RCA | CCA | NO ONE LIVES HERE | EXHIBITION IDENTITY SYSTEM
The Royal College of Art's (RCA) MA Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) course commissioned FL@33 to create an exhibition identity system, a dedicated website and an exhibition catalogue for their show No one lives here. We worked very closely with the course's 14 final year students who curated the exhibition together. No one lives here opened its doors at London's prestigious RCA and ran for over two weeks.
___ We developed an identity system that was applied across the entire exhibition – from signage to a tagging systems used in the exhibition catalogue and the website. It is playful and versatile although very systematically engineered.
___ The identity design is based on a three-dimensional hexagonal grid. Each depicted 3D hexagon reveals 10 triangles and each triangle represents one of the 10 artists featured in No one lives here.
___ The show is divided into five themes or 'tags' – Truth, Space, Data Politics, Narrative and Object – and these 5 themes are also represented by a shape within the depicted 3D hexagon.
___ As each of the 10 artists is linked to two of these 'tags' we combined these shapes with the artists' individual triangles – to create individual symbols that form the key ingredients for the exhibition identity.
___ The hexagonal symbols appear as individual tags next to the artists' names or form hexagon clusters – with all ten together symbolising the physical part of the exhibition. These clusters were also used in a more abstract way as seen on the catalogue cover and often the hexagonal symbols were then also cropped to suggest the evolving and sprawling nature of the show's subject matter.
___ For print and vinyl signage Futura Maxi (Futura PL / Fute) Demi was selected as the primary typeface combined with Futura Maxi Book. Online the non-existing Maxi webfont weights were replaced with Futura Heavy and Book.
CLICK FOR MORE INFO | NO ONE LIVES HERE | OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS
No one lives here reflects the many ways in which the digital now permeates culture and conditions the way we live today. The kaleidoscopic lens of the web, constantly shifting our perceptions of politics, the body, popular culture and technology itself, is inherently defined by its processes of production and reproduction. With this in mind, it is the relationships formed between the works of art in this exhibition, both conceptual and visual, that situate them within a digital culture. The relationships formed between the works of art in No one lives here, reinforce their ‘digital’ nature
and locate their meaning within an infinite landscape of information.
___ The exhibition takes its name from Gayatri Spivak’s text Planetarity, published in Death of a Discipline (2003), in which the theorist and philosopher discusses the opposing forces of the ‘Planet’ and the ‘Globe’. According to Spivak the Planet is an organic, nurturing body; the Globe, on the other hand, is defined by our relationship to digital technology. The Globe represents a network of connections, a utopian idea where all individuals are complicit and linked. No one lives here adopts the contradictions produced by this shift. We once inhabited the Planet but increasingly we exist within the Globe.
___ Artists: Neïl Beloufa, David Raymond Conroy, Mosireen Collective, Aleksandra Domanović, S Mark Gubb, Raphael Hefti, Jill Magid, Shana Moulton, Hito Steyerl, Jack Strange
CLICK FOR MORE INFO | PIONEN DATA CENTRE | OFFICIAL EXHIBIT DESCRIPTION
This research display based around the Pionen Data Centre near Stockholm, acts as a preface to No one lives here. This former Cold War era civil defence bunker now houses thousands of terabytes of data, including politically sensitive materials, such as the WikiLeaks servers. Throughout the many months of research and discussion that have led to the formation of No one lives here, the Pionen Data Centre has come to epitomise the paradigm of virtuality that the exhibition wishes to consider. The Data Centre remains a purely functional space, built to house data and information; something inherently technological and lacking humanity. Yet interestingly, it is heavily aestheticised, made in
the vision of science fiction: designer furniture,
and steel structures juxtaposed against bare rock and foliage.
Categories: Campaigns, Environments | 3D, Illustration, Installations | Exhibits, Logos | Identities, Moving image, Print, Screen, Typography, Websites | Digital
Sectors: Culture | Arts, Education
