About Undated Records

Intentions

  • Simulating the thrill of buying records which looked good and turned out to sound good
  • An open-ended creative experiment
  • Design practice
  • Art therapy
  • Fun

Rules

  • Include band name, all song titles, and catalog number
  • Embrace impulse: no obligation to be consistent or plan ahead
  • No reworking of real covers
  • Appropriate for store display

Process

  • Mix elements, embrace the subconscious, chance, and flaws
  • Find links, contradictions, and provocative ambiguities that suggest the non-rational, non-verbal pleasures of music
  • Assume that anything I see or sense fits the songs

Inspirations

  • The 1970s-1990s era of indie, punk, New Wave, and electronic bands on labels like Factory, Dindisc, Stiff, Sarah, and 4AD
  • Dada
  • Surrealism
  • Andy Warhol
  • Peter Saville
  • Laurie Anderson
  • Barbara Kruger
  • Joseph Cornell (no relation)

Thanks

A number of people helped me with this project, directly or indirectly. Alphabetically:

Results

Over 1,200 daydream artifacts, design experiments, art therapy exercises, meditative images, puzzles, and jokes. 110 have been printed.

About Jay Cornell

I’m Head of Content at RolloutSF, a full-service web design, development, and marketing agency. I’m the co-author (with R. U. Sirius) of Transcendence: The Disinformation Encyclopedia of Transhumanism and the Singularity.

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