It Didn't Make Sense Not to Live For

It didn’t make sense not to live for fun Joel Blanco

dough and design

actually Smash Mouth’s All Stars

index

1.1 In the corner 7 1.2 Like Bats 13 1.3 The logical imposibility 17 of being in one’s self 1.4 The donut 25

2 Ecstasy and Instasy 33

3 Experiencing the Hole 41

4About the dough 45

The Blanket Kids 50

5 If we see a hole we want to fill it 57

Turkish Drivers making donuts 62 at the frozen square

6 Making donuts 77

“There is no worthy designer that hasn't asked himself why he is doing what he is doing.”

- Vengaboys

1.1

In the corner

Last summer I arrived at a friend’s party at a late hour. When entering the room I discovered that all the guests had taken MDMA earlier and where in a rush now. All of them were talking wildly about a wide range of strange and seemingly unrelated topics: screws, music, houses, junk food and between all this a discussion was being held about why The Vengaboys are ‘way better’ than Beethoven. Even though I could understand where they were coming from and why they were so interested in this eclectic mix of topics, I couldn’t see myself engaging with them. We were sharing a room, but yet they were in a different place.

7 IN THE CORNER

Because of this divide between me and the party people, I started feeling awkward and I considered leaving. Even though to me it seemed obvious that they were ecstatic, to them it must’ve felt like I was the one who was ‘out of it’. And in a way, they were, off course, right. Because when one feels awkward, one starts watching himself from the outside. Your body feels like a robot you’re trying to control from a computer at the other side of the world through a bad internet connection. Whereas when you are on XTC, despite what the name suggests, you seem to fuse with the world. Instead of being locked out of yourself, all the doors and windows are opened wide.

However, if I had arrived at the party high on MDMA, only to discover that everyone there was sober, the situation would’ve been almost identical. There would’ve still been a wall between me and the other guests and I still would’ve felt ‘out of it’.

8 IN THE CORNER

Picture of the party when I started to play videogames by Andrés Agulla 2015

9 IN THE CORNER

An important principle in physics is that of relativity. It states that different witnesses will perceive certain events in different ways when they are watching from different perspectives. For example: when someone, let’s call her Alice, on a riding train has a bouncy ball and she bounces it off the floor of the wagon, to her it will appear as if the ball is simply going straight up and down, however, from the perspective of someone standing beside the railroad tracks (let’s call him Bob) the ball would seem to be moving in the horizontal direction as well and the path would look like a sort of V.

The idea here is that none of the observations are more truthful than any other. The ‘truth’ here is not in the individual phenomena, but rather the fundamental laws of nature. Because not only do both the ball as Alice sees it and the ball as Bob sees it move following Newton’s second law, it is actually because the second law applies equally to both balls that Alice and Bob will have different experiences.

When standing in a field, watching a train speeding by, it is quite easy to find your bearings. It is your two feet standing firmly on the ground below you that will tell you that it is the train moving relative to earth, rather than the earth moving relative to the train (even though this is just as valid a conclusion, and probably the conclusion Alice draws). Our perception starts with our own bodies and then

10 IN THE CORNER reflects on the environment, back to us. We are like bats using ultrasound to navigate. We triangulate our positions by grabbing on to the things and people around us. When everything starts to move however, things get confusing. Being in a room full of people on XTC is like sitting in a train standing still in the station, when the train next to you starts pulling up. For a moment it becomes impossible to tell whether it is you or them that is moving. When everyone around you is ecstatic, it becomes impossible to tell whether it isn’t actually you.

1.2

Like bats

Bats project their sound to find themselves in space.

We are not very different. Being able to perceive something is what places us in the world, the way of positioning through external references.

13 LIKE BATS

All our experiences are mediated. Our brain subconsciously processes the raw images, sounds, touches, feelings and smells into something intelligible and presents it to us 13 milliseconds after the actual impressions were impressed onto us. In these 13 milliseconds these impressions are moved by our entire past and it is this past that gives us what we consider meaning. For a baby a coffee cup is just some abstract object, however, because I have seen many coffee cups in the past I can recognize it, and not only that, I can also differentiate it from a tea cup, even though the differences are minimal. In this sense every time I drink a cup of coffee I am living in the past.

