Kevin McCaughey is a designer and co-founder of Boot Boyz Biz, a research and production cooperative based in New York.

Kevin’s love for music is apparent in the collection of bootleg clothing Boot Boyz Biz produces. The most intriguing thing about his practice to me is the research on each specific clothing release, and how the piece is meant to act as a container for research. His in-depth approach to clothing and graphic design has influenced my practice and how I think about design. The song he contributed to the mix was Ghosts of My Life by Rufige Kru aka Goldie, which he discusses further in the interview.

“Thinking is a putting-aside, rather than a putting-in discipline, e.g., putting aside the tall grasses in order to isolate the trail into informative viewability. Thinking is FM-frequency modulation-for it results in tuning-out of irrelevancies as a result of definitive resolution of the exclusively tuned-in or accepted feed-back messages’ pattern differentiability.”

The stochastic screen (used in print processing and in music formulated by Xenakis) is the modern update to the classic halftone screen. Whereas the halftone screen is a fixed crystalline structure, the stochastic (also called FM Screen) is amorphous and undetermined up close. Its noise pattern brings more resolution but also more chaos to the image. This development resembles the metamorphosis from modernism to postmodernism.

Noise is still the rhythm of the present — we’re warped by its exploding presence brought by globalization and technology. The complex task is to read through (not against) noise and collect the things that empower us, not exhaust and dehumanize us. What empowers us is not what ‘feels good’ but what challenges our current vision of what’s possible and illuminates an alternative — it starts with a new way of reading noise. We need noise (information) control to function.

Alexander Kluge speaks of the task of developing the ‘dragonfly eye’. Holding many points of view simultaneously. Nodes that interconnect unevenly. You have to continually speak ‘through’ noise to connect with the fragmented nonlinear, multi-perspective world. Villem Flusser talks about how our time is experienced as a pile of sand, not unlike a field of noise. In this sandpile every grain of sand is a historical event — evidence we depend on for decision making. We construct how we see the world based on what grains make up the pile. Its form reflects its parts. Is this sandcastle surrounded by a moat of power or are others outside of power allowed to dismantle its failings and determine its shape?

Noise can lead the pathway to inquiry — its obscuring power ends the automatism of perception, slowing it down and complicating meanings, and forces the imagination to fill in the blanks, disrupting dominant patterns of thought.

I’m thinking of the image of noise and the image of how stars appear to us in the night sky. It’s incomprehensible as a fragmented whole, but once you start making connections between bright points (what’s meaningful, useful) a legible picture emerges from noise.

The common thread between the artists you mention is that they resist specialization and refuse to be pinned down by disciplinary strictures (forced to one constellation) and embrace a kind of shape-shifting practice, jumping from constellation to constellation, putting the large field of noise into an interconnected view. This constellation-building practice gets us closer to understanding noise not as meaningless fragments but as pieces of a complex ‘whole’ that are interdependent — even though in reality it remains in ‘pieces’.

The aim is to put this relationship between technology and creativity into clear view. Highlighting the means of production, the ’how’ of making, not just the ’who’ and ’what’ on the surface. Bringing to light that creatives are never working alone. We need tools to mediate and our messages are largely determined by their potential. Its liberatory potential depends on how it’s used and for whom it benefits.

“Technology is the spark that ignites the powder of nature.”

Don’t forget, clothing and screen printing are technologies. All mediums are, as extensions of human abilities. Their full potential has yet to be witnessed. They communicate through echos and appear on a different layer/order of reality— an imaginative one. The graphic tee cannot work socially without being worn (though the market and the internet complicate this) and our bodies can only produce limited visual communication—a symbiotic agreement is made.

In the work we are dependent on so many processes and technologies—from Adobe to our Vastex Printing Press, the blank t-shirt distributor, and USPS logistics (and many more in between). An understanding of the whole system that you participate in gives you a heightened economic and political perspective. You realize that you are “in business” with a lot of people you wish you were not. This consciousness allows you to make more responsible decisions.

Information continues to explode onto the internet if you know where to look. But things are also disappearing. Google obviously sucks now so people will hopefully start to create new alternative knowledge resources.

Screen printing is a big business and slowly evolving technology but the recent developments appear to be easing the complexity. New tech that eliminates most chemicals involved in screen-burning could potentially make it easier to print from home, allowing for new experimentation. Print-on-demand is big and a huge negative for the world, and people increasingly sense the poor quality-which could spark a demand for hand-prints.

Tees in the wild condition us. They link us and repel us. Ack-nowledging this is a redemption of the ugly term ’streetwear’. It’s training through looking. Architecture and advertising have a similar semiconscious effect on us. The making of our visual landscape is a making of ourselves; that means we can realize new forms of connectivity. However, we also make our own passive alienation. To realize a less separated relationship to the world and each other doesn’t mean just putting out positive vibes but making objects politically.

