Faster Stronger Better is a series of posters intended to re-contextualize F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto for the digital age. Phillipe intends the posters “to underline the absurdity of Futurist ideals, which demand technology’s assumption of nature as means of human progress and promote war as ‘the world’s only hygiene’”.

Phillipe writes: “I chose to depict roughly rendered animals that have been poorly uploaded into the grid of cyber-space as means of pointing to the inadequacies of industrial technology. The use of Spanish, Chinese, and Thai – languages of countries infamous for mass-production – is used to refer to the dangers of a totalitarian approach to industrialization. I wanted the posters to be aesthetically brash and brutal, as a reflection Futurist ideology and Marinetti’s manic and surreal writing style.”

The digitally corrupted animals relate to each of the texts in the posters: the gorilla is ‘stronger’ in Spanish; the leopard is ‘faster’ in Chinese; the ant is ‘better’ in Tai – each become metaphors for aspects of industrialisation synonymous with the chosen countries. With no literal reference to Maranetti’s manifesto however, the posters risk a confusing ambiguity and inaccessible abstraction that restrains the intended indictment.

Using contemporary visual language to link current and historical expressions of ideology, the posters’ ambiguities do help convey the anxiety and alienation that are symptoms of the digital age. So perhaps the semiotic jest and conceptual ambiguity is intriguing enough for some level of engagement. These qualities can also be appreciated in some of Philipe’s other student work such as Eurofuture – “A web-based narrative envisioning a dystopian ultra-capitalist future in which soft foods, canned dairy and vitamin supplements are religiously consumed.”

Do these posters represent the limitations of an approach that is becoming more prevalent with online posters, away from their traditional “productive sites of conflict” (ie. the street)? Are they intrinsically too abstract, and the denunciation too subtle, for the medium of posters? Or does this decontextualisation represent a tendency for the poster to become more like a ‘painting’ – so the context might not be embedded, but external, for example a suggestive title, or supporting text with enough clues to decipher intention? A kind of augmented impact?

With Wipe Out Joel has mapped surfing’s regression from a radically independent counterculture to a market-led globalised trend. He also reflects on his own cultural identity, interviewing surf culture participants to present an equally subjective and objective portrait.

Referencing Dick Hebdige’s 1979 critique of British, working class youth, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Joel argues that surfing has followed a typical trajectory; beginning as a symbolic form of resistance, and eventually extinguished as the dominant culture contains its subversion through assimilation and commodification.

He has produced a series of T-shirts to codify surfing’s themes and commercial development in each decade since its popularity boomed in 60′s Australia.

The decades’ broad cultural shifts are portrayed on shirt fronts, with a pastiche of fashionable graphic and typographic cliches from each period presenting a relevant interview statement – from the naivety of nostalgic hand drawn lettering in the early decades, to digitally forged type culminating in the “Perfect Storm” of overwhelming corporate forces (“…becoming a normalised part of mainstream culture”).

On the shirt backs, the synoptic chart (weather diagrams surfers can use to predict waves) is applied as a metaphor for change and direction over time, showing both an increase in air pressure, indicating big swell (good waves) but also, symbolically, erosion of subculture and the series of cultural events leading to this “Perfect Storm”.

Lines of interview text are rendered as isobars showing “surfing’s proportion of influence in society”. Coded symbols interact to articulate surfing’s strength as a subculture, its general popularity, and degree of commercialisation.

The project has been conceived as an installation or performance, depending on whether the shirts are worn (walking single file in chronological order slowly down the beach?), or displayed as surf-shop merchandise.

By datamoshing Bounce, a popular music video by white Australian rapper, Iggy Azelia, Ebony aims to critique the increasingly common racist appropriation of minority cultures in Western popular culture and fashion, arguing that “cultures are not casual costumes, people are not accessories and that appropriation of Otherised cultures is disrespectful… cultural signifiers such as the bindi on Indian women are symbols of Otherness, and the same signifiers on Westerners are received as fashion statements.”

Ebony’s interest in glitching developed attempting to understand her Anglo-Indian identity. With glitching she explores cultural appropriation, and more complex ideas like decolonisation theory and the rejection of assimilation by Other Cultures. Seeing herself as a metaphoric glitch in the colonial system, she interprets bi-racial children as the unexpected outcomes of a system of forced assimilation. An awareness of the grammar of coloniality enables resistance, “and my datamoshing is about formulating a visual language for this rejection.”

