SPRAWL (PROPAGANDA ABOUT PROPAGANDA) X S:S17 (1)
Metahaven have been referred to as strategic graphic design agency and a radical design think tank as well as a set of political designers-as-artists. When taking a look at their work, it quickly becomes evident why it is hard to pinpoint the works of the Amsterdam-based collective founded by Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk. From wrapping electronic musician Holly Herndon in a veil of interface icons and national security agency logos to selling Wikileaks merch on eBay and publishing a design book for our dystopian age, Metahaven’s practice is out to break boundaries. In times when states are constantly amping up their soft power skills and terrorist groups are producing HD promotional videos, Metahaven is out to dismantle the notion and the dangerous powers of branding and to combat it with a new aesthetic of politics.
Metahaven are serving as a prime example for how interdisciplinary the work of designers has become today. In times when post-internet art has blurred the lines between fashion, art and (corporate) design and post-factual politics have shown that the ability to (visually) trigger emotions has become the most important skill a politician can possess today, designers can be filmmakers, publishers – and political activists. Consequentially, Metahaven creates documentaries, books, products and artworks based on an extensive amount of research. Their 2016 documentary The Sprawl has been rightfully compared to the films of Adam Curtis, who uses compelling imagery and provides his well-researched information in the form of an emotional visual essay: propaganda against propaganda, as The Sprawl’s subtitle suggests.
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The peculiar aesthetics of Metahaven – think mid-2000s Word Art, primary colours and neofuturist computer graphics – are just as impressive as the collective’s sensibility for trends and cultural developments. Three years before Pepe the frog became a reoccurring debate topic in the U.S. elections and the Cult of Kek cheered as Donald Trump was elected president, Metahaven predicted the political power of memes in their eBook “Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? Memes, Design and Politics”. “Jokes are an open-source weapon of politics”, they write. In times when this is scarily truer than ever, the book can be read as a manifesto for the political opposition to “fight nonsense with nonsense”.
For SLEEK #52, Metahaven collaborated with Ukranian fashion designer Yulia Yefimtchuk, bringing together her latest collection with graphic images and voice transcripts from their movie The Sprawl. A selected number of prints from the editorial are now available on SLEEK Art. Head over to the site to purchase these works or learn more about the collective!
SPRAWL (PROPAGANDA ABOUT PROPAGANDA) X S:S17 (1)
SPRAWL (PROPAGANDA ABOUT PROPAGANDA) X S:S17 (1)