Daisy Pearson Process Blog

I’m still thinking about the future – about empowering people to feel engaged with the future, and that they can play a role in shaping it, that the future is up for grabs, and could be wildly different—better—than the present.

In this vein I discovered some fascinating references.

All Tomorrows

I started with All Tomorrows, which, while I’m uncomfortable with the assumption that, after fucking up the climate of our own planet, we expand out into the galaxy, is incredibly creative in terms of thinking about the future of humanity.

He has a lovely bit where he writes: “The tale of Humanity was never its ultimate domination of a thousand galaxies, or its mysterious exit into the unknown. The essence of being human was none of that. Instead, it lay in the radio conversations of the still-human Machines, in the daily lives of the bizarrely twisted Bug Facers, in the endless love-songs of the carefree Hedonists, the rebellious demonstrations of the first true Martians, and in a way, the very life you lead at the moment.”

However, he continues: “it is sickeningly easy for beings to get lost in false grand narratives, living out completely driven lives in pursuit of non-existent codes, ideals, climaxes and golden ages. In blindly thinking that their stories serve absolute ends, such creatures almost always end up harming themselves, if not those around them”.

It has the effect of minimising current political and social struggles – yes, all this is meaningless in relation to the size and scale of the universe, but what’s up for grabs now is a huge amount of pain and suffering, and potentially the future of humanity.

In many ways I find the entire project, being situated entirely in space and in interactions with alien species, too distant and impossible. It’s nihilistic about humanity’s chances of averting catastrophe here on earth, and lives only in the impossible idealism of interplanetary travel. It justifies a dangerous line of thinking – that we don’t need to change anything about our lives, because we can/will eventually just leave earth behind, and evolution will continue despite climate collapse. Or it justifies the nihilism that even if we tried to change our ways it would be hopeless so why even bother. This is exactly the attitude I’m seeking to counter.

However, I was intrigued and entranced by the moments of social unity, wellbeing, and abundance: “What couldn’t be figured out in one world was helped out by another, and any new developments were quickly made known to all in a realm that spanned centuries of light. Not surprisingly, living standards rose to previously unimaginable levels. …Thanks to the richness of the heavens and the toil of machines, each person had access to material and cultural wealth greater than that of some nations today.” (11)

And later: “This coordinated effort lasted for almost eighty million years, during which its member species attained previously unimaginable levels of culture, welfare and technology. Each species colonized a few dozen worlds of their own; in which nations, cultures and individuals lived to the fullest potentials of their existence.”

Such extents of incredibly high prosperity and wellbeing are rarely dared to be imagined, and it is exciting to see it, though the purpose of this project is not to explore what that looks like.

(Re)claiming Archives: استعادة الأرشيف

(Re)claiming Archives argues that recognising yourself in the stories/histories/mythologies, enables you to see yourself in the future. It is a reminder to make sure I have a diverse mix of manifestos in the collection for my workshops.

It explores some of the many forms archives can take, and most excitingly for me, explores their relationship to the future. Some examples from Palestine show how archives can take a speculative/imagined role.

In the midst of the attacks on Palestinians in May 2021, a digital uprising started on Twitter. Posts were accompanied by the hashtag غرد_كأنها_حرة#, which roughly translates to #tweet_like_its_free.

GCD plays a role here in the creation and realisation of a future vision/manifestation of a liberated Palestine – all the paraphenalia must be created, and a vision of the systems they represent comes with them – new train lines, systems of nationality and borders, visits to family and friends, a life lived in the reality of liberation.

This reminds me once again of Lauren Williams’ Making Room – a manifestation of abolitionist imagination.

Countless Palestinian Futures

Next I came across Countless Palestinian Futures, a game which “introduces various ways to dream, imagine, and talk about what the future of Palestine could look like. Dreaming is a radical act, it defies all current realities to build a reality where we see ourselves existing and coming into being.”

As a workshop this is a fantastic concept: idealistic/visionary but practical. She invited Palestinian and Arab cultural producers, policy makers, activists, academics and organisers to trial the game for the first time.

Choose your own adventure

Much of Danah Abdullah’s work centres on the idea of the future. Choose your own adventure was an exhibition designed to free ideas about the future of Palestine from the prescriptions of the past or present: “The future is bleak. Everything revolves around the past. Fatalism…helplessness…or the opposite: utopian visions.” A series of posters presented realistic but positive visions of possible Palestinian futures.

https://futuress.org/magazine/becoming-savage/

“Jerá’s activism and educational militancy have been pivotal in reclaiming Guarani’s ancestral territories and fighting for the maintenance of the nhandereko (their traditional modes of existence) in her village, especially through the strengthening of the autonomy and food security of the Guarani Mbya people.”

