Interestingly, the motivation to produce of the book was born out of a close brush with fate aboard a flight on route from Moscow. After the hydraulics on the plane failed, Hughes, contemplating his own mortality, thought “… what was that project I never got around to?”. An hour and a half later when safely on the ground, the seed for ‘Cult-ure’ was born. Drawing from a vast collection of scribbles and notes in his box of Moleskines, Hughes started work on the book.

Visually, Hughes described the book’s design as a reference to a manifesto, bible or other “source of authority”; using gilded edges and an authoritative typographic style. Beginning with the quote, “culture is roughly anything we do and monkeys don’t”, Hughes took the audience through a selection of topics from the book.
Ranging from the simplification of symbols, to the theme of resonant objects (the idea of an object having it’s own meaning, plus it’s cultural baggage), to the human skill / need for pattern recognition (Hughes provided the example of the famous ‘face on Mars’), the talk was fantastically thought-provoking. Perhaps the best snippet from the talk, was Hughes concluding response to the question “How do you kill an idea?”. The answer? “Have a better one”.

By Paul Woods