After contextualising animism and highlighting the qualities which define graphic design for me, I would like to take you, again, on a brief route through some examples of graphic design’s history, that I believe, have allowed graphic design to exist as a living entity today.

In 1814, physical labour for the printing profession experienced a drastic shift. Friedrich Gottlob Koenig, a mechanical engineer had invented the Steam press, designed for the London Times. Speed, efficiency and better working conditions were not the only benefits that the printing revolution provided. Production costs and the possibility of mass-distribution allowed for potential investment in advertisement.

Thanks to William A. Dwiggins, the term Graphic Design was coined in 1922. It was after the Industrial Revolution and the technological advancements that it brought about when graphic design started to exist as a commercial practice. The combination of new production methods implied more specific tasks when it came to design. Throughout the 19th and 20th century the demand for designers increased exponentially and what was once known as art direction became a defined and coherent practice. Advertising agencies, T.V and cinema production companies, book publishers and magazines could now hire graphic designers to deal with visual communication and obtain a coherent identity related to their content.

But of course, as with any mass production process, quality was being affected in favour of larger amounts of printing material. William Morris, leader of the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, designer and craftsman, was deeply concerned with the consequences of industrialised process. He rejected the default, mass-produced object for beautifully designed ones, resembling the craftsmanship of the Gothic era and believed that the return to such methods could restore the harm done by the industrialised and capital oriented technologies. He inclined himself to handmade paper, the hand press (Kelmscott Press), dense inks and ornamental borders for books.

When talking about reactions towards capitalistic forms of production and how these diminish the designer’s possibilities of self-involvement and critical thinking, I cannot skip the Art Nouveau Movement. Inspired by Japanese simplicity and flat forms, artists and designers from the Art Nouveau implemented the notion of reduction to their work, propelling graphic design as a more symbolic act, bringing abstract imagination to the public. They worked with imagery and illustrations that signified the content, rather than depicted. Creating spaces where a dialogue between the maker and the audience could begin.

Designers of the postwar era revolutionised printed matter such as formats and forms of reading of the magazine. The poster as a format was reincorporated into the artist’s medium, used to address political issues, comment on civil right movements, feminist movements and other major political disasters. Satire established itself as a language throughout visual communication.

In 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. This resulted in political discourses characterised by ideological indoctrination and strategic disinformation. Public life and social imagination was paralysed and controlled by authorities, a feeling of constant waiting impregnated the collective consciousness. As a response, Ján Budaj and the group Temporary Society for Intense Experience (DISP) created a series of fictitious events, filling the streets of Bratislava with posters announcing fake happenings, known as The Week of Fictitious Culture.Kimpel, Oliver. The Visual Event. Spector Books, Leipzig 2014, pp. 17-20. By appropriating the methods of disinformation used by authorities, Budaj and DISP wanted to confront the public with the tools being used to confuse them and blur the socio-political context that was being used to control them.

The Provo Group was inagurated by the anarchist counterculture of the Netherlands, founded by a philosophy student, Roel van Duyn and an artist—interested in magic and in exhibitionism—Robert Jasper Grootveld. The Provo Group was a brief but impactful example of a self-regulated collective. They merged their desires and socio-political views, collaboration between disciplines, incorporating the public and generating their own content. The Provo Group exemplifies the power of designers as authors and the network that is created by breaking hierarchical systems of communication. The designer becomes its own client and has the possibility of defining the type of conversation that she wants to initiate with the audience, being this a reaction to authority and/or a proposal for new frameworks of understanding political contexts.

Between 1965 and 1967, Provo was their most representative achievement. A magazine featuring their manifesto and other radical manifestations commenting on the current political situation, such as recipes for homemade bombs. Due to their provocative content, they usually had to deal with printing and distribution as well, morphing the role of designers, philosophers, activists, copywriters, printers etc. Generally not concerned with aesthetics, they mainly printed in black and white, for conceptual but also economical reasons. They tried to escape the clean design adopted by advertising agencies and implemented by corporations since the 1950’s.

This has been a brief historical contextualization of design movements and figures that have contributed to the shift that design is navigating today. Let’s move on to the analysis of new-wave-animism and dissect the elements that form its life.