While drinking this first cup of coffee in the morning I will start thinking about the day ahead. We look at what there is to do and how to do this. Here we are using our past experiences to inductively imagine what might happen in the future. The present, however, stays strangely empty. It is sandwiched between the past it conjures and the future we imagine and in itself seems to contain nothing until this present itself becomes past.

Once again we are like the bat that does not know where it is. Because the present is so empty, it does not offer us something to grab on too, something to ground us; it does not present us with a coordinate-system. To make up for this we send sound waves into the past and into the future and

14 IN THE CORNER when they come back to us they form a space around us in which we can locate ourselves. But this space is created from times that don’t exist anymore, or don’t exist yet, creating the present-self from something outside of it. Just like we are ecstatic in the social spaces we inhabit, we are also ecstatic in time.

1.2

The logical impossibility of being in one’s self

Going to the middle of a donut to realize that you are not in the donut anymore.

17 THE LOGICAL IMPOSIBILITY IN BEING IN ONE’S SELF

Because the present is a virtual point between past and future, we are, in a strange way, absent from ourselves. That is, if you are searching for a self that is a pointlike essence or the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. However when we refer to the self, we are not referring to something negative or empty. Rather our ideas of ourselves —or of others, for that matter— seem to be positive. When describing ourselves we talk of our jobs, our ambitions, our childhood, our house, our phone, the books we’ve read etc. etc. Similarly when judging others we will look at their hair, their eyes, the way they walk and talk, we watch how they do their jobs or don’t do their jobs, we judge them for being overweight or asking stupid questions or we love them for the strange way they tilt their head when they laugh or for the meals they have prepared for you.

All of these things would instantly evaporate if even the slightest Cartesian doubt is introduced. Yet this is all we have to work with. And this makes sense, because we do not live in a solipsistic universe, but in a world shared with others and this sharing is done through meaningful gestures and language and symbols. To be meaningful, something can not be private, because that which is purely private will not be recognized by others, nor, one might argue, by ourselves. French thinker Jacques Derrida stated that for something to be meaningful, it has to be repeatable. When reading a sentence from a piece of paper, the reader repeats this sentence in her mind.

18 THE LOGICAL IMPOSIBILITY IN BEING IN ONE’S SELF

If, however, the paper on which it was written was left out in the rain, the ink would fade, the original sentence would be scrambled, the reader would not be able to make a mental copy and the meaning would be lost.

Many things that might appear private are in fact also covered by this definition of meaning. Take for example the smell of fresh coffee, it is impossible to describe this smell to someone who has never experienced it, but I can conjure up the scent and even the very experience of smelling it, in my own mind. So even though I can not copy it in such a way that I can communicate it to others, it is very much repeatable and therefore, in the broad sense of the word: language.

The experience of smell itself, however, seems to rise up from some pre-experiential darkness, or chaos as the ancient Greeks called it (source: Metamorphoses - Ovid), the formless emptiness from which the universe was formed, like bubbles rising to the surface of a dark lake. Science tells us that molecules from the coffee hit special cells in our nose that then send signals through nerve cells into our brain which then somehow, magically, converts these signals to a conscious experience that we recognize as the smell of coffee. This whole process comes before language in any form and cannot be consciously copied, since it’s not part of consciousness in any way.

19 THE LOGICAL IMPOSIBILITY IN BEING IN ONE’S SELF

Even language itself is subject to these dark, chaotic origins. When we are looking for the right words to use in a situation, do they not seem to pop up out of nowhere? One moment we are searching for le mot just and the next moment it has suddenly arrived.

A donut that my brother Edgar has drawn trying to make it look asian, somehow

24 1.3

The donut

Everything we project outward seems to come bubbling out of this dark centre, which nevertheless seems to hold the truth about what we really are. This unspeakable essence is like a hole in the middle, around a solidified circle of projections gets formed.

25 THE DONUT

This model of the self can be visualised as a donut. The glazing of the donut is our persona, a latin word meaning mask, which is everything others get to see about us. everything from the words we speak, the actions we do, the books in our bookcase or the posters decorating the walls of our rooms. Beneath that glazing is the dough, which would be all the thoughts and smells and experiences we have. It is the surface that exists beneath the surface. Just like our bodily organs that are, if all is well, being kept out of sight by our skin.

