Real Talk

Participants

nicole killian, Be Oakley, Mindy Seu

Be Oakley
When I was thinking about my connections to both of you, the first thing I thought about was the catalog you designed for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, nicole—Tag: Proposals on Queer Play and Ways Forward. The way that you used typography was really fun and exciting. It was such a cool project. The form was like a deck of cards, breaking the form so it’s unbound, and it’s breaking some of these forms that are queer and its nature which is unbound. It made me think of Paul Soulellis with Queer.Archive.Work, and how he doesn’t like binding things together.

nicole killian
That project was for a show curated by Nayland Blake at the ICA Philadelphia after the Walker project I had edited for Soundboard, which centered around queering design pedagogy. That was in 2018, and in 2019 some different projects came my way because I think queer became a buzzword, which felt strange. When Meg Onli from the ICA reached out to me, it felt like a wonderful way to work with former students! I worked with Drew Sisk on the design of the deck—who you know, Be, from Virginia Commonwealth University, and you had made Mother Nature Is a Lesbian…

Be Oakley
The Mother Nature Is a Lesbian font. That began my timeline for using my protest-inspired fonts. It’s incredible that after I created this first font, you almost immediately used it in this high-art, institutional way. Looking back, I remember it feeling extra crucial because of its immediate use in the world.

nicole killian
Yeah, it was a fun project because Meg came to me with the deck of cards idea. I was teaching a queer nonlinearity seminar in the grad program at the time. It felt really meaningful to work on and think about a catalog that is actually like a deck of cards. You can play with them. It makes me think about Naima Green’s deck of cards, Pursuit, this way of using them like divination, tarot: spreading them out and shuffling them back together. It felt like a perfect time to use your typeface, and I crossed my fingers that you’d let me use it for the project. It came together! It was a down-and-dirty project, so Drew and I worked really quickly, which helped with the nonlinearity of the project. We threw out some ideas, a structure was chosen, and then we broke that structure apart for the deck.

Mindy Seu
Beyond the nonlinearity, why do you think that a lot of these queering publications often use this unbound format?

nicole killian
It starts to break apart this idea of a beginning and an end—it allows the reader to come back to the same content in different ways. And I think that allows you to come back to a project with fresh eyes every time or create new connections. Taking away the hierarchy of beginnings and endings is one reason we see a lot of unbound content.

Mindy Seu
It also points to this impulse to bring together a variety of paper types or materials. It’s also more economical because we don’t have to worry so much about collation or restrictions on color profiles, so that makes it feel more expansive.

Be Oakley
A lot of unbound projects that I’ve seen—mostly thinking about Queer.Archive.Work—they’re less commercially based. You might worry less about stocking it at a bookstore. Not that Paul Soulellis or Queer.Archive.Work can’t sell unbound work, but it’s not the main focus. The fact that unbound work might be sold less but can be disseminated more easily does add a bit of friction. Often, projects stemming from unbound, queer-coded forms are seen as being less capitalist-focused, and then maybe it’s a more anti-capitalist form of binding. That may not be true, but it sounds very buzzwordy. It seems to be a less consumerist bent on printed matter.

Mindy Seu
**Right, it’s simultaneously more economical yet less consumerist, which is a nice pairing. Earlier on, nicole, you mentioned that the word queer had become more of a buzzword. Why do you think that changed?

nicole killian
**It was a moment in time when people were starting to talk about queer as an action—maybe a convenient moment socially and politically. On the flip side, it was also a moment where I started to get ads for queer credit cards, you know? When I started using that language, it felt like a moment when I was naming something for myself that I perhaps hadn’t been able to bring the right language to. When Emmett Byrne at the Walker asked me to contribute to Soundboard, I think that was the first time I said it in the context of graphic design. Maybe it’s one of those things, too, where the moment you start thinking about something, you see it everywhere.

Be Oakley
**I’m thinking about queer now, and even as I’ve published a lot of things with queer in the title, it feels it has lost some of its weight and criticality. Something I loved about calling something queer, identifying as queer, and using that term was the aspect of it not being a fixed identity. When I think of queer, it’s so connected to a non-binary-ness, a spectrum. But there are moments of fixity in our lives. I often think of queerness as a point graph with four axes. You’re here right now, and then you’ll be over there in the future. Anyway, I’m trying to use that word less.

