Speed Date / PETER LIŠKA, graphic designer
Where are you from?
From Malá Čierna, an end village in Žilina region. Right next to Veľká Čierna.
Where did you study?
AFAD in Bratislava.
Who was your best teacher?
Palo Choma, as I spent most of my time in his atelier. He essentially and for a long time defined my professional life.
Who were/ are your parents?
My mum started to work as a seamstress due to her complicated background right after finishing elementary school and my father is a wood carver.
What don’t you enjoy in design?
Overproduction – the excess of „design“. When design is reduced to marketing and the fact that the majority views design like this.
And on the contrary, what do you?
When things work and look simple, when they surprise.
What do you listen to?
Lately, my music is chosen by Spotify algorithm. It is strikingly good at it.
Your favourite film or cartoon?
Currently the new season of Black Mirror and as for cartoons, Rick and Morty. Both of them provide a brazen commentary on the new situations the world finds itself in. I recommend watching them in this combo.
Who do you respect as an authority in and out of your field?
E.g. Edward Tuffe, a statistician that meddles with graphic design, the pioneer of information design.
What thing did you last buy?
100 magnets and it was today.
Do you buy professional literature? What was the latest book?
“Truth Is the Daughter of Time: On the Origins of the Idea of Progress of Knowledge” by Daniel Špelda.
Do you vote?
Yes.
Who throws the best parties?
Well, I’m bit out of the game; my 1.5-year daughter organises parties for me now. But before, the openings in Photoport were the best. I guess these parties were important for the artistic community of my generation.
Your favourite dome?
I have a favourite duo – Pantheon / Mausoleum of Theoderic. Pantheon is a classic, a prototype, a standard; it’s a truly beautiful and grand dome. Theoderic wanted a dome on his mausoleum so much, but nobody was able to build it for him, and that only 100 years after the fall of the Roman Empire. So, they carved it out of one piece of rock.
Party dress. Made by…?
?
Your hero from the past?
Eratosthenes of Cyrene – he relatively precisely calculated the circumference of the Earth in 225 BC.
Best/nicest house?
I am curious about the reconstruction of the Slovak National Gallery. Really looking forward to it.
Do you have any stereotypes when you work? How do they show?
I don’t know if it’s a stereotype in the right sense of the world, but I try to build a new world for my problem, a sort of parallel cosmos where laws are derived solely from the problem. It is all right when this world is consistent. Then design starts to be generated by itself or it alone lays conditions. After that, it is just mere engineering work that ensures it could be made.
What’s on your desktop?
A picture of a hand-axe and an icon of HDD.
Best exhibition, work of art?
If the criterion is how long I was preoccupied with it, then it would be the exhibition titled Artempo: Where Time Becomes Art that I incidentally came across in Venice in 2007, besides visiting the biennale. Until then I had never seen anything put up with such a conception and on such a scale. Now I‘ve even found out that it has an entry on Wikipedia, so it seems I wasn‘t the only one.
What do you respect both from the local and foreign design scene? And why?
Craft in Plastic and their project of sunglasses made from biodegradable plastic. It has attributes that are still hardly seen in Slovak design.
Ethics or money?
Both of them are constructs, but ethics, nevertheless, is subject to inflation more slowly. So ethics. If the question was – ethics or e.g. potatoes – it would be harder.
Extraordinary book?
Brian Greene: Fabric of the Cosmos. I recommend it if you want to test your abstract imagination the way you have probably never done it before. Green also managed to explain complicated concepts used by contemporary physics and cosmology in the way that even if you couldn’t reach understanding, at least he lends you this magic feeling for a while.
Optimist, pessimist, nihilist?
Optimist.
Do you have any hobby?
Bicycle.
Solo or in a collective?
Individual input – collective output.
Slovakia as the Promised Land?
It still can be one.