a wholly new cultural product and domain, often through the actions of interpolation and critique as much as through the movement from one genre to others.
(Julie Sanders, 2016: 35)

These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013/7) is a single channel HD video with stereo sound, of 9:46 duration, filmed, directed, and edited by Peter Maybury. These Islands was first exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. This is a filmed response to the unauthorised development on commonage at Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo. A concrete structure 4.5m in height and 30m in diameter comprising 26 piers and lintels and recalling a henge, it was the subject of controversy having been erected over a weekend without planning permission, and was, after appeal, declared an unauthorised development with orders for its demolition and the return of the land to its prior condition. This ‘unauthorised development’ is appropriated as a found image or ‘text’ embodying issues of land ownership, boundary, public and private, community, authority and description. 

Inter Alia (2013), co-authored by Tom dePaor and Peter Maybury, was presented as a parallel contextual text when the film first exhibited, and was subsequently published as a discrete text in San Rocco – What’s Wrong with the Primitive Hut?^{134 134.} San Rocco (2013) Milan: San Rocco.. The text is an account of the incomplete construction of the unauthorised development structure; the ensuing dispute through the High Court; and the subsequent appeal and inspection on behalf of the Planning Board and the ensuing determination.^{135 135.} Curiously this text was used (unauthorised) as the research basis of a text in Mary Foley (2014) ‘Development of Exempted Development’, The Brief, The Official Journal of the Irish Institute of Legal Executives, 2014. Dublin, The Irish Institute of Legal Executives.

The Intertextual Modality of Appropriation 

The intertextual modality of appropriation in These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo (2013), is examined through the film itself, its original staging for exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and through its subsequent incorporation, with These Islands, Ballysadare, Co. Sligo (2017) into a diptych forming part of the exhibition I See Earth: Building and Ground (2022). Both These Islands films take a ‘found’ subject as text for appropriation (the ‘henge’ at Achill;  the abbey at Ballysadare), through which to reflect on issues of property, materials, boundaries, resources and ownership.>>>

I first visit the Achill site as a text for appropriation, and revisit it within the work as site of bricolage (the film itself is appropriated for I See Earth), and in the thesis for its self-reflexive devices, and for its questioning of the evidentiary nature of visual and audio material. The first These Islands film takes as a given or found object the unauthorised development on commonage at Slievemore, Dooagh, Keel East, Co. Mayo. As an entity, this structure is ambiguous. Although renowned for being erected over a weekend (and left incomplete after the issuing of a court order to desist), it was clearly a sizeable and thoroughly planned project. Significant ground work was done in advance, carving out with trucks a turning circle in the bog and banking the spoil around this. Foundations were poured in readiness for the siting of the structure’s piers and lintels which were pre-cast in concrete in Co. Galway and transported by truck on the weekend they were erected. The structure is attributed to (bankrupt) builder and property developed Joe McNamara, who chose not to let his underlying intentions be known, although he is notorious for previous protests, including in 2010 driving a cement mixer bearing the lettering ‘TOXIC BANK ANGLO’ into the gates of Leinster House (the Irish Parliament). McNamara in his referral to the An Bord Pleanála Board of Appeals argued the development should be exempt from planning by making reference to certain exempt developments such as ornamental garden, lighthouse, beacon, buoy, burial ground, self-feed silo or assembly yard, but ultimately claiming its purpose was unimportant. The Board, however, determined that the structure was unauthorised as its function was unclear and did not sit within existing exempt categories.^{136 136}. Online searches now return results referring to it as sculpture, Stonehenge replica, and it is listed as an attraction on Tripadvisor.

On reading of this structure reported in The Irish Times in 2011 (Fig. 78), the initial appeal (beyond the incongruity of this structure on the front page of a national newspaper, and its collision with adjacent headlines), was its relationship with the land.^{137 137.} Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/mcnamara-behind-mysterious-achill-henge-1.17867 [Accessed 28 March 2025]  Rather than enquire into the developer’s intentions, we viewed this as a ‘text’ available for appropriation. Tom and I immediately decided that we would visit it and that I would film this encounter; thus, the footage for These Islands is thought about as field-recordings. I vividly remember walking from a distance through the bog towards the structure and recording successive views along my approach. High winds meant the camera shook while on the tripod. Most of the audio was hampered by wind-thumps (I wasn’t adequately prepared). The establishing shots show the surprising slightness of this large structure when seen across the scarred bog commonage. Reaching the gravelled track near the structure I recorded the sound of my footsteps and my breathing as the camera hopped unevenly in my hands, and the camerawork reflects the uneven footing beneath. While I walked the mud-track perimeter I allowed the camera to tumble and sway as I made my way around, consciously embedding my physical presence in the footage – a V-Effect that would draw the viewer to the spectacle and construct of the film. I wanted to capture a sense of the encounter but at the same make the viewer aware of this footage as one encounter, not a definitive representation of the structure. I was after all entirely external to its existence, an intruder. This framing in turn shaped my own attitude and encounter giving me objective distance. On noticing the hollowness of the piers, I took to throwing stones and rubble at them, recording the sounds – I was ‘playing’ the otherwise silent structure as sound source, as if to yield another type of information from it. As the light changed and the weather calmed the impression was different, and I filmed locked-off shots in a more conscientious effort to gather multiple viewpoints.

Thus, the manner in which the structure was filmed, and my subsequent editing and presentation were concerned not for the intentions of its ‘author’, but for the ways in which it resonated with or intersected with Tom’s and my shared concerns as Gall. We saw the structure and its surrounding context – economic decline and collapse, the contestation around description – as armature through which we could explore implicit links to land, property, ownership, and resources. In the first instance it seemed obvious to appropriate the structure – to work without permission or approval – since this is precisely what the structure itself achieved in its appropriation of commonage. The first act of our appropriation then was to film it, and through this to distance the structure from its initial framing (as henge, and enraged builder), by making my presence evident in the filming (through breathing, footsteps, or the action of throwing stones to generate sound), and by expressing the artifice of film (hand-held shots, non-synchronous sound, discontinuous/ jump-cuts, sound ‘pops’ and wind-thumps etc.). The film offers no context, but instead recontextualises the filmed material through opening footage of Gunnera tinctoria – an invasive species, which has many correspondences regarding land, description, ownership and colonialism.

Informing Text

Kostelanetz makes a distinction between the art book which is ‘honorific’, and ‘book art’ which is in itself constitutes an artwork (1978: 28). My publications are not honorific of the source material, but take the material as ‘informing text’ from which a ‘wholly new cultural product’ is developed (Sanders, 2016: 35). This approach is characteristic of appropriation which comes about ‘through the actions of interpolation and critique’ (Sanders, 2016: 35). Johnson refers to this as ‘borrowing’ of property, while the intertextual is both ‘misreading or infiltration’ and ‘violation’ of property (1987: 116). The poles of these – honouring and violating – present powerful poles of practice (see Fig. 7). The borrowing and reversioning of both These Islands films for I See Earth does not perserve the original integrity of the films but renegotiates their constituent parts as available material for this new purpose.

‘The gallery is illuminated by These Islands, a diptych of films recorded on Achill Island and at Ballysadare by dePaor’s long-term collaborator Peter Maybury, transforming a static exhibition into an animated lightbox of big landscapes and ever-changing light.’ 

Isabel Allen (2022), ‘Tom dePaor unveils I See Earth retrospective’. [online] Available at: https://architecturetoday.co.uk/tom-depaor-unveils-i-see-earth/ Allen, I. [Accessed 22 March 2025]).

These Islands blue
Tom and I are standing in the large room at VISUAL. It’s Monday morning and the gallery is closed to the public, so Anthony, the technician, has set up projectors and laptops on tables which we can wheel around the space to test my two These Islands films. They will need to be reedited as a diptych but before this we need to understand how they work spatially. The films provide essential framing for Tom’s exhibition, giving context to what will be in the room, and situating Gall (the work Tom and I make together) within Tom’s practice, while at the same time the films are attributed to me. They must also perform the very practical function of light-source in which to view the other works – an interplay that will produce complex kinetic shadows and superimpositions. Although none of the other elements of the exhibition is there, as soon as we turn on the projectors we both know it’s all wrong. Tom has designed a central element for the room consisting of three blue light strips spanning 4 metres, and although it’s still being fabricated we can tell it just won’t work with the films. The blue will diminish the colours and density of the films, and the films will defeat the graphic impact of the blue strips of light. Anyway, the mix of colour and black & white in the two films is jarring at this scale. We test lots of permutations including floor projection but nothing works. The sound though is fantastic! So good in fact I suggest we ditch the films and keep only a spatialised soundtrack. We drive back home feeling something between fear and dejection but we’ve been in these scrapes before. It’s a kind of confidence game; we both believe we can resolve it, but right now we have no idea how. About 10 kilometres from home I suggest we make the films blue. This solves everything! If the films are blue there’s no clash – the blue light is additive, and better still it harmonises my two films, and locates them in the room on a clear visual plain through which the exhibition can be seen. 

Fig. 79 These Islands Blue.

Repurposing, and Resistance to the Singular Account

For this iteration, the function of the films was quite different. Tom wanted to use film projection to light the main exhibition space where newly fabricated work (reimaginings of previous projects) would be displayed. Tom’s new works made from 6mm round bar were effectively three-dimensional drawings. The films are first functional, providing a modulating light-source. The original footage from both films has undergone substantial transformation, overlaid with blue light, and the two sources have been (re)edited (both ‘condensation’ and ‘augmentation’) to form a spatialised diptych of 10 minutes duration. For this, some previously unused footage from both is introduced. As imagery they provide contextual framing and make a statement of conditions on the island of Ireland – a literal backdrop. Arranged on opposite walls it is only possible to view both films simultaneously from oblique viewpoints, where seeing one full projection square-on involves turning your back on the other. The sound is (alike with the IMMA installation) detached from the footage. I reuse the configuration (and hardware) from Landfall to spatialise signals across two stereo-pairs. For the most part, individual sounds are directed towards their correlating image, but this too merges for the viewer-reader who may be viewing one image and hear sound relating to the opposite screen. All of this contributes to a sense and the intention that the films are now ‘material’ available for repurposing or appropriation. There is no wish to preserve the original form or intentions of the films, only to make new use of them. This resistance to a definitive version is pragmatic (the material is a handy quarry, or the to-hand tools of the bricoleur) but it also offers an opposition to the notion of an artwork which would typically have a definitive form.

