TEXT-TO-SPEECH: CHRIS LEE

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/1115591772?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" title="Text-to-Speech: Chris Lee"></iframe></div> <p><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script></p> <h1>CHRIS LEE</h1> <h2>Thursday, May 1, 2025, 17:30–19:00 BST/12:30–14:00 EDT</h2> <p>Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Tokyo, Japan. He has taught at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem, OCAD in Toronto, and SUNY Buffalo, and has worked for The Walrus, C Magazine, Scapegoat Journal, and the studios of Metahaven, and Bruce Mau Design. Chris’s research explores graphic design’s historical entanglements with power and standardization, particularly through its shaping of legal, financial, and institutional documents — and the relationship of that history to how graphic design is taught. In 2022, Library Stack co-published his book <a href="https://www.librarystack.org/immutable-designing-history" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Immutable: Designing History</a>, which traced the graphic genealogy of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonialism. In this book, Chris parses an implicit imperative towards immutability — that is, permanence, unchangeable-ness, resistance to the material decay of entropy — running continuously from Mesopotamian cuneiform clay tablets through coins, maps, paper money, promissory notes, property deeds, survey boundaries, invoices, weights & measures, book-keeping, and cryptography all the way through to cryptocurrencies and network protocols today. Immutability through time is Chris’ hermeneutic for considering the graphic histories and securitization techniques of legal and financial documents. And in his wider formulation, graphic design education today focuses on logos, books, websites and branding, when passports, licenses, money, contracts, and emblems of credit are actually the field’s more consequential genres.</p>