And then in the middle of it all there is the hole. This hole is, paradoxically, the essence of the donut (for a donuts without a hole is just an oliebol) even though it is an emptiness, and absence. This hole seems to be what constitutes our being. We feel as if in this hole we would be able to find a truth that reaches beyond the accidental and illusory truths of the phenomenal world.

26 THE DONUT

Lao Tzu writes:

“Thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub; It is the center hole that makes it useful. Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes which make it useful.”

27 THE DONUT

When we look at a teacup, it is easy to get distracted by the shape of the porcelain or the pretty patterns painted on it’s surface, but all of this is only there to serve the 125ml of empty space it surrounds. The teacup is not so much made from porcelain, but of carefully constructed emptiness and this construction, in a way, fills the emptiness. In the same way the hole of a donut is not simply nothing it is not the absence of dough, but the presence of donut.

In topology, the humans are like donuts too. THE DONUT

30 THE DONUT

Satori is a Japanese Buddhist term for awakening, “comprehension; understanding”.

Ecstasy and instasy

We always exist in a state of ecstasy in relation to other people. We always are outside of the others around us. We get to see their glazing and the cheerfully colored sprinkles that cover them. On rare occasions we might even get to see small fragments of the donut on places where the glazing doesn’t fully cover it. But we will rarely see more than a glimpse of this. The hole in the middle is buried so deep that we will never be able to see it.

33 ECSTASY AND INSTASY

Yet we try. Like medicine students dissecting corpses to discover the internal workings of the human body, we try to cut each other’s minds open to reveal to us it’s inner workings. We imagine that if we find the hole in someone else and stare into its darkness long enough we will find truth there that is universal. It doesn’t matter who this other person is, because we reason that all human holes are alike and if I know what makes you tick, I will know what makes me tick as well.

In lieu of Others our minds often turn inwards. If we cannot figure out our own working through the objective activity of observing others, we will figure it out by observing ourselves, so instead of being ecstatic, we are now instatic. We stand on the donut and peer down it’s hole. But in a way this means that in being instatic, you are still locked outside. Instacy is being ecstatic to yourself. Off course you are always locked out of your self, but when turning the attention towards the hole, you are also directing your attention to the impenetrable walls it has constructed around itself, when being instatic you are even more ecstatic then you normally are. It’s like trying to watch a shadow more closely by using a flashlight.

34 ECSTASY AND INSTASY

Solipsistic Helmet. -Me trying to isolate from the world. It didn’t work.

35 Corner boy. -Me trying to be one with the enviroment. It didnt work.

36 ECSTASY AND INSTASY

photo by Delany Boutkan

Instasy and ecstasy in Alarido Mongolico’s videoclip “Mi vida” Pie de foto

40 3

Experiencing the hole

Many of the popular techniques used to approach this unapproachable hole are derived from Buddhism. One of their core beliefs is the idea of anatta, or non-self. The concept that there is no real self and that being truly aware of this, is the path to enlightenment. This realisation is however hard to reach because of dukkha, which is generally translated as suffering, but means something more like: our tendency to cling on too things in the world, even though everything is temporary and will therefore always disappoints in the end.

41 EXPERIENCING THE HOLE

Translated into the language of deep fried batter rings we can say that the concept of anatta implies that the hole in the donut is in fact empty, that there is nothing special about it and that it does not hold any truth except for the truth that it is identical to the empty space surrounding the donut on the outside. The dough of the donut is the false idea of self we create via the things we choose to hold on to, the temporal things we pick up and claim as our own—a dukkhin’ donut, if you will. The answer is to understand that the dough is false, that the way to reach happiness is to make the ring slowly fade away until the boundary between the hole and the space outside has completely disappeared and the two fuse back into one indifferentiable field of nothingness again. The part of the world we so aggressively claimed as our own by building up false walls is returned again to it’s proper owner.