Datamoshing is the process of breaking files or creating mistakes in digital systems that force unexpected outcomes. Ebony writes: “I am asserting my awareness of the digital/political system by being disobedient inside it. I am inserting the human into the code and creating errors, that the digital system doesn’t know how to compute. By doing this, I am in some way acting out decoloniality in a digital framework.”

Glitch artist and educator Nick Briz describes glitching as hacking, as an act of creative destruction: “Glitching is a kind of tactful exploitation of systems, digital and technological systems… it can establish a kind of critical relationship between users and computers, that isn’t normally there by default. And it’s that kind of critical relationship I’m hoping to create for others by presenting this process, though systematic, as all about destroying systems or instigating a kind of self destruction of systems.

This hack always exists in the present and never in the past, because every use of the glitch codec necessitates a new destruction of the codec file at a code level: creation by destruction. Destruction, in this case, is used to refer to this demonstration of the systems appeared self dismantilisation. And the reason I say ‘appeared’ self dismantilisation is because computers don’t really make mistakes. Users input stuff, and machines output stuff, a glitch is really just an unexpected output, which by catching us off guard, makes us aware of the medium, its structure, and its politics, which are really there the whole time. But the error is actually a human one.”

#iggymosh was created by forcefully breaking the original clip’s video and sound files. Intentionally interfering with the video’s compression artefacts (the systems that computers use to force files to lose quality so that they can be stored or uploaded easily) allows the media to be endlessly manipulated.

For example, Bounce’s original audio file was split from the video track and opened as a RAW image file in an image editing program. Quotes from Dodai Stewart’s article On Miley Cyrus, Ratchet Culture and Accessorizing With Black People, Rohin Guha’s article Iggy Azalea Bounces Backwards With Disappointing Clichés and Jaya Bedi’s article Beyond Bindis: Why Cultural Appropriation Matters were then overlaid as white text. The file extension was converted back to .mp3 and manipulated in an audio program to affect speed and tempo so that the track fitted the glitched video.

Scripts is a user-generated monument to dissent. It focuses on the growing political authority of online discourse. The massive amount of freely shared information feeds a powerful platform for discussion, dissent and active political action.

Camille and Andres have embodied this phenomenon in a column. From the Parthenon and the Alhambra to the Brandenburg Gate and the Lincoln Memorial, the column has evolved from simply being a structural element in buildings to, increasingly, a symbol of institutionalised power.

They write: “Our column is reimagined as 24 ceiling-mounted receipt printers (a direct reference to the 24 flutes found in Ionic columns): each is tracking the discussions of online platforms such as twitter, each on a specific subject. Our software deconstructs and fragments the authority of the column: the more interest certain situations gain, the more the relevant section of the column will grow, and in no way will we be able to predict its final outcome.”

Scripts considers both the strengths and the flaws of online discourse which by its own nature is typically anarchic, unregulated and fickle. The project’s deconstruction of the centuries-old aesthetics and semantics of the column aims to raise questions regarding the endurance and efficacy of online discourse, and to serve as a monument to user-generated content, “a Trajan column for the digital age”.

Learned Nothing is a booklet built as a plain infographic, quoting a passage from anthropologist W.E.H Stanner’s influential 1968 Boyer Lecture After the Dreaming to highlight the issues of Indigenous relations in Australia, focusing on ‘Indigenous literacy’ and the culture of misinformation and lack of proper consultation with Indigenous Australians.

A percentage of the text on each page is translated into selected Indigenous languages, corresponding with statistics of ‘Indigenous literacy’ in Australia-wide tests. This is revealed when the cropped, partial page is turned, and suggests that an Indigenous child who performs below the national standard of literacy is not ‘illiterate’, but rather speaks a non-privileged language (a language other than english). The languages chosen range in status from endangered (Iwaidja language) to educational (Tiwi language), highlighting the danger of these languages becoming extinct.

From Wikipedia: In the late 18th century, there were between 350 and 750 distinct Aboriginal social groupings, and a similar number of languages or dialects. At the start of the 21st century, fewer than 150 indigenous languages remain in daily use, and all except roughly 20 are highly endangered. Of those that survive, only 10% are being learned by children and those languages are usually located in the most isolated areas.

