 is the first in a series of books by Andrew Herzog documenting one of his public art installations. The first Report centers around Herzog’s 2018 installation, 

, in which he painted a meter wide, one-kilometer diameter circle around the National Museum of Art of Romania. This book is the result of looking for a “how-to” guide/ any insights for making public art and not really finding it. It tells the entire story of how the installation was completed–all of the people and relationships that made it possible, all of the good ideas and bad ideas, hard parts, fun parts, bureaucratic parts, and easy parts along the entire nearly year-long journey.

Andrew Herzog

How to Make Public Art

Art Practice

Craft

Community

Graphic Design in the Post-Digital Age' examines the challenges and opportunities in the wake of the rapid rise of creative coding within a growing community of designers opting to make their own design tools. This comprehensive overview covers educational approaches in design programs and the historic and economic contexts of programming in graphic design, as well as the implications surrounding the integration of coding with design. The book includes over twenty interviews in which major figures in design reflect upon the ways in which coding has innovated and transformed their design practice and strategies, and the directions it will take in the future.

You can purchase it here. Could, only find it in stock at amazon, sorry.

Demian Conrad

Graphic Design in the Post-digital Age

Graphic Design

Technology

Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artifacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources.

 uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.

is structured in chapters with titles of professions that designers can occupy (such as Educator; Engineer, Hacker, Futurist, Activist, etc.). These titles respond to the importance of not just how designers make work, but also how they perform daily economic and social roles.

Each chapter is divided into coherent articles in which diverse examples of objects and design practices are relayed. The book also features examples of radical design collectives, that work towards alternatives between design, community and reciprocity.

Ruben Pater (1977, NL) was educated as a graphic designer, worked in several design studios, also independently, and as an educator (e.g. MA Royal Academy of Art, The Hague). With Untold Stories Pater makes critical work on the edge of graphic design, journalism and activism.

is an inspirational book full of sources for design students, educators and visual communicators all over the world, just like Ruben's first book 

(BIS, 2016). www.untold-stories.net; @unlisted_roots; @capitalslock

Ruben Pater

Caps Lock

Capitalism

We’re honored to have hosted Ruben Pater, a designer and thinker whose contributions have informed and enriched our ethos at Index, for a talk about his new book, Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, And How To Escape From It. The talk was held on Zoom and live-streamed on the Index Public Square (our homepage). You can watch the recording here.

Caps Lock — A Book Talk with Ruben Pater

The internet is a vast expanse, full of endless treasures, glimpses of difference, and the messiness of being human — but so often we only get to skim the bubbles that rise to the top, as filtered through 

 or the business models and ideologies of 

Part creative prompt, part act of protest, part meditative exercise, our hour-long expedition departs once every week. Each session we picked a platform, discussed what its algorithms might be hiding, and then divided up into teams — divers, researchers, excavators, and cartographers — and plunged the platform’s depths for signs of life. We used what we found as materials to create new works, talk about what we learned, and returned to our days with water between our toes.

Together, we plunged into the deepest darkest corners of the internet on our lunch break.

Elan Kiderman-Ullendorff

Deep Sea Diving on the Web

This book is influential in informing aspects of our thinking around Index, particularly as we think about creating meaningful programming and social situations, and the role of technology in supporting — not substituting for — interaction within communities. Barack Obama also likes this book.

In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives.

Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, 

 is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing

It's a Student Work

Student Work

Architecture

Camille Baldwin is an entrepreneur, investor, & brand expert and gave a talk about symbolism in branding. 

In the 20th century, brands were symbols. In the 21st century, they are stories. Learn what this means, why this matters, and how to create a brand for our wet canvas world. Framed for creative practitioners but open to all.

What constitutes a brand? How — and to what end — do brands wield the power of narrative? In what ways has the climate of consumerism changed since the 20th century? And how can we, as creative practitioners, use this knowledge to shape a future with intention and integrity?

Together with the executive team of Gin Lane, Camille co-founded Pattern, a multi-brand consumer goods company, creating the brands for the family of Pattern, Equal Parts, and Open Spaces.

Camille Baldwin

Open Source Brand 101

Brand & Identity

“Hear with your ears, listen with your heart,” was one guiding principle of Pauline Oliveros, the pioneering sonic artist who lived from 1932–2016. Her other mantra was “Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.”

This book provides scores for such exercises. 

Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice

 offers an exciting guide to ways of listening and sounding. It provides unique insights and perspectives for artists, students, teachers, mediators and anyone interested in how consciousness may be effected by profound attention to the sonic environment

 is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She taught this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking 

 classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. 

 practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the 

 classes and retreats.

Oliveros is recognized as a pioneer in electronic music and a leader in contemporary music as composer, performer, educator and author. Her works are performed internationally and her improvisational performances are documented extensively on recordings, in literature and on the worldwide web.

Read more about the fascinating work of Pauline Oliveros in this New Yorker article by 

Pauline Oliveros

Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice

Music

Philosophy

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates… Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.”

An essay on aesthetics by the Japanese novelist, this book explores architecture, jade, food, and even toilets, combining an acute sense of the use of space in buildings. The book also includes descriptions of laquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure.