• Indigenous cultures
• Translation
• Anger: “All the bad things that are happening on planet Earth come from civilized people; people who are not, in theory, ‘savages’.”
• “If we did an anthropological study about your culture, we would then have the adequate qualifications and greater legitimacy to convince many people to become savage—not so intellectual, not so important. You would then face the everyday risk of being killed, of watching everything you love burn to the ground: your homes, your families, your children. But overall, at the end of it, you would be better people.”
• Lost traditional foods – so many varieties, and the space to grow. Fighting for their land. Important for biodiversity and ecology, but also for culture, taste, heritage. Extinction of species; extinction of cultures. “If we work on Guarani food autonomy and sovereignty, we will keep our people strong; that is our aim.”
• local, food autonomy, sovereignty
• Working alongside white systems – learning portuguese, getting state grants, but then always putting it back into the community, and separating themselves when necessary: “When I was nine years old, I joined your culture in order to study it. In the beginning, it was very painful.”
• “Even though I held a stable position as a teacher of the community, one upon which I could easily retire, I decided to stop. It was from that moment on that I was able to strengthen my own discourse, and to live up to the things I said when I was still a teacher. Back then, I shared my wage with the community; it was never just for myself. But still, I would be seen as a civil servant, a person who owned things and would have access to things that most people wouldn’t. Things are different now, and I am able to show that I can live just like my mom and dad used to, like my grandparents did, without a wage from the State.”
• Need to find a way to work together: “I think that many of the Juruá want to fight, many Juruá cry too, they are also angry. We just don’t know how to unite, how to join forces, how to join our studies and reflections; to fight hand in hand to protect our immense nature that is essential—not only for Brazil, but for the entire planet.”

Beautiful illustrations to accompany it: documentation of the women leading this struggle: land, farming, care, education, campaigning.

http://carolinacaycedo.com/banner-series-2010

“the artwork aims to visualize the women who are fighting not only against natural extractivism, but also against a patriarchal structure—the two struggles are inseparable.”

I attended UAL’s Earth Day, and quite frankly I am so sick and tired of hearing about recycling. I honestly don’t care any more. It even makes me angry. To see so many people who supposedly ‘get it’ – young, creative, passionate, talented people, channelling their own energy, and others’ into small individual actions, that literally won’t save the world. I was even frustrated to encounter so much environmentalism. If you actually care about the planet, about protecting it and saving it, you should care about debt, you should care about finance, about colonialism, capitalism, racism, war. I know it’s not fun, or pleasant, and yes there’s a role for community gardens to play, but not as an escape, otherwise you distract people’s energy from the real fight.

Folk Politics

All italics quoted from: https://www.designing-history.world/en/theorie/folk-politics/

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams define folk politics as a politics of immediacy: a way of political action and thinking that privileges the immediate over the mediated.

Folk Politics remains reactive. Its political mode is resistance: the initiative always comes from the political opponent. We see this clearly with the example of the surge of right-wing parties: they gradually shift the Overton Window, i.e. the framework of what can be thought and said, to the right, while the remaining “progressive” parties remain in defensive mode, unable to set their own issues.

• this is why the Labour 2017 manifesto felt so exciting! & Corbyn. It set the agenda. it was visionary. it didn’t just react to the opposition 
• this is why imagination & visioning is so important! It’s the vision, the ideology, the thought leadership that goes with activism and demanding change.

Folk Politics does not develop long-term goals and strategies. It has no real hope that the future could be substantially different. Folk Politics reproduces the political visions of the past instead of developing new visions.

The world has become increasingly complex in recent decades. It is becoming increasingly difficult to control our present. Simple solutions are no longer valid and the belief in the so-called grand narratives has been lost under postmodernity. There is a lack of narratives that make it possible to find our place in the world and to act in it. We no longer feel in a position to understand the world in all its complexity and to act within it.

Folk-political thinking is a reaction to this powerlessness. Folk politics reacts to the increasing complexity of the world by declaring this complexity to be its opponent. She says: “We must break down the complexity of the world to a level that allows us to understand it again and act effectively within it.