Oscar uses Stanner’s text and the issue of language and learning to illustrate colonial ignorance and malevolence.

He writes: “The passage of text, the typography of which reflects colonial texts of the period, recounts Governor Phillip’s first years in Australia and states that ‘After almost three years’ experience it is obvious that he had learned nothing of aboriginal mentality or tendency.’

After 225 years, struggling to ‘close the gap’ whilst Indigenous languages to this day become extinct, perhaps we have also learned nothing.”

John wanted to challenge “the belief that an ever-expanding consumption of goods is advantageous to the long-term economy”. He created an installation as a kind of 3 dimensional poster. Its physical bulk becomes an affecting spatial experience.

The word ‘Mine’ is coupled with turgid marketing straplines from a local homewares retailer and mining company:

“When you make a lasting impression, it has to be a good one” AUSENCO

“Turn Longings into Belongings” Freedom Furniture

“Mine uses both meanings of the word to highlight the relationship between mining growth and consumerism. It aims to create links between daily choices made by the audience and the industrial-sized repercussions that their needs collectively create.”

So the ‘mine’ of mineral extraction (a void/absence) and possessive ‘mine’ of consumer acquisition (a mass/presence) are linked in a sculptural yin and yang.

It is an example of research and experimentation leading to a focused, distilled and convincing concept. One short word, repeated, invested with context and presence, and released as a critical meme.

As the end days draw nigh, these polite ploys of visual resistance will help ambush the ideologies of denial. And such a simple and forceful idea is realised entirely with letterforms.

Digital technology is enabling ever more efficient intrusions into personal realms with corresponding potentials for exploitation. From cloud computing and Big Data analytics to backscatter (naked body scanner) x-ray devices at airports, geolocation capabilities of mobile phones, social network data sales, and even domestic surveillance drones and genomic and other ‘omic’-type data including collected individual DNA sequences – we are willingly or coercively exposed.

Torunn has created a campaign focusing on parents online sharing of their children’s images and personal information. She states: “A study done by AVG shows that 84% of Australian children under the age of two have some kind of digital dossier online, mostly photos posted by their parents. Although the average “digital birth” happens at around six months, one-third of children have information and images online within weeks of being born.”

Torunn produced industrial pedestrian safety signs displaying basic advice for parents and a website with more detailed information. Intervening in the public realm requires ingenious strategies to avoid legal transgressions. Torunn visited children’s playgrounds throughout the city, cordoned them off with safety tape, and placed the signs in prominent positions. She documented the intervention and interviewed parents regarding their reaction to the messages:

“It’s worrying to read “the 84%”… I never give out any information about my daughter online. Or, I have images of her on my Facebook-profile. What can people get from these photos?” (gave some examples) “I will go home now and check what photos I have on my profile.”
mother of a girl (primary school)

Aaron and Luke explain: “After research into the supporting visual language that was developing alongside the Occupy Wall Street movement, it was clear there was a great lack of cohesion and quality in the visual messages being communicated. A monospaced display typeface was developed as an offering towards a visual common ground for the occupiers.

“The movement’s diversity is of course one of it’s central strengths and characteristics, so the typeface is not intended as a kind of brand homogenisation, rather a visual equivalent of the unifying verbal devices used by the occupier’s, such as their very nomenclature (Occupy New York, Occupy Brisbane etc) and slogans like ‘we are the 99%’.

“Selected type specimens were overprinted on copies of the stridently conservative, News Corp. owned paper, The Australian. The newspaper effectively became ‘occupied’ with the existing design adopting critical new meanings. The overprinted type specimens were pasted up in public spaces. These specimens contained quotes sourced from Occupy Wall Street protest signs found in various occupations around the world.”

Monospaced or fixed width letterforms, created as they were in the analogue era to enable a predictable distance before the impression of the next letter, are technically redundant. The efficiencies of digitisation means typefaces with proportional spacing now rule. However the aesthetic virtue of the monospaced typeface perseveres. The inversion of typographic hierarchy whereby a monospaced body font ‘occupies’ the role of a display face is also a metaphor for the movement’s political aims. The relatively generic letterforms allow the parasitical subversion of found propaganda with carefully considered overprinting.