In this commodity culture, we have to play with the contradictions for creative advantage, but we try to eliminate as many as we can without sabotaging the economy of the project. The main contradiction being the commodity tethered to education and having to sell something for our project to survive while also providing social value. We produce politically by organizing as a co-operative and we limit what we produce to our direct abilities— eliminating waste by meeting direct demand and printing DIY to eliminate alienated production. This way we never have to ‘sell’.

Images that instrumentalize identity lead to an atomized, tribalized engagement with the world that continues the logic of capitalism and private property. Tees certainly can participate in the petty “narcissism of small differences.” But this attitude has to be recognized as the immature stage of engagement with social objects. If we approach images as tools for connecting with others, they can open up a new kind of collectivity. The image landscape has exploded via technology, and graphic tees are a mediator for temporarily pinning down forms and ideas to be shared and discussed. Its virtues derive from their ability to create a unique kind of noise that oscillates between the personal and collective, subjective and objective, a blurring that speaks to modernity.

The tee is powerful in space, as a ‘proxemic’ actor (Edward T. Hall). One with potential is one that activates all of the social spaces (personal, social, and public) where its legibility changes and unrolls as one draws closer or farther. The point is to create contact that wouldn’t happen otherwise. The tee can be a kind of ‘amulet’ that can improve our spirit and hold our attention within the whirlwind — batteries storing energy for unexpected use — a counter-spectacle, that shocks us to wake us up from complacency.

Personality is important, and tees can play a role in its development. The association of multiple free personalities is the ideal of culture. The merging of ideas and disciplines on a tee could promote the natural merging of personalities into a newly connected network. Here the object promotes cooperation.

Alone in the crowd becomes a socialized space…. A Brechtian refunctioning, transforming the spectacular crowd into an educational/intellectual/emotional festival. In Debord’s world, this is close to “détournement”—using the everyday spectacle for different means. A dream that wakes us up from the dream of the status quo. The sandwich man wearing an advertisement (still the dominant form of graphic tees) makes up the spectacle of commodities; a different kind of broadcasted message can make for a counter-spectacle of different hopes, dreams, attitudes, ideas.

Images of the past, left incomplete, can be part of the alt-ernative plan going forward.

The research is often sparked by a simple urge to share something that’s impacted our lives recently or in the past, but we give ourselves space to complicate this singular subject through an undetermined digging and stitching process (organization!). On the journey to collect materials and organize a layout, unexpected material takes us on productive detours where we embrace expanded and serendipitous connections that unlock something new when illuminated in conjunction with our initial subject. The research is really an uncovering of a wider labyrinth of connections that isn’t visible until the pathways are marked, compounding and revealing a new web of information.

How we select is an intuitive process of picking and choosing like anything else. The more you think with images the better you develop a sense of what images make an impact.

A tee works when its message penetrates a viewer’s image of the world. The arrangement has to tell a coherent story, but it requires new pictorial reading that’s nonlinear and more ambiguous. New intentional relationships between images need to be interpreted. Our moment of “noise” (as discussed earlier in the text) has conditioned us to experience time polychronically the ability to attend multiple events simultaniously. The multiple significance of signs on top of signs is becoming a comfortable pastime. For most it still requires a ‘double take’ taking a viewer out of automatic perception and activating thought.

This is the language of film and also of lowly advertising, the front page of newspapers, 19th-century “catchpennies,” ancient illuminated manuscripts, and emblem books from the renaissance (all ancestors of the poster and t-shirt). They share a common literary method: “headline, image, caption.” By tapping into this simple tripartite visual rhythm (bass, strings, vocal in music) one can generate infinite complexity. It’s a starting scheme to be further developed and later turned on its head.

Above all the arrangement has to activate the intellectual and emotional, the rational and irrational. What graphics make it onto an object corresponds to its potential for creating situations as a worn sign that activates any of these responses. The content and medium have to be in sync, which means legibility across multiple distances in social settings. If the material is too banal, novel or illegible it has less of a chance for being noticed. This is all obvious. An effective way to generate notice is to meet people where they’re at by showing something at once familiar and unfamiliar, where the new and unknown springs from the already known. Referencing what people already expect from t-shirts (a 70-year history to draw from) can act as a Trojan horse for introducing new forms and ideas. When something’s ’slightly off’ people take notice. A simple “logo flip” is the simplest version of this. Shock is the quickest way to affect someone’s nervous system but it is not sustainable (unless you’re the New York Post) and people are most generous and open to a reading when they’re at ease and understand at least part of a visual puzzle right away. This is also a strategy for building knowledge through constructive links. Tees can then become gateways into the details we have on the website and become a mnemonic device or a kind of emblem of compressed thought — a mental map, a sigil, a tool for reflection and memory. A diagram of complex data that accelerates understanding and reveals routes for deeper exploration. The shirt explodes inwards spiritually and outwards socially.

