As part of the London Anti-Design Festival there is an open poster competition. Posters must be black and white and on the theme of anarchy/apathy. Selected posters will be printed A1 and hung in the Research Studios workshop space. I gave two submissions:
Finally got these posters finished, apart from trimming and framing. I changed my mind about them half way through, initially they were going to be portrait with the crystal forms coming in from one side and a paragraph of text from Smithsons ‘The Crystal Land’.
The gray sky seemed to swallow up the heaps around us. Fractures and faults spilled fourth sediment, crushed conglomerates, eroded debris and sandstone. It was an arid region, bleached and dry. An infinity of surfaces spread in every direction.
Robert Smithson identifies entropy with the crystalline and I have taken this a very loose departure point to begin another project. I decided to make a set of posters with crystal like structures as a way of experimenting with a different process: printing and overprinting laser cut perspex on the letter press. The pieces are engraved so they will print solid with hairlines reversed out.
A line from Robert Smithson’s essay Entropy and the New Monuments translated into B-Movie style psychadelica, taking the science fiction theme of the essay to an extreme.
Along with Joana and Nina I am organising a lecture series at Camberwell. So far Jonathan Barnbrook and Brave New Alps have been our guests. Vaughan Oliver will visit on the 10th March and Metahaven on the 17th (both 3pm in Wilson Road Lecture Theatre).
There are two sets of posters to advertise the talks, which, in our slightly complicated way are rather different. The digital versions that Joana came up with look like this:
My submission to the Synesthesia exhibition was Colour Value a piece exploring the role of colour in language. Colour is used in many metaphors, and it tends to have strong associations, the idea of this project was to draw attention to the relationship between the colour and its use.
Eric Gill once wrote “Letters are things, not pictures of things.” Something that I am interested in is the ‘thingness’ of language, that language is so powerful despite being so ephemeral. Language takes its written form through letters, so if they are also things in themselves then the whole ‘thing’ that is language becomes extremely thingy indeed.
For the ‘Egshell Clangwave Oscillator…’, synesthesia themed exhibition, I made a set of screenprints and a film about colour, and its meaning. Here is the accompanying text:
“In the age of plastic goods and digital surfaces, colour is ubiquitous, bright, and seemingly interchangeable, but to a synesthete, sounds, letters and numbers may have specific colours which they cannot be separated from. Although colour seems to be a free value for general use, that may be selected according to taste, colour is not so simple. To see, or even here the name of, a colour, triggers strong associations, and they are used in many sayings and common metaphors. Altering the combinations of colours and their uses produces uncanny effects, and perhaps in some cases, this process reveals underlying ideology.”
The official poster for the second MA Graphics show.
There have been various versions of the poster for the next Camberwell MA Graphics exhibiton, I have uploaded them here to show how the have developed, this one is my version of a previous design by another student (show below). The others thought I was joking with the stretched rainbow type. It is not tasteful ‘good design’ I know, but then, it is a poster to attract students, and I thought this was a good opportunity to do something eye catching and trashy. Common sense prevailed.