 

 

The Literature of Graphic Design
I’m a little irked to read in Ellen Thomson’s ‘The Literature of Graphic Design’ that for practicing designers ‘libraries are resources for visual inspiration and information on current styles and trends, new technologies, and professional news. It seems like a slight. Thomson goes on to contrast this with the needs of the graphic design scholar ‘who relies on the research methodology and tools used by historians and social scientists’.^{138 138.} Thomson, E. (1993) ‘The Literature of Graphic Design’, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Spring 1993, 12 1, 7–11. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of North America Stable. This reads to me like further qualitative distinction. While I do not raid libraries as ‘a treasury of visual ideas’, neither have I approached them as a scholar. In practice my literature and reference material derive from the material from each project; the people I work with; the context(s) in which my work is situated (from the nightclub to the gallery); lived experience; and any number of disparate sources. It’s ad hoc, a bricolage, but out of this my central enquiry into communicating artistic knowledge takes hold. It is through this written thesis that I can now articulate its mechanisms, but approaching this task feels at first like a superimposition, as so much of practice is in response to contingency.>>>

Fig. 80. The Literature of Graphic Design

The Language of Graphic Design

The graphic designer inevitably responds to the visual culture of graphic design, and this is a vocabulary in which people are conversant. Graphic design is after all ‘the public art’ (FitzGerald, 2010: 66), and ‘the dominant visual medium of our culture.’ (FitzGerald, 1997: 21). Part of this discourse ‘is that of fashion’ (Clarke, 2003: 177), and I draw on this common understanding, fluency and expectation to create a transformation.^{139 139.} ‘… every form of alienation needs something to be alienated from; any deviation or rupture of illusion has to build up a world of illusion in the first place’ (Pantenburg, 2011: 159)

Style First
For FitzGerald ‘Graphic design’s current evaluation methods continue to emphasise aesthetic achievement… Good design is defined as high formal accomplishment, such as can only be realised through the patronage of elite cultural or commercial clients.’ (FitzGerald, 2010: 126). This is certainly true of much graphic design output, and prizing production values and trends of professionalism short-circuits the importance of being attuned to a wider cultural context, and the complexities this might afford. In Fiske’s articulation of intertextuality he makes a distinction between horizontal and vertical intertextuality. The horizontal relations are the primary links – for Genette this might be the hypotext and the hypertext – while the vertical relates to secondary texts – criticism, journalism, gossip and conversation (Genette’s metatext). This horizontal plain can be seen as a more linear time, while the ‘vertical’ cuts across this, and is more ephemeral: fashion or taste at a given moment. These relationships are dynamic, and change over time. I am interested in these shifting values and perceptions of visual material only in their productivity as points of reference. I use and reference current cultural tropes (I am not above or beneath fashion) amidst a constituency of elements, a bricolage which emerges from the material and which exist outside of stylistic dogmas. My use of stylistic affectations is measured against the context and lifespan of a project. 

No Style
As Foucault observes, all discourses are ‘objects of appropriation’ (2020: 211). I have coined the term ‘no-style bricolage’ to describe part of my approach regarding my bricolage that comes about through the foldback and mutual constituencies of context and medium and technique. It’s adapted from Scalbert (2013), who in his writings on 6a Architects, talks of contingencies, situations and fortuitous collisions which bring about production that is outside of any definable style.^{140 140.} These non-decisions help to illuminate the meaning of bricolage. Through them, unpredictable events seem to overtake the will, the intentions and the authorship of the architects. For sure Keaton and Tati have a distinctive style of acting, but it cannot be said of their jokes that they are typically Keaton’s or Tati’s. Rather they arise form the fortuitous collision between an artefact and a situation, a door handle and a toothache, an inner tyre and a funeral. For this reason, there can be no style, not even individual styles of bricolage. (Scalbert, 2013: 140) Importantly, in place of style, the learning, and the visual language come from the particular conditions of each site of publication, ensuring that the discourse develops around the subject matter rather than having the undue interference of a style – Pater’s ‘clearly authored visual language’ (2021: 300). (see 6/7 ‘1968’ / ‘1969’ / ‘Discipline’ / ‘1981’)

 

 

Bahktin situates the text within history and society, which are then seen as texts read by the writer, and into which he inserts himself by rewriting them. Diachrony is transformed into synchrony, and in light of this transformation, linear history appears as abstraction. The only way a writer can participate in history is by transgressing this abstraction through a process of reading-writing; that is, through the practice of a signifying structure in relation or opposition to another structure.

(Kristeva, 1980: 65; emphasis in original)

No Style Bricolage
On 9 March 2012 I make a suite of poor resolution photographs as people, overlooked by uniformed police, stand around in small clusters at the site of the recently dismantled Occupy settlement on the plaza outside the Central Bank in Dublin. A large chalk circle has been drawn on the ground, within which are symbols and messages including ‘We are the 99%’. This gesture seems deeply poignant, and although I don’t have a good camera with me I’m compelled to make something with my photographs. The gathering of people, and the images give me a connection with the vastness of the problems we are facing and the scale of the efforts of those who have participated.

Fig. 81 No Style Bricolage

Landfall ostensibly comprises documentary or observational footage shot in the Republic of Ireland over the period 2012–19. The material was recorded by me using a DSLR camera, in a Direct Cinema tradition (single camera, available light etc.). The footage consists primarily of tripod shots with panning, zooming and varying focus-points, and a small element of hand-held footage. Exceptionally, two sequences were recorded using a mobile phone camera. The camerawork intermittently makes itself conspicuous through abrupt movement, focus-finding etc., bringing a self-reflexive element. In contrast, much of the soundtrack is heavily processed in post-production using Ableton Live software – where I combined direct sound (recorded either in-camera or using an additional audio recorder); sound generated using analogue synthesizers; Foley techniques; and field recordings from non-contiguous sources.^{141 141.} Foley (named for Jack Foley) is the production of sound effects that are added to films during post-production. They may emulate or simulate natural sounds Often there is no actual correlation between sound and image as the sound has been entirely synthesized, but the viewer imposes one. The film is a succession of vignettes which combine to form interrelated observations on the island of Ireland as a set of conditions – geographical, political, ideological – with emergent themes of contested ground, boundaries, containment, resources, energy, systems, and structures. Chronology and geography are disrupted, thus correspondences across the material are explored through sequence and juxtaposition and recurring motifs or themes.^{142 142.} see Landfall exhibition leaflet found in Appendix III, detailing all footage locations and shooting dates.

I am Standing Outside the Circle

Landfall has an intertextual relationship with Make Ready. The book predates the film by five years, but in making Landfall this suite of images was a catalyst. In Landfall, as there aren’t many photographs from that day to work with, I compensate by filming a segment staged in an office with images displayed on a computer screen. Woven into this is filmed footage I had made previously of the Central Bank façade, and audio gleaned from Occupy demonstrations. I borrow this device of a staged office setting from Julien Faraut’s Regard neuf sur Olympia ’52, but in my film the archivist is conspicuously absent from the frame putting both maker and viewer at a distance from the material – I am the outsider.^{143 143.} Regard Neuf Sur Olympia ’52 (2013), [Digital film] Faraut, J. France, Films à Cinq.  I return to this device though in On Being There (2022), where my corporeal presence (hands mostly) performs the task of locating my role as caretaker and archivist reviewing material, opening out rolled drawings across a table, handling objects, or digitising analogue 35mm slides. In On Being There, this device distances the authorship of the material under review (Tom’s practice and our work as Gall) from the authorship of the film and any reading of the material that it might evoke. In Landfall, it serves to remind the viewer that they are watching a construct of film and sound, and calling into question both their political intertextuality and that of the filmmaker. We are reminded how all evidentiary material, particularly that pertaining to be documentary or reportage is, to some degree a construct, and that its verisimilitude should be interrogated.

Beep Plz
I arrive on my bike, with my usual rucksacked alibi of tripod, camera, and sound equipment. I set up and stand amongst them to film this small gathering. There isn’t much talking going on as the traffic noise is so loud, and movement is constant along the footpath in front of the building that has been occupied. The people gathered on the steps are preoccupied, so my vague efforts to assimilate go unnoticed. People at a protest are surprisingly indifferent to cameras – I am, after all, checking them out, not quite sure of their politics.>>> 

I cross the street to frame and film the demonstrators and the occupiers. A larger group has gathered now, but this segment of road with high volume of buses is inhospitable to people, and particularly to protest. Banners get blown out of the way, someone speaks through a megaphone… it’s hard to hear… 

At one point I walk away and start packing up, before rethinking – I haven’t captured anything worth having. Whatever their politics (and I can work this out later), this kind of action is worth recording. I make my way back up the street as occupiers on the top floor, each of whom is masked with an oversized cut-out face of then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, try to attach a banner from the windows. The masks make their efforts comical as they battle the wind, trying hopelessly to weigh it down with water bottles. In the editing process I am alert to how easy it would be to ridicule this inherently comical action. The comedy is indeed partly at their expense but perhaps more so in seeing the recognisible face of an elected leader with fixed smile struggling to accomplish what becomes an absurd task. I’m drawn in by this yet I feel outside of this event – it is an initiative of others, and while my presence here offers tacit support, perhaps my more honest intention is that of gathering material. They have occupied a building owned by a property developer (this is slightly ambiguous for me as the basement is and has been for many years a rehearsal room for bands including mine – a sub-cultural mainstay) and this is something I am never likely to do.+ It feels dangerous. Perhaps this is an action for people without young families to care for? Perhaps I am too conservative or lack their courage. It makes me question how I think of myself. Filming this gives me vicarious participation, but no sense of belonging.

