Herb Lubalin

Creative,5Hedonism
BY ANDREA CODROICTON
S cott Makela has a bad cold, or at least this is what I'm
told as my call to the studio he shares with partner and wife Laurie Haycock Makela is patched through
to their home, where he is taking it easy for the day. Laurie, I imagine, is sitting in the studio, sur-
rounded by the familiar sight of books, magazines and stray artwork: the visual detritus of everyday
life that at some point might twist its way into her refined creative vision. Scott at
rest is admittedly more difficult to conjure. With a famously short attention
span and a propensity for creating multimedia work that can best be
described as athletic, he doesn't strike me as an easily confined
patient. Laurie just laughs. "I can take a year to make a book'
she agrees, and he can barely stand to spend more than
two days on a poster!'
Through the ghostly clicks and delays of long-dis-
tance telephony—and a free-form conversation
that ranges from music to sex to machines to
childrearing—a picture begins to emerge of the
couple's multifaceted partnership. After five years
of living parallel but separate professional lives—
Laurie as the renowned design director at the
Walker Art Center and Scott as head of his own digital
imaging studio—the couple find themselves having to
mediate their disparate instincts, esthetics and skill sets
as Cranbrook's new co-chairs of the 2-D design department.
Add to that the pressures of running a joint business and raising a
spirited six-year-old and you get two people who are masters-in-training
of the emotional balancing act. "We're still trying to tie the pieces together
with our design work:' confides Scott, "because we really are completely
looking from different sides of the fence. We've had some problems, I'm not
going to kid you:' Despite such difficulties, the couple admits to having more
work than they could ever have imagined possible—everything from crea-
tive directing a Raygun Publishing start-up called Sweater and conceiving film
titles with Jeffery Plansker for an upcoming Hollywood picture, to spending time in
Switzerland as adjunct professors at Ecole Cantonale d'Art de Lausanne and creating a
controversial promotional brochure for Virgin Interactive.
The creative tension that is manifest in the Makelas' work—print vs. moving picture, detail vs. mass,
the intellectual vs. the physical—clearly represents in miniature the fragmentation of the design field
on the whole, and this inspires the couple's teaching. "The reason we're here is because we are two
voices walking side by side, yet we represent the complexity of the field:' says Laurie. Of course, part
of their job as educators and creative enablers is to further complicate things—by opening up minds,
by breaking down notions built up by an industry all too often controlled by the corporate bottom line.
The Makelas' come-on in their department's student prospectus reads, appropriately enough, "Cran-
brook is intellectually and creatively hedonistic, emotional, monastic. Come and be prolific:'
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Breaching boundaries that exist between different media has long been of interest to the Makelas, who
first met in 1985 while teaching at Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles. Whether
it was coincidence or kismet that the designers met at the same time the Apple Macintosh first came
out is anybody's guess; that the desktop computer changed their lives inalterably is not. "Scott had such
shame about his inability to draw or handwrite': recalls Laurie, "that when computers arrived, his cre-
ativity was punched out. It was like a prosthesis. Suddenly he was able to express himself' And express
himself he did, in bold, adrenaline-driven graphics that muscled their way into music videos and TV
commercials across the country. "I think the digital realm is part of what makes our work possible:' says
Laurie, who spent years herself conceiving a project at the Walker called "Digital Campfires: Stories of
Life and Liberty:' a multimedia exhibition exploring the interstices and overlaps between technology and
democracy. (For reasons of funding, the exhibition was canceled, although the project
has since taken on a new, NEA-funded life as an extensive Web site and CD-
ROM collaboration with the MIT Media Lab that will introduce teenagers
to the Bill of Rights and its manifold issues.)
Increasingly, the Makelas have found inspiration in a multi-
media collaboration called AudioAfterBirth, a synesthetic
hybrid of machine funk sounds and haunting lyrics that
will be combined with retina-searing graphics on a
multiplay CD-ROM called "Addictions + Meditations."
"AudioAfterBirth is really our first total collaboration:'
explains Scott, who released the first album with
Emigre Music four years ago. "Laurie was a backup
singer last time, but now she's become the voice that
people respond to the most. We've found a groove
together in music that's much more comfortable:' The
fluidity of music, its very abstractness, is what makes
collaboration easier for the designers, who admit to having
"made a point of being in different professional sandboxes"
in the past. So far, there seems to be no signature "Scott sound" or
"Laurie sound' but rather a seamless amalgam of auditory sensation.
As may be indicated by the name of the couple's self-created music label—
Flesh and Fluids—issues of digital production and human reproduction are
closely linked. Scott indeed admits to a "perverse affection for the machine
as a sign for what is actually happening in the flesh:' While the Makelas have
worked on countless projects both together and separately, they have produced
just one child, their daughter Carmela—a sign that the correlation, while fascinating,
need not be taken too literally. Parenting has been the ultimate test of the Makelas' colla-
borative ability: an admittedly intense experience. "Carmela's a hybrid of both of our person-
alities and drives," marvels Scott. "I can't think of creating anything more powerful than her."
Power and difference play a part in any collaboration, be it personal or professional, and these are
aspects the Makelas hope to tease out in their Double-Blind concept. "Collaborators are not necessarily
alike," says Laurie, "and what's interesting to us is why two very different people even want to talk to
each other in the first place:' The creative collision that occurs when the couple approaches the same task
with their own set of ideas and preconceptions gives them what Scott terms "a running rocket start" on
solving design problems. "Then we actually begin seeing how the atoms start intertwining with each other."
ANOBEA 00011.**TON IS A WRITER BASE* IN NEW YORK.
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Center. Laurie Haycock Makela: Double-Blind 'Putting Our Heads Togett
Top right: P. Scott Makela: Double-Blind 'Heaven and
Bottom right: P. Scott Makela/Laurie Haycock Makela: 'PleasurePower" for Virgin Interact