 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

. It includes beautiful artifacts from her home that link to pages containing poetry and personal anecdotes.

Her work revolves around our first creative prompt called 

. Phoemela decided to take it quite literally by creating a graphic of a home with stairs taking direct visual influence from 

The button asks you to take off you shoes as you enter the door up the stairs.

The site then brings you to the second creative prompt, 

which encourages creative use of hyperlinks as a way to craft narrative.

One of the prompts that are part of the hyperlinks is a net art garden of ascii art. Take a stroll amongst creative use of text based imagery.

If you click on "Stones", you will be brought to a wonderful prompt from the course, 

where Pheomela took pictures of stones outside her house and edited them in photoshop. She arranged them in a grid and gave them a link to an other page which consists of excerpts from her journal. This idea stems from mythology of 

This site was crafted during 6 weeks during the Intro to

Phoemela Ballaran

Welcome to my Home

Net Art

Coding

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

This is a collective webzine created by students who took Intro to Coding for Designers with Alexa Bonomo during Spring 2022

Intro to Coding for Designers Webzine 2022

Sarah Kennedy, Julieanne Harris, Steven Lin, Liza Maione, Thomas Sullivan, Lana Hodgkinson, Yehezkel Lipinsky, Kathryn Bingham, Yaren Kaya, Emily Kolocotronis, Emily Kolocotronis,Shailendra Sharma, Sarah Nunez, Jon Marsh, Lauren Palmer, Dal Hae Lee, John Johnson, Hugo A. Ramirez, Lucas Anderson, Roo Robertson, Jeane Kim, Katie Schalick, Hye Jin Lee, and Hanna Marsh

Intro to Coding for Designers Webzine, Spring 2022

Zine

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

Michelle Mattar and Brian Schmatz give a talk about sustainable packaging practices. 

, a brand building firm focused on ethical commerce, and  

, a not-for-profit making sustainable design resources free and accessible. 

 is a Senior Business Development Manager for trinamiX GmbH, where he focuses on new applications for Near-Infrared (NIR) hardware and software services.

The top 35 Consumer Packaged Goods companies have committed to ambitious 2025 goals for sustainable packaging, but there’s already doubt in their ability to execute. Designers have a crucial role to play.

While we’ve made strides in curbside recycling for everyday waste, today’s complex packaging materials often end up in the wrong places. Many supposedly eco-friendly items end up as waste in landfills or harming nature. By understanding different materials and how they move through the waste process, we can leverage design to make a real difference: right now.

This isn't just about ideas – it’s about giving you practical principles to design packaging that matches the way we recycle and handle consumables today. The Practical Guide to Sustainable Packaging Design is aimed to equip you with a framework to measure how successful and sustainable your packaging really is, and how to be effective in pushing for even better solutions.

Michelle Mattar & Brian Schmatz

A Practical Guide to Sustainable Package Design

Climate

Packaging Design

Brendan Page and his class created vases in an exercise during the first class of the

 Here Comes the Neighborhood: 3D Modeling for Beginners

The course is designed to build skills in 3D modeling basics in a collaborative workshop-style course to build and sculpt an imaginative virtual neighborhood

This course is open to all levels of experience in digital tools and art backgrounds and encourages all who are interested in participating in creating one of the many group-made artifacts by our own blossoming community at Index.

3D Modeled Vases from Students in Here Comes the Neighborhood: 3D Modeling for Beginners

3D Modeling

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

This month, Index founders Hugh Francis and Elie Andersen talked with 

 founder Bryan Wolff. We discussed about the development of Index Nodes, a global network of independently operated spaces we’re growing to empower people all over the world to open the third spaces their community needs. We also shared some advice we’d give to give to those looking to open new creative spaces, and what values underpin the expansion of this program.

You can watch our interview, or read an edited transcription below

Elie Andersen: For those who don’t remember or weren’t yet part of our community, remind us of Index’s origin story.

Hugh Francis: When we all went into lockdown during the pandemic, all of a sudden we felt really isolated and really lonely. But I actually think that feeling of loneliness existed before the pandemic, but when the pandemic happened, suddenly we were all like, 

 isolated, and that isolation was super obvious.

So we launched Index online at that point, to get people who were sitting alone in their houses to come together, and it grew into this peer-to-peer learning environment, to the point where we were having like, 250, or 300, people come into the Zoom rooms.

