DISRUPT
Visual identity for a one day music festival in Groningen, NL. The central themes were disruption, distortion and glitch.
I worked on the logo, posters, flyers, video teaser and other social media content.
In preparation I've made over 50 variations of the logotype by physically manipulating a printed paper on an active photocopier. You can see some of the results below.
ESCHATON FULFILLMENT CENTER
Graphics and conceptual development for an absurdist art installation. I was commissioned and invited to collaborate by programmer and artist Igor Bobeldijk.
In the early stages of ideation, we've decided that we will focus on three central concepts: [1] late stage capitalism, [2] algorithm and automation as a religious ritual, and [3] human and machine folly. The name is a play on Amazon, Enron, the apocalypse and political utopianism. We wanted to portray what a package shipping center might look like in the moment of messianic rapture, or perhaps after the planet's sixth mass extinction. Would the process of automated labor continue? To borrow a well-known remark from Fredric Jameson/Slavoj Žižek/Mark Fisher: it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.
The installation centered around cardboard packages moving autonomously (as if by their own volition) and procedurally generating vaguely poetic thoughts. The event took place in a temporary art space constructed out of shipping containers. A couple of screens functioned as artificial windows, slowly shifting their hues between a sunny sky and the blue screen of death.
Bobeldijk has a background in software development and robotics: he assembled custom robots that pushed the boxes around from the inside, as well as a system that monitored their contingent positions in the space.
Other than the conceptual development for the project, I designed the ESCHATON logo and the various graphics and looping videos for the screens. The design visually alludes to low res packaging labels, parking spot markers, uncomplicated religious imagery (i.e. Yijing hexagrams and the cross), the escape key, and Paul Rand's iconic corporate designs for IBM and Enron.
As mentioned above, the moving boxes/robots also generated semantically elusive (read: mostly nonsensical) sentences through a curated word bank and an algorithm that monitored their spatial coordinates. I scraped the vocabulary from thematically relevant work of Walter Benjamin and W.B. Yeats, organizing some of their texts into different parts of speech and turning it into raw material fit for subsequent algorithmic re-assembly. These new verses/prayers/laments were being generated and printed out in real time. The audience was invited to take the receipts home as a souvenir.
POSTCARDS FROM THE STATE OF NON-EXISTENCE
Book design. Cover and collage illustrations for Zbigniew Machej's recent book of introspective literary essays about "the fleetingness of poetry in Poland".
Each chapter has its own dedicated collage, which also serves as a divider page.
Unused alternatives for the cover:
OTHER WORK
A selection of miscellaneous older projects.
