Enfolding and Unfolding
An Aesthetics for the Information Age
By Laura Marks
Design by Raegan Kelly

Designer's Statement

I am watching out the window as a gorgeous snow storm blows sideways through the trees and down the alley behind my building. The wind is just audible above the whisper of electronics and npr and the old man snores of my mountain dog Luc. Though the material qualities of my environment evidence sustenance, privilege, and even a certain peace, why is it the proximity of this brief blizzard that causes my chest to burst with joy? It is a wonder how the material artifacts of experience can sometimes hold more than you were aware of at the time, yet just as often fail to express what is lived.

What I remember most vividly about my first meeting with Laura is her optimism”"to paraphrase her: collapse in the face of creative anguish is a learned response, the habit of those who can afford to collapse. We have but to relearn, to revisit the vast pool of our experience and drive authenticity back to the surface. To implement Laura's model, as the planes of information/capital and image eddy, bloat, and overflow with replicas, individual and small collective energies and creative product flow on, and up, and over.

Laura was right to insist we stick to illustration. Both the quality of her ideas and the complexity of the relationships she outlines are sufficient to provoke contemplation, and so I strove to keep the design sparse, diagrammatic, and evocative of her descriptions.