And what became clear as Covid started lifting is that this community wasn’t going anywhere. They still felt lonely, they still felt like they wanted to come together and learn together and have a space to congregate. We also kept hearing that people wanted a physical space to go to. But what was since Index started online, we had people all over the world who were gravitating towards these groups.

It started to feel like there was kind of this global mycelial network of people whose vibe was aligned with the way that Index talks and the spaces that Index was creating. So we wanted to make sure that when we built a physical space, it wasn’t centralizing and boxing out people who are coming to Index from all over the world.

One of the things that has always been a big part of the conversation about Index is how to make sure that this global network of creative and free thinking individuals can still be a community, even if we do build a space. So we began asking, can we have Index Nodes somewhere else other than New York City? Which is when we began talking to Bryan about his ideas for post-office.

Bryan Wolff: Yeah, the feelings you’re describing of loneliness and seeking connection, and wanting to combat that in some way or form very much relate to our origin story as well. I think a lot of what people started in that somewhat gruesome year of 2020 was dealing with these themes, in one form or another.

Initially for me, it was in the form of a practice, figuring out how to work on these ideas through 

. We were trying to figure out a way of working where we could focus on these kinds of topics, but we were doing so in a prefigurative way. And we began to feel like we could accelerate much more if there was a space to do so, where other people could come into it physically, beyond just a Discord.

So it was that idea, which I think I mentioned off-the-cuff to one of you, and you said, well actually, we’re actively thinking about Index Nodes. So what for me maybe felt more latent, or sort of like a pipe dream, became this beautiful coming together.

We discussed that, for Index Nodes, the conversation has to originate with, 

 And our answer was the same as in New York: Amsterdam needs a physical space for people to get out of isolation.

But Amsterdam also has a really unique history of third spaces, and a long squatters’ history as well. Some of the most iconic cultural institutions like Paradiso started as a squat. This place called 02301, which is sometimes a concert venue, sometimes a club, also has workspaces and studios in one giant building, that used to be a squat; then they rented it from the city, then bought if from the city, and it’s now under collective ownership. There are so many beautiful spaces in with stories like these our city’s history, but squatting has now become illegal. And basically, the whole city has become commercialized to the point where these third spaces are now in the form of a Soho House, where commerce is much more important than the creative community they’re purporting to support.

EA: Index and post-office both emerged from desire to create spaces that are resistant to the over-commercialized landscape of our respective cities. But at the same time, we’re working within that system: We’re paying rent in two of the most expensive cities in the world. And so we’re inherently dealing with business and money. I have been learning so much since opening our space about the balance of hospitality and transaction. How have you guys been thinking about engaging in capitalism, exchange, and transaction in ways that are non-extractive and that are still true to our origins of bring artist- or creative-run, collectivist spaces, made by us and for us?

HF: The thing that we’re trying to do differently with Index is to ensure that people aren’t being turned into products. The thing about the Soho Houses and the WeWorks and the Neue Hauses of the world is that they’re definitely nice spaces, they’re nice places to go — but you can’t help this underlying feeling that you’re being both extracted from and also productized as a member of those spaces. 

Come work next to these successful companies

, and suddenly, you’re part of the sell. And the problem with that is you don’t really have any transparency as to whether you’re being ripped off, so you kind of feel like you are.

Being part of the product line at one of these places makes you feel like these are not well-equipped environments to critique the act of consuming in the first place. So there’s a whole subset of conversations that we, as creative people, want to be having in these spaces but can’t because it doesn’t feel congruent with existing inside them.

So Index and post-office may approach this idea in different ways, but essentially both our spaces involve members in the financials of what we’re doing. All our members know how much it costs to run our spaces. In New York, we have quarterly town halls where we talk openly about how much money we’ve lost — and maybe some day, might make. We talk about what members are needing in the space, how we can upgrade it, how to make continual improvements based on the needs of our members. Ultimately, we want them to be owners of the space itself, and there’s more we want to do in the future to give them even greater sense of ownership.

And I think that same philosophy applies to how we opened and how post-office came about, because a traditional model for a network of spaces might look like a franchise. But we funded post-office in a grant program. post-office is a completely freestanding entity that yields a free benefit to its members, which is that anyone who’s a member of post-office can come to Index NYC and work for free, and anyone who’s a member of Index NYC can go to post-office and work for free.

But other than that, there is no financial connection. There’s no money flowing between these spaces at all. And I think that’s integral because we are a solidarity community. There’s no transaction happening between these spaces. And that means that we can focus on creating the best environment for the right conversations to happen. And that’s why people are going to continue to gravitate toward us.