This is the type of book that all the coolest people you know have on their shelves or in their bibliographies.

Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

In Praise of Shadows

Aesthetics

Have you ever seen a web interaction from a fancy site-builder and thought 

wow that looks insane, I could probably never make that myself

? In this workshop, Ryan, (https://www.ryanscheuer.com/) is a developer & designer living in Brooklyn.will show you how to reverse-engineer some of these interactions to show you how easy and fun web development can be.

In this workshop, participants joined in a coding workshop where they:


Learned the basics of reverse-engineering sites

Learned how to ask the right questions as you inspect code

Familiarized themselves with a CSS pre-processor

Gained confidence to develop novel layouts & complex interactions

Ryan Scheuer

Painting a Website

is a type design discipline that incorporated primarily for tax purposes. Artists, Desmond Wong and Christina Janus talk about the theme of waves in their practice; starting each day with a walk to the beach and assuming the role of what composer Terry Riley calls, “an antenna” for streams that have been broadcast, 

 Desmond and Christina will be answering 

 have set out to create an online space to chit-chat about philosophies, theories, and tools of the trade with people of all kinds. Please join us in conversation with your soon-to-be favorite practitioners in this low-stakes/high-returns atmosphere.

Desmond Wong and Christina Janus

Open House with Desmond Wong and Christina Janus

Typography

Current Reflections on Art and Architecture — Space and place as topics of playful investigation and serious reflection.
This book looks at art that relates playfully to architecture, with contributions from artists, architects, designers and scholars including Franz Xaver Baier, Beatriz Colomina, Olafur Eliasson, Andrea Fraser, Bruce Nauman, Tom Sachs and more.

Space is the Place

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

 is a 1992 self-help book by American author Julia Cameron. The book was written to help people with artistic creative recovery, which teaches techniques and exercises to assist people in gaining self-confidence in harnessing their creative talents and skills. Correlation and emphasis is used by the author to show a connection between artistic creativity and a spiritual connection with God.

Julia Cameron

The Artist's Way

Our first Community Conversation at Index! During this event series, we feature members of our community who share their thoughts on a given topic, seeding the ground with fertile conversation and connection.

This month’s conversation was on On Hope. We asked: 

What could the future look like for the hopeful?

 How can we spend our time radically imagining good — from the local scale to the universal?

Our three speakers each took 7 minutes to introduce a conversation topic related to the subject of hope. After the presentation session, we split into smaller groups to unpack the ideas presented. Then we regrouped to talk about the presentations in a panel format.

Sam Taylor

Community Conversations: On Hope

Mindfulness

Since launching in April 2021, we’ve hosted some sixty-odd events, courses, workshops and other happenings at Index. Our audience for these programs has ranged from intimate groups of three to sprawling multi-page Zoom rooms and hybrid events of more than 300; probably close to 2,000 people have joined a program at Index.

Creating accessible creative programming is at the core of our mission, so the Index Public Square was one of the first features we developed when launching our platform. Basically, the Public Square is a livestream on our homepage that connects via Twitch to an event happening on Zoom. It’s been a great way to lower the barrier of entry to our free programs even further — no registration required.

Two years in, we’ve got a really powerful archive of 

 content of programs hosted on the Index Public Square. To make that archive navigable — and to extend the life of these otherwise ephemeral happenings — we bring you Index Resources, our Library of Alexandria, encompassing past programs, recommended reading, and — soon to come — student work from our course curriculum.

Our hope is that, by extending the life of these great programs, we’re able to include more and more people, unbounded by geography or time zone, in our community through the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and relationships.

An ever-growing library of archived material, student work, and recommended reading.

Introducing Index Resources

Index

Gideon Jacobs is a writer who has been exploring guided meditation as both an ancient spiritual technology and as a format for immersive fiction.

At its most basic, this could be seen as parallel explorations of the grammatical device of the imperative mood. A great reading experience, like a great meditative experience, requires at least some surrendering of agency, some relinquishing of control. The proverbial guru and author have more in common than we might think.

Gideon led an evening of meditations. Some of which were more traditional exercises meant to anchor the group in reality, some of which were pieces he has written in this particular style for publications like Buffalo Zine, Office Magazine, Autre, and more.

Gideon Jacobs

Mediated Meditations

Topics of the talk include but are not limited to: How to build fonts and relationships, and how to rethink licensing models and ways of working together. A crash course in managing artist expectations, teams, and a growing typeface catalogue will be included. Also discussed: Our use and abuse of in-house design tools, workflows in general, and more or less successful attempts at staying on Slack’s free plan for as long as possible. For the business people amongst us, we  took a look into one year of collected sales statistics, share never-spoken-about industry gossip, and try to fortune-tell where all of this might be heading next. Could even live-publish a typeface during that night, let’s see!

Johannes Breyer

Dinamo – All Fonts Are Bastards

In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline.

The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance—Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari—measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however—Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich—struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline.

Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history.

Chistopher S. Wood

A History of Art History

History

Will Hallett screens selections from a video art practice he's been working on over the last few years while discussing some of the research that backgrounds it and the particular workflow that’s developed through/alongside it.