As much as it may intuitively seem as though they make a good argument, there are problems with the buddhist creeds from a design perspective. Trying to embrace the oneness of the universe by diluting the self to the point of its disappearance is fine when you are sitting on a mountain top in the middle of nowhere, but as a designer you do not want to fade into the world, rather you want to impress onto it. You want to cause ripples. And to make ripples you need to hold on to something, however impermanent and ultimately disappointing this something may be, so you need the donut. If you’re lucky the ripples

42 EXPERIENCING THE HOLE you make will move the donuts around you which will then generate their own ripples, causing a chain reaction, so that in the end the impermanence of your donut might not be so impermanent. Even the most discreet and invisible design attempts to do this.

In design we don’t want to get rid of the donut, rather the opposite, we want to be the biggest, baddest donut around causing the biggest bow wave possible. The desire to change things, however small and humble, is an inherent quality of being a designer, for a designer who does not see anything that needs adjusting, fine tuning or outright overthrowing would not go out and design. Buddhism is too passive, too quiet; what we want here is something a bit more… rebellious.

44 4

About the dough

If buddhism is a philosophy of silence, then absurdism is the philosophy of loud conversations in a bar, drowning out the music playing in the background. If buddhism is a mysterious smile, barely curling up the corners of the lips; then absurdism is the barely muffled laughter of two kids in a classroom sharing a private joke

45 ABOUT THE DOUGH

We first meet the absurd man in Albert Camus’s L’étranger. The main character Meursault doesn’t care much about the world. The people around him tell him what is important in life, but he finds it impossible to agree with them. When his mother dies, he seems unfazed. It is not that he doesn’t love his maman, but death itself doesn’t seem meaningful to him. He enters into a relationship with a girl, and here also the concepts of relationship and marriage don’t seem to carry any meaning for him. He does like her, that is, he thinks she’s pretty and he doesn’t mind hanging out with her, but he is completely ambivalent when it comes to naming it or defining it.

And then he kills a guy. Pretty much by accident. He didn’t mean to do it, but the sun was shining brightly in his eyes and he wondered how it would feel to pull the trigger. When he is arrested he cannot explain why he did it, nor does he show any remorse. Again, death seems meaningless to Meursault. For his lack of remorse the judge sentences him to die.

At first Meursault doesn’t seem to be too bothered by the prospect of his early death, but slowly, as the day approaches something changes and at the end of the book he hopes that on the hanging platform he will be met by an angry mob judging him, shouting at him, stoning him and cheering when he is hanged.

46 ABOUT THE DOUGH

The argument I believe Camus is making here, is that we’ve been looking for truth or value in the wrong places. Since the beginning of philosophy we have been searching for value outside of ourselves, simply because we wanted to find something that would last forever, whereas us humans have a rather limited shelf-life. Some looked for God, others for the universal laws that governed the music of the spheres, and some sought their answers in logic. However at the start of the twentieth century all of these searches ended in catastrophes, at least as far as the search for truth, meaning and value were concerned (side note: I am using these term more or less interchangeable here. It was Plato who said that the good, the true and the beautiful where one and the same and also the most valuable things, the things worth aspiring towards. I believe that some of this sentiment is still present as an undercurrent in the common discourses found today). Nietzsche declared God was death, and he even blamed us for it; quantum mechanics had turned physics into Alice in Wonderland and Gödel had rigorously proven that the foundations of logic must logically be illogical.

We asked the universe for answers and not only did it not respond, it seemed unlikely that it had even heard us in the first place. Enter existentialism. The character Meursault has looked at the universe for answers and found the universe doesn’t care, so now he doesn’t care. The death of a mother is just atoms

47 ABOUT THE DOUGH and molecules shaking around in slightly different patterns and love is just two objects smashing into each other rhythmically. Meursault himself has also become a physical object, an automaton. He is reduced down to inputs coming in and outputs going out. The sun shines to brightly in his eyes -> the trigger of a gun is pulled.

Camus calls this the absurd. And it is absurd. Meursault is an absurd man, just barely human. According to Camus this would be the logical outcome of searching for answers to the biggest questions outside of ourselves. But why, he argues, are we looking for these truths and values in the first place? Because we care. Because we give a fuck. Because we are standing with two feet inside of life. But asking a universe that is incapable of caring or looking after the things we find most important for answers to our problems is an absurd idea. It’s like looking for poetry in a book on mathematics — you might find it, but you probably had to force it.

In the end it’s people that bring some sense of meaning to Meursault's life. The law cannot make him care, but the idea that people might show up at his hanging, not because it’s their job or because they were sent by the church, but only because they truly hate him. Only that which cares can judge and something who cares is always a someone.