EA: Our members aren’t a product — they’re not users. They’re members, they belong here.

BW: Right. And it’s tricky sometimes because everyone uses the word 

 — what does that even mean? But at our spaces, we want people to feel truly as members of the space and of the community. And, to me, the key to that is transparency.

Just because we’re playing within capitalism doesn’t mean we have to play by the old rules. And so, to lean into transparency fully changes the conditions of how we act, and how people can act with us. So we’re transparent about our roles, our finances. We try to empower our members to feel they can change the space to fit their needs. And we’re also still using money. But once we get to a place of equilibrium, or a place of surplus, we can extend this value of transparency toward maybe buying a space to put into collective ownership.

These are long-term goals, but what we’re doing today is saying we don’t have to wait until there’s a perfect moment where we don’t have to pay rent — we’re going to start offering some compromised version of that, where at least we can start coming together and having these conversations. You guys were doing that years ago, not waiting to open a physical space, figuring out how to get started with the tools available at the time on Zoom and in the digital space, and figuring out how to communicate your values to others in order to solidify the community.

EA: And values transcend location, like, we can have the same values here in New York that you share, and that others share in places around the world. And I think that’s what makes the Index Node network a really captivating idea. How do you guys see the Index Node program expanding to other parts of the world? What could it look like to bring a new space online?

BW: I think it has to start with the same question of 

 Also, I think this idea of transparency, that anyone who’s a part of the space has a say about how the space is used.

As of now, Index the Index model is sort of, “co-working in the front, revolution in the back,” and post-office is close to that model too. But I’d love to see someone from another city be like, 

we need a cinema. And so our space is an arthouse cinema first, but then we’re using the same rooms for events and for presentations

. And to see our financial values apply to different models, like if you buy a ticket to a movie, what kind of ownership does that get you? How would collective ownership and management work in different contexts?

HF: Yeah, I don’t have much to add to that. I think that, provided that Index is doing the work to uncover and empower people in those communities to serve their own communities better, then I think it’s going to be additive to the network by virtue of starting local and expanding outward.

EA: So, we talked about transparency. We talked about originating in need, asking 

 Are there any other attributes that other Index Nodes must or will have in common?

BW: One thing that I think all Index Nodes must have in common is accessibility through some kind of a public offering. Index and post-office are doing it through programming. You don’t have to be a member to be part of the community, you can just come along to events and see what it’s about. So, like you said, (1) originating from a place of need, (2) financial transparency, and (3) some sort of connection to the public that leaves the door open to non-members.

HF: Yeah, I mean, basically, the recipient of a grant to build an Index Node has one requirement, which is that they offer some free benefit to all the members of all the other spaces that are are also in the network. So, provided that you’re yielding up that free benefit, you can build whatever space you want, and you can serve your community in whatever way you would like to.

So that’s kind of why we’re doing this. This solidarity economy that we’re building is far more important than any type of transactional one, for sure. But I think it’s also worth saying that these spaces tend to be good at doing a lot of things. Our space in New York is primarily a place where people come to work. But we also do a tremendous amount of events, both with our members, so our members are able to host events, they’re able to broaden their impact within the community, but there are also cases where people outside of our community produce programs. And then further out than that, we also have an events offering where companies might also want a space to host a gathering, or put on a dinner, or celebrate a launch, and so on. So that’s how Index NYC us usable to our broader community today.

BW: Yeah, post-office is not dissimilar. Our space is essentially one big room. Activities tend to take over, so we’re trying to find that balance between being open to everything, but also usable by multiple people at the same time. We’re trying to figure out how to service events that aren’t coming from members — so far it’s just been members who have taken charge to initiate and lead events. But it’s starting to happen that people who may not live in Amsterdam but are coming to visit and maybe want to do a book talk or something. So we’re developing the logistics for managing those types of events — who’s going to coordinate, be there on the day of, that kind of stuff. The way we’ve done it so far is that these kind of requests get posted to all the members, and if someone’s really excited about it, they can take that up if they want to.

And it’s worked inversely too — we had someone become a member who was already hosting a book club, but didn’t have a consistent home for it. So we said, if you become a member, you can just do your book club here every month.

welcome to our space, you can do anything here

, they’re so not used to that that it really takes some examples to show that we really mean truly anything and everything.