Fig. 82 Beep Plz.

What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture a caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value. But we will make this demand most emphatically when we – the writers – take up photography.

(Benjamin, 2005: 775)

De-centring Authorship: The Outsider, Author as Producer/ Producer as Author

As I film an Extinction Rebellion ‘action’ am I participant or observer? Am I counted? Does my presence signify approval? Does the demonstration or action voice my views? Is my filming an endorsement? Can I be transparent whilst present? By the inclusion of this filmed material in a work am I endorsing it? For the graphic designer, any role in communication must be a form of consent, at least an endorsement as something acceptable within the profession. As a producer I must reflect on this, while the professional practitioner must ask themselves what they are willing to accept and subsequently endorse through awards and publications. As attendee at a demonstration I feature in the headcount, I walk the routes, I assemble, and I listen. In this sense I am participant-author, or reader-writer – contributing to the dissenting voice(s). My presence implies an endorsement.>>>

I am shooting with semi-professional equipment, lightweight and portable, carrying everything in a rucksack on my bicycle, and as such this is not legible as the equipment of a television crew. I am alone, whereas TV reportage almost always comprises a crew at least of camera, sound, and reporter. None the less my identity is provided by my camera, my tripod, my microphone, which form a distancing device, in a sense making my presence invisible – people are used to cameras, assume their presence, and are largely unconcerned by them. Behind this ill-defined identity or cover provided by the camera, I move and operate freely, as far as my self-confidence will allow. People make way for, and tolerate a camera. Sometimes too they talk to or perform for it.+ The camera as spectator/ observer is supposedly impartial, recording events which unfold. This is of course immediately challenged by my selective presence at various events or gatherings. Some recordings in Landfall may be conspicuous by their absence. This may have been purposeful, or more likely as a result of other things going on in my life, since all of the filming occurred in ad hoc fashion and without planning. When I could, I packed my bag and went to film. Then there is the way events are filmed. As I work alone, there is only one camera point of view at any one time. As I film I react, with notions of what could carry a scene, or capture an emotion or energy in its specificity or generalisation. The sound, often recorded separately, is asynchronous, and used to spatialise or charge the imagery.

In one sense each segment in Landfall represents a found text, a ready-made. Material, images, voices, and various discourses are appropriated in filmic segments, and reframed by their constellation amongst other segments to construct another (larger) framing. Each protest or demonstration is a text authored by those who assemble and participate. Each of the marches featured in the footage has been called by an entity, or campaign, (for example the National Homeless and Housing Coalition; Right2Water). Within this, political groupings make their presence felt with flags, banners, and chants. Reluctantly or willingly, there is a collective authorship of disparate make-up ostensibly unified but often factious. By walking together the individual merges with these disparate voices, and is in some way complicit. It is not possible to clearly articulate a single agenda. As a filmmaker with my camera (a form of banner?), I find myself within this and outside of this. Of course my filming of footage also results in the exclusion of other events. Why are these not reflected? Is it simply because I was not there, did not record the footage? Does Landfall represent a total view, or is it indicative? The film asks questions then of its author/originator/scriptor, and through this my political intertextuality is intelligible. 

Whereas in documentary, events and locations are identified, Landfall transitions from one segment to the next without identifying locations. Material is gathered together for the viewer-reader to make sense of based on their own frame of reference. Landfall makes use of visual rhyming, juxtaposition, détournement even(?), particularly through its dual screens – to prompt the viewer to look afresh at (sometimes) familiar spectacles. Annually for St. Patrick’s Day festivities, a fairground micro-architecture is installed in front of the Custom House, a location originally intrinsic to all trade at Dublin Port, and adjacent to the contemporary Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC).+ Footage of this is preceded a few minutes back by views of the once-intended site of Anglo Irish Bank, which we see consecutively both abandoned and at an advanced stage of construction, having subsequently been purchased by the Irish Central Bank, the original location of which we will see later.^{144 144.} Simon Carswell provides a detailed account of Anglo’s growth and collapse and its implications for the Irish economy in Carswell, S. (2012) Anglo Republic: The Definitive History of the Bank That Brought Ireland to Ruin. London: Penguin. + All of this takes place along the banks of the once navigable River Liffey (something legible to those with local knowledge) with underlying narratives emerging through the sequence, where an account or (perhaps cynical) critique of the financial collapse of the early 21st Century can be inferred (Fig. 83).

Gardaí in hi-vis cluster; a bus passes by; the camera sweeps right, then left, holds on a hand-painted placard, then cuts to a pink card held aloft. In the frame the hand is more or less centred, while the card sways under the gentle straining of raised arms. Just in front and to the left is another pink card (exactly the same). The two momentarily merge so that the full screen is pink, with the hand at the centre. As the card to the left billows we see beyond it the words ‘No more waiting’. I hold and manoeuvre the camera to try and maintain this framing. Everything is modulating. The footage has been slowed to amplify this. It’s nine seconds before the silence is interrupted by the sound of a gathering crowd. The segment lasts another 32 seconds before we are released from this image and we move on down the street.

Fig. 84 No More Waiting

The shot has strong graphic resonance and composition: the flatness of the image contrasts with the scale of the assembled kinetic body of people; the swaying hand has a stillness that seems to perfectly embody the patient determination of the crowd, and as I filmed I was anticipating the edited sequence. Training the camera on this framing was both a workaround to the limitations of a single camera –  a limitation that requires me to formulate a useable result from whatever I can capture – and an instance where the camera is not impartial. This is no longer the camera as objective observer, but an instance in which I am seeking out emotional resonance through graphic impact. I am responding to the empathy of the crowd. I am fully implicated here as participant/ supporter amongst the mix of voices, which I put into discursive constellation.

Hear the Drummer (7 July 2018)
I’m cycling home from a disappointing gig in the Iveagh Gardens. It’s 11pm or so and as I near O’Connell Street, I hear the drummer. He has a full drumkit set up outside Foot Locker and he’s playing solo. I have been meaning for some time to film him, and now seems like my chance. I speak with him briefly and get his agreement before racing back home to pick up my equipment, always ready in a rucksack. I return and set up as quickly as I can, tape a microphone to a lamppost and just as I manage to get the camera level on the tripod I press record as two passersby begin to dance as if to camera. To look at it now it appears set up, choreographed, but everything is chance. The two don’t know each other, but respond to each other, and Jason the drummer is improvising. It’s like a set piece, but then the moment dissipates, the beat shifts, the energy trails off, and people move on. The evening continues much like this – the intensity builds then ebbs. A cast of characters emerge during filming – three musicians with a shopping trolley (who will later appear, again by chance, in another segment of Landfall) arrive and jam; people dance, rap, sip beer, wave branches and linger, or move on. It’s a balmy evening and the drummer transforms the setting and the atmosphere. The public street becomes homely, accepting, it is reclaimed by its occupants. Playing finally ceases when Gardaí arrive and politely ask the musicians to stop – there have been complaints from nearby hotel guests. The irony of this is not lost on anyone.

Fig. 85 Hear the Drummer

Footage of a street drummer, borrowed from my film Hear the Drummer (2018), is enfolded into Landfall (2020) for its thematic resonances.^{145 145.} See Appendix IV for Survey of Appropriation and Sound Manipulation in Landfall. The footage is eidetically intertextual – although reedited as part of the whole, the sequences and sound are largely unaltered. It is thus appropriated from another of my works, while critically it is also ‘appropriated’ – taken as ready-made, raw material, therein claiming authorship of the footage, even as the footage itself is dependent on the authorship of the spontaneously unfolding events and musical performances it depicts. This is multipart– 1) the intertextual quotation/ borrowing from my own work and 2) the appropriation of what is contained within the footage and soundtrack 3) by recontextualising the footage other resonances emerge and inferences can be made. While reference to the public domain is implicit in Hear the Drummer, this theme becomes amplified in Landfall, and the relatively commonplace tradition of busking appears as an act of resistance.

 

 

It all felt so possible, instinctive and essential.^{146 146.} Thread Pulls, Boys of Summer, Twinkies, Catscars, Laura Sheeran, School Tour, Children Under Hoof, Sunken Foal, Somadrone and so many more like-minded people were creating and writing intoxicating, exhilarating music. Supporting each other, playing in makeshift venues, people’s houses, art spaces and squats. It all felt so possible, instinctive and essential.’—Katie Kim, The Thin Air, No. 2 May/June 2022

(Katie Kim, The Thin Air, 2022)

Thread Pulls Also Play House Parties (27 June 2009)^{147 147.} Available at: https://thumped.com/bbs/threads/10th-box-social-mini-fest-saturday-27-of-june.73570/ [Accessed 22 March 2025]
It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon and Patrick Kelleher is standing next to the flowerbed crooning wistfully into a microphone, accompanied by a backing track of slightly kitsch drum machine and organ sounds. People are scattered throughout the house and along the lawn. There’s beer being served from a shed down the end of the garden. It’s the first set in a long day of music. Almost 12 hours later Gavin and I are playing in the front room. There’s space for a drumkit and our amps in the bay window and somehow about 40 people have squeezed in, pressed right up against us. I’m surrounded by drums but Gavin is standing in the audience. The notion of a stage is dissolved as everyone moves together in joyous exuberance. People talk with us during the set; a cymbal gets dislodged and someone puts it back in place for me – it’s a conversation. As we play each song the room sways and heaves.