We must vehemently oppose the Folk-Political mindset — the challenges of our time demand that we act globally and in a coordinated manner.

another future is possible. And that is precisely why we have to change our tactics and strategies.

This requires confrontation with complexity. So we need to find new ways to navigate our complex world. Our project must not be a project of retreat. Instead, we have to fight to do justice to the situation in which we find ourselves. To break with Folk Politics, we need a Promethean Politics of the Future.

We need a politics of the Future, a discourse of complexity, an in-depth and entirely pragmatic structural and systemic critique, and a powerful, shared, achievable vision.

My practice must be about furthering these aims, about priming the space for a discourse of complexity, about normalising future visioning, about making people feel empowered and welcomed in that endeavour. My practice must supersede reactionism – it cannot exist only in opposition, but must create an independent culture.

overall points:

• 10: true objectivity is impossible, so the closest we can get to it is being really truly honest about the position from which we are seeing and describing, and trying to understand that position, and that way of seeing as deeply as possible, so to be as deeply honest about the observation as possible
  • “an argument for situated and embodied knowledges and an argument against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims”
• 11: “the alternative to relativism is partial, locatable critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology”
  • what’s relativism? a bad thing?
    • relativism is a way of being nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally
  • in general this is saying multiple connected knowledges, with much self knowledge behind them – interconnected, web, solidarity, conversation. Not a lone individiual OR PERSPECTIVE – too much uniformity in white male scientific knowledge – hegemony.
  • counter to conspiracy theories etc – no-one knows what to believe – need a strong web of truthful voices, that are honest about where the info is coming from
    • 17: “We seek those ruled by partial sight and limited voice – not partiality for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings SKs make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities not about isolated individuals”
• 13: The western eye has fundamentally been a wandering eye, a traveling lens – violent, conquering. “Western feminists also inherit some skill in learning to participate in revisualising worlds turned upside down in earth-transforming challenges to the views of the masters”
  • what does this mean? as in: now we want to revisualise worlds and turn things upside down, we can at least use the tools learnt from white men? is this not problematic? what about our own biases and privileges that we inherit with those skills
• 13: “the promise of objectivity: a scientific knower seems the subject position, not of identity, but of objectivity, that is, partial connection.” 
• 14: “struggles over what will count as rational accounts of the world are struggles over how to see. The terms of vision: the science questions in colonialism, the science question in exterminism…”
• 15-16: limitations of the visual metaphor: “it seems to present to consciousness already processed and objectified fields; things seem already fixed and distanced”
• 17: science = “better accounts of the world”
• “science becomes the paradigmatic model, not of closure, but of that which is contestable and contested”
• “The science question in F is about O as positioned rationality. Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions – of views from somewhere”
  • collective endeavour
• 19: “SKs require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource” 
• 22: Katie King: “apparatus of literary production” – “the emergence of literature at the intersection of art, business and technology… a matrix from which literature is born”
  • the text in time. historicising.

The unions are on strike. For restoration of pensions. For fair pay, job security, manageable workloads, equality. The value of pay in higher education has fallen by over 20% relative to inflation since 2009. Pensions have been subject to devastating cuts – amounting to 35% of staff’s guaranteed pension. To find out more about the reasons for the strikes check out the UCU website, and go here for specific info on the Four Fights and the UCU’s demands. To view the student union’s stance go here.

These strikes will cause significant disruption to our timetable over the next couple of weeks, just as it did in the run up to Christmas. I pay £6,650 a year for this course. I know many of my fellow students pay far more than this, due to international fees. This is a huge amount of money, especially for someone who believes education should be free. In the present political climate we’re encouraged by the Tory government to view it through the neoliberal lens: this is an investment in our futures. A guarantee towards better employment opportunities and more skilled jobs when we graduate. In the neoliberal argument, monetisation of higher education will mean competition between institutions, driving up the quality of the product delivered. Of course this is not what we’re seeing. The strikes show this.

Our studies, our already very limited contact time, will be significantly impacted by strike action – the current fight has been going on many years now, and currently shows no signs of going away. We will not receive replacement tutorials, nor a refund for hours missed. We will not get what we paid for.

This is of course the whole point of a strike. To cause disruption.

So, the question is, how to pass the disruption upstream? How to make sure the students don’t absorb all the shock of the strikes? They, after all, have done nothing wrong.

My instinct is that it is vital in these moments that students do not passively accept this disruption, this loss of tuition. For did we not enter into a contract with the uni when we handed over the money? And are they not letting their side of the deal down?

