Subject: Viridian Note 00027 Key concepts: Viridian Mascot Contest, Viridian Aesthetics, Viridian graphics, List mechanics; Viridian "Fungal Typography" Contest Attention Conservation Notice: It's about the possible future role of graphic images in the Viridian movement. It's over 2,000 words long. If you become too interested in this, you might volunteer for something that becomes a major attention sink. Links: http://rampages.onramp.net/~jzero/ http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch/V-Notes/ViridianIndex.html http://www.bespoke.org/viridian Entries in the Big Mike Viridian Design Contest: http://www.pinknoiz.com/viridian/logos.html http://www.spaceways.de/BigMike/Mike.html http://weber.u.washington.edu/~r1ddl3r/bigmike.html http://powerbase-alpha.com/bigmike http://rampages.onramp.net/~jzero/ http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades http://www.57thstreet.com/viridian/ http://www.ioc.net/~bini/bigmike.htm http://www.pcnet.com/~thallad/mike.htm http://www.golden.net/~eli/viridian/ http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~smcginni/big-mike/big-mike.html and http://www.karmanaut.com/viridian/big.mike/ Attention warning: Interactive 3D "Big Mike" animation may baffle some browsers. and, just under the wire: http://www.nonsensical.com/viridian/ arrived too late, but a pretty good effort anyway: http://www.netaxs.com/~morgana/viridian.html The winner of the Big Mike design contest is John Zero (jzero@onramp.net*). On due consideration, his version of our beloved mascot "Big Mike," at http://rampages.onramp.net/~jzero/, has been judged the "most Viridian-looking." Mr. Zero has been sent his well-deserved prize, a copy of DESIGNING MODERNITY: THE ARTS OF REFORM AND PERSUASION 1885-1945, selections from the Wolfsonian design museum, edited by Wendy Kaplan, Thames and Hudson Press, 1995. I hope list readers have found this contest as entertaining as I have. If you haven't, I suggest unsubscribing immediately, as I am encouraged by the success of this experiment and plan to intensify these activities considerably in future. Words simply aren't enough. ASCII isn't enough. Over many years, I've read hundreds of thousands of words about the Greenhouse Effect. The issue has been very hard for any futurist to miss. In 1994, I even wrote and published an entire science fiction novel postulating a grim Greenhouse future. Then last summer I stepped out on my porch, saw that the sky was the color of television, and found myself smelling Mexico on fire. "I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand." This vital multisensory experience was the core inspiration for Viridianism. I hear a lot and I need to see, but I must also do and understand, and bring attention to people who are understand and who are doing. As a writer by profession, I very badly need to see. Mailing lists are ascii- dominated. They are heavily weighted toward the professionally glib, such as critics, authors and journalists. Words alone aren't going to get us out of this mess. We need to see better, we need to make the invisible visible. We need contribution from the vast majority of human beings who don't know what to do with a semicolon. I prize these people, I know they're important, and I expect the solutions to come from the hands-on creation of better artifacts, not from scribblers like myself. We need to become different people than we are. The world may not have faced up to it yet, but our situation is untenable. This very moment is another symptom. Every time I hit the return key and send out a Viridian Note, every time you read it, there are tiny spurts of soot from machines all over the planet. The Net is inter-wired intimately and utterly with the planet's electrical generation and distribution networks. Cyberspace isn't floating serenely somewhere in the noosphere; the thing gobbles fossil fuel. Knowing this fills me with discontent. It robs me of what should be a natural pleasure in my own achievements. It renders my activities somehow inauthentic. Every net.person in the world should be painfully aware of this repellent truth. As thinking, creative people, we must find the courage and energy to think and create our way out of this dilemma. Expertise is not the whole answer. It doesn't matter how good we've become at what we're doing today; what we've been doing is in some sense part of the problem. We need to undertake activities that, at the very least, publicly symbolize some willingness to think new thoughts, to behave differently, and to live in a different world. This does not require artistic genius. What it requires is awareness, a contrite heart, and a hands-on vote of confidence in the human imagination. If an artistic genius like Charles Rennie Mackintosh somehow shows up on the Viridian List, we're obviously going to have a lot of fun (at least until the new Charles Rennie succumbs like the old Charles Rennie and drinks himself into creative and professional collapse). But I don't want to hold people on the list to the creative standards of the world's greatest designers and architects; I believe we should have high critical standards, but I also think we need to create for one another, not as paid professionals of superb accomplishment, but as simple acts of personal testimony. If we were a standard art movement such as the Fauves or Pre-Raphaelites, we'd all be living in each other's laps. We could meet in cafes, buy each other drinks, go to each other's gallery openings, steal each others girlfriends and boyfriends, and ask each other to dance. These little acts of human generosity are simply not possible on an Internet mailing list. We must kick hard against the cramping limits of Internet possibility. You can send in news; that's interesting; you can comment on the news and that's even better; but you can also create something and give it away to us, and I very much want to encourage that activity. It is a vital act of solidarity, a little gesture of social cement that is conveyable through wires. I think it's of great importance; it constitutes the difference between a movement and a random scattering of subscribers. In fact, if this can't be done, I need to be doing something else rather than running a list on the Internet. I envision three different categories of Viridian graphic activity, which should be judged by three different standards. First, and most important, is the category of "things made by Viridians." The creation and free distribution of original artwork by Viridians. The "Big Mike" contest was a first test of this. We are doing our own work here. We may be simple, or even naive, or primitive, but we are being honest. We are