Not that I’m ashamed of the word queer. I just want to live up to the radical potential of what I feel queer should be. I want to honor it more. I also want to do this project based on another ICA Philadelphia catalog called What Is a Queer Voice?, asking artists what is their queer voice to get to a specificity of what queer means.

Mindy Seu
**Queer has somewhat recently reached the collective consciousness. It’s now part of the mainstream. In some ways, this is incredible, but it also means that it can be so readily co-opted by corporations, which are its antithesis. Queering is inherently personal. Politics are inherently personal. When we start to use terms like queer or decolonization, et cetera, we need to map our own personal trails of references that can situate our stake in the ideology. Judith Butler described queer as an action and not as an identity or a noun. That’s a nice reframing, right? A prompt to use it as a motivating force rather than as this fixed state.

Be Oakley
**Absolutely—more specificity in its use. What I loved about queer was its openness and nonlinearity. I believe the academic-ness of queerness is a problem because of accessibility issues. And unfortunately, a lot of queer theory is not accessible to a lot of people. Like Judith Butler just came out with a new book, and it was, like, thirty dollars and hardcover. That feels wrong, and I refuse to buy it because it is expensive. And I don’t mean to shame Judith Butler, a fantastic theorist. But so many queer people can’t even access that, you know?

Mindy Seu
**See, that’s where this loops back to this unbound quality or this self-publishing format. I do think there is some value to publishing in a conventional way. But we can counter or complement this with bootlegs, with free releases, with sliding scales. It’s not one or the other.

Be Oakley
**PDFs! One thing about a more prominent publisher like Verso Books is that they’re good about occasionally offering free PDFs of their work, especially recently with works on Palestinian scholarship that help people get educated. That’s the balance that needs to be struck with some of these larger publishers to make urgent information accessible.

Mindy Seu
**Yes, trade publishers like Verso routinely publish pocket books for twelve to fifteen dollars. That’s great.

nicole killian
**I mean, someone will always circulate. I grew up on the internet in the 90s, downloading like fifty Dave Matthews Band concerts because I could—because someone put them online, ha ha. I digress…

I very much believe in people being compensated for their work but also in finding a way to circulate for free. When I’m teaching a seminar with students and there’s a book, I tell them the book is available. But usually, if we Google the title, I can find it on are.na or somewhere. And I think that, like, those things coexisting... It’s not perfect whatsoever.

Mindy Seu
**It also points to how broken this model of publishing is. I’ve been doing research on micropayments, and I’m trying to push forward a new model of attribution called citational splits, where if you are cited, you will get a small split of royalties. So, ten to fifteen cents per book might be tiny, but if a book sells 2,500 copies, that’s roughly four hundred dollars for a citation. So, I think that if we ask everyone to spend ten cents, that’s great, but it’s almost like a sliding scale model: the people who want the object and the original pay the full rate, assuming it will trickle down and disseminate in other ways.

Be Oakley
**I use sliding scale for all my publications on my website. For a publisher at my scale, there’s no reason not to do a sliding scale, to have options under what the book is technically worth, my ideal price point, and a higher price. It’s like, why? I’ve noticed some people want to spend more money and want to support artists and authors doing radical work. I’m thinking of artist Irena Haiduk—one of their publications was sold by your class identification–like if you self-identify as lower class, middle class, or upper class. I don’t go that far, but sometimes, people pay thirty dollars for a zine that costs one dollar to make, and I don’t feel bad at all. They had the option to pay that. I live off sales, so I’m so thankful that someone spent more money because that helps offset those who spend a little less. Sliding scales can be a form of wealth redistribution for those who can’t afford how expensive basic expenses have become. However, another question is how sliding scale can be implemented on a large scale. Who the fuck knows? But, yeah, I just love sliding scale.

Mindy Seu
**If you state that it’s a form of redistribution, people are more inclined to pay more if they can see transparently how it’s being redistributed—asking if you want to buy another copy for someone who can’t afford it, or state that some percentage of the proceeds will be donated. Gush, the lesbian party co-founded by Angel Dimayuga, has tiered pricing so queer folks pay a standard rate, but straight men must pay double or triple the price.

nicole killian
**I think that’s why I continue to come back to the small book publishing community that I feel so lucky to be a part of, because the idea of a sliding scale has been happening the whole time that I’ve been active in that world. It’s a beautiful space. Because many times when I table, a younger person comes to the table and they maybe feel overwhelmed and excited about what they’re looking at, but they also have no money, and so you just give them the zine, you give them the book. And what that means for that person—maybe they go home and start making something too, and figuring out a different way of distribution that works for their friend group, whether it’s trading or sliding scale.