I will begin this dissection by connecting the role of the designer with the role of the audience and explaining how one cannot exist without the other.

New-wave-animism exemplifies a combined action between the designer and her audience. Design is alive and is formed by elements that need each other. Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author points out a relevant annotation to the living entity I’m trying to explain. He describes writing, or text in itself, as a code of symbols with a preconceived notion of meaning. This code of meaning–text—exists before the author makes use of them. He tries to exempt the author from some kind of authorship. “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing.”Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen Magazine no. 5 6, item 3: Three Essays, Phyllis Johnson, Roaring Fork Press, NYC, p5. ubu Web What Barthes is trying to communicate is the power and sovereignty of text. The meaning of this text does not belong to the author but to the interpretations that will arouse when the reader receives it. The “true locus of writing is reading” Idem.. If we consider design as a form of writing or as a combination of different writings, thoughts and images, we are collaging a pre-existing set of symbols, with their own meaning, and publishing them in order to be re-interpreted or revived. The work of the designer is labeled as a combination of autonomous symbols with their own meaning. But we can’t stop here. It can’t be possible that the designer is seen as a mere machine that puts things together without any thought. There has to be some type of authorship that belongs to us.

The moment a designer publishes something, the work is part of a public sphere of information. The designer has a political commitment over a discourse that belongs to a community. Here is where the paradox with Barthes’ Death of the Author appears. It is true that the designer will no longer be able to retract what has been made public. It’s out there and the designer has relinquished control over the interpretations the audience will make over it. The discourse is public. But the designer has authorship over the commonality of the work. This is a term coined by philosopher and culture theorist Bram Ieven in his essay Fiction is not Untrue. Ieven, B. “Fiction is not Untrue: The Commonality of Art and the Postnational Imagination.” Post–Truth Fiction, 24 June 2017, Post–Truth Fiction “The commonality of art implies that art engenders a certain commonality, contributes to it and makes it possible. This means that art not simply represents a community, but adds something to that community; art not only represents the imagination of a community but also engenders the imagination of that community.”

Incorporating design in this terminology is valid as the intentions and effects of design and art are starting to merge. Positioning the designer as the author enables her criticality to be reflected on the work and thus having equal responsibilities when making it public.

The designer is responsible and therefore holds authorship over the fact that the work is made public and has the potential to influence public imagination. Not only this, but going back to Barthes, the designer is responsible of how she arranges the different sets of symbols when creating new meaning.

After establishing the connection between designer and audience, I would like to elaborate on what exactly allows for this connection to happen. What is it that calls the audience to a conversation? It’s the work in itself and the effect that this one has on the perceiver. But how can we talk about this effect? In this section I will also take the freedom to blur the terminology of art and design.

It is through art that we acquire a specific sensibility for what is beautiful and what is not. But beauty is not based on a specific set of rules. It’s individually attached to emotions and feelings, making its conception vary drastically between individuals. Trying to understand what art is has been an unanswerable question for centuries, where many different thoughts about it have been thrown on the table. From Plato’s Republic, written in 380 BC in Ancient Greece, to Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art? in 1897 in Russia.

Jean-François Lyotard’s Critical Reflections, an article published in Artforum, April 1991 issue, points out the fact that art is a part of the world, however it also is apart from it. He believes that this apartness that art incarnates is what makes it so effective. It leaves aside art’s existence as a cultural object from which critical theories are attached to and endless ascribed symbolisms have tried to explain it through historical reasoning. Once these critical narratives are removed, the art piece remains, and so does the effect it might have, broadening it’s radius of influence.

There is an interesting, and relevant, proposition by Simon O’SullivanO’Sullivan, Simon. “The Aesthetics of Affect”, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, pp. 125-36, 6, General issue, December 2001. on the dilemma of understanding what art does and it is linked to the aesthetic power it possesses. This aesthetic power as an “immanent” power—one that operates from within—and he uses the term “affect” to explain the medium in which this power operates. This conception of the power of an artwork recalls the important role of the gaze. The role of the participant is crucial in order to activate this intrinsic force.

