Art Metropole

12 Oct. 2023

Book Launch: Immuatable: Designing History by Chris Lee

Time

6PM

Offsite Location

OCAD University, 100 McCaul Street, Room 230

OCADU Graphic Design & Art Metropole present the book release of Immutable—Designing History with the author Chris Lee

Immutable: Designing History outlines a thematic genealogy of the document—graphic design’s most banal genre—and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a roughly 5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed blockchain ledgers. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering securitization techniques (material, technological, homicidal, administrative) against the entropy of a document’s movement through space, time and dispute.

An overview presentation of the book will set the stage for a developing discussion. This event invites speculation and debate on the implications of centering the document in the narration of graphic design history on how we might think about who the designer is and what the designer does. Through the conversation, the hope is also to explore possibilities for challenging some of our assumptions as students, educators, researchers, and practitioners, as a starting point to imagining other ways of studying and doing design.