Mindy Seu
**Right, it’s like a pay-it-forward model. As designers and artists and publishers, we’re thinking about trying to change these conventions. For the Cyberfeminism Index, as a printed translation of a very ephemeral online history, I knew that it should be “officially” published with an ISBN, housed in the Library of Congress, intentionally trying to take advantage of these “forever” institutions. The book is over six hundred pages at thirty-five dollars, but simultaneously, we created a hack so that someone could go to the online index and use our print-on-demand generator to export PDFs and print for free. You can have the formal version of the book and then also have the customizable and more affordable bootleg. With my book collaborator Laura Coombs and my website collaborator Angeline Meitzler, we wanted those to feel like two intentional yet distinct objects.

Be Oakley
**Well. And for your book, thirty-five to forty dollars is a higher price point, but it is a large book, you know, giant, but it’s affordable for what it is, too. It could have been even more extensive if you published with another press. The form of the Cyberfeminism Index is so beautiful, with the thin, soft paper. The way your book is printed invites viewers to engage with it and gives you permission to open it and engage with it and not be like, “Oh, I can’t touch this because it’s too lovely.” In theory, you want a book like the Cyberfeminism Index to be a resource you will revisit more than once.

Mindy Seu
**Thank you, I appreciate that! I was talking to different publishers, and the price point changed so much. Some of the fine book publishers wanted a luxury coffee table book priced at over seventy-five dollars, but that didn’t make sense or align with the ethos of the project—this is a source book! I want people to tear it up, annotate it, dog-ear the pages. Inventory Press gave Laura and me more autonomy over the form.

I also want to emphasize what you said earlier. I compulsively buy books all the time, even if I have no plans to read them in the near future. But you’ve clarified for me that buying a book now is like an investment that you will be interested in the future. You’re creating an indexical map of what your future self might want.

Be Oakley
**I’ve written about archiving in the past. I published this book with an exhibition, Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice at the Center for Book Arts. (I’m not a big fan of them right now, because they’re missing the moment on Palestinian issues, and I’ve been very disappointed with them. Make sure to put that comment in the final transcript. It’s essential to be critical and ask institutions to do more, because it’s the minimum.) Anyway, with this exhibition, I talked about what I love most about my archive: the archive of human touch on my books, the everyday wear and tear of using your book so much, even used to death—as an artifact of its former pristine self.

nicole killian
**Yeah, it’s a context for reading.

Mindy Seu
**Yes, it should be. I love the form of your GenderFail books, Be. They’re pocket sized—you want to carry them around and fold the cover over the back. Implying how the book could be handled is really important for the reader.

Be Oakley
**I love that. I called my project GenderFail because the quality of my work is good, but it’s not perfect—I’m not a large-scale printer. I printed in my apartment, and sometimes the bindings break, but you can tell that a human made it, and people appreciate the humanness. Glitch Feminism is another excellent example of a book that’s small and meant to be carried with you that is also really, really beautiful. The ink bleeds slightly on one of the pages, and I’m like, “Oh, I love that moment.” It reminds me of a handmade book, even though it’s mass-produced. And again, your book does that, Mindy; it has that quality of life that I don’t see in many other books.

Mindy Seu
**I wonder, are there particular typographic styles you find yourself returning to when exploring themes of identity? I don’t know the names of the fonts, but Nat Pyper makes bespoke typefaces. Asad Pervaiz has this great serif typeface where the tail of the Q looks like a sperm.

nicole killian
**Even though I’m drawn to free fonts—the fringe—I do buy typefaces. I like a mix. Especially if I’m being commissioned, I’ll use some of that money to buy someone’s typeface. But I’ve used Arial Narrow for so much, like most of that Nayland Blake deck from 2019 is Arial Narrow, plus your typeface, Be, and I used the bootleg Walt Disney font—I think it’s called Waltograph—in that project.

