Chris Lee

Pratt Institute

Historiography as Indictment

This presentation will deliver an overview of two projects that explore history as a genre of graphic design praxis. The first project is a book called Immutable: Designing History. It makes a case narrating a history of graphic design populated by bureaucracies and the documents that constitute them, while challenging the modelling of graphic design's story based on the methods of art history, and animated by a techno-progressive teleology. In doing so, it also points to the pivotal achievements in the development of documental form not as markers of advancement, but as evidence of crimes against what Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls "possible histories."

The second project, 1882–1982–2019, involves the creation of a so-called "chop suey" typeface in three "weights." The first weight is derived primarily from archival illustration material from late 19th-century California. The second weight develops on the first through the application of a variety of admonishments expressed by European and American masters in typographic craft. The third weight entails a collection of hundreds of AI-generated Chinese characters. In sum, the typeface's development is not motivated by practical application. Rather, it is in general an exploration of the capacity of a typeface to prompt historical narration, and in particular aims to put into relief the occluded operations of white supremacy in graphic design history. Together, these projects hope to provoke a rethinking of the ways in which graphic design history is thought and told, while offering a critique of the underlying assumptions and unexamined tendencies of its more conventional expressions.

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Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY), where he is an Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department. He graduated from OCADU (Toronto) and the Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), and has worked for The Walrus Magazine, Metahaven and Bruce Mau Design. He was also the designer and an editorial board member of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy. Chris is the author of Immutable: Designing History, which explores graphic design’s entanglements with the development and perpetuation of capitalism and colonialism. It is published by Onomatopee/Library Stack.