Towards The HyperNormal
The managed outcomes of an increasingly fake world
Towards The HyperNormal
The managed outcomes of an increasingly fake world
Towards The HyperNormal – The managed outcomes of an increasingly fake world explores a number of concepts featured in film maker Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization. The increase in management systems and management personnel throughout every aspect of the government, education, technology, policing, finance, news and media, and medical sectors reveals new strategies that leaders and managers are adopting in order to maintain stability. The project involved research, explored in the context of a written text, to which a body of visual work was created in response. The final re-mediation of all elements was expressed in the form of a printed and bound book.
The individual drawings progresses the work produced over the past five years, exploring forms of mark-making, shape production, and colour combination. These drawings which were made on paper with pen and ink grounded the project in real, material form. The drawings were then photographed and immersed into fake Photoshop mock-up files of books and poster frame images to reinforce the thesis of the text. The page layout of the printed and bound book was designed around the proportions of the artwork frame in the fake Photoshop images—the geometry of the fake image dictating the overall proportion of the real book—representing a ridiculous design approach that produced interesting results.
Within this body of work, real artifact influences fake image, and vice versa. In combination with material and digital re-mediation of visual elements is the written text. The generative process of making within each element of the project became a responsive reaction to both exterior influences (referenced texts, documentaries, articles) as well as to interior artifacts shaping and reacting to each other. This constellation of inspiration and creative process served to blur the lines of real and fake, similar in essence to our current condition of the hyper normal.
The final article can be read on Medium.