It is in this moment where the skeleton of new-wave-animism in graphic design starts to become apparent. The designer uses its context to translate it into desired forms, different from reality, speculate on what could be, connect dots that are not apparently connected. The perceiver is granted with these frameworks of possible realities and has the freedom to take them or leave them, to think them and experience them.

The designer’s creation—the life of this creation—has to be perceived in order to be activated. The purpose of this creation, whether it has embedded meaning of its own, is to influence and it will only influence when the perceiver observes it, feels it, accepts it, rejects it or ignores it. Life begins to palpitate. But it is hard to discuss or imagine how this influence looks like. Is it a feeling? an insight?

The “immanent power” that O’Sullivan discusses brings us back to the idea of Animism’s essence and its inability to be objectified. He describes “affects” as “extra-discursive” and “extra-textual”. Affects can’t be reduced to a structure, they cannot be studied and they do not only produce knowledge. There is an intuitive relation to the idea of animism, something beyond explanation, spiritual, immaterial or magical. A sort of intensity. It is this part of the network, the affect of the work, that overflows the structure. What intensifies its life. I remember my first encounter with Metahaven’s work, I think it was their first book Uncorporate Identity (2010). I was shocked. I didn’t understand their aesthetics and it was sometimes hard to grasp exactly what they were discussing. But it was powerful and drowning in affect. It made me want to create.

What seems to be described here is the actual experience of the artwork, an experience composed of chemical reactions, of life. Critical Theory, or any theory in general, tends to leave aside—or undermine—these magical, ungraspable experiences, which can also be perceived as events. It is precisely during this event where the affect takes place. The event of the communion between maker and audience, through the affect of the work.

What I find most fascinating about the idea of affects existing on a meta level from language is the direct connection it has with animist practices. Although these practices are no longer encountered in Critical Theory—as they were once labeled as primitive and the modern Man evolved considering them irrelevant—an echo of them is perceived through the experience of the event as art. Félix Guattari describes, the forming of “affects” as an event happening before any symbol is created. He emphasises the different “a-signifying” register they have. Signifiers follow a specific logical narrative, affects don’t follow logic, they work through an existential machinicGuattari, Félix. “Pragmatic/Machinic.” The Topological Media Lab, Topological Media Lab, a primitive intensity.

Affects then, can be a combination of events, ups and downs, vertical intensities that form any living experience. However, there needs to be a connectivity in order to experience the affect. In this case, a work has to activate a reaction in order to be felt. Parting from the idea that art is experienced—or lived—through affects, and affects are basically events, O’Sullivan proposes to either side with Critical Theory, where the event will be already constituted or, to open up to more religious, or spiritual approaches, where the event will be something unexpected. The experience of the artwork can be intuitively understood by the viewer and ungoverned of the maker, but at the same time forming a conversation between both.

Following a more spiritual discourse, Lyotard explains the experience of art as a practice of concentration and connectivity, almost like entering a meditative state. “The secret of such ascesis lies in the power to be able to endure occurrences as “directly” as possible without the mediation of a “pre-text”.O’Sullivan, Simon. “The Aesthetics of Affect”, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, p. 128, General issue, December 2001.

The directness required, or chosen by the maker when beginning this conversation holds close connections with the idea of individuation, where the personal and collective unconsciousness enter consciousness. The idea of recognising the creation of the designer as something alive and with the potential to influence, happening through events of experience, like dreams, active imagination or free associations—like the Amazonian Ayahuasca experience.

After portraying the connectivity between the designer and an audience, and elaborating on the elements that make this connection possible, I will zoom out and try to mount these relations onto a wider frame. The life cycle of graphic design is the new-wave-animism.

When I try to understand and formulate the animism in graphic design, I cannot forget the syntax of the word, mentioned in Chapter II, Anima. An interesting analogy to understand the appropriation I have made of the term universal addressability comes from the founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung. To remind you, when I speak of universal addressability in a design context I am referring to the phenomenon of the designer as creator, in conversation with an audience, through the affect of design having the possibility of communicating with each other, like sentient agents, with a life of their own.

