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 documentati…