PLACE—HOLDER
magazine issue 3


editorial design
Daniels school of Architecture, Landscape, and Design
University of Toronto

Editors: Michael Abel & Mina Hanna
Faculty Advisor: Jeannie Kim
Copy Editor: Michael Esteras
founding editors: Elizabeth Krasner & Roya Mottahedeh

2015—2016

“Copies in an Age of Network Culture” is interested in the possibilities in how network culture, an organism with an ever increasing speed, has physically changed architecture—an industry notoriously known for its extreme slowness. Today, the network not only connects the world, it reconfigures both culture and subjectivity by transforming the way we produce and share ideas. The 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins defines a meme as a set of cultural data that acts like a genome—replicating, spreading, and mutating in response to the selective demands of the culture in which they develop. Yet, information when imitated is subject to variation, and no copy is in fact the same.

But ultimately, what does it mean to copy in the age of the internet, where almost everything is collected, archived, shared, and circulated online. Hito Steyerl compares the 20th century Soviet Avant Garde’s productivism—the claim that art should enter production and the factory—to circulationism. “Circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but about post-producing, launching, and accelerating.” Copies is aware of circulationism. A rising tendency to circulate post-produced images as soon as they’re exported in JPEGs, GIFs, and MOVs, in a race to claim authorship towards the ‘original’ and/or the ‘productive.’

www.place-holder.net/3-COPIES

duy Pham is a Vietnamese Canadian graphic designer and art director, originally from Saigon and currently based in New York.


he specializes in brand identity and environmental experience at the nexus of contemporary culture and new technologies.


duy previously worked at design firms 2x4 and Local Projects in new York, and Bruce Mau Design in Toronto.


he holds a BFA in Computation Arts from Concordia University in Montreal.


Duy is also a passionate collector of comme des garçons and objects of curiosity.


for commission and collaboration, or to say hi:
duyphamk@gmail.com