Be Oakley
**I was going to ask you; I remember seeing a Disney reference. So it is a bootleg Walt Disney.

nicole killian
It’s from dafont.com. I’m using mostly the fonts that show up when you turn on your computer for the first time, and then bootleg or fonts that are built from, like, the Lifetime television channel logo—and someone’s made a whole alphabet, which is great. I really like Brush Script. So these are, like, not fancy ones. I also really love that the Estonian Academy of Arts graphic design undergrads have a project called Suva Type Foundry, where everything is downloadable. I’ve used a lot of those. I spoke with Paul Soulellis about my approach to typography when I was included in the first edition of Queer.Archive.Work, and I set my writing almost entirely in Brush Script and the Walt Disney font, all capitals. A funny thing happened there, because it’s readable if you take your time. So the thing that I really like about that is it questions the idea of accessibility, legibility, and readability as three different things.

At the MoMA PS1 launch, I shared my text and did a performative reading, and at the end, Jack Halberstam said, “I really liked that reading, but could you send me the Word document so I can read it?” And I was like, “No, that’s not how it works.” Like, in practice, you can read it if you want to take the time, ha! I remember Paul talking to me more about trying to work with type in a way that is readable, but like, I’m daring you to read it, or like, I’m daring you to take the time. Thinking about the form of language, typography is like this, also. The idea that those who know, know, and those who want to take the time to see you will see you.

Mindy Seu
Intentional opacity or intentional illegibility is a nice prompt to get people to slow down, as you’re saying. I’m also someone who uses “default” fonts or system fonts and then intentionally changes the action, because I’m much more of a web person. So even if you’re using Arial, one of the few system fonts co-designed by a woman, sadly—Patricia Saunders for IBM—you can then queer the interaction. For this website for the Synthetic Ecologies Lab at Serpentine, led by Yasaman Sheri, we commissioned Brian Huddleston to do a cut of Times New Roman that could degrade or build, becoming more or less legible. So I think there’s a way to draw attention to something that feels traditional, let’s say, and actually change the function through interaction.

nicole killian
So when Michele Galluzzo launched Logo in Real Life in Milan, Ben Schwartz of Source Type was in conversation with him. They were both talking about the power of the bootleg, or these ways in which we encounter visual systems—systematic images, logos—and how they actually operate in real life, what we do with them. So much of the work that Michele cites in his book is by queer people—logos by Hello Machine or Roxanne Maillet. How do marginalized folks take a dominant visual culture and use it in different ways? Thinking about Shanzhai Lyric, other folks who are documenting the way dominant visual culture gets digested by folks and distributed in different ways.

Be Oakley
I think what you two are saying refers to what we were talking about earlier, that queer is an action. The tools themselves don’t have to be queer because, unfortunately, there are disproportionately few typefaces designed by women or even queer people. I remember being in graduate school and asking someone to recommend typefaces designed by queer, trans people, and they said there wasn’t much they would think of off the top of their head. So many of us can’t think of many. So if the tools aren’t queer, our actions with them thus become queer, which might be obvious, but essential to underline. I was excited to make this comment when you started talking because it perfectly illustrated what you were saying, Nicole. The typefaces you use aren’t “cool,” “underground,” or “fancy,” but the way that you’re using them is interestingly different and so authentic. The language that you’re using is what makes it queer, and that’s what makes it exciting. By even just using Arial, it becomes something other than that. You see the potential in these mundane fonts—you’re queering them. I’m trying to find tools that are queer, but it’s important to remind myself that queer is an action we perform.

nicole killian
There were a couple of years in a row that I went to certain institutions and was asked to talk about queer typography. I showed some exercises at the beginning—like going into different AI generators and putting in “queer typography” to see what sort of examples I would get, but then also going to websites like Fonts in Use and seeing the stuff that pops up when you put in “queer typography.” I was trying to ask, “So how is this language being used?” Was the designer who used Garamond using it for a queer event? Or was it designed by a queer person? What are the ways in which we’re categorizing these fonts? This exercise is just a question to consider why we use this language and tease out what’s productive for each of us. I found the outcomes to be really funny but also dark, because you really have no idea why someone on these sites is labeling things as queer—I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Mindy Seu
This goes back to the first question that was posed by Polymode when we were connected: is considering a typeface to have an identity a queering? And I think we’re all saying it isn’t, necessarily. There are definitely fonts designed by queer people, and there are also a lot of fonts that are designed by who knows whom, for whatever purpose. But how they’re activated is an essential component. Sometimes, that’s taking something that was designed with a certain intent, and other times, it’s intentionally misusing it.

