Ever since we looked up at the night sky and saw soldiers and bears and twins in the stars, we’ve been telling each other stories about the world around us. The best of these didn’t claim complete truth. Instead, they were ways to understand the world and our place in it by allegory, metaphor.

Storytelling is not possible, of course, without language — a set of fixed objects and concepts that can be placed in certain relations to one another, and to the outside world, in order to create and convey meaning. Italo Calvino writes, “the storyteller explored the possibilities implied in his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures and the actions, and of the objects on which these actions could be brought to bear. What emerged were stories.”¹

If language is simply a set of “figures and actions,” we can look beyond words and grammar to other figures — individual pieces of content, and other actions — visual, design relationships. We’ve never had more possibilities at our disposal than we do today, in this era of endless content and ever-increasing complexity. I’m interested in using these opportunities to tell new types of stories, to use existing content to open up access points to otherwise inaccessible systems — what Paul Elliman describes as “working or thinking in the language of the things around” us.²

What emerges is a kind of second-order language, a design syntax that places pieces of content in certain syntactical relationships with one another in a way that is reactive to the way we as people naturally think. Images become nouns, tweets become verbs, entire books become subordinate clauses. And by carefully considering the content and the structural arrangement of its presentation, sentences begin to form, then paragraphs, then stories — we begin to read this content. Gunther Kress distinguishes this “image-reading” from regular text reading as follows: “The imaginative work in writing focuses on filling words with meaning — and then reading the filled elements together, in the given syntactic structure. In image, imagination focuses on creating the order of the arrangement of elements which are already filled with meaning.”³

The idea is not to put this content behind glass as an object of study, but instead to let it live and breathe and find new purpose. Or, as Elliman puts it, the goal of this act of collection and arrangement is not “separating [content] from a living world through the act of completion,” but instead “reinstalling some of the precariousness of life” in the collection.⁴ The content is arranged in carefully considered ways that are suggestive of meaning, but that are open enough to allow each reader to create his or her own meaning, to find his or her own narrative.

My hope is that this second-order design syntax opens up a dialogue between the audience and the endless streams of content around us — that by reading these arrangements, we let the content tell its stories, but also find our own.

1. Italo Calvino and Surprenant Céline. Cybernetics and Ghosts, 1987.
2. Martens, Karel, and Paul Elliman. Counterprint. London: Hyphen Press, 2004.
3. Gunther Kress, Literacy in the New Media Age (London: Routledge, 2010).
4. Martens, Karel, and Paul Elliman. Counterprint. London: Hyphen Press, 2004.

In considering unfathomable depths and boundless horizons, in starting from a position of overwhelm, the natural first question is, how to even begin? Best to meet a tough question with a simple answer: to put one foot in front of the other.

The first step to making something massive and complex approachable is to approach it, to navigate its twists and turns. The primary genius of the internet is organization and navigation, so there is no shortage of ways to do this — from casual surfing to targeted Google searches. But walking the straightest line to a single answer doesn’t involve much of a journey, and random clicking doesn’t tell you much about the medium. Instead, I’m after alternative modes of motion — not moving to, but moving through.

I was inspired by the concept of a dérive, described as a “drift” or a stroll in which “one or more persons… drop their usual motives for movement and action… and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” In a dérive, the walker “[notices] the way in which certain areas… resonate with states of mind… and [seeks] out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed … as a means of showing the concealed potential of experimentation, pleasure, and play in everyday life.”¹

In other words, a form of “moving through” that illuminates previously unseen details precisely because it encourages disengaging from the normal way of looking at and using a space, a landscape, a tool. What’s more, this method of navigation gives insight room to breathe because it is intentionally slow, deliberate, inefficient.

Drifting connotes quietness, slowness, peacefulness — an exploration that is deliberate, but not aimless — instead, letting oneself be guided by winds and tides, learning the landscape by following where it leads. In a way, Ed Ruscha used this approach, letting the famous Los Angeles street speak for itself in Every Building on the Sunset Strip, using physical navigation through space as the means for engaging with narratives — and suggesting that each point along a prescribed route is also the first point on another potential journey. As Chris Balaschak says of the work, “the facades of buildings may appear as stage sets, but they are active points on other itineraries, anticipating future and past narratives.”²

That’s part of drifting, after all. The journey is not random — the path is dictated by the structure of the landscape — but in the journey there is possibility, the serendipity of what you’ll find along the way. As William S. Burroughs writes, “you can not will spontaneity… but you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.”³ By shaping the journeys implicit in my experiments in drifting in a way that is responsive to the content they explore, but yet leaving enough open space for the reader to wander, I hope to have created the possibility of serendipity.

A specific kind of journey, then: structured but not restrictive, serendipitous but not random, reflective but not aimless. Movement as an interpretive act, navigation as a path to direct, experiential understanding of something complex and labyrinthine. In Italo Calvino’s Cybernetics and Ghosts, Hans Magnus Enzensberger writes that a visitor can conquer the labyrinth and release himself from its mysterious power simply by mapping it from beginning to end: “for one who has passed through it, no labyrinth exists.”⁴ But my goal is not precise mapping or complete understanding — but instead exploration, accessibility, the chance at forging a personal relationship with a thing by exploring it in certain ways. For one who enters to enjoy the twists and turns — not to find the way out — there is also no labyrinth at all.

