Conflict in My Outlook
Location:
Melbourne, AUS
Year:
2022
Core Service:
- Implement
Client:
Perimeter Editions
Designers:
Dalton Bruyns
Suppliers:
Agpograf
Dinamo
Camelot
Kometa
Tomorrow.Type
Idea Books
How does one create a feeling of internet nausea? How could we recreate the mess and chaos found online? We turned data in materials to explore and develop a visual narrative fit for an exhibition about the online world.
We sought to explore the material qualities of the digital realm highlighting the hidden surveillance, invisible power structures, the human commodities and transient transfer streams that flow to space no human can touch. In essence, we translated data into raw materials, renewing the landscape as a digital one, with ethical, moral and historic baggage attached.
The design of the Conflict in My Outlook centred around making the internet tangible, through all of its mess and chaos. We treated data as material, mixing and matching different elements to provide a chaotic reading experience not dissimilar to blog post with ads jumping left right and centre.
"Feeling overwhelmed on paper brings the digital world to life through the rollercoaster of the cloud data base"
Each typeface was chosen to convey certain meanings, scaled differently to further impose the internet like ‘busy-ness’, challenging the reader to focus on the content beyond the ‘noise’. The top bar acts as a navigation, encoding author and place, whilst mono-spaced fonts provide functional information such as title and appendix items. True to the internet there are hidden easter eggs placed throughout the publication. The main one is on the back of the dust jacket, which as the entire content of the publication on a single spread. This resonates with the cover image representing the frontend of ‘the cloud’ with the backend housing large stores of data.
–– Press Release –– Edited by Anna Briers, Nicholas Carah & Holly Arden
We live in a hyper-mediated world. We are drowning in an ocean of images and information. Data is the new oil. Conflict in My Outlook brings together contemporary artworks and new texts that shed light on human experience in an era of ubiquitous networked technologies. From digital intimacies and the weaponisation of social media to invisible power structures, clickwork and the ‘gig’ economy, contributors argue for a better future in the context of algorithmic racism, machine learning, and the new colonial frontiers of surveillance capitalism.
Conflict in My Outlook takes a unique approach by focusing on contemporary art as a means to explore the techno-politics that define our age. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok depend on us turning our lives into flows of images, while notoriously harvesting our data. This abundance of information is inextricably entwined with invisible power structures. It is precisely because of the invisibility of such technologies that images as carriers of meaning matter more than ever before.
136 pages, 23 x 12.9cm, section sewn cold glue bound, ota bind softcover with dust jacket, Perimeter Editions (Melbourne) x The University of Queensland (UQ) Art Museum. Images kindly supplied by Perimeter Books.