Will Hallett

How the Internet Could be a Hospital: Mutual Aid at the Video Store

Speculative

Michelle brought together casual learners interested in exploring the creative potential of everyday office applications through the world of pixel art, excel art, or in this case, Google Sheet Parties.

We celebrated how people express themselves on the internet through image, emojis, text, color, and more.The group walked through a blank, digital landscape composed of malleable cells ready to be filled with text, color, and more! Digital footprints were left behind!

Michelle Devlin

Pixel Play

A New Plan to Capture Greenhouse Gas documents how growth-minded politicians, industrialists, and engineers have spent decades advocating for CO2 removal, at the expense of real climate solutions. Surprising stories surface: a failed “CO2 dump” experiment off the coast of Hawaii, an MIT partnership with the state-run oil giant Saudi Aramco, a campaign to deregulate pollution on the high seas, and more. Andres tells these stories in a unique style of drawing that incorporates archival research and reproduction.

In a talk celebrating the book’s release, Andres discussed the troubled history of CO2 removal and what it could mean for climate movement organizers today. Of course, he shared drawings from his book along the way.

Andres Chang

A New Plan to Capture Greenhouse Gas 

Climate

Research

 discusses the exhibition Torn Apart: Punk, New Wave + the 

. Michael will highlight a selection of ephemera from the show including posters, clothing, flyers, zines, buttons and stickers, with a focus on graphic design and typography. Sitting alongside the familiar lo-fi cut ’n’ paste irreverent aesthetics of Punk, the idiosyncratic styles of New Wave and Post-Punk offer a visual diversity that reflects a broad range of musical styles and avant-garde ideas. Equal parts nostalgia, novelty, discovery and inspiration, the presentation documents the visual explosion that occurred when Punk as a formative subculture was born, and tracks the journey as Punk imploded, producing an aftershock of a thousand shards still piercing design culture today.

Michael Worthington

Kick Over The Statues

Culture

 mayors, from climate fighters to renowned disobedient chefs, from Russian dissidents to record-breaking climbers and insanely talented music producers, writers, artists, political advisors, archistars, entrepreneurs, movie stars, disobedience is a seed that can be found everywhere. The book 

, written by Vincenzo Angileri, is a guide on disobedience, a loving invitation to rebellion, a curious and thirsty exploration on creativity and social resistance, a call to break the rules (or invent new ones), featuring interview with badass personalities of the likes of Pussy Riot, Rita Indiana, José Andrés, Patagonia’s Vincent Stanley, Alex Honnold or Bad Bunny, among others.

In a laid-back yet militant talk, we will interrupt your lunch break and, instead, set off together for a Zoom-powered journey through the editorial process of the book, with the risk of bumping into interesting notions, boring facts, anecdotes, eternal truths, critical thinking gems, and some first-hand interesting takeaways from some of the world’s most disobedient and brilliant minds.

Published by Temas de Hoy & Acid House Barcelona

Vincenzo Anglieri

Disobey: A playful guide to disobedience, creativity, and rebellion

Michael Pollan is famous for writing books like The Omnivore's Dilemma and for saying things like Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. It’s not a stretch to see why he’d evolve an interest in a holistic approach to food into a holistic approach to consciousness. In this book, Pollan writes about the history and contemporary medical uses of psychedelics and also does a bunch of them himself. His tone is of wonderment but not naïveté — he’s a child of the 60's and 70's. But his clear explanations and documentations of psychedelic experiences feel like a guide for a still-skeptical society on how to open (and how to change) the mainstream view of psychedelics, and get the most out of our time alive.

When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists inadvertently catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research.

A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, 

 is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

Index is opening IRL in NYC this spring!

How to Make Public Art

Andrew Herzog

Graphic Design in the Post-digital Age

Demian Conrad

Caps Lock

Ruben Pater

Caps Lock — A Book Talk with Ruben Pater

Ruben Pater

Deep Sea Diving on the Web

Elan Kiderman-Ullendorff

How to Do Nothing

Jenny Odell

Student Work

It's a Student Work

Open Source Brand 101

Camille Baldwin

Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice

Pauline Oliveros

In Praise of Shadows

Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

Painting a Website

Ryan Scheuer

Open House with Desmond Wong and Christina Janus

Desmond Wong and Christina Janus

Space is the Place

...

The Artist's Way

Julia Cameron

Community Conversations: On Hope

Sam Taylor

Introducing Index Resources

An ever-growing library of archived material, student work, and recommended reading.

Mediated Meditations

Gideon Jacobs

Dinamo – All Fonts Are Bastards

Johannes Breyer

A History of Art History

Chistopher S. Wood

How the Internet Could be a Hospital: Mutual Aid at the Video Store

Will Hallett

Pixel Play

Michelle Devlin

A New Plan to Capture Greenhouse Gas

Andres Chang

Kick Over The Statues

Michael Worthington

Disobey: A playful guide to disobedience, creativity, and rebellion

Vincenzo Anglieri

How To Change Your Mind

Michael Pollan