I Know This (19 October 2012)
We’re in the Joinery again, this time to launch our latest EP, and we want to create a total environment. Of course this should be done with minimal means. I’ve designed large posters for the gallery space at the entrance and we lean striplights against the wall, dramatically lighting them. We play almost in the dark, lit only by two task lamps taken from my office – one over the drums, and one clamped above Gavin’s head. I’ve put together an hour-long video from fragments and outtakes of the promo videos that I have made for the EP. Low-lit footage of spinning bowls, drums, vibrating rocks, and hands, makes thematic or textual links with the EP artwork, and this is projected across us and onto the screen. The room is packed and we’re playing almost in the round. I can feel people behind me, close beside me and across the room close up to Gavin. We’re playing an entirely new set, testing new modes. Some of this stuff is slow-moving, and this idea has evolved from playing out live so much – we want to bring the audience with us, deep into the sound, and duration seems the way to do it. I Know This takes more than eight minutes to unfold. A steady groove, with intervals of verse or chorus, it’s more about tonal modulations than a song. With a skeletal sound of just drums and bass, some reverb and delay, progressive shifts in pattern and accents draw you in. We’re all immersed in what we’re hearing.

Fig. 86 Thread Pulls Also Play House Parties/ I Know This.

Author as Producer: Collective Authoring

The Joinery opened in 2007 as a shared studio space, but a significant music programme evolved in response to the need for a performance space for a tide of people making music less suited to pubs and larger venues.^{148 148.} The Joinery was a not-for-profit art space in Stoneybatter, Dublin, which encompassed gallery/project/performance spaces and small studio/workspaces. Set up in 2007 by Miranda Driscoll and Feargal Ward, the Joinery provided a platform for emerging artists and musicians to experiment and explore their practices. The Joinery could be seen as a site for experimentation – for making, exhibiting, performing and discussing. http://thejoineryarchive.org/about/about. [Accessed 22 March 2025] There is always a deficit of venues in Dublin for music that might require close listening, and any available space becomes a locus for activity and contributes substantially to shaping the music that is produced at a given time. The Joinery was the locus for much of this musical activity in Dublin from 2008–2013. This was not necessarily legible nor did it attempt to be legible as a subculture; the Joinery received Arts Council funding, but as an ad hoc site of cultural activity those who gravitated towards it – performers and audience, facilitated by the organisers – developed as a subculture.^{149 149.}  ‘The second subcultural category is ‘oppositional’, representing loosely organised resistance to social institutions, values, and practices. A fair amount of punk, metal, rap, folk, and reggae is oppositional. An ideological convergence takes place between creators and consumers of these musics. Oppositional subcultural music confirms political positions and cultural orientations by reinforcing alternative ideologies and actions. These objectives are met not only by the lyrical content of the music, but by its signature textures and atmospheres as well. Oppositional subcultural music is part of the resistance to the “tendencies” of a society’s socioeconomic elite to “reproduce… its structure of domination”’ (Hall cited in Lull, 1992: 29)

Thread Pulls played our first show in the Joinery on 22 November 2008 on a bill with E+S=B. This was one of the first gigs while the venue was finding its identity as an artists’ studio, gallery and performance space. There was no nominal headline band, and indeed there was no stage. There was a rudimentary vocal PA but the sounds of the instruments came from the acoustic drums, and guitar and bass amps. The Joinery ran on a profit-share basis, and the money on the door (€5 admission) had a 70/30 door split in favour of the performers. Over the next five years, The Joinery became a home venue for us. The Joinery was significant in two distinct ways with regard to authorship for me. Firstly, the nature of the place itself, and secondly how it manifested as a subcultural site over time. 

Without a defined stage, the room could be configured differently for any gig, and importantly, as there was no stage there was no hierarchy between bands, or between bands and audience. These aspects gave us parameters and a space in which to try out ideas around sound and performance. Effectively playing in the round, and with the other performers in the audience, created a sense of unity, changed how it felt to perform, and consequently how we were received.>>> Non-hierarchical billing and staging, along with the friendly door price and BYOB policy gave a collective sense to any event. Across successive gigs we would learn better how to use the space, arranging equipment, making use of lighting and projection to further flatten hierarchy. For one of our gigs we bought fluorescent green strip lights, and the glow flooded the entire room so that neither performers nor audience were privileged. We left the lights at the venue afterwards and they were frequently reused, becoming a signature visual element; photos from the Joinery from this period are often bathed in green light, becoming a recognisable signifier of the place (Fig. 87). 

As there was a limited PA (essentially for vocals), we developed ways of working around this, and this in turn shaped our overall sound. A conventional PA is directional – it faces outwards from the stage. Split into a stereo signal, it separates sounds from performers in an effort to create a full room sound, but with this any sense of localised sound is lost. The sound of the voice, the trumpet, bass, or drums all come from the same place in the room. With only a vocal PA, we were able to optimise localised sound, combining acoustic and amplified elements. My hybrid drumkit fused acoustic drums and electronic signals which I fed through adjacent large amplifiers, creating a single sound from the drumkit. The vocal PA was located near Gavin, and his voice and processed trumpet sounds passed through this. A bass guitar amplifier opposite the drums completed the sound. Through this we could more precisely control timbre, something often left to (or lost to) a house sound-engineer who superimposes their taste and sense of what is ‘correct’ onto a band’s sound. As a consequence, we developed a more autonomous gigging setup such that when we played in more conventional venues we retained much of this timbral control.

While these pragmatic issues helped to shape the development of Thread Pulls performances, there was another current of authorship at a subcultural level and recognising that I was part of this has been significant for me in conceptualising notions of authorship, participation, collaboration and community. It’s tempting to think that this community of people who attended Joinery events had a single or coherent ethos or operating principles but in fact the audiences were remarkably diverse. I would meet people there whom I knew from the art world, as well as music (the two are usually quite separate), but I was not part of a close-knit ‘scene’. Different events would attract distinct audiences. Scenes are often identified or claimed retrospectively but cultural activity like this at the Joinery is based around contingency. That Miranda and Feargal were open to letting the remit of the place evolve led to a collective co-authorship. It was a collective entity of audience, performers and organisers who as contributors defined what the Joinery became, and Thread Pulls contributed to this. There was a collective authoring of a creative space, a reconfiguring within existing subcultural networks and a forming/furthering of them. Thread Pulls was sited within networks of venues, promoters, independent releases, rehearsal rooms, composition and recording strategies, and working with friends. We, like each contributor brought our network constellation to the Joinery, where multiple entities mingled and cross-pollinated. The Joinery was not outwardly identifiable nor self-defining as a subculture, but by its nature (a unique, independent cultural facility and venue with a flexible programme strategy and profit-share policy with artists) it constituted subcultural activity. It did not ‘conspicuously’ define itself in relation to the mainstream or ‘more orthodox cultural formations’ (Hebdige, 2010: 103), nor did The Joinery or the people who loosely constituted this field of activity. Unlike a museum, which is by nature establishment, The Joinery, or indeed an independent music label, or a promoter/ venue network exists only in response to a need and because of the participants, and opportunity. When circumstances shift, they are gone, the hole closes over. Over time people reconfigure and new outcomes may result. This impermanence vs. the permanence of the museum is both tacit objective and requirement. Although no one intentionally sets something up anticipating its demise, it always becomes clear in retrospect how things have a moment, before circumstances shift.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fig. 88 Make Ready, 127
Sometimes it’s nice to be led by the order of your ideas and to be surprised by the outcomes. In the process of making, you form a view of the material through the strategies you employ, but once all the technical checks are completed and editing ceases, the changes take place only in your perception. An adjustment occurs between expectation and material outcomes, and it can be a while before it’s possible to experience the effect of those strategies with a sense of remove from the process. It can take a while before you’re able to see the view.>>>

Decentring Authorship

Kristeva defines three coordinates of dialogue: ‘writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts’ (Kristeva, 1980: 65–66). In displacing the author, ‘subject-addressee’ and ‘text-context’ form a ‘synchronic literary corpus’ (ibid.: 66). In the short text above I am reflecting on the writer-as-reader, and from this vantage point towards the end of my thesis, it resonates with the reading-writing process described by Kristeva (ibid.: 65). Stepping back from the outputs, what do they indeed achieve or signify in relation to their particular discourse and in regard to graphic design discourse? In the heat of practice, decisions are based on contingencies which may steer us away from our intentions. Being attuned to this process has been instrumental for me, but the evaluation mid-process is only completed by post-production evaluation. Only then can we see how something really performs when it meets an audience, until then it is speculation. Distanced by time from the making process, I too become the audience and reader of the work, the viewer-reader, and can newly align intent, outcomes, and surrounding conditions.

 

 

Presented in both boxed-set and browser versions, I have put form and content directly in dialogue, and my thesis at once problematises the conventions of a written thesis which reflects on practice-based publications, by making the thesis reading experience a performative enactment of its findings. While the writing in both versions is identical (eidetic), the encounter with either digital or physical artifacts, and the arrangement of text and image on page or screen, elicits different behaviours and responses. My textual presentation is far from the prescribed submission format of an A4, text-based document with accompanying figures. As a graphic designer entering into the critical space of a written thesis, I was initially cautious of deviating from these regulations lest it be perceived as, or have the effect of, superfluity or decoration. In fact, I did not want to ‘design’ it, as my focus was on writing. Through this process however, it emerged as a necessity that I develop a means of integrating the reading experience with the publications themselves in order to make legible detailed observation and analysis which might otherwise be confounding, and for the reader to register some of the effects of engagement with the material object. Any effort to do this though is necessarily incomplete, as in some instances, naturally, only artifacts or documentation remain, but across the two modes of presentation, the material encounter of paper, ink, and page-turning is countered by the experience of the all-in-one digital environment, and the differences register with the reader as embodied knowledge.

While both versions – boxed-set and browser-based – are in themselves discrete, both in parallel have been presented for examination as I believe this serves to defer a hierarchy or preference, and equally to point towards the non-definitive, and incomplete nature of any enquiry or presentation. Both have virtues and shortcomings, yet the differences they produce demonstrate aspects of what my thesis proposes. To engage with this thesis in either format is to enact or complete the theory and methodology proposed in the writing and evidenced in the publications. I believe that this integral relationship and its testing of the viewer-reader across both versions enriches the thesis experience, registers a greater depth of insight, and further points towards elaboration of this approach by doctoral thesis candidates.

