Forged Designs
Speaking at Printed Matter earlier this month to promote his new book, Immutable: Designing History (Onomatopee), Chris Lee offered an interesting take on the universal equivalent. “Money,” he said, “is a design object,” and in this capacity, it’s also a claim to authority. He pressed the latter point: “If you put a gun to my head, I will use your money.”
Lee is a Brooklyn-based graphic designer and educator, which frees him from certain constraints of the historian. Early on in his talk, he produced an image of an ancient coin bearing the inscription “To counterfeit is death” and, on the flip side, a depiction of the Babylonian sun god Shamash endowing the king Hammurabi with the auspices of the law. He fast-tracked the chronology to the Bitcoin present, connecting this “new kind of inscription technology”—powerful precisely because it is decentralized and dematerialized—to Hammurabi’s Mesopotamia by way of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. When dissident Chelsea Manning later leaked evidence of army war crimes, US authority came to be undermined by its own documentation. And when banks blocked the flow of funds raised in support of Manning, cryptocurrency emerged to circumvent official fiscal authority. The thesis is, above all, captivating in its sweep.
Currency is but one example of what Lisa Gitelman theorizes as “the document.” Drawing on her 2014 book Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Lee also discussed passports, contracts, maps, and other legalistic trappings that “materialize the utterance, the claim” of authority. He concluded by interrogating his own métier: “What questions should design ask to try and undo colonial and capitalist documents enforcing power?”
How, indeed. Lee’s method blends numismatics and cybersecurity, Foucault’s power-knowledge and Marxist value theory, but has little to say about student loans and job markets. Yet he did identify a model of practice to follow—that of designer, curator, and World War II resistance figure Willem Sandburg, namesake of the Amsterdam institute where the Immutable author began exploring his theme. Sandburg, we learned, applied his skillset to forging IDs to protect dissidents. “If we want to help people,” Lee mused, “maybe we should teach them how to counterfeit passports.”