How writing and design can respond to fast-moving times
We often think of writing and design as being a slow and reflective process. But in our quickly changing news landscape, there can be merit in reacting fast and loose, says Nick Asbury
On 17 August 2017, I was in a pub near Euston station, killing some time before my train back north. News was breaking of a terrorist attack in Barcelona and I felt a vague urge to write something. After opening the Notes app on my iPhone and tapping away for a few minutes, I wrote this:
In London / drinking alone / with time to kill / thinking (not aloud) / about a van that has plowed / (always plowed) / into the happy crowd / and the man / now out of the van / on the run in Barcelona / some loner / with time to kill
I took a screengrab and posted it to Instagram, explaining it was a rough and probably short-lived experiment in writing poems in rapid response to current events.
Two years later, I’ve posted 1,300 poems at a rate of at least one a day, and it has become a ritualistic part of my creative life, to the point where it’s hard to imagine not doing it. Along the way, I’ve thought a lot about how writing and design can respond to fast-moving times.
Time is usually the boring taskmaster in the creative process. We work to deadlines. We charge by the hour and the day. Some of us fill in timesheets. Every creative empathises with that quote by author Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
But sometimes it’s fun to invite time into the foreground. One of the things in my mind when I started Realtime Notes was a project by artist Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves). His ‘speed song sketches’ involve drawing the cover of a single in the time it takes for the song to play.
The fun lies in the overlapping of two conceptual frameworks – music and drawing – in a way that changes your perception of the finished artwork. Some of the energy of the music translates itself into the drawing. For the artist, there’s also a liberation in the constraint. If the result is not that good, you have a decent excuse. If it works out well, it adds to the magic. It’s like being the goalkeeper in a penalty shoot-out – no one expects you to save it, but you’re a hero if you do.
Another thing on my mind was the work of Christoph Niemann, whose Abstract Sunday sketches appear once a week on Instagram. There’s a Netflix programme about him where one scene shows him using a marker pen to draw a cyclist on the inside of a cab window. As the cab pulls away, we see the drawn cyclist navigating the city in a beautifully convincing way – a spontaneous idea that occurred during filming and becomes a realtime artwork.
There’s a tradition of sketching in art, but less so with writing. When writers write fast, it’s usually associated with a drug-induced high: Kerouac rattling out On The Road in less than a month (typed on a roll of taped-together paper that stretched to 120 feet), or Coleridge awaking from an opium-fuelled dream to write Kubla Khan – a poem that might have been longer if he hadn’t been interrupted by a knock at the door.
But most writing is slow. Especially poetry writing. You’re allowed to do just about anything with a poem these days. They don’t have to rhyme or scan. They can be ‘prose’ poems. You don’t even have to write them yourself – there are lots of ‘found’ poems around. But one of the last expectations is that poetry should take time, both to write and read. It’s about highly concentrated language, under the pressure of sustained editing and craft. And it’s published slowly too – usually through a system of submissions windows for magazines, or books released long after the poems are written (but whose blurbs nevertheless describe the writing as ‘urgent’).
Instagram provides a way to speed things up. But most Instapoetry (yes, it is a thing) retains the slowness that you would expect from printed poetry. Often it takes the form of a meditative motivational aphorism, with the text presented as part of an illustrated artwork. It has proven hugely popular for artists like Rupi Kaur. But it leaves a gap for poetry that embraces the ‘insta’ of Instagram to write about things as they happen – especially political things.
You may have noticed it’s been an interesting time politically. When things are moving this fast, it feels like art and creativity can go one of two ways – slow down and tap into the eternal realities of the human condition. That’s a pretty good way to go. Or speed up and move at the speed of life. That’s interesting too, and it reflects something in the zeitgeist.
It’s no coincidence that the defining artist of the Trump/Brexit age is Coldwar Steve, whose rapidly photoshopped collages feature a surreal cast of characters – the ever-present Steve McFadden and Kim Jong-Un rubbing shoulders with Noel Edmonds and Cilla Black. There’s great skill involved in creating them, but the aesthetic is fast and loose – most were created on the artist’s phone on his bus journey to work, then posted to Twitter.
— Cold War Steve (@Coldwar_Steve) June 20, 2019
Design can work like that too. JohnsonBanks explored a similar idea on Instagram with Picture The News – images created to respond to the main news stories of the day. They’re in the same tradition as op-ed illustrations and newspaper cartoons – visual snapshots that condense a bigger story into a memorable and shareable image.
Design can also go the other way, taking the instantness of social media and transposing it into the permanence of print. Led By Donkeys began as an idea to take a well-known David Cameron tweet and put it on a 48-sheet. The genius of the campaign was in providing no extra commentary or context. Each poster simply used the words of the powerful against them, exposing their hypocrisy in the process. It’s hard to argue against a poster when it’s not directly arguing at you.
Last night we started a little project to record for posterity the prophetic words of our leaders. Here’s the first one (Manor Rd / A10 in London). Eyes peeled for more #LedByDonkeys #TweetsYouCantDelete @David_Cameron @Ed_Miliband pic.twitter.com/9ED5MUPTTn
— Led By Donkeys (@ByDonkeys) January 9, 2019
Writing can play a front-line role in protest too, but usually it’s writing in other fields. Stand-up comics process the mood of the moment and get a reaction in real time. Michelle Wolf’s 2018 speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner stands as one of the best acts of political protest of our time – sample line: “It’s 2018 and I am a woman so you cannot shut me up. Unless you have Michael Cohen wire me $130,000.” Equally, you can read Marina Hyde every day in the Guardian and see her skewering politicians left, right and centre (mainly right).
Journalism is topical by definition – they call it the first draft of history. But there is an opportunity – maybe a need – for poets, writers, artists and designers to write their own first drafts. For many, there is a feeling that we’ve been under psychic attack in recent years, with Trump, Brexit and the culture wars. Creativity is a way to absorb the blows and channel it into something meaningful and powerful.
Journalism reports the world, but art remakes it. You step onto the blank page with only the clock against you and suddenly no one is your boss. You’re not a remainer or leaver or deplorable or globalist cuck – you’re defining yourself with your next word or mark.
Kanye West said it best. On 18 April 2018, he tweeted:
oh by the way this is my book that I'm writing in real time. No publisher or publicist will tell me what to put where or how many pages to write. This is not a financial opportunity this is an innate need to be expressive.
— ye (@kanyewest) April 18, 2018
That’s how I feel about Realtime Notes. This August, I’ll have finished two years of the project and published the best of them in two volumes. Most are rough, some are humdrum, some are slapstick, some are philosophical, some are angry, some are furious. But they’re all fast. And they’re all acts of creative protest – my way of reclaiming power from the powerful.
As one of the poems says, ‘You think history is written by the victors? It’s written by the writers.’
Nick Asbury is a writer for branding and design. He is talking about Realtime Creativity at D&AD North in Manchester on 22 August 2019 – tickets available here; asburyandasbury.com
Latest from CR