Although a thesis is produced in the realm of the academy, my writing is inextricably linked to and is a practice iteration. I have thus written in several modes in an effort to reflect the discoveries and contingencies of practice and equally, the emergent nature of writing a thesis. In the same way that my practice outputs often express and draw attention to the artifice of their making, I wish to draw the reader’s attention to the artifice of the thesis – that it is one available account of a practice, albeit a ‘preferred reading’ (Fiske, 2011: 118).

By opening out the convention of the footnote into further paratextual material (particularly marginal notes), I devised a format which allows a central text to be disrupted by writings in different registers, such that my thesis presents in parallel a completed work, alongside evidence of a work in progress. As with any process, the writing of this thesis was iterative, and since the writing took place over a considerable period of time, the temporality of emergent insights and observations gained relevance. To revisit a section or passage 
of text was to revisit not just the writing, but an insight or perspective held at a particular moment in an emergent process; in reassessing previously held views it became evident that to concretise this in the form of marginal comments would enforce in the thesis the significance for the practitioner of the iterative process. My ‘in-thesis commentary’, where I have reflected on the task at hand at various moments, functions as a ‘V-Effect’, making evident the formation of the views held in the writing. In an undoing of convention where a singular authorial voice runs through the text, this proposes a sense of contingency. In the browser presentation the marginal notes are indicated with arrows and highlighted to draw the reader away from a central column of text, exploiting behaviour typical of an online environment, where we are accustomed to non-linear reading and digression. In the print version, the central text is disturbed by fine diagonal lines that lead the reader to a marginal note. This doubly has the impression of something provisional – that the text has been annotated – and that something has been stuck-through or cancelled; both of these gestures disrupt the reader, in a further undoing of any sense of a definitive reading. Also in the margins are tertiary information and references which extend or digress from the central text. This affords a further shift away from the idea of a singular text and is thus reflective of and actuates an aspect common to each of my publications, where multivalency, non-linear reading, digression and the production of a discursive space for the viewer-reader, are prioritised.

Vignettes, written in the present tense, as if at the moment of their occurrence, have been employed throughout the writing to situate the reader inside my practice. Some are in written form only, while others combine text and image, yet both are referred to as ‘figures’, alluding to their visual presence and their production as illustrations of an unfolding practice. The inclusion of text excerpts from Make Ready (2015) is first intertextual, but in referring to them also as ‘figures’, I am proposing that they too are images or illustrations. These observations made in another context and through a different lens are fixed, like images – 
freeze frames of a previous state or reading of practice – and are represented as artifacts within the writing.

In challenging writing conventions in these ways, I have operated in a way consistent with my practice, whereby assumed conventions are exploited for their communicative possibilities. I believe that these innovations in my thesis presentation demonstrate ways in which to embed the inextricable relationship between form and content and to more acutely address the contingencies of graphic design practice, alongside the formation of writing around practice.

My thesis findings offer a constellation of sites, effects, processes, and contexts operating as a malleable and adaptable toolkit of resources rather than any kind of blueprint of approach. This reveals a longitudinal practice enquiry across which these findings apply and this in itself is instructive. While the thesis primarily addresses five publications produced over a 12-year period, they inhabit a life-long enquiry, and I believe this perspective to be insightful for any career-practitioner. Deeply held views underlie my practice and each iteration is an articulation in some way of those views. To this end I have repurposed an existing publication – Make Ready – as a means to structure my writing. By revisiting and reinhabiting the Make Ready book, I was able to draw on a body of work and a reflection written from a practice perspective at a particular moment in an on-going enquiry. Make Ready was not an academic reflection; it was a continuation of practice, enveloping all of my interests, one of which is writing. Make Ready was a symbiotic exploration of idea and form, and a playful (re)staging of material. I certainly intended to reveal the complexities of practice, but as an ongoing set of conditions rather than as critical enquiry. Make Ready revels in the pun, in placement and collision, and does not endeavour to be a summation of practice. By contrast, this written thesis was motivated by the need to make tacit knowledge available and transferable outside the context of a singular practice. By reusing this structure, I could reinforce the notion of longitudinal, iterative enquiry, further decentre any singular, or ‘correct’ reading of a practice, while acting with the intentions and instincts of the bricoleur, who looks to what is available – to the ready-made – to adapt to current or future requirements. This structure enabled me and, I hope in turn the reader, to stay close to the practice. Eliminating any distance from the publications, I have written directly into a practice output. By the inclusion of what I have referred to as ‘redundancies’ – entries and accounts in Make Ready of publications which do not otherwise figure in the written discussion – I have registered their relevance within a larger edifice. A graphic design practice is shaped by opportunity and contingency, and theory and methodology are not articulated or indeed formed from the start. Neither is the practitioner in control of the path their practice takes, only that they might seize and avail of opportunities to open out their enquiry. In retrospect, some decisions or publications seem more relevant or can be made more significant than others, while others still may represent mistakes, or less fruitful enquiries, yet each of them was formative, and it was for these reasons that their presence was retained in the thesis. The lexicon which accompanies each Make Ready entry amplifies the multivalency of practice. As lists, they present a sometimes-unlikely collision of actors and actants, making visible some of the intertextual breath of the publications, together with the concentration of efforts and energies of many voices in a publication. Collectively, they also reflect how, through a practice such as mine, I become imbricated in the outputs of others, sometimes without their knowledge or permission.

As a student I was firstly a fan of graphic design. Thrilled by the pages of Emigre magazine, i-D, and Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, formal enquiry motivated by these publications quickly lead me to a purposeful interrogation of the surface of things; how could materiality, timbre, and arrangement (re)shape the message? This gave me a sense of purchase on the world around me, and I contributed directly to the culture(s) of which I was a part. This began to define my operative position. With the ‘graphic designer’ label though, comes an assumption of transparency, and the authorship of graphic design is not so much contested as overlooked, or remains an intruder. This outsider status has, however, been a productive turn for me, and manoeuvrability in this guise led to the publications in this thesis. The recognition of this is an important thesis finding for the graphic design practitioner, since this positionality afforded the possibilities which emerged in the course of the publications that I made with Gerard Byrne. My role as graphic designer opened up for us the exhibitionary space of the book in a distinctive manifestation of existing and newly generated material, availing of the full parameters of book technology. Through the chance of this working relationship, we were able to produce publications which met with their relatively prosaic objective – collating and registering material relating to a body of work – while in the process expanding on the material’s inherent complexities as it meets the technology of a book.

Equally, the malleable role of graphic design afforded by its descriptor has brought about the unusual combination of projects and publications I have made with Tom dePaor. On paper an architect–graphic design partnership, we both operate within and outside of these descriptions to produce film, photography, writing, books, sculptural works, and exhibitions. From a critical perspective this led me to speculate as to the commonalities and distance between the practice areas of architecture and graphic design, where many of the practice activities are similar although the motivations may be distinct or even oppositional. Menon and Patteeuw’s (2018: 84) case for ‘magazine architecture’ has interesting correlations with this view, in that they see the production of a magazine as part of architectural practice. I have not, however, made any claims in this thesis towards practicing architecture but I enjoy and find productive the way in which my work with dePaor problematises this, calling both operational fields into question, asking of the viewer-reader that they question their assumptions, particularly of the relationship between the built and unbuilt and how it exists within architectural practice. Additionally, it allowed me to critically engage with architecture discourse from this insider-outsider position.

With each publication in this thesis, the degree of my proximity to the site and subject matter varies, but I was never entirely at a remove; I have an investment in the culture to which I am adding. I have identified in my thesis the importance of my emic operative position, immersed, and contributing with things made by-not-for the viewer-reader. As such, I am first a reader, writing into the ‘already written’ (de Certeau, 1998: 43), bringing to this my ‘political intertextuality’, together with the position of privilege from which I have the opportunity to speak. In industry, graphic designers are often the last to be invited to a project, while my thesis and associated publications demonstrate other ways of operating. My thesis evidences a depth of insight and engagement that can only be achieved by a practitioner who contributes to the culture(s) of which they are a part. This is distinct from the expectation of the professionalised designer who is required to deliver an effective design solution based primarily on a fee-paying exchange, and who may at times be working at odds with the wishes of the commissioner. My practice position is not subservient to content, but immersed in it. It is of no interest to me to superimpose a pre-formulated ‘style’ upon a publication. Although I recognise personally, and within the writing that my outputs develop unavoidable stylistic tendencies – I am writing into the already written and naturally draw upon what has gone before – these are arguably a bi-product of modes of enquiry as much as they are a weakness towards taste and trends.

Through this thesis enquiry I have identified my field of study as the communicative ordering and instrumentalisation of ideas, material, and media in diverse artistic and cultural contexts, framed by my practice formation in graphic design. In so doing, I am often reliant on those with whom I work, the material they produce, and the authorship inherent in that production. As such, I have further identified my operative position as one of ‘mutual constituency’, a non-hierarchical dynamic where, in serving the communications needs of a publication, I am equally deepening my own research enquiry. It is not always possible to work in this manner (it depends on personal relationships), but I have found this description to be useful in setting the tone for any exchange. Through writing this thesis I have articulated this operative position, and it has since served as a useful tool with which to assess any potential undertaking. While each publication has a sometimes given, sometimes found subject matter, operating within one or more discourses, it affords me – and I suggest, any practitioner – a mutually constituent relationship with those with whom I work, whereby subject matter intersects with my own longitudinal enquiry into the graphic design practitioner’s production of knowledge through publication. In each instance this must meet an audience, and through my practice position I am able to enter into dialogue with diverse practitioners and groupings, serving to enrich both my practice enquiry and that of those with whom I am working.