Be Oakley
One of the main reasons I was probably invited here was the creation of my fonts based on queer and trans protest events since the Stonewall Riots of 1969. This stemmed from not finding enough typography made by queer and trans people and not waiting for someone else to do it but doing it myself. When I first started, I knew nothing about typeface design. For my first font, Mother Nature Is a Lesbian, I didn’t even know what kerning was, so there were crazy spaces between the letters. Part of me loves that, because I’m not making these fonts as a typeface designer. I’m making them as an artist. I am a designer, but I didn’t make these fonts within a design context. I like these fonts because they do connect to design history. Talking about the curation or preservation of typographic archives for future generations, that’s what I’m trying to do with these protest-inspired fonts. I think of myself as stewarding the letters and not curating them. Stewarding felt like a better language for connecting the past to the future.

I aim to make fonts from events like the Brooklyn Liberation March at the Brooklyn Museum on June 13, 2020—the largest gathering supporting Black trans people in history. There hasn’t been another that big since. The event had 15,000 to 20,000 people, and I made these fonts to help historicize these events. How do we make an event history? Especially with more underground histories of world events in the news right now—with Luigi Mangione shooting the CEO—that’s already history. And, you can tell that’s such an important historical event. But how do we make queer and intimate moments history, and how do we historicize these events? Through making these typefaces, I hope that I’m historicizing each of these events, even if it’s in a small way, and that’s important to me, too. Also, it’s super-important that they’re open source, because selling these would be such a conceptual failure. Since I’m sourcing these from the protest, it would be capitalistic. It is so important that I don’t own these. I’m stewarding them, as I said before.

Mindy Seu
I love this word steward, like a docent. As an archivist, you’re also a pseudo-historian trying to provide context for where these things came from and also suggest a reactivation of them. The open-source thing reminds me of that collection, Badass Libre Fonts by Womxn.

nicole killian
A text I always come back to—I feel like we read this together, Be—a text by Litia Perta that brings up how curation comes from the word cure, like, to care for. I get really excited about this idea that there are so many different queer archives, or, you know, different types of archives that one can go to and find depending on what you’re searching for, and the list keeps growing. I think we’re in a particular moment where, you know, so many young people are taught to think about their own personal archive and their familial archive. I’m thinking about designer Zoë Pulley, who just came and spoke at VCU and has a practice centered around familial and Black joy archiving.

Be Oakley
On that note, students are interested in archiving, especially from a personal narrative standpoint. When I was teaching at Tufts University, I came up with this class called Ephemeral Archive—I only taught it once. In this class, I had students create their archive throughout the semester and then create a project based on it. One student did this beautifully complex archive of their relationship with an aunt incarcerated in Florida for doing this housing scam. The student also looked into their white identity and how that intersected with this process. The way the student archived their correspondence through the Florida corrections system was so interesting. It made me so excited how students can look at their own experiences and make incredible work with them. Having this student, who was white, make work about their privilege and how it affected their experience navigating the prison industrial complex was done so thoughtfully. That was a fascinating reflection and something that I don’t often see.

nicole killian
Sometimes, going through an archive or being able to look at ephemera that has been collected and distributed—maybe by someone who has had a lived experience that you do not relate to but want to learn about—these are such powerful moments. Actually, there was an amazing show at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, curated by Amber Esseiva, called Dear Mazie. It’s about Amaza Lee Meredith, the trailblazing artist and educator who became the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the U.S. She built a house in Virginia for her and her partner to live in, and in the show, there’s not only archival material but contemporary artists responding to that work. But there is also a timeline of letters that her students wrote to her after they went out into the world. And it is just beautiful. It is such a gift that this work is in the world for more people to see, as an education.

Be Oakley
That perfectly illustrates what you mentioned earlier, nicole, about the root of curating being care. That’s what Amber did with this exhibition—stewarding and caring for this archive to share this artist’s experience. Dear Mazi_e is an example of curation at its most genuine.