The Blanket Kids At first all was empty; than a blanket appeared.

Under this blanket two tiny creatures were born, their heads were large and their limbs were small, for eyes they had two tiny mirrors reflecting the faint light of a rounded torch that made their shadows look large on walls of their blanket shelter.

As they grew the blanket hid them from the darkness outside. But like all children their curiosity would sometimes overcome their fears. They would lift the blanket, just a little, and held out their torch as far as their tiny arms could reach. The darkness was so complete that it would swallow all the light their little lantern had to give, not even illuminating the darkness imperceptibly.

50 As time went by, one of them started fearing the dark more and more, but the other started feeling trapped by the walls of their little blanket fort.

He wondered whether there were maybe other blanket kids and he asked himself where they and the blanket came from. And though he still feared the dark, it also started calling for him with it's voiceless whispers.

One day he woke up while his brother was still sleeping, and for reasons he couldn't remember afterwards, he took the lantern and stepped out into the nothingness. Soon there was only darkness left on all sides, he couldn't see the blanket anymore and the light he carried got swallowed by the

51 darkness so completely he might as well not have taken it. He could not orient himself any longer, he could no longer tell which way he was going and then his sense of time disappeared. He didn't know how long he had been out there, it might've been only minutes or it might've been years. Then, for the first time since he had left his blanket home, he heard a sound. It was a voice singing very softly and very far away.

"Come back from the void, come on, hold my hand, your eyes are too small, your light is too low, how do you expect to see? your voice is not loud and my ears are too little, please come back to me.

No one will find you, so please find me, we don't belong out there,

52 I will bring you back from the void, please don't leave me alone."

He followed the voice and so he found his brother quickly. He hadn't gotten far from the blanket. He climbed under the cover and took the light in with him and as they saw themselves reflected in each other's eyes they felt safe. They knew then that they would grow old together and die under their blanket and they had warmth and light and each other.

And so they started telling each other stories, using their hands to create shadow figures on the walls

The blanket kids

If we see a hole, we want to fill it

For Meursault it was too late. He embraced the absurd too late in life, and so the hate of his fellow men was the only thing from which he could finally derive meaning. For those of us who are not about to be executed, we can find much, much more to get out of our absurd lives. We may hope for more than just anger and judgement. We may find meaning in happiness and joy and without an ascetic universe weighing our moves on metaphysical scales of fate, we are allowed to enjoy more.

57 IF WE SEE A HOLE WE WANT TO FILL IT

Camus says that he is not beholden to ideas or eternity, but rather to truths he can touch with his hands. (source: The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus) It wouldn't be taking things too far to say that the feeling of holding a woman's breasts is the kind of truth Camus is talking about here. We all want to fill the hole of the donut, but the traditional fillers, like God and universal truths have turned out to be holes themselves. Yet nature abhors a vacuum, so rather we should fill it with something that is real, and don't let the priests and philosophers tell you that your desire for sex is somehow lower than their desire for empty theories. Fill the donut hole with the dicks you can see and touch, not with invisible gods.

Taking the absurd man as a starting point assures us that there are things that matter, that have value, however short lived these values may be. It grounds truths, but accepts that these truths are only temporary. This also means that there is always something left to do, there is always a new temporary truth that needs to be found. In the old models this is a problem. Take modernist painting: to a certain extent these painters where looking for the ultimate painting, the one painting that would finish painting. There is for example Ad Reinhardt who kept reducing the content of his paintings, trying to reach the purest form. He ended up with canvasses painted completely black. A photo of him shows him sitting in his studio, staring at one of his black canvases. The look on his face is hard to read, but one can imagine

58 IF WE SEE A HOLE WE WANT TO FILL IT him thinking: "Well, fuck...". He just finished the historical game of painting, but now he realises that this will not change anything, he will still wake up the next morning and feel the same. He'll still feel like he has to do something, but there is no work left to do: painting is finished and we finished it.

Reinhardt: “Well, fuck...and now what?”