It is not uncommon to meet graphic designers who are drummers (I am one), and thoughts in one area naturally migrate to the other. In reflecting on this in Make Ready I observed that it was through drumming that my ‘energy transfer’ construct took shape. Its formulation of ‘capture’, ‘storage’, and ‘release’ emerged through practice, and was first outlined in Make Ready to describe my process of encountering and assimilating material, translating it through arrangement and technological processes into publication material, subsequently realised by its meeting with an audience. It is most clearly articulated in my musical activity, with the immediacy of live performance, yet it is through this written thesis that I have added critical framing, providing a structure within which the constituent parts in the sequence of publication-making can be understood. While this has had a tacit presence in my practice for many years, through its framing in my thesis I now use this as a model in teaching undergraduate students in Visual Communication. Its tripartite structure helps make visible for my students the overlapping yet distinct phases in which they engage as they produce work for the viewer-reader, and through this, they are more clearly able to articulate a design process. Built on these thesis findings, my students can assimilate often complex information from multiple sources, edit this while making choices defined by their unique perspectives, and via technological means, produce what are effectively storage devices – physical, digital, or spatiotemporal artifacts or events – which, alike with an archive, remain passive until they are met by an audience.

A graphic designer who turns to filmmaking will bring with them a particular understanding, not just of the interfaces of digital editing, but a sense of time, pacing, composition, editing, and juxtaposition, in common with the arrangement of elements on a static page or screen. Much of this is shared with music, and spatial, and timbral characteristics of sound have visual parallels. The correlations between the organisation of elements on a printed page and the constituent sounds of a drumkit arranged in time, are evident in practice. Crossovers inevitably occur, and experience and understanding in one area has informed the other in a process I refer to as transdisciplinary ‘foldback’. I have drawn attention in my thesis to the importance for the practitioner in recognising and being responsive to this. This ‘technicity’, as I have framed it, is a further mutual constituency – one that exists through our human relationship and response to materials, form, and technological transformation, and through which the material ‘speaks’ in accordance with its nature or resistance(s), resonant with my bricoleur methodology, as I allow it to inform the path of my work’s development.

FitzGerald makes correlations between music and graphic design, drawing from Brian Eno, who identified timbre as the greatest innovation of contemporary music (FitzGerald, 2010). I refer to FitzGerald’s metaphor of the recording studio mixing desk to equate the parameters of graphic communication, although this type of correlation was always self-evident for me through the practice of making, and Eno’s framing of the recording studio as musical instrument articulates what was always part of my everyday practice. Through the technological convergence of computers, this became more pronounced as arranging sonic material became visual, with graphic representation on a scrolling timeline. Access to affordable recording hardware and software brought timbre within my control as a musician, and as an available compositional element, these sonic ‘textures’ reflected the techniques and technological artifacts that I was manipulating in a visual context to amplify content. I have referred in my thesis to the ‘ineliminable grain’ of any technology, which brings light to the artifact of production, present despite any notions of transparent communication that graphic design (or recording) is expected to achieve. With the availability of home recording technologies, the recording process shifted from the engineer to the musician, and the resultant ‘misuse’ of equipment and technologies became more common, resulting in unexpected results and significant innovation. This misuse of equipment and intended processes, and its resultant effects, have their equivalents in graphic design, and these chance happenings, alongside repurposing, appropriation, and the resourceful availing of what is ‘to-hand’ are further characteristic of my emergent bricoleur methodology. In my introduction I present a diagram of these and other parameters, which determine the character of the publications I make. Collectively, they set out the instrumental set afforded through my bricoleur methodology; its mapping provides a rich scope of communicative possibilities which can be used effectively to produce or situate any publication. While many parameters might seem familiar, in each I build on prior knowledge and understanding (that of the bricoleur) in its application, and the innovation is in the ensemble of this proposition. Rather than a prescribed series of steps, my thesis proposes this as an instrumental set available to the graphic designer, who must in its use be agile and responsive to content and context.

The publications under discussion in this thesis are resultant of this relationship with modes of production and through this I have made visible for the graphic design practitioner a path that diverges from the necessity for technical expertise or mastery, in favour of an attunement to the many levels of control and exactitude, and their influence on how the viewer-reader receives the material. The traditional expectations of a professionalised approach are replaced in my practice with a more holistic framing of the design process, where all decisions remain contingent on the emerging process of design and production. The bricoleur reveals traces of his/her own presence in what is produced, speaking both with and through the medium (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). Thus, engagement with formal methods and processes leads to a manifest methodology, aligning with my world view informed by the nightclub, the gig, the gallery, and the socio-political conditions in which I live. Each of my publications negotiates technique as a productive, communicative tool rather than a prerequisite. The first example I have given in my thesis is in the use of Albertus, a ‘display’ typeface, for the body copy of Make Ready (2015). Typography, is built around conventions of usage and arrangement, which can be manipulated to productively disrupt the reading experience. This choice of typeface looks awkward, while its practical unsuitability for use in continuous text, as well as the uneven setting of the type, point towards the inexpert. In these ways it engages productively with issues of professionalism in graphic design, drawing into question the intent of the books design, and the nature of my practice.

If these ideas describe a productive bricolage methodology and operative position, my theoretical framing draws most productively on Genette’s ‘transtextual’ model to bring light to framing devices at play across each of my publications. The ‘intertext’ is consistent with the DIY or sub-cultural producer, and the ‘already written’ is part of the bricoleur’s toolkit. I have borrowed Genette’s transtextual modality of ‘transposition’ (1997: 212) to explore facets of my framing of the book as ‘exhibitionary space’, and in two of the publications made with Gerard Byrne (Images or Shadows, and A Late Evening in the Future), I have examined contrasting approaches. The former revisits as discursive space the monological or honorific task of art publications. By arrangement, together with the inclusion of transtextual material, the normative relationship of image to text is disrupted. The latter eschews the ‘framing closures of a single privileged view’ (Potts, 1999: 184) through the affordances of book technology. In a process of ‘transmodalisation’, the material is restaged specifically for the book encounter, rather than purporting to document events which occurred elsewhere. The book serves to fashion a new encounter that is parallel to, rather than placeholder for actual encounter or experience of lived phenomena. I believe that this framing represents a significant contribution to knowledge in the formation of publications. Other ‘intertextual’ modalities have been borrowed from Miller, and Friedman (political intertextuality), and Fiske (vertical intertextuality), alongside discussion of the various means of appropriation of which I have availed, in an ensemble of ‘trans’ or ‘inter’ textual relationships threaded through each of the outputs, and the entire of my practice (Fiske, 2011; Friedman, 1991; Miller, 1988). The constituent parts of this, more than one of which might be present in any publication, I believe offer a critical lens through which any publication can be shaped.

Graphic design practices often refer to a ‘target audience’, objectifying the receiver as someone or some thing at which to aim communication. Other terms such as ‘audience’, ‘visitor’, ‘viewer’, or ‘spectator’ each set the individual outside of or at the end of a closed path of communication, suggesting a passive or receptive role rather than one of critical engagement. More problematically, they also suggest that a publication or piece of communication is completed prior to its meeting with people. ‘Effective’ communication with its implication of singularity is something that I eschew in favour of complexity, whilst the audience will always bring to any work their own values and understanding; I have preferred to exploit the possibilities of this rather than suppress potential interpretation. In each publication I may try to produce a ‘preferred reading’, but the engagement of the viewer-reader is contingent on multiple factors including where and for how long someone might engage with the material, their intent and their political intertextuality. A publication meets with each person and it is the ‘viewer-reader’ that completes the text. Addressing the ‘viewer-reader’ as a function of my practice has enabled me to pivot on the implications of these more conventional terms, situating the ‘viewer-reader’ within the publication process – an idea aligning with my ‘energy transfer’ construct. In its two-part form, each person views and subsequently reads the ‘text’, a task outside of the control of any publisher or graphic designer. This identifies the key and decisive role each person has as receiver of the energy being transmitted in the form of material output or publication, and it is through them that this energy is released and meaning is shaped. Equally, it both affords and invites the reflexive position of reader-writer; the author too is always a reader first, writing into the always already written. This is an important conclusion that I arrived at in addressing issues of authorship.

The Make Ready exhibition (2015) disrupted the behavioural conventions of the gallery, wherein books, prints, CDs, LPs, documents, and artifacts – the materials of the studio – were brought to the light as exhibits, while the visitor was invited to hold and browse the material, or sit amongst it to read. Viewed from the street, this resembled a theatrical staging, where the visitor could be seen through the shop window, performing an integral role in the completion of the exhibit and the publications on display. My exhibition placed the viewer-reader at the centre. Images or Shadows (2011), a book published to accompany an exhibition, is transformed into an ‘exhibitionary space’, in which multiple content typologies are in dialogue, disrupting the conventions of gallery publications based around reproductions and accompanying critical essays. Images or Shadows is recognisable as such, but closer engagement with the book serves to undo much of this. The form is directly in dialogue with the subject matter – Byrne’s practice and selected outputs – in which he restages or reconstructs events based on prior published accounts, inherently questioning the veracity of evidentiary material and the accounts or restagings themselves. In the Irish Pavilion Of de Blacam and Meagher (2010) at the Venice Biennale, the publication Irlanda (2010) itself was the object on display – graphic design supplanting the artifacts of practice. A drawing or a photograph is fixed in time not least by its technological means, and its substitution in the exhibition with reproductions in an editorial context stripped them of some of their original meaning. This move highlighted the distance that exists, initially between drawings and models of a building in prospect and the subsequent encounter with place itself, and further, with any documentation, and was thereby a reflection on the dilemma of exhibiting architecture. In its disembodied form, people walked amidst the publication, negotiating the room to encounter the material in a sequence which they determined, while physically gathering and collating their own copy of the book to take away. With my band Thread Pulls the audience–stage dynamic was undone (often motivated by practical concerns), and the single sound source of the PA gave way to a multi-directional or localised encounter with sound, while the dynamic between audience and performer was adjusted to invite a more participatory experience. The film Landfall  comprises footage much of which resembles reportage, but it’s construction and dual-screen presentation bring the material in dialogue to suggest a larger thematic enquiry, open to multiple readings; the relationship too between sound and image is more compositional and visceral than figurative or explanatory. In each of these publications the disruption was purposeful and productive, instrumentalising the means and site of transmission to complexify the communicative function, while serving to alert the viewer-reader to their participatory role, inviting them to question both the character and verisimilitude of the material before them. In making explicit the processes and methods of the bricolage through self-reflexive devices – such as the cover of Make Ready, which within it contains the cover of Images or Shadows, or the unsteady camera work, footsteps, and obtrusive wind-thumps in These Islands (2013; 2017)  – the viewer-reader is alerted to the artifice and construct of communication, prompting them to further question any account or evidentiary material, whilst reminding them that they themselves are instrumental in the construction of meaning.