Jung refers to anima and animus as the primary anthropomorphic (having human characteristics) archetypes of his theory on the unconscious mind. These archetypes, as I understand them, reflect the universal addressability between genders, and the way in which they both exist as one. Retroactively influencing each other. Anima, refers to the feminine inner personality in the unconscious of a man and animus refers to the masculine inner personality in the unconscious of a woman.

According to Jung’s theory—which mainly developed the idea of anima—anima appears personified through images of women embodying different roles, including a spiritual guide. The anima functions as his soul, within his psyche, influencing ideas, decision making, attitudes and emotions.

A universal addressability can be understood through various narratives, and so it also happens when understanding communication networks (the designer whilst making, the perceiver whilst perceiving the work). These networks mainly describe the direction of the communication stream and whether or not there is a reciprocal feedback. The main difference between these networks is the degree to which they are centralised or decentralised.

From a generally accepted business model of five types of networkLunenburg, F. (2011). "Network Patterns and Analysis: Underused Sources to Improve Communication Effectiveness". National Forum of Educational Administration and Supervision Journal, 28(4), p.2., the All channel Network does a good job when attempting to visualise the new-wave-animism in graphic design. If we imagine a circle, it has no beginning and end. We could imagine more circles inside of it, moving freely without a hierarchical path, forming an All Channel Network. Elements are connected, meaning every element is free to communicate with the rest. There are no central positions and no communication restrictions. The rounded, smooth form vs. squared, cornered shapes accentuates an organic feeling.

As it becomes autonomous, there is no central position which restricts or dictates what graphic design has to talk about. There are even no restrictions on how the design process can be applied as I previously made reference to when mixing up the terminology of art and design. Designers are finding new ways to apply their skills and how to make them useful for other people.

I was at a birthday party in Amsterdam, somewhere at the end of October, where I met an Estonian designer who had graduated from the Gerrit-Rietveld Academie in 2014. He occasionally did some commissioned work involving printed matter but he mainly described his professional role as “helping people organise their things”. He explained how his graphic design skills naturally evolved into a sort of concealing where people ask him to “do something with what I have”. This goes from getting invited to a concert where the stage design isn’t working and having to rearrange it last minute to deciding what to do with the storage of a painter or to helping out an artists that is stuck in a inspirational void. I found this example beautiful and felt how it empowered the discipline. It wasn’t easy to describe in one sentence what exactly it was he did. But it became clear the design process and the life it creates can reach anything or anyone.

As you might have felt throughout the text, I’ve been trying really hard to talk about graphic design barely mentioning any of it. The conception of new-wave-animism is what brings together all potentials in other fields that want to be used by designers, breaking through with the term graphic design, freeing the designer from expectations.

It has been crucial for me to imagine this infrastructure, including no graphic design, for it to make sense and to outlive the autonomy I'm describing, because what is graphic design anyways? However, I would like to make a short mention, before jumping to concluding parts, of those so called designers that have inspired me and have helped me imagine a new-wave-animism.

A few chapters ago I quoted a Native American belief of a hunter praising a beautiful scene. The quote manifests how we remain primitive today. The affect of nature never runs old. The inexplicable beauty and a sense of understanding and completeness is the paradox of animism. I belong yet I don’t understand. I just know.

I couldn’t even comprise the idea of reaching these feelings through design. How can I feel I belong yet not comprehend? This has been a constant feeling throughout my studies that has fuelled the need to create. Take for example French visual artist, Kevin BrayKevin Bray.biz. When I observe his landscape representation, the affect of nature is bouncing back at me in pixel form. Mesmerised by endless combinations of horizons constructed from fragments of reality, yet behaving in ways that a landscape could never reach. new-wave-animism seems to be falling right on top of me when I see his constructed worlds of forms executing the impossible. Nora Turato Nora Turato.com can similarly bring us close to the realm of new-wave-animism. Her elegant yet aggressive spit sounds unfamiliar but allows to ride a train of thought of endless associations that feel strangely intimate. In Liquid Metal, Josse Pyl flips inside out the human oesophagus and zooms in to each human organ that gives us the possibility to communicate. His uncanny sculptures and still illustrations make us feel on a constant journey.