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. 53 have been printed and framed, and the 39 unsold ones are available for sale. Four are available as NFTs.

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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