They are failing us by failing our tutors. They are failing them through casual contracts and unequal pay and conditions. They are failing us through undermining our tutor’s stability and their futures. They are failing us through reduced budgets, increased class sizes. This is what happens when you turn universities into businesses.

The conditions of the staff and tutors of the university are intimately connected to the conditions and experiences of the students of the university. I wish that there was more acknowledgement of that in the communications being put out about the strikes. It seems to me that a strong show of solidarity and support from the students would help the strikes succeed (though I’m no expert on strike history and tactics), since we do, after all, bring the money in. And it’s clear that better working conditions for the staff means a better experience for the students.

“University staff working conditions are student learning conditions; our fight for a better education system is inherently linked. A free, liberated university cannot truly exist without its staff being treated fairly and respectfully.”

Shahadah Shahril – SU Campaigns Officer

Collaboration would be mutually beneficial! By standing by the staff at this time we would be fighting in solidarity, but also for a better educational experience for ourselves! To find out how you can get involved and support the strike – go here.

Extinction Rebellion Blockade 15 Amazon Fulfilment Centres on Black Friday

On Black Friday, Extinction Rebellion blockaded 15 Amazon Fulfilment Centres, including 13 in the UK, 1 in Germany and 1 in Amsterdam, to call attention to Amazon’s exploitative and environmentally destructive business practices. We combined physical disruption and design. The design is partly to create photography opportunities to attract press and create good images that circulate. However it’s also about creating a visual intervention that forces people to rethink their perceptions of status quo. By subvertising, you take branding and well known elements of a brand’s image, and hijack them, subverting people’s expectations and associations with that image (or font, or colour scheme) and hopefully reprogram the way someone reacts to the original brand.

Much of my work this term has sought to answer this question of how do you unsettle people’s faith in institutions that do not serve them? and further: how do you inspire people to take matters into their own hands? To challenge these corporations who get rich off the exploitation of people and planet? To believe that alternatives are possible, and that we have the power to change things?

I believe actions like these are highly effective at this, through disruption on multiple levels.

(N.B I designed the stencil in the bottom three images, although sadly it wasn’t used on the banner & rocket for the main site)

As part of the Cross Year Studio on Pamphlets, I recreated our Jubilee for Climate Manifesto as a pamphlet.

I am interested in the design of manifestos, and exploring issues of authority, legitimacy, amplification in activist visual communications. I have been working for a while now in this style of “maybe my voice is not the one that needs to be heard” – of presenting my work quietly, unfinished, platforming others, creating open forums for conversation.

I sometimes feel self-conscious that this is at odds with much of the graphic design I do as an activist, which is usually campaigning, creating flyers and posters, trying to widely distribute a message, creating actions & banners that seek to get press attention. I write manifestos, press releases and speeches. It’s all about confidence, amplification & distribution.

For a change, I wanted to explore this side of the visuals: rhetoric & confidence. The manifesto has always fascinated me for this reason. How does the visual and physical form of the manifesto shape the audience’s interactions with it?

I also wanted to explore what it did to my chosen material – a manifesto I had co-written for Jubilee For Climate, a new campaign we’ve launched to address the root causes of the climate crisis. As with so much in activism, we’re a small team, with little time, so I’d made a banner version of this manifesto in the space of 30 mins. I utilised elements I associate with contemporary political design: bold sans serif italic font, All Caps, white lines & borders.

I did this for several reasons:

1. The solutions to climate change will be political
2. We are trying to counter the treatment of the climate crisis as a single issue
3. We are not simply ringing the alarm on climate, but are taking a step forwards to actually suggest solutions (which XR has avoided in the past).

In my pamphlet version, I utilised many of the design features of early modern pamphlets, including many of the oldest fonts – Blackletters for the titles, and Jenson for the body copy. I centred the text, created huge numerals, and staggered their spacing, mostly so you knew to read down the page, rather than across.

I used woodcut prints of the trumpets (which have a civil, ceremonial, historical vibe to them, whilst also having a thematic and etymological connection to ‘jubilee’: mid 17th century (originally in the sense ‘making a joyful noise’): from Latin jubilant- ‘calling, hallooing’.

I made them pocket size, so you wouldn’t be tempted to roll or fold them, and you’d be more likely to keep them. I gave them several paper types, for material interest, and for a high quality, luxury feel. The out sheet was a thick (expensive!) tracing paper, so I used the translucency to create an engaging aesthetic. My fellow activists said they induced pride in this thing we’d created, in contrast to the mass proliferation, cheap & quick as possible aesthetics we’re often stuck with.