EA: I’ve had some questions from people who are getting to know Index that are like, 

how do you curate events? How do you find people to facilitate your events? How do you make sure that your events are good?

 And I’ve been thinking a lot about this because we don’t really have a curatorial process. We help people hone and refine their ideas based on what we’ve learned about how to communicate these ideas to our audience, but I don’t feel like it’s necessarily our place — unless it’s really really value misaligned — to be like, 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that Index is not a curatorial initiative — Index is a vessel that takes the form of whatever is inside of it. We’re more like a container. Imagine a fabric bag, and whatever’s inside it changes the form of the bag. Because our programs are proposed and led by a community of peers, not by a single curator, they span a breadth and variety that reflects the diversity of that community.

I’m really inspired by that, as somebody who’s both inside the bag and sometimes holding the bag. It makes me want to keep engaging with this because it’s not the same thing — the same idea — over and over again. I think curation runs the risk of becoming a prison, and if you’re constantly taking the form of and reflecting the changing and evolving ideas and desires and initiatives of the community, then that stays really vibrant.

And I think it’s also a matter of endurance. Curation gets tired. If we want to think about longevity, then really being reflective of the people who make up Index in its respective nodes and environments is the way that we do that. So I think that looks like transparency and collective decision-making, but I think it also looks like a platform that’s a place for our community to do what they want.

 It all comes back to the base values of transparency and needs. And it can feel daunting because our society doesn’t often give us the freedom to ask what we want to do. So it’s this funny paradox of individuality and collectivism: By being a collective, we enable individuals to tap into their very specific interests. And so that’s actually the curatorial program.

I also feel very excited by the eclectic nature of the program that emerges from this process, where it’s like, we’ll have private Magic the Gathering nights for members and their friends, and then later that week, a book talk by Helen Hester, and the next week a water kefir workshop. What do any of those things have to do with each other, besides that these are the interests of our community? This is what people want to teach each other, or learn from each other, or just spend time together.

Another thing is, if you’re part of our space, you have the full excuse to use us to reach out to your inspirations. So like, I’m a fan of this magazine, and now I have a reason to be like, 

hey, I know you have an issue coming out, want to do an event at our space in Amsterdam?

 All of a sudden you have this reason to reach out, besides just being like, 

EA: Yeah, and now we have an offering! Especially in places like New York and Amsterdam where space is at such a premium, it’s a pretty valuable contribution to the culture.

HF: Also, if we were to be curatorial, and we were to have a strong opinion about the types of programs and the types of people we want to come to our space, we would be working against becoming the type of company we want to be.

We, ideally, want to be creating a relatively neutral infrastructure so the people who actually inhabit it can make it what it needs to be. If we were to try to curate it, to try to put out a really opinionated message, then it’s not the community space that we want it to be. It no longer exists to fill the gaps of what our community needs.

I think the hubris of curating anything under the Index banner works against it. And it’s also why you feel like a product at all of these other spaces. You’re fed their point of view, and you can go to the meet-up, or not, but you can’t necessarily change the narrative. So, I don’t know — fuck curation, we’re infrastructure.

EA: What learnings would you share with others looking to open spaces like this within their own communities?

BW: First, I’d advise anyone who wants to open a space like this one to have a good answer for why they want to have a space, and what is it for, and who is it for.

Second, figure out how that vision blends with — or contradicts — a sustainable financial model, contending with the reality of the fact that this space will exist within capitalism.

And within this balance of the conceptual and the practical, new ideas will emerge, and maybe contribute to or enrich the reasons for opening a space in the first place.

Then, I’d say, no one should prepare to open a space unless they’re ready to get really down with the nitty-gritty. You have to be ready to navigate a lot of short-term bureaucracy: figuring out how to incorporate, how to set yourself up so you’re not personally vulnerable to the financial risk of opening. And also the long-term realities: We’re not self-sufficient yet at post-office, and the end of the runway is in sight, so what are our back-up plans? We’ve had to get comfortable with worst-case scenarios.

Also, Index and post-office are different because Index had a community already from doing programs online, and in Amsterdam we said, 

let’s open a space so that people can come and we can create that community.

 And that’s also something to think about, do you already have the community, and how do you make sure that whatever space you’re building is answering their needs.

