Freak show
At the beginning of this semester, I tried to focus on high vs. low taste and give voice to the “low” aesthetics. In my last post, I said I wanted to use beauty in alternative worlds to inspire change. This YouTube video, “Being poor is cool, only if you’re rich,” made me change my mind (again). Luxury brands take inspiration from homeless people and make it into a “sophisticated, cultured” homelesscore style. The style has no content; it’s a cosplay. Sympathy is a decoration, and rebellion is just another trend. Popularising an aesthetic is just adding fuel to the consumption machine — I don’t want to be part of that.
Seeing a hipster Asian fusion restaurant in the city does not help integrate me into this society. If I do something that celebrates diverse ways of being, it has to relate to its content, not repurposing it in another, more celebrated format.
Object Idea 1: Everyday design + unusual content
My original approach is to introduce marginalised aesthetics to mainstream channels. Now I’m thinking the reverse — using polished mainstream design to host insights on inequality. Luxurious gift packaging for energy bills; cheerful cereal boxes with the back of packs giving tips for kids on how to act white; graphic T-shirt with cartoon earth and flowers in the front, and a breakdown of its environmental impact at the back.
Capitalism, colonialism, sexism, and ableism… are all “natural.” We cannot imagine outside them if we don’t stop seeing them as natural.
Working on the Insight Through Data course reminded me that data is not the ultimate Truth; it is a small hole through which to look at the world, leaving so much messiness and unmeasurable out of the system. Similarly, I can paint a picture of the edge of capitalism/colonialism/sexism, etc, I can make them look not-so-natural at all. Make the familiar unfamiliar.
A few weeks ago, I went to a design conference and heard the presentation by a design agency, Metahaven. Their project Island in the Cloud is a speculative branding project for an offshore digital haven. “The studio’s speculative practice privileges the vocabulary of graphic design as a means of knowledge production, using it as a tool to analyze organizational models and power structures.” (MoMA, 2013). I find this very exciting, my understanding it that they are actualising a dystopian (or utopian if you’re into it) world by branding it, and leaving a stain on the internet when people search for related topics.
Object Idea 2: What’s “natural” in parallel universes
In our world, a cereal box contains the brand, product name, flavours, barcodes, romance copy, country of origin, ingredients, nutrition information, and other mandatory information that varies between countries. It does not list every person involved in making the cereal, like movies do. It does not have luxurious print finishes like alcohol packaging does. What would cereal boxes look like in different parallel universes?
By physically presenting these cereal boxes, I can channel imagined alternative worlds into reality and make people think about them.
Object Idea 3?
These ideas are not final. They might be too obvious. I’m still interested in something poetic and leaves the viewers with a vague message.
Whichever I choose, these objects will serve as absurd mirrors. To make the familiar unfamiliar and open up space for dreams.
Publication
My final project will be a book/magazine/newspaper that includes these objects.
I also really want to interview interesting people and include these interviews in the magazine. Realistically, I want to use this as an opportunity to talk to people who are doing the type of work I admire and see where I could go in the future. For the project itself, I think it also adds more data, gives more dimension to the work, and fits the spirit of the project, being about a variety of alternative voices. Lately I found so many exciting books and magazines about design and politics. I will share them after reading them.
Hope
Finally, the project’s purpose is to inspire hope. After a little bit of light reading about hope, it confirmed my feeling that optimism is dangerous, as it suggests everything will be good even if we do nothing. Pessimism is similar, it suggests everything will be bad no matter what we do. Either way, we do nothing. Grounded hope, on the other hand, does not require optimism. “darkness as much of the womb as the grave.” “Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed.” (Rebecca Solnit)
I don’t know how to inspire hope, but I’m doing some readings about it. To be, discovering so many cool publications gave me hope, so maybe my work itself is enough?
Thanks for reading xx
Beth
