The twenty-second issue of Triple Canopy, Standard Evaluation Materials, has reached its conclusion. The issue, launched in March of 2016, considers the standards that harmonize bodies, regulate speech, and fix time. Established by voluntary consensus or the passage of centuries, abided by gentle coercion or through habit, these standards are experienced in all that we record and transmit. They appear as graphical symbols on roadways and machinery; intermodal containers that pass from port to freighter to port; TCP/IP, PDF, MPEG, A4, ISBN; expressions of veneration and nationalism; models for seeing and hearing.
Standard Evaluation Materials began with an event at the Whitney Museum and includes essays, conversations, lectures, digital artworks, musical performances and recordings, an edition of sea-glass sculptures, a video game, and a typeface created by Studio Manuel Raeder. These contributions treat standards as aesthetic artifacts, political instruments, technological protocols, and linguistic codes. They ask how our lives might change if we could grasp the matrix of standardized objects and processes within which our actions and expressions are enacted and interpreted. How might we read and represent standards, inhabit and appropriate the languages of the bureaucracies and technical systems?
The issue includes contributions by Lucy Raven, Susie Ibarra, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Claire Lehmann, Alexander Provan, Jen Liu, Timothy Leonido, Sowon Kwon, Nader Vossoughian, Theodore Porter, Juan Caloca, Brian Droitcour, John Houck, Hua Hsu, Jonathan Sterne, Mika Tajima, Jared Stanley, Miwon Kwon, José Arnaud-Bello, O Grivo, Theodore Porter, Adam Florin, Maria Chavez, Josh Tonsfeldt, Chelsea Carey, Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy, and Luciano Concheiro.