Cheyanne explains: “The Parental Lie Kit expresses the damage that little white lies have on children. The aim of the Kit is to engage parents, persuading them to be honest with their sons and daughters. These lies often occur when parents are attempting to escape an awkward situation or simply to make their children happy. Parents believe in teaching their children to tell the truth, but in reality most parents are guilty themselves of uttering these sanctioned untruths.”

Influenced by Fluxus kits, Cheyanne has built a mock polygraph instrument that comes with a collection of ephemera cataloging common ‘white lies’ and justifications.

The polygraph kit attempts to elevate a parent’s half truths and harmless exaggerations to the status of mendacious subterfuge and fraudulent deceits. Polygraphs are typically associated with unearthing criminal guilt so the machine aims at syndechdoche in revealing ‘little whites lies’ as more a serious manipulation.

The appeal here is pathos and ethos, but perhaps more logos would have been more convincing. Including evidence of the negative consequences of manipulating trusting children might have helped counter a dismissive parents tendency to defend their parenting. This is all leaving aside the intrinsically problematic nature of truthfulness, not least in relation to child-rearing, when, as any parent will testify, formally rigid realities melt faster than arctic sea ice.

The humanist and monospaced typography evokes an instructive, scientific authority that also sells the Kit’s subtle humour. Nearly as funny as a cynical baby bonus.

Luke writes: “The ‘Little Children are Sacred’ report was commissioned by the Howard government to falsely justify the recent Aboriginal Intervention in the Northern Territory. This A2/three poster series is a typographic response to prevalent and pervasive government rhetoric, raising the possibility that the stolen generation is simply entering a secondary, continuing phase. It highlights the ever-present, destructive narrative of Australia’s relationship with its indigenous people, and visually references the alarmist, newspaper headline aesthetic of a (not-so) by-gone era.”

As humans become increasingly separated from the natural world, the linguistic relationships between phases of evolution are gradually discarded, mapping a potentially terminal alienation.

John writes: “Our current unsustainable existence is the result of a series of unknowing actions. Our ‘development’ from an anthropocentric to an increasingly techno-centric mode of being ensures that we move further away from a reality that supports the natural resources that sustain us and, therefore, our own well being. Throughout modern history the world that we have designed has also designed us, resulting in a series of unconsidered steps that have lead to this point of instability and ungroundedness. A Series of Steps aims to chart this journey and the ramifications this unthought process has left us with in the present and, potentially, in the future.”

John’s posters map the diminishing similarity of the words labelling our evolving modes of existence. A few letters are introduced and substituted but there is a discernible continuity: animal > human > manual > manufacture, until we get to technology, which breaks from these relationships.

The first poster is blank and the final poster has no words, just abstract diagrammatic marks, an indecipherable technological code. This absence of typography is in itself unsettling for its sudden absence of humanity.

No shirking the big themes here. And the outcome is so assured and restrained. There is an imperative to render critical ideas in an accessible and engaging form, without flattening them altogether.

Robert writes: “Certainty is a booklet arguing that science and religion are related in their misguided claim over absolute truth. It aims to question the often ignored (or denied) filters through which we view the world. The booklet overlays two creeds that are often believed to be in direct conflict – science and religion – and allows them to be viewed independently of each other by the use of a red or cyan acetate filter.

“Both creeds imply the naturalness and inevitability of their world-view, but by viewing them individually and simultaneously, the reader can judge for themselves their similarities and dissimilarities. By bringing attention to the historical and cultural embeddedness of these views while avoiding judgment on their validity, this piece opens up a space for reflection and dialogue on our most closely held assumptions.

“The typeface has been designed specifically for this booklet to combine the religious connotations of a Gutenberg blackletter with the rationalist philosophy of a modern didone.”

In science’s corner is a 1889 text by Robert Ingersoll, and religion is represented by an early statement of Christian faith called The Apostle’s Creed.

The booklet can be read as double page spreads or folded out as a concertina. The ‘little red book’ format references Mao and the Giddeon’s bible.

Images reinforce the text. So there are conflicting texts and opposing images (eg. the final page contrasts the Christian Crusades and a submachine gun).