Recently, we stumbled on L.A. based design collective Al Que Quiere’s blog AQQ Index and felt like we’d fallen down a rabbit hole. The site consists of three columns of images: art, interiors, furniture, much from the 70’s and 80’s in a mashup.  As you move the center column up or down, the side ones move in the opposite directions, so all the images are in constant flux. There is no indicator of how many images are to come, or how long the page is (it is almost endless). Your eyes travel side to side and still you can’t catch all there is to see. And there is, maddeningly no way to hold your place on the page. (And maddingly, the site works well only on a computer; the tablet experience is terrible.) We looked at the AQQ Index on a laptop, mesmerized for hours, finding treasure after treasure*, with no end in sight. Obsession.

The site’s opening statement is truly after our own hearts:

The AQQ Index is not to be thought of as an end, but an arrow that points.

The arrow points happily.

A photograph of a piece of furniture is not a piece of furniture; the same is true for painting, sculpture, architecture or whatever.

aqqindex.com
aqqindex.com

  Al Que Quiere means “for he who wants it.” The phrase was lifted from a book of the same name by William Carlos Williams. The info page is compelling, somewhat arrogant, at once true and a bit crazy:

AQQ holds that life is deeply horrible but one can still be profoundly optimistic. Possibilities are endless but not for the reasons that most idiots think. To strive for an ultimate belief in an empiric view of the world, that our senses and sequences give us, is wise when we are children, but ludicrous when we are aged. We should constantly strain our necks, and hearing, to eavesdrop on that which is unstable and strike when the mystical synapse, to that which is non-human, opens. Sometimes the expression of this can be a chair.

aqqindex.com
aqqindex.com

*When we spotted the Richard Tuttle wire sculpture and some scaffolding we’d posted about, we KNEW we were onto a like mind.

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