I printed 100 and distributed them at the Lord Mayor’s Show, when the newly elected Lord Mayor (the global ambassador for the City of London) parades through London, from the Bank of England to Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown. This year Extinction Rebellion hijacked it to call out the huge role that the City of London plays in the climate crisis (if the CoL was a country, it would be the 14th largest emitter of carbon emissions in the world).

This is another form of subtervising – hacking into the aesthetics of luxury of the LMS, and possibly tricking people into thinking it’s part of the event. At the very least, it explored how to appeal to a different audience. I think people were much more likely to accept them than a flyer.

I sifted through the voice notes and interviews I’d collected, and sorted them into sections. Nearly everyone had communicated the values they held, with regards to what justice means or should mean. Several had found it necessary to address the failings or shortfalls of the existing justice system, and many addressed the innate challenges with pinning down a definition, or creating a system that works for everyone.

And then finally I compiled them into a 30 second clip that speaks to each of these three areas:

Reminder of the ongoing aims of my practice:

• create, stimulate, encourage change, spur people to action
• change the way people think, add complexity, nuance and depth to people’s understanding of the world and the way it works
• critique communication practices within activism, and possibly probe and suggest alternative forms of activism?
• platform and amplify marginalised voices
• “forge more attentive and open structures to provide opportunities for others to be heard” (Lupton on De Bretteville)

Expanding on the Parliament Action, and Reformulation as activism.

At the time of the first tutorial I was coming up to my first ever trial. In November 2020 I scaled the Houses of Parliament to hang a giant letter from a group called Africans Rising to the government and people of the UK, asking for an honest acknowledgement and apology for the true human cost of slavery and colonialism, and debt cancellation and reparations for Africa (among other things).  At the time of this action we were doing the Unit 1 “formulate” brief, and considering how processes of reformulation (transforming, scaling, recontextualising) changes the meaning or interpretation of existing material. This letter was written by activists on the African continent and transferred to us as a word document. We were asked how we could help deliver this letter, this message, to the people and leaders of the UK, i.e. the government and the Queen. We considered a range of approaches, all of which meant considering how the new form and context would impact the communication. In the end, we decided on a handmade banner, 7m x 12m (possibly the biggest banner we’ve ever made in the art factory) to be hung from the Houses of Parliament. Parliament was the only appropriate target (as I recently argued in court) because it placed the letter’s appeal firmly in the context of politics: and the solutions to these issues are political. The banner was handmade, in seven 1.5m strips, that were then sewn together. We had to project the letter onto the fabric from a 12m distance, again, doing this in strips, taking care to get the angles right and not distort it. A small team worked on this over many days, using paint markers to trace the outlines of the letters (for a total of 500 words) and then taking it over to the painting table to colour the letterforms in. Afterwards the strips were sewn together, another multi-person job, as the volume of fabric was simply huge by this point, and needed a second person to help pass it through the sewing machine. Hand-making it was partly an issue of cost, and partly one of values. It took a huge amount of labour, care and collaboration—working practices I explored a lot last term—and which I believe contribute to the meaning of the end product: the process is the medium. It was an act of devotion, solidarity and allyship, as we pledged our time, labour and care to support the Africans Rising cause, and it was an action that has forged a great relationship between us. Extinction Rebellion actively works in this way, hand-painting, -printing and -making all its visual materials, because those aesthetics of craft and care and DIY culture communicate some of the vital values of the movement: empathy, resourcefulness and passion.

Collaborative making is something that happens very naturally in activism, as Evan Nicole Brown explores in her Futuress article, “An Accidental Game of Telephone”, which unearths how a group of women designed the Black Panther logo. It was not a conscious collaborative project, nor even a conscious design project – like so much activist design, it happened on the fly, in brief moments, stolen between other aspects of organising a movement. Lowndes County’s existing white supremacist ruling party used as a white rooster as its symbol. Jennifer Lawson says, “I recall that John Hulett [a local organizer and activist] then said: ‘What we need is a mean black cat to run that white rooster out of this county.’” Ruth Howard Chambers, a SNCC member, sent a rough sketch of a panther to the LCFO team in Alabama, and Dorothy Zellner was asked to tidy it up and turn it into a logo. Jennifer Lawson adapted it for use in pamphlets and printed material, and years later Lisa Lyons was hired to adapt the logo for the Oakland, California chapter. As such it was adapted and iterated, its form shifting somewhat with each different use, only finally becoming solidified in posterity (though many different versions of it were operative at the time). None of these women sought credit or celebration, or sought to claim ownership over the design. Its collaborative history is written into the many versions that proliferate over time, but the strength and courage of the image is never lost.