59 IF WE SEE A HOLE WE WANT TO FILL IT

Though we live only once, life itself is structured as infinite repetitions. As long as we live we'll have to eat, breath, defecate, go to sleep, wake up, fuck. There is no hamburger that will fill us forever, no wine that will kill the thirst for all eternity, no sex that will satisfy the horniness until the day you die and no truth that can satisfy our curiosity once and for all. Truth is not a noun, but a verb. Truth is an act. Also truth is not a single thing, rather truth is plural.

60 IF WE SEE A HOLE WE WANT TO FILL IT

Sisyphus carrying an oliebol because “it feels better than a rock.” - Tiziano feat Joel Blanco

61 Turkish drivers making donuts at the market square

On saturday January 7th, 2017 first it snowed, then it thawed and then it froze. The snow melted into slush and the slush froze solid. The result was that the whole city of Eindhoven turned into an ice rink.

When walking by the Woenselse Markt in the evening I witnessed how a handful of Turkish man in their fancy cars were playing around with the unusual weather conditions. The square was normally used as a parking lot, but on saturdays there are no cars and a market is set up. By the evening the market stands had been taken down so the square was completely empty and also

62 completely covered in a thin layer of ice.

The Turkish man where drifting all over the place, making hand brake turns and slipping over the ice. They would pull donuts, sliding in circles like a dog chasing it’s own tail. Serious men playing like children, the cars as oversized and overpriced toys.

The next day the ice was gone and the square was once again filled with empty cars waiting for their owners to come back from shopping, leaving little room for play.

64 Turkish drivers making donuts at the frozen square

Budhist monks (colored)

Dutch fan #Netherlands #Holland #Soccer #Football (colored)

Designing in the absurd

In design, the ecstatic is ‘outside’, but arriving at a ‘pure inside’, a kind of truth, is a logical impossibility.

69 DESIGNING IN THE ABSURD

It is easy to hate on a song like Loona’s Vamos a la Playa. The music is simple and the lyrics are ridiculous and nonsensical. The song will probably be completely forgotten two decades from now. But the value of the song should not be measured with history books, but rather with the fleeting moments where people danced to it in the discotheques of Ibiza, the teenage girls singing along with their stereos playing the song and with the serious man driving his car to his serious job, subconsciously tapping and humming the song as it is playing on the radio.

It works because the beat is simple and pronounced and the tempo is constant. Every change in the music is announced well in advance, so that even someone who has never heard the song can dance to it as if she knew it by heart. This principle is off course the basis of all dance music. The lyrics sing of simple times where one needs only dance and the Spanish is the Spanish of tourists. The words are words that anybody who has ever been in a Spanish beach resort knows.

I decided to make a Dutch version of Vamos a la Playa. But since the Netherlands are not known for its sunny beaches, I went for something that would be familiar to tourist visiting the country: it’s snack culture. I mixed a lot of snackbar references with a few Dutch words I picked up while living here and mixed those into something that sounds Dutch, but

70 DESIGNING IN THE ABSURD is really quite meaningless, just like the Spanish in Vamos a la Playa is pretty much nonsense. For the music I stole the Netherland’s most iconic style of music: gabber. This work, “Bitterballen Donder Op”, with my band Alarido Mongólico, was a success and it got a bit of attention from the people and media.

When putting all of this together, suddenly a different kind of meaning emerges. The song does not have a particular message, but its essence is its recognizability. It does not require a lot of thought to lure people in. It creates a common platform for a lot of different people. The argument might be made that songs as simple as this just play to the lowest common denominator, but to reach the widest range of people, you have to start with the basics.

71 DESIGNING IN THE ABSURD

So when I entered the party where everybody was high on MDMA and they were discussing why the Vengaboys where so much better than Beethoven, this is what they were talking about. One might say that Beethoven’s music is more complex and has a wider range of expression, but when Beethoven wasn’t composing he was going Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! In his room like the rest of us. Beethoven raises questions, whereas the Vengaboys give answers and answers might be a better place to start. Because as we saw, trying to find truth in the donut hole from within the donut hole leads to false believes, to metaphysical theories that don’t match with the way we function. Looking for value we shouldn’t start with eternity, but with something that lasts roughly three minutes and has a four beats to a bar.

Then, when the people have walked onto the floor, when they are all dancing, feeling their own bodies and the bodies of those around them, they are at a good place to start looking for something more, for questions, for reflection, for insight. But just like the American game show Jeopardy, it is the answer that raises the question, not the other way around.