The interstitial sites to which my thesis title refers are each addressed through existing paradigms – a book, film, exhibition, music performance, or recording – yet these are often peripheral to normative graphic design practice, or to the discourse in which they are sited. Since they are the work of a graphic designer, in some cases made with a practitioner from a discipline such as art or architecture, they enter at an angle into other discourses. The ways in which I instrumentalise the tools of making have developed from my practice formation and thus are displaced in their new context. In On Being There (2022), I used film as a way to produce a discourse around the existing archive of an architecture practice, simultaneously bringing the sensibilities of a graphic designer-musician to filmmaking, and (enabled by practice with dePaor), situating my film within architecture discourse. Of de Blacam and Meagher too is interstitial, with graphic design presented as architecture – text and image arranged on a page – whose physical form in paper and wood is configured within a 16th century oratory, both inhabiting and producing an architectural space. Landfall, while recognisable as a film, exploits technical limitations to negotiate a space between documentary, essay film, sound composition, and installation, while availing of the opportunity of a commission afforded by my practice description (the commissioners sought to exhibit work in a gallery by someone at the periphery of art practice).

Each publication under discussion in my thesis was in part motivated by a disruption. The normative exchange that graphic design provides an audience or reader, of delivering a message with clarity, and with assumed transparency, has been subverted or challenged. The single view or account was replaced by multiple views, multivalency, and polyphony, with space afforded the viewer-reader to derive meaning. For this to be productive the form to which it is referring must be recognisable, such that the disruption causes the viewer-reader to question their expectations, heightening their awareness of the artifice of any communication. The space was prepared for the productive engagement of the viewer-reader, with certain expectations disrupted in relation to form, context, subject matter, or handling of material. A ‘transformation’ is achieved through taking an existing paradigm and reshaping it to produce a more discursive experience for the viewer-reader. The intention in this is to open up gaps between the (given) phenomenon (an event, an artwork, a place), and the capacity of recorded material, closing-in on correlations which have visceral characteristics, premised (as Andrew Tracy notes of the ‘essay film’), ‘on the recognition that even the keenest insight pales in the face of an ultimate unknowability’ (Tracy, 2019: n. pag.). Thus ‘capture’, and ‘storage’, through technique, timbre, sign, and arrangement (the tools of my bricolage), amplify ideas, and offer polysemy, contributing to a ‘transformation’ (Clarke, 2003: 177–8), by connecting the viewer-reader (at the moment of ‘release’) with the implicate order of things. If the bricolage of my work is successful, it leaves space for the viewer-reader to complete the energy transfer, meeting the material with their own ‘political intertextuality’, to ‘set it going’ (Barthes, 1978: 163; emphasis in original), producing it as ‘text’.

Aguirre, P. (2022)  ‘Writing on the Wall: Interview with Experimental Jetset’ [online] Available at https://www.academia.edu/73248498/Writingonthewall_Jet_Set_Peio_Aguirre_ENG [Accessed 22 March 2025].

Allen, I. (2022) ‘Tom dePaor unveils I See Earth retrospective’. [online] Available at: https://architecturetoday.co.uk/tom-depaor-unveils-i-see-earth/ [Accessed 22 March 2025].

Anderson, S. (2018) ‘Notes on Signals, Spectres and Systems’. A Late Evening in the Future: Signal, Spectre, System, 39–46 Vienna: VfmK Verlag für moderne Kunst GmbH.

Bailey, P. (2018) A Line Which Forms a Volume. Stuart, M. and Bailey, P. (eds.). London: London College of Communication.

Barthes, R. and Heath, S. (1978) Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang.

Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Massachusetts, London: Belknap Press.

Benjamin, W. (2008) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin.

Blauvelt, A. (2003) ‘Towards Critical Autonomy or Can Graphic Design Save Itself?’ Emigre: Rant 64, 38–43. California: Emigre/ New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Blauvelt, A. (2013) The 2013 D-Crit Conference: A. ‘Graphic Design: Discipline, Medium, Practice, Tool, or Other?’ [online] Available at: https://vimeo.com/showcase/2359892/video/66385792 [Accessed 22 March 2025].

Bloom-Christen, A. and Grunow, H. (2022) What’s (in) a Vignette? History, Functions, and Development of an Elusive Ethnographic Sub-genre, Ethnos. [online] DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2022.2052927 Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2022.2052927 [Accessed 22 March 2025].

Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R.A. (1999) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Borsuk, A. (2018) The Book. Massachusetts: The MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bourriaud, N (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. 

Bringhurst, R. (2004) The Solid Form of Language: An Essay on Writing and Meaning. Kentville: Gaspereau Press.

Buzon, D. ‘Design Thinking is a Rebrand for White Supremacy: How the Current State of Design is Simply a Digitally Updated Status Quo’ [online] Available at: https://dabuzon.medium.com/design-thinking-is-a-rebrand-for-white-supremacy-b3d31aa55831 [Accessed 22 March 2025.

Carswell, S. (2012) Anglo Republic: The Definitive History of the Bank That Brought Ireland to Ruin. London: Penguin.

Chion, M. (2017) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia University Press.

Clarke, J. (2003) ‘Style: The Creation of Style’, Resistance Through Rituals Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 175–191. Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds.). London and New York: Routledge. 

Davis, E. (2002) ‘Recording Angels: The esoteric origins of the phonograph’, Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music. London: Bloomsbury.

dePaor, T and Maybury, P. (2013), ‘Inter Alia’, San Rocco – What’s Wrong with the Primitive Hut? 8, 142–5. Milan: San Rocco.

de Certeau, M. (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.

Denisoff, R.S., and Peterson, R.A. (1972) Sounds of Social Change. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Denzin, K. & Lincoln, Y. (2013) The Landscape of Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

Derrida, J. (1978) ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, Writing & Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; and London: Henley, Routledge and Keegan Paul Ltd.

Drucker, J. (2014) Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Cambridge, Massachusets; London, Harvard University Press.

Duchamp, M. (1999) À l’infinitif. Hamilton, R. and Bonk, E. (eds.). The Typosophic Society: Northend Chapter.

Duncombe, S. (1997) Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. Bloomington, In: Microcosm.

Eco, U. (1989) The Open Work. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.

Fiske, J. (2011) Television Culture. Oxford and New York: Routledge.

FitzGerald, K. (1997) ‘Fuel Full Pull Poll Pool Cool Cook Book’, Emigre: Design as Content 44, 14–28. California: Emigre. 

FitzGerald, K. (2010) Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Foley, M. (2014) ‘Development of Exempted Development’, The Brief, The Official Journal of the Irish Institute of Legal Executives, 2014. Dublin, The Irish Institute of Legal Executive

Forde, G. (1991) ‘The Designer Unmasked’, Eye 23, 57–68. London: Eye Magazine Limited.

Friedman, S. (1991) ‘Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author’, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, 146–180. Clayton and Rothstein (eds.). Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press. 

Foucault, M. (1979) ‘What is an Author?’, Textual Strategies 141–160, Josué Harari (ed). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 

Foucault, M. (2020) ‘What is an Author?’, Aesthetics: Essential Works 1954–84. UK: Penguin.

Genette, G. (1997) Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.

Gilloch, G. (2002) Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Goggin, J. (2012) ‘2009: Practice from Everyday Life: Defining Graphic Design’s Expansive Scope by Its Quotidian Activities’, Graphic Design: Now in Production, 54–56. Blauvelt, A. and Lupton, E. (eds.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center.

Goodwin, A. (1992) ‘Rationalisation and Democratization’, Popular Music and Communication. Lull, J. (ed). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Grumet, M. (1987) ‘The Politics of Personal Knowledge’, Curriculum Inquiry, Autumn, 1987, 17, (3), 319-329. Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto.

Hall, S. (1979) ‘Culture, the Media and the “Ideological Effect”’, 315–348, Mass Communication and Society. Curran, J. et al (eds). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Hart, J. (1980) Preface to On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. University of Western Ontario.

Hebdige, D. (2010) Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge.

Heller, S. (1996) ‘The Man who Invented Graphic Design’, Eye 23. London: Eye Magazine Limited.

Heller, S. (2018), ‘Octavo: Eight Historic Issues’ Print. [online] Available at: https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/octavo-eight-historic-issues-unit-editions/ [ Accessed 22 March 2025]. 

Hutchinson, J. (1997) The Bread and Butter Stone: On Memory. Dublin: The Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Hutchinson, J. (ed.) (1999) Utopias. Dublin: The Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Hutchinson, J. (2005) Huts. Dublin: The Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Jackson, M. (2017) ‘After the Fact: The Question of Fidelity in Ethnographic Writing’, Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing. Pandian, A. and McLean, S. (eds.). Durham: Duke University Press.

Jensen, K. B. (2016) ‘Intermediality’, The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy. Jensen, K. B. and Craig, R.T. (eds). Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley & Sons.

Johnson, B. (1987), ‘Les fleurs du Mai Arme. Some Reflexions on Intertextuality,’ A World of Difference. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Juncosa, E. (2011) ‘On the Subject of the Existence of Monsters’, Images or Shadows, 135–142. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art. 

Jones, T. (ed). (1990–91) i-D 80, 38–51; 89, 22–25; 93, 38–43. 

Kim, K. (2022) The Thin Air, 2, 29. Coney, B. et. al. (eds.)

Kincheloe, J. (2005) ‘Continuing the Bricolage’ Qualitative Inquiry, 11 (3); 323–50. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Kittler, F. A. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 

Koonts, L. (1995) ‘Table Coffee Talk’, Emigre 36: Mouthpiece, n. pag. California: Emigre. 