Rufige Kru aka Goldie — Ghosts of My Life (1993)

This is a guiding spirit. Mark Fisher talked about this one too. It is so emblematic of this drive we share—to renew the best of the past (here it’s Goldie updating Japan’s “Ghosts” from 1981), bringing it into constellation with the present (Goldie’s Jungle generation of the early 90s). It’s a blueprint for using the past as raw material for making something completely new without diminishing the truth content of the past. A progressive recycling, not impotent melancholic nostalgia. Here the past and present are on equal footing and in symbiotic relation. To produce something like this requires a responsible translation. This doesn’t mean any kind of loyalty or literal translation of the original, but it requires an ability to understand two worlds, multiple perspectives and languages simultaneously and see how and where they fit together to make unforeseen sparks. This track is history transformed–made compact and intelligible to a new generation raised on new sounds with new tools. Writing on top of history, Throughout the track is an acute sense of danger anticipating pain… but glimmers of hope manage to explode through at 3:04 for about 30 seconds. This is us sifting through trash, the deep storm of information, and by miracle bringing a pearl or two back up to the surface to share with all.

This track is history transformed—made compact and intelligible to a new generation raised on new sounds with new tools. Writing on top of history, Throughout the track is an acute sense of danger anticipating pain… but glimmers of hope manage to explode through at 3:04 for about 30 seconds. This is us sifting through trash, the deep storm of information, and by miracle bringing a pearl or two back up to the surface to share with all.

My path is marked by a very “unofficial” education, a selfeducation first inherited from the surface (popular bourgeois sphere), and later in my teens within alternative spaces like online forums, late 2000s social media, blogs and p2p sites with chat rooms. In those spaces you understand the real potentials of file-sharing combined with discussion (everyone’s library is a unique constellation), which becomes a mode of simultaneous building and sharing—a super productive mode for learning that rivals any “official education.” There you learn to freely express and play with language (before followers existed). What’s missing are any kind of standards for good writing. These contingent spaces are organically constructed instead of casted like a season of the Real World. Engaging with a thousand arguments about why X band is great or X band sucks becomes a fruitful struggle for constructing knowledge (going beyond the immediate subject).

The history of music is open for discussion and you learn what’s good with enthusiastic (sometimes toxic) people working to discover for themselves what’s good under their own direct control. But these spaces are transient, so the aim since then has been to seek out or develop similar and updated frameworks for continuing to add to this great discussion of what’s valuable (information war). Aesthetics are involved in convincing people why something matters (rhetoric, propaganda). Bridging the URL with the IRL was a next step which led me to self-publishing and design.

As my interests evolved beyond music (into design, art, philosophy etc) this method for self-constructing and presenting knowledge continued, but I found the search for good images and media from other disciplines located in a different landscape well protected or unavailable online. Meaning it’s unavailable to most others too. At a certain point of digging you hit proverbial paywalls or an institutional gatekeeper that denies access to quality material that would help improve a growing conception of the world for many. Access denied (due to lack of economic or social capital) requires alternative methods to reach an objective. This involves smuggling — rescuing and liberating what’s been locked up or hidden is the primary action. Teenage experiences of ripping unheard records and uploading them to Soulseek is close to the current method of organizing found material onto ‘objects-to-think-with.’ The movement of mp3s circulating on networks is analogous to shirts moving through city streets: people log-on and log-off, go out and go home — when the space is live and shared, information is allowed to flow.

There’s a different conception of the “gatekeeper” that I’m drawn to — one with the responsibility to keep doors open: between disciplines, institutions, and to all differing worldviews. Every institution (and person) is determined by what ideas are able to be smuggled in and out of its system. Closed off institutions and specialized individuals are doomed to decay. With open doors and a flow of information, new forms emerge. The internet has given us keys to previously sealed off rooms but we still need direction to find their entrances.

History can be told in academic papers as well as in images: which one has a higher probability of being read? Condensed forms don’t have to be of lesser quality or impact. Any medium and tool has the ability to drop its therapeutic or entertainment function and become one in the service of education and socialization. The goal isn’t to replace the academic text, but to lead a person into it that would never encounter it otherwise, and then carry on its ideas as an educational beacon. Tees work as potent tools because they’re in touch with the emotions of modern life—the desire to share signs with hopes of building new associations and knowledge with others through values in common. Illuminating signs unroll into a new use value, newly organized images lead to newly organized people (who organizes the images and for what purpose is most important). The meaningful, surprising interactions mediated by these tools help knowledge stick and generate further inquiry. As long as the ‘official education’ is reserved for a select few, these unofficial objects like Tees will provide a similar temporary scaffolding that ignites a process of interiorizing and socializing knowledge.

Experiment and decide for yourself (the nice way of saying “f around and find out.”) Discovering “what you do” actually does play a part.

Embrace and take in the whole of life, then give energy (whatever form) back to it. Stirring others to work and enjoyment is the aim. Design without thought is a dead thing.

Continually cultivate a balance between “Live Laugh Love” and a “Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists” without diminishing either.