If, as Mickey Knox once quipped, media is like the weather, only man-made, then Tibor Kalman is a man for all seasons. Kalman has excelled as a magazine editor (Colors), an art director (Artforum), a creative director (Interview) and an industrial and graphic design entrepreneur (M&Co), the clients of which included Chiat/Day, Jenny Holzer, MTV, MoMA, Talking Heads and New York's 42nd Street Development Project. Born in Budapest, Kalman emigrated to the US in 1956 aged seven. He grew up in Poughkeepsie, interviewed Timothy Leary for his high school newspaper, and left New York University for Cuba in 1970 to cut sugarcane in the Ten Million Ton Harvest. Recruited by Oliverio Toscani, he launched Colors in 1991 in New York and two years later moved his family to Rome to continue working on the magazine. In 1995, he quit Colors and returned home, where he continued to brood over how to make a truly international magazine. His idea is so intriguing, Wired may collaborate with him on it.
Wired: As a designer, you have said you try to make things look wrong. What do you mean?
Kalman: We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right. Look at computers. Why are they all putty-coloured or off-fucking-white? You make something off-white because you are afraid to use any other colour - because you don't want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it.
So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay attention to anyway. We don't talk about planes flying; we talk about them crashing.
What about computers? Do they make for more beige, or less?
In a way, computers are helpful, because more and more they are giving individuals the power to fuck things up.
You've said that mass media are horribly beige because sponsors want predictable results. You've also said you want your work to be "mass". So how do you get the sponsorship needed for mass without beige-ing out?
Let's face it: we live in a time when government is less and less powerful, less and less effective, and the agent of social change is, at least for the immediate future, the corporation. So people are going to have to figure out ways to co-opt corporations, to trick them into doing socially responsible things. Colors was a very good example of that. You could look at it as a progressive educator, making people think in new ways about race. Or, if you looked at it as a Benetton stockholder, you might say: "this is a really great way to reach the kids."
Yeah, but some people could look at Colors and think that Benetton uses politics the way Nike uses basketball. They see you - not Benetton - being co-opted.
Look, if someone is going to permit me to make a publication that is politically and culturally progressive and not tell me to put their favourite movie stars on the cover, if I get to do what I want in an honest way - as I did in the beginning at Colors - then I'm going to do it.
No one gets to work under ethically pure conditions, and I think if you are in touch with your audience and they think what you are doing is honest and credible, then you are on safe ice.
Do you think that media always been as compromised as it is today?
There was a time not so long ago when egomaniacs made media to their own personal standards.
When you make something for yourself, it will always be far better and more honest than something you make to please the marketplace. With computers, individuals can be egomaniacs and make the media they think is good.
If you were to design a robot, what would it do?
Laugh at all my jokes.
Actually, intelligent people have spent far too much time talking about robots. What we need is fewer people imagining what robots could do and more people thinking about racism.
How many black people, other than Spike and Mike, work on those cool Nike ads that use African-Americans to set cultural and fashion styles? Let's get robot geniuses working on that shit.
Which of the following is more accurate: "Information wants to be free" or "Information wants you to gimme a hundred dollars"?
Everybody who wants information wants it to be free. People who make it, assemble it, edit it, and publish it want to make a living at it. Some of them want a large Mercedes-Benz. But what I want to know is: how is information supposed to be free when food isn't?
Where are you looking for innovative media?
I don't know. Probably it's being hatched in some garage. It's always the freaks in garages who make things move forward. There's always a garage and antisocial behaviour involved. I think without those two things there is no real cultural advancement.
There seem to be a lot of new-media garages. What's your take on them?
I think some of the most innovative Web sites have probably already come and gone. Meanwhile, I think there is tons of room left to experiment with traditional media.
What kinds of experimentation would you like to see happening in the area of traditional media?
I want to know if it is possible to make a movie that's just words, or if it is possible to make a movie on paper. And why can't television be 100 times faster? Or slower? And why are 90% of magazines structured the same way? And why do they all stop at borders?
What comes after postmodern?
Relief. Clarity. Faith in the future.
Brad Wieners is an editor at HardWired and co-author of the book Reality Check. He has survived three magazine start-ups.