Afonso Duarte — A Premature Retrospective

As Primeiras Horas

Book [2009]

The lines on this cover are the baseline guides I used to typeset the book, a reference to Maico’s meta-poems.

Un Singe de Beauté

Poster — 420 × 594 mm [2007]

Having as a starting point Oulipo’s manifesto, this project’s aim was to create a poster out of it.

Oulipo was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, and dedicated its existence to the syntactic deconstruction of language through the creation of constraints, which often consisted of mathematical formulas.

This poster features a sentence generated through such a process, the homophonic translation, which was taken from the last sentence of Oulipo’s second manifesto. The original sentence by John Keats—“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”—thus became “Un singe de beauté est un jouet pour l’hiver!”.

Translating this process into a design practice meant deconstructing the word form. I therefore adapted a Scriptographer script to randomly destroy and branch the input it was given, originating an unpredictably shaped tree. I meant to create a cross dialectic with the Oulipian processes and language by approaching their work in the light of the chaos generating tools that we now dispose of.

Simultaneously, and without prior knowledge, this poster is also a reification of Deleuze’s thoughts:

Deleuze draws a picture of an abstract logical space anterior to the divisions and up/down, high/low moments within the great Platonic tree—a space that inhabits a force or potential that constantly submits its branches to unpredictable, even monstrous variations.

—in Constructions, by John Rajchman (1998)

The temporal shortcut was found, in pure ‘pataphysician tradition.

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Magazine — 156 pp, 250 × 320 mm [2005]

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni is a magazine that deals with language in all its aspects. Its form is a reflection on language in itself: each article is presented in a very austere grid on transparent paper, followed by a personal interpretation of its content by the designer. This dichotomy is meant to emphasize the designer’s role in the presentation and interpretation of text.

This magazine was made in collaboration with Pedro Proença, Sara Santos and Inês Barros.

This magazine was part of the Jovens Criadores 2006 selection in the Graphic Design category.

Monkey’s Finger

Sticker Booklet — 16 pp, 148 × 210 mm [2007]

Having as a starting point Wolf Vostell’s manifesto and a Naomi Klein’s No Logo excerpt, this object deals with capitalism’s inherent logic of expansion: lowest common denominator reduction. As such, I reduced some of the world’s best known brands to simple graphical devices, with the intent of representing the underlying logic that their sophisticated corporate images try to deny.

This booklet contains several elements that can be commonly found in labels in different sizes, but all reduced to the same form: type set in black Helvetica on a white background. It’s also printed on adhesive paper to allow the creation of custom labels. Lastly, this object’s name comes from The Beatles’ song Come Together, in which someone is described as having monkey finger and shooting Coca-Cola. Looking up the meaning of “Monkey’s Finger” I found out that there’s a book by Isaac Asimov with that name that tells the story of a monkey that learns to copy his masters’ literary style and quickly replaces him altogether. This seemed like the perfect title to give to a project that talks about the misleading nature of styles.

This project was followed by the We’ll Make a Lover of You video.

Plataforma Comum

Website [2007]

http://aftadesign.net/comum/

Developped in colaboration with Mário Coelho, this platform was our final year project for Communication Design (FBAUL 2006/07). It proposes the access to other final year projects and documents oriented by the theme “(inter)Activisms” and marked out by the concepts suggested by the tags “Relational Aesthetics”, “Catalysts”, “Time-based”, “Dynamic", “Interactive”, “Participatory”, “Variable”, “Customizable”, “Provocative”, “Responsive”, “Digital”, “Multimedia”, “Installation” and “Performative”.

COMUM acts as support for a dissertation on this theme, presenting a relational organization between these terms’ implications and embracing structurally the form in which the context transmits it.

COMUM is the convergence element between Communication and Community. The name points to its own significance—“Comum” means common in Portuguese—, creating a dialetical loop that refers infinitely to itself.

COMUM takes shape as an online exhibition platform. The projects presented there are mostly visual and sound experiences that question the spectator's role and speculate about its possible elevation to an active participant in the pieces. These projects find in the platform the possibility of expansion of their installations through the direct intervention of the users. There, they can interact textually with them, and these texts will live and become part of the navigation itself, shaping the next user's experience of it. It aims to underline the possibility of a spectator as an intervening agent, empowering the user's interference through a relational/communicational stimulus between them and the piece.

This projected was exhibited at the REACTOR exhibition, in Fabrica Features, Benetton Chiado, Lisbon, from 13^th October to 15^th November 2007.