1. “The Situationist International Text Library/Theory of the Drive,” Library, accessed June 10, 2022, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314.
2. “Every Building on the Sunset Strip 1966,” Art Blart, accessed June 10, 2022, http://artblart.com/tag/every-building-on-the-sunset-strip-1966/.
3. CPCW: The center for programs in contemporary writing, accessed June 10, 2022, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html.
4. Italo Calvino and Surprenant Céline. Cybernetics and Ghosts, 1987.

But it wasn’t the emotional overreaction of traders that caused the crash. Instead, it was an army of algorithms, trained to comb for the news for events that could impact the markets. Thousands of automated trading platforms seized on the story and set off a chain reaction within this intricately and mysteriously interconnected network.¹

This jarring event is just one example of an all-too-common phenomenon: we’ve created vast, intricate systems that govern the world around us but are too complicated for us to understand. While each of these trading algorithms was carefully and individually programmed by a person, taken together, their interactions are too vast and too unpredictable for us to make sense of.

I’ve had the privilege of being a member of the last generation to remember a time before the internet became a ubiquitous part of our lives, and though it seems distant and dreamlike now, I do remember an adolescence spent offline.

While the internet has triggered inconceivable advances in the ability to generate, deliver, organize and provide access to more information than ever before, it’s also made it more difficult to access that information on a personal level. We are creating content and adding knowledge at a pace that far outstrips our ability to make sense of it, and the result is systems and complexity of content that we don’t — and can’t — understand.

So how do we approach systems that operate on an inconceivable scale? Writer and Harvard Fellow Samuel Arbesman uses weather as an analogy. Even armed with satellites, radar and advanced computer modeling, we don’t fully understand weather systems. There are simply too many inputs, too many unknowns. Yet we develop extremely simplified models, and using just a few, isolated variables, we develop reasonably reliable forecasts. We don’t expect perfect understanding or perfect accuracy — when the forecast is wrong, we just reach for an umbrella and deal with it. We understand that there are gaps in our knowledge, and that the model often falls far short of perfection, but it allows us to achieve a general understanding of this vastly complex system, and learn to live within it.²

I think there’s an opportunity to open up a similar line of thinking in design — to abandon attempts at precise understanding or perfect explanation, and instead, to open up access points. To take something complex or fundamentally unknowable, and to make it accessible on a human level. Like our approach to weather, this involves isolating single variables and controlling the rest; reduction to a reproducible scale; and simplification for the purposes of understanding.

Perhaps it’s time to take a step back from the creation of new content, and instead to use what we already have. To filter the stream through the simple acts of collecting, selecting and sorting. To insert little obstructions in the overwhelming flow, and to observe and reflect on the content that pools up around them.

Rather than attempt to explain vast, complex systems in a comprehensive or precise way, this method allows understanding by metaphor or analogy — uniquely human ways of understanding. Unlike the rigid databases or optimization structures that allow Google’s search algorithm to retrieve the most precise results, perhaps we can build systems that interact with content in ways that invite uncertainty, chance and serendipity. Systems that are reactive to human thought, with output that only make sense because we are people. As Lev Manovich writes in a recent article, designers “should not forget that art has the unique license to portray human subjectivity — including this fundamental new dimension of being ‘immersed in data.’”³

This is Where, a publication project of mine, explores this idea by pairing random Google Streetview images with random tweets that contain the phrase “this is where.” To a computer, the process is entirely random, meaningless noise. But to the human reader, the pairings take on a narrative form that is often epic in scope. The tweets — mostly clichés or minor observations in the context of a Twitter feed — become momentous statements of purpose, recollections of love or loss, when placed against the backdrop of a sprawling vista of rolling hills and wide-open sky.

The effect is achieved because of a flaw in human thinking — an insistence on reading narrative structure or contextual relationship even where we know there is none — but the very act of reading This is Where lets us engage with endless streams of content in a way that feels essentially personal.

This approach, I think, exists at a right angle to the historical practice of graphic design, which has often privileged rigorous organization, perfect grids and explanatory clarity. Here, my focus is on small gestures, question asking and thought experiments. And my approach is strongly informed a practice introduced by 1960s Conceptual Art and followed by Appropriation Art — of searching, archiving and reusing the existing glut of visual and textual material.

The systems I build tend to enable a sort of performance with material. Some of them pull specific instances from the flow, arranging them in a carefully-choreographed way, shifting context, scale or perspective. Some chart idiosyncratic paths through existing content. And some start with a piece of content and move outwards, utilizing the concept of search as an end in itself, a process that uncovers hidden connections and triggers new ways of thinking.

It’s a subtle shift: trading understanding for open inquiry, instantaneity for uncertainty, pushing forward for lateral reflection. Perhaps we can flatly admit that we’ll never really understand the world around us. This admission, I think, frees us not just to see new things, but to look in different ways, with different goals and expectations.

1. “Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world.” TED.com. http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world (accessed March 6, 2014).

2. “It’s complicated.” Aeon Magazine. http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/is-technology-making-the-world-too-complex/ (accessed March 7, 2014).

3. “The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art.” Lev Manovich. http://www.manovich.net/data_art.doc (accessed March 7, 2014).