Immutable: Designing History explores the graphic genealogy of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a roughly 5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed blockchain ledgers. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering securitization techniques (material, technological, administrative) against the entropy of a document’s movement through space, time and the political.
This project is proposed as a counter-position to the imperatives of graphic design education, which foregrounds logos, books, websites and branding while passports, money and property deeds constitute the field’s more profoundly ...