Finalistas Pintura ’06

Website [2006]

http://www.fba.ul.pt/pintura_06/

The website for Painting final year students of 2005/06 was supposed to work as a support for the actual exhibition. Because I wanted the website’s functional logic to be medium-specific, I implemented a random mode of navigation. If you click any of the images, the algorithm that defines what student page to load will be randomly generated, making each visit and path taken unique. At the same time, this system provided greater fairness, since statistically every student will be have the same chances of having their work displayed, which any other type of sorting would not allow.

Afta Templates

Website [2006]

http://aftadesign.net/tciii/templates_en/

From the introductory text:

It is my most profound and burning desire to see the last designer hung with the guts of the last artist. For only freed from these tyrants shall we finally aspire to a life of real fulfillment and satisfaction. Only freed from these guard dogs of the ruling power structure shall we once again take control over the reins of our lives, invert the castrating perspective of the social stratification and start enjoying a good that is presently just the privilege of some: the vivifying everyday life rooted in our most intense desires.
Just as afta represents simultaneously the little ulceration of the mucosae that insists on disheveling us with pain days in a row and the portuguese phonetic translation of the english word "after", so our game has two layers of meaning: we both want to meticulously torture design practice and transform it into a common good shared equally and non-hierarchically. Only the distracted ones will not see that these two actions are not only not antagonistic, but actually complete each other: only by completely destroying and demystifying design can one dream about its propagation as a tool of emancipation of the living moment. Just as modernism opened up to the possibility of a critical look at itself, exhausted itself with that criticism and spawned post-modernism, the era of the oscillating subject, so design will do the same until it spawns the post-design, the era of the designer without ontology, the one open to the difference and thirsty for experimentation. This fearless designer gifts without compromises and creates exuberant, self-referential work. It’s creation for its own sake, gifting as a way of life.
Everyday we are witnesses of the total disaggregation of the poor representation of life’s spectacle, instigated by the fierce advances of the horizontal communication networks, the same ones that pass the power back to our side of the field. These are the networks that give us the means to operate this paradigm shift, here and now. For now it is us who control and create the media, and not the other way around. It is us who decide what’s relevant and it is us who make the culture we consume. Long gone are the days when the information was controlled by a tyrannical elite. The time as come for us to write our own history.

This starting point for this exercise was the exploration of a chosen technology. Having picked HTML/CSS, I created a community website aimed at rendering design as a profession obsolete, by encouraging information exchange in the form of website templates, which are to be regarded here as open processes rather than prefabricated formulas.

Get Off The Internet

Website + Ad campaign [2007]

http://aftadesign.net/getofftheinternet/

Get Off The Internet™ is a Firefox extension that replaces ads with an image from its archive. These images animate a list of stupid alternatives to spending time on the Internet. The objective is to reinvent the spaces traditionally reserved to unilateral communication inciting capital accumulation, transforming them instead in everyday life subversion appeals.

The messages delivered can be anything, from nonsense pub crawls rules to irritating handshake suggestions, as long as they cause any kind of disruption in the way a given mechanism operates.

Simulate the extension

Art Brut

Video — 01’17” [2007]

A video about selfless devotion to music, based on a song with the same theme.

Track: My little Brother by Art Brut

Eat Me

Video — 04’21” [2005]

This video was a support for a presentation about Émigré, the magazine and type foundry, for the Communication Design class. It displays Jeffery Keedy’s text Rant, originally published in Émigré no. 64. The text is a harsh critic of Graphic Design practice, and questions its motivations, objectives and means used. To present Émigré in a meaningful way we couldn't escape its critical discourse, which became a reference throughout the 80s and 90s, hence the usage of this particular text along with this metaphorically illustrative footage. The song Assassins by Lightning Bolt was chosen for the soundtrack for the violence and roughness it infers to the contents. All typefaces are, obviously, made by Émigré.

This video was made in collaboration with Pedro Proença, Sara Santos and Inês Barros.

This video was part of the Jovens Criadores 2006 selection in the Video category.

We’ll Make a Lover of You

Video — 01’13” [2007]

Having as a starting point Wolf Vostell’s manifesto and a Naomi Klein’s No Logo excerpt, this loop aims at representing capitalism’s never ending cycle of human exploitation by other humans, a loop which feeds and justifies itself eternally.

Track: We’ll Make a Lover of You by Les Savy Fav

This video is an extension of the Monkey’s Finger booklet.