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Serbian activist Serdja Popovic writes in Blueprint for a Revolution that the Otpor! (meaning revolution) clenched fist logo similarly came from a scribble on a piece of paper, and was quickly adapted into something that could be easily and widely spray painted; this was their main recruitment method in the formative days of the movement. They quickly spray-painted 300 fists in one evening, and when the citizens of Belgrade woke up the next day, “this gave people the sense that something large and well-organized was lurking just beneath the surface.” Of course the principles of branding, and the importance of a having a unifying symbol, are well known to us graphic designers, but it’s useful and interesting for me to consider this from an activist and movement-building perspective. 

The banner we made was the result of a collective working, editing, designing and making process, between activists in Africa and the UK, something visible in the imperfections of the handprinted lettering (in a variety of hands), in the sections sewn together, in the many names signed on the bottom, and in the number of us it took to get it in place. Despite its many words, the letter was perfectly legible from Westminster Bridge, where many people stopped to look and read, and it is legible in the photos we have of it. The scale of it gave it gravity and importance, as did its new context: the words of this African movement, fighting for justice, peace and dignity, were now set against the backdrop of the grandeur and wealth of the Houses of Parliament, wealth that was built on the profits of colonialism, slavery and empire. It was the best platform we could give these voices, the voices of people whose countries have been exploited for centuries by the people in that building, and the political processes that happen within those walls. 

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In my work with Ocean Rebellion we use  mischief, humour and spectacle to get a wide audience on board – people are entertained, and thus intrigued, and willing to engage. We frequently use projections as a way to get our messages out there; projecting onto the target sites makes the message clear, and also undermines the authority and legitimacy of the targets. Projecting something onto the building itself, or else using the site and its architecture in other ways, makes the building part of the protest, something which is especially powerful when the grandeur and pomp of the building seeks to assert authority or respectability. This is partly inspired by Led By Donkeys, whose work emphasises the power of recontextualising even more strongly, since they frequently use pre-existing material that’s already in the public domain. They usually take things that politicians and world leaders have said, and simply reflect it back to them, alongside facts and statistics that reveal their failures,  inadequacies or outright lies. They blow their tweets up to billboard size, or project messages about Brexit onto the white cliffs of Dover and videos about Boris Johnson’s hypocrisy onto the Houses of Parliament.

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Another fascinating example of recontextualising is The Museum of Neoliberalism curated by Gavin Grindon and Darren Cullen, aka ‘Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives’. A collection of prime examples of neoliberal culture, that may go unnoticed in every day life, where neoliberalism is all around us,  but when gathered together and placed alongside one another, paint a clearer picture of the underlying value systems inherent in a neoliberal culture. Added to these are quotes and commentaries from political and social theorists, and satirical responses to neoliberalism by artists and activists. There’s something especially entertaining about it coming together in museum form. A museum suggests legitimacy, as though something is important enough to be worthy of collection and study. It gives the subject matter importance and gravitas, and suggests in this case that it is perhaps worthy of study in order to understand humanity and society. The museum context also suggests something historical, lending perhaps a hopeful optimism to the conversation, as though we are looking back on neoliberalism as an outdated curiosity from a distant future. It perhaps lends the audience the distance to be critical about our present society. 

I guess all of these are forms of brandalism,  subtervising and hacktivism. They all hijack and play upon existing methods of communicating authority and strength, in order to subvert the dominant modes of communication and the values they espouse. In doing so, all seek to expose the dominant power systems that structure and shape our society, so that they might be recognised  for what they are, and challenged. So much of this power is invisible and pervasive. 

This analysis has made me more keen to continue to pursue some form of catalogue, collection or archive as a way of projecting and distributing the analysis I have done of the visual communication systems of our present day justice system. Perhaps I would like to find a way to bring in humour to this, though I acknowledge that my material is less innately humorous (or inconsistent or hypocritical) as much of the material dealt with in these examples. However I think it may be possible to use humour to suggest the absurdity that our legal system is more concerned with communicating its authority than its values.