Kristeva, J. (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lafuente, P. (2011) ‘Texts, Paratexts, Hypertexts’, Images or Shadows, 3. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993), Gesture and Speech. Cambridge/ London: The MIT Press. 

Liestman, D. (1992) ‘Chance in the Midst of Design: Approaches to Library Research Serendipity’, RQ, Summer 1992 3 (4), 524–32 American Library Association. 

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966) The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Louridas, P. (1999) ‘Design as Bricolage: Anthropology Meets Design Thinking’, Design Studies 20 (6). [online] Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X98000441 [Accessed 22 March 2025].

Lull, J. (1992) ‘Popular Music and Communication: An Introduction’, Popular Music and Communication. Lull, J. (ed). Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Lupton, E. (1991) ‘The Academy of Deconstructed Design’ Eye 3 (1). London: Eye Magazine Limited. [online] Available at: https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-academy-of-deconstructed-design [Accessed 28 March 2025]. 

Lupton, E. (2012) ‘The Designer as Producer’, Graphic Design: Now in Production. Minneapolis: Walker Arts Centre.

Lupton, E. and Blauvelt, A., (eds.) (2012) Graphic Design: Now in Production. Minneapolis: Walker Arts Centre.

Maybury, P. (1997) The White Book. Self-published.

Maguire. H. (2010) ‘A Nymphaeum by any other name’, Reservoir. Dublin: Gall Editions.

Maybury, P. (2015a) Make Ready. dePaor, T., McNulty, D. (eds). Dublin: Gall Editions/Ways& Means. 

Maybury, P. (2015b) ‘Peter Maybury’, Ways&Means, n. pag. Dublin: Ways&Means.

Maybury, P. (2022a) ‘Your Sound Position’, W/HERE: Donohoe, D., n. pag. Available at: https://daviddonohoe.bandcamp.com/album/w-here [Accessed 22 March 2025].

Maybury, P. (2022b) ‘Throw Away’, Throw Away. Maybury, P. & Nugent, C. (eds.). Dublin: Image Text Sound Editions.

McCarthy, S. (2013) The Designer as Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator & Collaborator: New Models for Communicating. Amsterdam: Bis Publishers.

McCoy, K. (1990) ‘The New Discourse’, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, McCoy, K. and McCoy, M. (eds.). New York: Rizzoli.

Meggs, P. B. and Purvis, A. W. (2011) Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Menon, C. & Patteeuw, V. (2018) ‘Magazine Architecture’, Karel Martens and The Architecture of the Journal, OASE, 100. NAi Publishers. [online] Available at: https://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/100 [Accessed 22 March 2025].

Mermoz, G. (1995) ‘On Typographic Reference (Part One)’ Emigre: Mouthpiece 36, n. pag. Sacramento: Emigre.

Miller, N (1988) Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing. New York: Columbia University Press.

Muhle, M. (2011) ‘Re-Enacting Art History’, Images or Shadows, 174–188. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Mukařovský, J. (1984) ‘Poetic Reference’, Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions. Titunik, I and Matejka, L (eds.). Cambridge: MIT.

Mould, O. (2020) Against Creativity. London and Brooklyn, NY: Verso. 

Müller-Brockmann, J. (2007) Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three Dimensional Designers. Salenstein: Niggli.

Murray, J and Evers, D. (1989), ‘Theory Borrowing and Reflectivity in Interdisciplinary Fields’, Advances in Consumer Research, 16, 647–52. Association for Consumer Research.

Pantenburg, V. (2011) ‘Medium Promiscuity: Notes on Gerard Byrne’s Film and Video Work’, Images or Shadows, 157–166. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art. 

Pater, R. (2021) CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Penman, I. (2002) ‘On the Mic: How Amplification Changed the Voice for Good’, Undercurrents. London: Continuum. 

People Meet in Architecture: Biennale Architettura Participating Countries/Collateral Events (2010), Venice: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia and Marsilio. 

Potts, A. (1999) ‘The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image’, Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Poyner, R. (ed.) (1991) Typography Now: The Next Wave, 53. London: Booth Clibborn Editions/ Internos Books.

Rock, M. (1996) ‘The Designer as Author’ Eye 20. London: Eye Magazine Limited. [online] Available at: https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-designer-as-author [Accessed 28 March 2025].

Rock, M (2013) ‘Fuck Content’, Multiple Signatures: On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users. New York: Rizzoli International. [online] Available at: https://2x4.org/ideas/2009/fuck-content/ [Accessed 21 March 2025].

Rose, S. (2017). The Lived Experience of Improvisation: In Music, Learning and Life. Chicago: Intellect Books.

Sanders, J. (2016). Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge.

Scalbert, I. (2013) Never Modern. Zürich: Park Books.

Shaw, P. (1996) ‘The Definitive Dwiggins no. 81 – Who Coined the Term “Graphic Design”?’ [online] Available at: https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2018/01/the-definitive-dwiggins-no-81-who-coined-the-term-graphic-design/[Accessed 21 March 2025].

Shaw, P. (2020) ‘The Definitive Dwiggins no. 81A—W.A. Dwiggins and “Graphic Design”: A Brief Rejoinder to Steven Heller and Bruce Kennett’. [online] Available at: https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2020/05/the-definitive-dwiggins-no-81a-w-a-dwiggins-and-graphic-design-a-brief-rejoinder-to-steven-heller-and-bruce-kennett/ [Accessed 21 March 2025].

Silberman, M., Giles, S., and Kuhn, T.J. (eds.) (2021) Bertolt Brecht: Brecht on Theatre. London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.

Simondon, G. (1980) On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. University of Western Ontario.

Simondon, G. (2017) On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 

Smith, D. (2008) ‘Delayed Departures: Cinema/Venice Architecture’, The Lives of Spaces, 135–145. Campbell, H., Martin-McAuliffe, S., Ward, B., Weadick, N. (eds.). Dublin: Irish Architecture Foundation/ UCD.

Smithson, R. (1996) ‘Art Through the Camera’s Eye’, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. Jack Flam (ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 

Tarfuri, M. (1980) Theories and History of Architecture. New York: Harper & Row.

Théberge, P. (1997) Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Hanover & London: Wesleyan University Press.

Thrift, J. (2000) ‘8vo: type and structure’ Eye 37. London: Eye Magazine Limited. [online] Available at: <https://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/8vo-type-and-structure> [Accessed 21 March 2025].

Thomson, E. (1993) ‘The Literature of Graphic Design’, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 12 1, 7–11. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of North America Stable.

Tracy, A. (2019) ‘The Essay Film’. [online] Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/essay-film [Accessed 28 March 2025]. 

Triggs, T. (2010) Fanzines: The DIY Revolution. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

van Toorn, J. (2009) ‘Design and Reflexivity’, Graphic Design Theory: Reading from the Field, 102–106. Armstrong, H. (ed.). New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

van Toorn, J. and Crouwel, W. (2015) Excerpts from ‘The Debate: The Legendary Contest of Two Giants of Graphic Design’. Monacelli Press. [online] Available at:  https://designobserver.com/feature/the-debate/38883/ and https://designobserver.com/feature/the-debate-part-2/38884 [Accessed 22 March 2025].

VanderLans, R. (ed.) (1990) Emigre: Sound Design, 16 n. pag. California: Emigre Graphics

Walker, S. (2023) ‘Design is… Lost’, The Design Journal: An International Journal for All Aspects of Design 26. [online] Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14606925.2022.2154962 [Accessed 21 March 2025].

Walters, J. (2010) ‘Joost Grootens: Paper planet’, Eye 78, 68–83. London: Eye Magazine Limited.

Wibberley, C. (2012). ‘Getting to Grips with Bricolage: A Personal Account’ The Qualitative Report, 17, Article 50, 1-8. NSU Florida (nova.edu). Available at: http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR17/wibberley.pdf [Accessed 14 November 2020].

 

Filmography

Maybury, P. (2022) On Being There. Single channel digital video with stereo sound. Duration: 1:00:00. 

Maybury, P. (2022) These Islands: Diptych. Dual channel video with dual stereo sound. Duration: 15:00. 

Daly, F. (2021) The Mirror of Possible Worlds: Kiarostami on Aran.

Maybury, P. (2020) Landfall. Dual channel digital video with dual stereo sound. duration: 1:00:00. 

Maybury, P. (2020) Dysart 050920-120920. Single channel digital video with stereo sound. duration: 20:21.

Maybury, P. (2018) Drape. Single channel digital video with stereo sound. Duration: 6:34.

Maybury, P. (2017) These Islands: Ballysadare. Single channel video with stereo sound. Duration: 5:00.

Maybury, P. (2015) A Study. Single channel video with stereo sound. Duration 10:00.

Clarke, P. & McCafferty C. (2014) Drawing on Life.

Maybury, P. (2013) These Islands, Slievemore, Dooagh, Co. Mayo. Single channel video with stereo sound. Duration 9:46.

Faraut, J. (2013) Regard Neuf Sur Olympia ’52. France, Films à Cinq.

Magan, R. (2011) dBMgallo. DVD/ digital film), Dublin: Irish Architecture Foundation. 

Maybury, P. (1999) Gucci/ Trash/ Canvas/ Points. Single channel video with dual stereo sound. Duration: 5:13. 

Discography

5/8 Rhythm Here (2012) Thread Pulls. C/F records, CF/F34 (vinyl, 45RPM, digital download). Available at <https://www.discogs.com/label/17493-CF-Records> [Accessed 28 March 2025]

New Thoughts (2010) Thread Pulls. Osaka, OSALP18 (vinyl, 33RPM, digital download).

New Thoughts (2010) Thread Pulls. Osaka, OSACD018 (CD, digital download). Available at <https://www.discogs.com/label/820252-Osaka-Records-Limited> [Accessed 28 March 2025].

Summer Songs (2004) Thread Pulls. Dublin: 9-pt. Records.

Fluorescent Series (2006) Thread Pulls. Dublin: 9-pt. Records.