I try to do this in design. Everything I do is meant to be Pop, made in such a way that it is instantly recognizable and instantly gratifying. But behind those answers, there are questions. Why do I like it? What makes Pop popular? Why is this so

72 DESIGNING IN THE ABSURD recognizable? etc. Because it is not enough to provide a dance floor. Embracing the absurd and embracing Pop is not an excuse for relativism, it doesn’t mean that anything goes. Because a dance floor is more than a hedonistic escape from reality, it is a fertile piece of land for thought. It confronts us with our humanness, it confronts us with our highest ideas and our lowest biology at the same time, while denying one nor the other. The implication is that you’re never finished. There are no final truths that can be reached in design, or any other place. Only those truths that are finite and graspable. And though this way it may seem like a sisyphean task, it is actually a relief. No longer do I have to form my humble earthly materials into divine insights or cosmic harmonies. Just make it stupid, make it for as long as it will last—don’t aim for the history books, aim for life.

Plato said that in the realm of Ideas, there is no Idea that corresponds to something as low as shit and Riff Raff raps that he doesn’t like to think. I figure that they are both wrong.

73 VENGABOYS BOOM BOOM, I WANT YOU IN MY ROOM

whoa whoa... whoa whoa... there´s no places back in time! whoa whoa... whoa whoa... whoa whoa... whoa whoa...

if you´re alone and you need a friend some one to make you forget your problems just come along baby take my hand! ill be there lover tonight

whoa whoa... this is what i wanna do! whoa whoa... lets have some fun whoa whoa... one on one just me and you... whoa whoa...

boom boom boom boom i want you in my room lets spend the night together! from now untill forever boom boom boom boom i wana double boom lets spend the night together! together in my room whoa whoa ...

74 BEETHOVEN MOONLIGHT SONATA

Making donuts

An absurd man, as designer, wouldn’t ever attempt to show you any kind of truth, since this is impossible. Instead, he would do an attempt to make you enjoy the graspable. All with the relieving thought; that there is nothing more to it than this.

77 MAKING DONUTS

Imagine something stupid like trying to break the world record for biggest donut ever made. For some reason, people always love record attempts like this. I remember seeing clips on the news of large groups of people helping with creating the largest pizza ever, or the many onlookers at a midget throwing contest. Whenever something mundane becomes silly and free T-shirts are handed out, the people will come. The people will flock together in a way that, for example, an academic treatise on postrelativistic onthology in late modernism could never achieve.

It seems that doing the pointless is more worth doing then the pointed. People do not do things to achieve something, they do it because they want to do it. It’s like the evolutionary psychologist saying that we tend toward liking sex because it creates offspring, but this thinking is the wrong way around, rather we like sex because it’s nice and that’s the reason we haven’t gone extinct as a species. If we see a hole, we want to fill it, not because we prefer things filled, but because we like filling.

Scientists have found that there is a certain type of brain damage which will make people unable to not act on the objects around them. If, for example, you put a glass of water in front of them, they will take a sip, even if the glass obviously is someone else's. If there is a pack of cigarettes on the table, they will light one and smoke it, even if they’ve never smoked in their life, they will eat food presented to them,

78 MAKING DONUTS even if they just had a big meal and said that they were full. These people miss some brain structure that controls certain impulses, but in a healthy brain these impulses also exist just as strongly. The desire to act is more primary than the desire to achieve.

In this way the making of a world record size donut challenges the serious ideas by presenting itself as more primary and in a way more human and valid, while at the same time it forces us to stare into the abyss because we are confronted with how silly we as humans really are, how senseless everything is, how tautological.

If we want to put everything we design in the hole of the donut, shouldn’t we rather focus on designing around that emptiness instead? The only way to design a hole, is designing its context. I’d say that contextual design is about making donuts: let’s show the hole and celebrate the dough, cause one wouldn’t exist without the other.

And in the middle of all this senselessness we refuse to appeal to the values of a universe that doesn’t give a damn about us. We ourselves will be the judges of things, because we are the ones who cares. And we will just decide to use our precious time on earth to make a really big fucking donut.

Because life is life, nah-nah nah nah-nah.

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