EA: Yeah, I’ve been really inspired throughout my creative life by commune counterculture, back-to-the-land movements — Drop City, Arcosanti, Black Mountain College — and I’d just add that no one should open a space unless they’re ready to be a business owner and a business operator. Utopianism aside, many communes failed because of in-fighting, financial mismanagement, and poor allocation of labor (namely, women doing all the work). But we’re able to learn from that history, so we can prepare for the reality that running a space takes a massive amount of maintenance. Keeping spreadsheets is maintenance, taking the trash out is maintenance, ordering toilet paper is maintenance, writing emails is maintenance.

So a big part of opening a space like that is being responsible for that maintenance, and learning to embrace it. A wise man named Hugh Francis told me last year to stop being afraid of numbers, and that’s really been the most important thing I’ve learned in the past year. Having a vision is a very emotional thing, but accounting is not emotional. Watering the plants is not emotional.

There’s a wide variety in the labor that comes with seeing your dreams come to life. I’ve dreamed of opening a space like Index for a decade, and bringing the vision to life over the past year has been an enormous amount of work, both emotionally and logistically. But I’ve learned to take solace in the parts of the work that are transactional, precise, and calculable as so much remains wild and unfounded and unformed.

BW: Even the least business-y businesses are businesses. So either prepare to do that work yourself, or bake it into the business model. Make sure there are resources to pay somebody to do that work. We don’t have a revenue surplus now, but when we do, we’ll be able to pay other members to take up some of these tasks.

But, at a certain point, setting up a business also means taking a plunge. I was crunching numbers, crunching numbers, crunching numbers, trying to reduce my financial risk, but at the end of the day, there’s no way to eliminate all risk attached to doing something like this. So at some point, I had to take a leap of faith — and knowing that, as an Index Node, I had the support of these amazing people and wasn’t in it by myself — I just had to press Go, and believe in it.

HF: For sure, I think the “right mindset” as an Index Node operator is that your priority is to serve your community in whatever way you can, knowing that there will be sacrifices that come along with that. You will sometimes have to clean the bathroom or empty the trash because no one else will, and when you start the space, there won’t be enough money coming in to pay someone to do that.

So as long as your heart is in a place of, 

I’m going to do everything I can to create infrastructure to empower the artists and creative people who gravitate toward this space

, then your heart’s in the right place. And that includes making the business financially sustainable. Because if it isn’t, then you’re not serving that community well. You’re setting them up for failure.

So, an Index Node operator has to be ready to support the community, to make some sacrifices that allow it to exist, and to know that it’ll get easier as more people hear about it and you build a reputation. Meanwhile, you’ll feel tremendously rewarded by seeing these people come together and listening to some of the conversations that you never imagined would happen in the space. So that’s the harsh reality of it. It’s not a massively lucrative business, but it’s massively rewarding.

Founders of Index and post-office

Index Nodes Interview

Index

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

Dan categorized the data collected by his fitbit – starting with all of the times it was detected when he's been asleep. Dan was interested in how he can visualize his self data creatively using data emitted from devices that we use. Taking ideas from concepts known as 

At the time, everyone was receiving their annual Spotify Wrapped playlists. Dan thought this was the perfect opportunity to expand this idea outward on his own accord. He was interested in how this plays into ideas of data ownership and autonomous use of it. He used the fitbit API to create a server that pulls from his fitbit daily and updates the visualization. 

He is currently working on making the experience work with more channels of fitbit data such as heart rate and steps.

Index NYC is now open and accepting new members.

How to Make Public Art

Andrew Herzog

Graphic Design in the Post-digital Age

Demian Conrad

Caps Lock

Ruben Pater

Welcome to my Home

Phoemela Ballaran

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

Intro to Coding for Designers Webzine, Spring 2022

...

Open Source Brand 101

Camille Baldwin

Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice

Pauline Oliveros

In Praise of Shadows

Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

A Practical Guide to Sustainable Package Design

Michelle Mattar & Brian Schmatz

3D Modeled Vases from Students in Here Comes the Neighborhood: 3D Modeling for Beginners

...

Painting a Website

Ryan Scheuer

Index Nodes Interview

Founders of Index and post-office

Open House with Desmond Wong and Christina Janus

Desmond Wong and Christina Janus

Sleep Wrapped

Dan Hemerlein

AlGhamdi Clubhouse

Tina Nguyen

Legal for Creatives

Cece Xie & Max Zidel

Space is the Place

John Szwed

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

Look Ma! I Can Code!

Kate Schallick

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

Zines from Making and Breaking the Zine, Spring 2023

...

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