holding up our hands in public Viridian testimony. We need to do this for one another, no matter how silly we look. If an eleven-year-old child can do it (http://www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades) then anyone can. (Besides, look at those cilia. Those are the best Big Mike cilia I've ever seen.) The second category are links to, and graphic images of, things we did not create, but which we are ideologically appropriating. For instance, I very much doubt that anyone on this list is going to invent a biodegradable solar panel, but should such a thing come to exist, it would be extremely Viridian and we would all want to gawk at it at great length. We want to have a vast and growing catalog of things: photographs, images, clothes, shoes, gizmos, hairstyles, *anything,* that has a "Viridian Look." We also want links to commercial products that we consider exemplars of good design. We are quite unashamed about our powerful urge to buy these things. The bad things that we're buying are doing us in as a civilization. We can't stop buying and survive, so we have to buy different. The third category is graphic evidence. Charts, tables, maps, spacecraft photos of blazing rain forests, sensor output of various kinds. The Viridian dictum of "aestheticize all sensors" implies that data of this kind should be made accessible and beautiful. Beautifying it is an excellent idea, but first we have to make it accessible. I don't expect this to happen all at once or overnight. It's going to require a lot of digital housework, more work than I myself can do. The Pope- Emperor is a full-time working artist. I'm in the midst of a novel here; I'm also writing book reviews, and journalism, and speeches, and a column on typographic design. I also have a pre-school child in the house, which is the domestic equivalent of trench warfare. And I'm not a webmaster or webmistress, I'm a words-in-a-row kind of guy. The situation will require a new Viridian officer. An Archbishop of Graphics. Perhaps three of them, one for each category. We have two volunteer archivists already, who are running Viridian text archives in Denmark and Australia: http://www.bespoke.org/viridian http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch/V-Notes/ViridianIndex.html These fine volunteers are doing yeoman duty and deserve all praise from us, but the Viridian Archbishop of Graphics is going to have a steep row to hoe. This high- ranking Viridian personage will require a lot of disk space, and a lot of patience, and some serious webmastering skills. I am soliciting volunteers who are so entirely committed and so supernaturally well-organized that they figure that they can engage themselves in Viridian graphic web-archbishopping until the year 2012. There may be some small net.guru perks involved, such as cool, unquestioned authority over other people's artwork, and lots of hipster journalists logging on to your site, but there will be no pay, and it's mostly going to be disgruntled postal-worker labor. Keep in mind that if I don't get a volunteer, I may ask my eleven-year-old to do it. Now for some further words about "Big Mike." The Big Mike contest is now completed, but Big Mike himself can, I think, serve a further role for us. I may be sticking Mr. Zero's version of Mike on to some giveaway items in near future. Expect to hear more about this. But the basic concept of Big Mike should be available to all Viridians. If this list means something to you, and you feel a need to make a personal gesture of contribution, then I urge you to create your own image of Big Mike. The original design parameters are available at http://www.bespoke.org/viridian/ in Note 00011, but we won't hold you to those parameters any too tightly. Germs are, after all, known for their rapid mutation. Big Mike is a happy germ with the word "Viridian" on him. If you create an image of Big Mike and place it on the Web for us, I will publicize that address to the list, and I will give you your very own star >*<. This is not part of a contest any longest. You won't be held to a stringent critical standard. Doing a Mike is an act of solidarity and part of our Viridian gift economy. So much for cuddly Big Mike and the tender-hearted, supportive role of Viridian garage-style graphic amateurs. Now for the harsh, two-fisted world of next Viridian design contest! In a word: typography. Art Nouveau had its own typography. Art Deco had its own typography. The Sex Pistols had typography. The digital design world has tons of torn up, twisted, blurred, ripped-up, pixelated, EMIGRE-style typography. We need a 21st century, Viridian typography. History shows that type-styles change with the means of production of text. We've had angular cuneiform poked into clay, reed pens drawing on papyrus, monumental Roman capitals chopped into stone, goose-quill Renaissance italics, metal letters squeezed onto ragpaper, phototypeset letters rolled onto newsprint, and, most recently, pixelated digitized stuff which can basically work its way onto the page/web/screen through consensual hallucination. Now let's imagine the Viridian world of bio-type. Let's pretend that mere computers aren't glamorous enough for us anymore. We're living in a world powered by genetics, enzymes and hot goo. Our paper is pure sheet cellulose that's coming out of a K011 fermentation lab in half-drowned Greenhouse Louisiana. We've decided that, as the natural next step in typography, we're going to *grow* our lettering. We've got hordes of live microscopic spores crawling around deep in the fabric of our page, and, on some mysterious enzymatic command, they're going to exude pigment out of their swarming little bodies and words are going to grow on the page like fungus. It's Viridian fungal typography. Your task is to imagine and create this typeface. You don't have to do the entire tiresome upper-and-lower-case alphabet plus the italics, dingbats and the new and highly annoying "Euro" symbol; you just have to write the single word, "Viridian." That's just a, d, i, n, r, and V. Dead simple. Write the word "Viridian" on a web page, put it up where we can all see it, tell me about it, and I will post it. Go have an inspirational look at our "Viridian Design Principles," such as they are, in Note 00003, and then go for it. The Viridian fungal typeface that is judged "most Viridian- looking" will take the contest prize, which is one copy of *HOT DESIGNERS MAKE COOL FONTS* by Allan Haley, Rockport Publishers, 1998, ISBN 1-56496-317-9. And yes, if you are Russian, you can do it in Cyrillic. The contest will end in one month. I look forward to seeing your efforts. Good luck! Bruce Sterling (bruces@well.com)