"Norman founded an experimental space called Poster Studio on Charing Cross Road, London. This space was a collaborative effort with Merlin Carpenter and Dan Mitchell. In 1998 in New York he set up Parasite, together with the artist Andrea Fraser, a collaborative artist led initiative that developed an archive for site-specific projects.

Norman now lives and works in London Copenhagen. He exhibits internationally in commercial galleries, museum, and in public and alternative spaces. He writes articles, designs book covers and posters, collaborates with other artists, teaches and lectures in European and the US. Norman completed a major design project: an 80m pedestrian bridge and two islands for Roskilde Commune in Denmark in 2005 and is now working together with Nicholas Hare Architects on a school playground project for the new Golden Lane Campus, East London. He has recently finished an artist residency at the University of Chicago, Chicago, USA."

"2. Yes, you should not worry too much about the consequences and you should definitely quit your job that you hate and it'll probably all work out great. Job quitters are the happiest people around…

The soulless careerists, though: they get where they are because social training doesn't allow us to stop them. They depend upon our unwillingness to say "bad things" about people. But if you don't, who will?

It is incumbent upon you to put a fucking boot in the face of the soulless careerist.

When people ask you about them, tell the truth. Practice saying "They're useless and horrible." Practice saying "They're soulless careerists who don't care about anything or believe in anything and they're just using us all to get ahead at any cost." Practice telling the truth. They can't stand the exposure in the light of day. They can't keep stepping on people if their previous steppings-on are known. You'll all be happier in the long run."

"Here's a curious paradox: the more you insist on sticking to a straight-&-narrow path defined by your own evolving principles, rather than the expedient one defined by current situation, the more you'll have to twist & turn in the real world. The straight path in your head turns into spaghetti in the real world.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, the more your path through the real world seems like a straight road, defined by something like a "standard" career path/script, the more you'll have to twist & turn philosophically to justify your life to yourself. Every step that a true Golden Boy careerist takes, is marred by deep philosophical compromises. You sell your soul one career move at a time.<br />
<br />
If you are driven by your own principles, you'll generally search desperately for a calling, and when you find one, it will consume your life. You'll be driven to actually produce, create or destroy. You'll want to do something that brings the world more into conformity with your own principles…"

“All of the disciplines are increasingly identifiable as professionalisms, which are increasingly conformable to the aims and standards of industrialism. All of the disciplines are failing the test of propriety because they are failing the test of locality. The professionals of the disciplines don’t care where they are. Though they are inescapably in context, they assume or pretend that they think and work without context. They subscribe to the preeminence of the mind and (logically from that) of the career. The questions of propriety, calling as they must for local answers, call necessarily for small answers. But small local answers are now as far beneath the notice of professionalism as of commercialism.” — Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle

"If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college. Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things." ... "Those who work on the lower rungs of the information-age office hierarchy face their own kinds of unreality, as I learned some time ago." ... "A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this." ... "The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions"