Coined by sociologists Donald Horton & Richard Wohldenoting, a relationship characterized by a one-sided sense of intimacy felt by a fan for a prominent figure.
ACCELERATION ACROSS THE RUBICON
Henri Lefebvre, French philosopher and sociologist, wrote The Production of Space at the birth of post-war consumerism. Drawing from Marx’s theory of alienation, he described how art being separated from life culminated in the estrangement of people from their labour and species-being; demanding for an everyday free from the logic of the spectacle, escaping commodified isolation to return to lived experience, and reclaiming transformative power by rejecting bourgeoise commodification. “Space is a product... It is not a thing among things but rather embodies social relations in their coexistence and simultaneity.” Lefebvre called for the re-aestheticization of art that was confined to institutions, transforming lived experience.
Stable meaning structures or “third places”, a term coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, are civic spaces serving as community builders, and they are collapsing. In modern times, the free market is treated as an all-encompassing system promoting secular values like individualism and scientific progress, speculative realist ideologies hinging on capitalism appearing such as Landian accelerationism. Following the mass shutdown of comedy clubs, arcades, and the impossibility of renting real estate due to inflation and stagnation in wages— youth culture has been sublimated and gone online. Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt described power as communication, not coercion and control; power “exists only as long as the group keeps together”. (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 200) We connect through social media, develop parasocial relationships, eventually falling down rabbit holes of arcane web drivel. Rebellious non-participation is the norm; centennials are becoming increasingly atheistic, the UK more cosmopolitan, and as churches are attended less, sanctity of the family, faith, and civic participation is valued less, and youths try to find their own meaning in this neoliberal age. “God is dead,” (Nietzsche, 2010, §125) Nietzsche proclaimed, addressing the crisis of meaning. Nihilism thrives now the possibility of becoming is replaced by consuming on a digital marketplace of souls.
Coined by sociologists Donald Horton & Richard Wohldenoting, a relationship characterized by a one-sided sense of intimacy felt by a fan for a prominent figure.
Nick Land's political philosophy of accelerationism, embracing capitalism’s drive toward a post-human techonomic singularity.
GIF © Home Box Office, Inc. (The Sopranos (1999)).
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06/10/2025
We were tasked to amplify our everyday environment, and I made a conscious effort to capture the rawest parts of Nottingham. I applied Lefebvre’s thought, taking a psychogeographical approach. Unitary Urbanism, key praxis of Situationist International, rejected the Euclidian approach to urban architectural design, an approach that produced sterile, alienating environments. Their revolutionary approach theorised by key Situationist writer Guy Debord included “dérives” or drifts: wandering and pondering about your relation to the environment, mapping your emotional topography, “a playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects.”(Debord, 1956/2006, pp. 50‑54).
International organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. (1957-1972)
Outdoor communal areas drew me in. The Tram Line skatepark spot particularly— it was cliquey, but hardly unwelcoming in the way films back in the noughties would portray it. Street skating is dying alongside alternative cultures like punk rock, and the environment was reflective of this. Graffiti that seemed almost performative, music played from an old system, sparsely populated considering the number of students in Nottingham. It made me long for an adolescence I didn’t have, a coming-of-age arthouse film like Mid90s: cool, distinctive, aesthetic. I felt out of place walking through the area.
A gripe I (among countless others) have with our government representatives is that their understanding of basic civics does not enable them comprehension of the disconnect between economic growth and the economic realities most people live in. Homelessness is strife in Nottingham; rarely do I go out without being approached and asked for change. It’s particularly rough around my area, I pictured the weeds, litter, and old furniture strewn across gardens. The terraced houses themselves have seen better days. Our place has a leaky tap, a dodgy boiler, creaking floorboards, a bathroom cupboard that has a bucket with moss in it for some reason. Despite it all, I like it. It’s comfortable, a little kitsch, and full of my roommates' tchotchkes. Perfectly imperfect. Dérive hlped me to noticing the beauty in the mundane everyday, warts and all.
I created a collection of digital collages from my photography influenced by post-internet art, Blockchain platform Solana’s “Avant-Gay” scene at the forefront and serving as my main point of reference. "Traitmaxxed" NFT schizocollages aim to be as crude as they sound, the excess of "traits" create a maximalist, idiosyncratic appearance. Unexpectedly crypto enthusiasts and artists have united on the information highway, playing memetic games, exploiting the mechanics of viral propagation by moving as a "crypto cult".
Captioning the images with mainly socialist quotes/slogans in a graphic style inspired by a subculture affiliated with the e/acc, a movement unconcerned with the adverse consequences of no-holds-barred innovation, is a little ironic. I think the images do convey the tension between the real and wired— the old children's bicycle discarded among leaves leaving a nostalgia for simpler times, a romanticisation of plain predigital life when micro-tribal identities had yet to supplant real community. In a technofeudal age we are data points in a digital fiefdom, in response to structural alienation we must reassert community beyond algorithmic mediation— teenage angst is only exacerbated through digital escapism, an overlooked form of addiction.
Effective accelerationism, a 21st-century tech-centric movement advocating for rapid, unrestricted technological progress (particularly in AI)
The Avant Gay art movement emerged as a reaction against the early Ethereum NFT "fine art chain" scene. Miladymaker is a notable example, neo-chibi and ironic.
WORKSHOP 1
9/10/2025
Our first task was a one minute excersise illustrating the person sitting opposite pulling exaggerated expressions. Luckily I had the most enthusiastic of partners (see following interpretations of him posing sideways and upside-down).
Words contradicting their expressions are written underneath, changing the feeling of the image entirely. His seemingly overjoyed expression paradoxically paired with "melancholy" makes us wonder, is it a facade, or a manic cry for help?
Choosing one of these characters, we were tasked to locate a point of interest from out the 9th floor windows, considering how our character would interact with the environment below and illustrating them doing so. Stress was put on not overworking a piece, consideration behind the composition matters more than technical ability.
Ultimately I chose 'FEAR', his expression seems sinister yet playful, the accompanying word gives a sense of unease. I aimed to play with the fact he was upside-down.
The resulting collages are quite visceral, unlike the subdued calm I felt while drifting, but suit the revolutionary message of the graffiti I pictured: "NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR". Given the chuavinistic climate, we are met with increasingly subversive art, vandalism barely scratching the surface. "All space is occupied by the enemy. We are living under a permanent curfew. Not just the cops — the geometry." (Kotányi & Vaneigem, 1961/2006, §6) is a quote from Raoul Vaneigem, founder of Situationist International, encapsulating the flaws of modern urban life— streets are layed out restrictively, and so I used the photo of a drain to appear like bars of a jail cell, confining, policed not just by authority but by the urban environment itself.
Moving forward I aim to include similar digital processes, merging traditional illustrations with edited photographs, producing busy, iterative results that appropriately communicate the chaos of online spaces. Excessive posterization and overlaying images with blending modes gave a distinctly graphic feel that abstracts discernible forms, effective for conveying virtual unreality.
I came across a crane on my walk around Nottingham and immediately felt it a more intersting and fitting setting to place my character in. To convey fear alongside the devious playfulness of his expression, I drew him him hanging precariously from a lattice boom crane, perspective from below, emphasising the scale and vertigo. The underlighting on his face makes him look sinister.
This workshop was challenging, not only did I have to push my perfectionist boundaries and grind out unpolished artwork fast, envisioning a scenario simply based upon a 1 minute portrait was tough. I will continue to consider characterisation through a spatial lense, how personality can be easily visually conveyed through relationship to the environment.
At first, I was uncertain about where to position my character. I began with a simple sketch of the Arkwright Building viewed from the Design and Digital Arts balcony. My initial thought was to place the character standing on the balcony ledge, his manic expression conveying a sense of anxiety. This composition however would have sacrificed the most compelling element of the sketch, the inversion, the fact that he was upside-down.
The balcony itself presented another challenge; its sleek glass boundary reminding me of a scene in Succession, constructed in a way that made it difficult to imagine a believable way for the character to hang from it.
In the end, the idea felt too grounded and familiar, right inside the building I was constantly in. I decided to explore new settings to provoke more imaginative ideas.
WORKSHOP 2
Book 1 - Present Day, Present Time
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13/10/2025
Feedback from my tutor suggests I overworked the zine post assembly, negative space could have been utilised better for an impactful spread that would improve contrast and visual weight. Some spreads seem natural and unself-conscious, others unbalanced in their clutter. The point of the excersise besides was to get into a flow of creative childlike artlessness, the intricacy in some of the illustrations takes away from the abstraction. Since when presented to my internet-using peers it was still indicipherable, in my next attempt I'll try convey the narrative clearer. One idea is starting the book with a simple graphic that exudes teenage insecurity, "Why don't women like nice guys?", an innocuous comment preceding the incel pipeline.
We were set the task of drawing abstractly on A2 before dividing into A4 and re-assembling the pages into a zine, producing a random result. I tried emulating the same maximalist incoherence of the post-internet schizocollages. References are strewn throughout relevant to the internet (art, discourse, and symbols alike): Pepe the frog and wojaks, futurist Mussolini art, figures such as Luigi Mangione. It appears a cultural collage, but lacks the explicitness in its relation to the internet, the images becoming meaningless without context. I drew Schloss Neuschwanstein, a watercolour by Hitler, representing both rampant neo-Nazism online and debate around Hitler (and fascists in general) lacking in artistic merit, however none of the people who flicked through my zine noticed this, and to them it was just as is— a castle. The result is more a litmus-test for the chronically online, a book of internet easter-eggs.
Assuming I do go down the book route rather than an audio-visual, I think a discordant visual narrative could work, similar pages of internet-vomit overwhelming the space, contrasted with a mundane portayal of everyday reality. An impactful end to the book could be a direct screen clipping of the last messages a real individual sent before commiting a school shooting, or a sign-off from a manifesto.
Zine Research
The Age of Earthquakes by Douglas Coupland, Shumon Basar, and Hans Ulrich Obrist is an updating of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is The Massage (an encapsulation of how technology and design impacted 1960s culture) for what they descibed as our "extreme present".
The zine decodes a world redefined by the Internet. Douglas Coupland sardonically described the indifference we have to great feats of technology that shape the way we live. "We have these amazing things that just dropped into our laps, and now we just want something new. That’s the other part of the relationship with the future we just spoke about it. You’re scared of what’s coming next, but you also want it. What would you call that kind of relationship? Co-dependent?"
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The zine utilises typography as well as images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists and graphic designers to update what Quention Fiore described in 1967 as “a dialogue between the computer and the book”. An obvious design consideration was the usage of contrast. Hans Ulrich Obrist emphasised the importance of the "classic empty page," and how, in a way, the book is a medium. "For the avant garde of the 60s, the artist book is very much at the call of conceptual art."
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McLuhan’s presentation of visceral images and bold text is emulated in The Age of Earthquakes, readers being grabbed and warned in a format not dissimilar to self-help books. We are threatened and enlightened to what accelerated advances in technology and communication are doing to our collective and individual psyche.
“The paperback itself has become a vast mosaic world in depth... a transformation of book culture into something else.” McLuhan had said in 1964,
the ‘something else’ being the current culture of addiction to screens.
I aim to embed technology into paperback in a similar way, reappropriating internet-coined phrases to turn them into a kind of literature.
La nueva carne (“the new flesh”) is a magazine project by Fuego Camina Conmigo, an independent creative agency based in Barcelona, aiming to awaken people of "the changes that the digital world, like a capricious god provokes in us and at the same time does not allow us to assimilate because we are too immersed in it." The human being is changing as a result of the digital era-- the magazines cover topics such as identity, transhumanism, privacy, big data, and how memory and technology interact.
Issue three I picked up, one that looks at faith in the digital age, not just religious faith but faith in technology-- belief in immortality via transhumanism, AI as a new kind of deity.
Our digital routines (Check notifications, swipe, repost, refresh) become ritualized behaviors that shape how we experience community. Invisible code and algorithms govern our lives, a digital scripture. Our smartphones, clouds, servers, we treat devices as portals to truth and connection, even though we can’t see how they work, becoming our objects of faith. Tech futurism becomes prophecy. Ideas like the singularity, AI superintelligence, or techno-immortality resemble eschatology. Our faith is outsourced to machines, a secular belief in the invisible networks that connect us forming a new kind of mysticism.
This sort of digital esotericism I aim to incorporate into my book/audio-visual, portraying the tribal formations that mimic the sociological structure of religious communities; the myth, doctrine, leadership, and taboo.
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SIGNAL A journal of International Political Graphics & Culture is an ongoing book series covering political graphics and cultural production of international resistance and liberation struggles. It is edited by Justseeds collective members Josh MacPhee and Alec Dunn, a decentralised organisation of artists contributing graphics to grassroots struggles for justice.
I picked up the ninth edition. Aaron Terry discussed the film posters of the Eastern Bloc in it, and I'd seen an interview before In Signal: 03 about his mobile silkscreen setup, a sort of traveling printshop he brings to community spaces. The goal is to demystify the process of screen printing and make political graphics a collective act instead of a studio-bound art practice. Its fitting of Signal’s ethos, how graphic art intersects with social movements around the world, the importance of participation, deconstructing the idea of art being reserved for the elite.
Don’t _____ Me, I ______ For _____ © Alex Lukas (2025).
Anyway, going back to the edition I read recently, the particular section that caught my attention was "Print-On-Demand America Great Again: The Aesthetics and Means of Production of the Far Right" by Alex Lukas. I've long been enthralled by the so-bad-its-good visual culture of MAGA America; the trucker caps, flag-covered rally on wheels, suburban devotional kitsch and mar-a-lago faced trad wives. Alex Lukas spent several years on Amazon downloading the graphics of vendors selling custom flags to explore populist republican visual design trends in print-on-demand graphics. Don’t _____ Me, I ______ For _____ is a series of emblazoned flags with phrases like "Don't blame me I voted for him", which gained popularity after Trump's 2020 loss. Its the exploration of how digital marketplaces have shifted political graphic production that interests me, the ironically copy paste patriotic aesthetics intended to flaunt individual rights. It feels like an easy thing I could satirise, the MAGA "cult" having one of the more absurd political uniforms.
Left Cultures brings together the writing and art of a wide range of contemporary leftist voices. Unlike The Age of Earthquakes its less format focused rather prioritising literary substance. "Ne travaillez jamais" by Robert Rubbish (incredible name, disproving nominative determinism) stuck with me. "Never work" is what it translates to, what Rubbish described as one of the most radical statements he'd ever encountered. Originally scrawled on a Parisian wall by Situationist theorist Guy Debord, it became emblematic of the revolutionary spirit that shaped the May 1968 student uprisings.
What struck me, however, wasn’t the recount of history of visual protest but Rubbish’s proactivity in tracing that history physically. Starting with a single photograph, he went on an urban drift in true Situationist fashion to locate the original wall, and lo and behold up the Rue de Senie he found it. His discovery underscores how physical exploration and emotional resonance intertwine. It was quite touching to know even with the grafitti scrubbed away the revolutionary words still resonated with someone, and that the workings of a disbanded collective haven't gone forgotten.
WELCOME TO THE POST-TRUTH WORLD
"Even those who thought they were attacking the system - the radicals, the artists, the musicians, and our whole counterculture - actually became part of the trickery, because they, too, had retreated into the make-believe world, which is why their opposition has no effect and nothing ever changes."
Bank of quotes & notes (expand upon & write about)(WORK IN PROGRESS)
"Radicals across America turned to art and music as a means of expressing their criticism of society. They believed that instead of trying to change the world outside the new radicalism should try and change what was inside people's heads, and the way to do this was through self-expression, not collective action."
Detatching themselves and retreating into an ironic coolness a whole generation were beginning to lose touch with the reality of power
"It was the mood of the era and the revolution was deferred indefinitely. And while we were dozing the money crept in"
The old idea of using politics to change the world and the new idea that you could run the world as a stable system. Kissinger had no time for the emotional turmoil of political ideologies. He belueved history had always been a struggle for power between groups and nations
Palestinians didn't want to assimilate into Syria Jordan or Lebanon. They call themselves "Those who go back" "al-a'iduun," you say in Arabic.
One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation"-- you were so much a part of a system that it was impossible to see beyond it.
Cyberspace, counterculture of 1960s, LSD, Escape from Ronald Reagan's right-wing politics, safe haven. liberated from old corrupt hierarchies of politics and explore new ways of being. John Perry Barlow "cyberthons", bringing the cyberspace movement together
A declaration of independence from cyberspace
phiber optik & Acid phreak Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception
Perception management- reality is simply something that you handle.
We live in a "runaway world" Ulrich Beck. Everything is interconnected. It is impossible to predict outcomes. The catalogue of natural disasters proves this. Politicians had to givw up anyway to change the world. Banker Larry Fink worked on a giant computer that make the future predictable. to predict the rrisks of deals and investments. guides and controls assets
AI-- Weizenbaum/ Eliza. "In an age of individualism, what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them"
The old idea of democratic politics, that it gave a voice to the weak against the powerful, was eroded. In the real world not everything can be predicted by collecting data from the past. The banks that had lent Trump millioins discovered he could no longer pay the interest on the loans. His empire was facing bankrupcy.
ALGORITHM
As the intelligent systems online gathered ever more data, new forms of guidance began to emerge. Social media created filters - complex algorithms that looked at what individuals liked - and then fed more of the same back to them. In the process, individuals began to move, without noticing, into bubbles that isolated them from enormous amounts of other information. They only heard and saw what they liked. And the news feeds increasingly excluded anything that might challenge people's pre-existing beliefs.
Arab Spring first protests in Egypt were organised on Facebook. "There are no heroes -- we were all heroes" "This revolution belonged to the internet youth" -Wael Ghonim. Organising a revolution without leaders
"Angry people click more" The radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead, it was becoming a fuel that was feeding the new systems of power and making them ever more powerful.
© British Broadcasting Corporation. (HyperNormalisation (2016)).
© Martha Rosler. (Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)).
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13/10/2025
Book 2 - My Twisted Simulation
I overdid the small text, scale wasn't utilised in regards to contrast. Using more bold typography that takese up space would break up some of the wordy pages. what will i do next who is the intended audience
In my second book I considered contrast more, the result is a clearer conveyance of my topic. I wrote excerpts of Elliot Rodger's manifesto "My Twisted World", subsequently inspiring the title. The replacement of "world" with "simulation" was to convey the idea of the internet being a space of hyperreality-- the user no longer engages with actual people they consider their political opponents; radicalised individuals enter extremist ecosystems, hyperreal ideological worlds that feel more true than lived experience. Most of Elliot's (and many other incels) issues are self-manifestations they affirmed through their enabling algorithms.
Structurally, the first page of this book does more to establish the theme than the entirety of Present Day, Present Time, a simple google search being the seemingly innocent starting point before a great unravelling. I again stole aphorisms, spam, slogans and infamous UI from the internet, reading as far more poetic in this format, a technique the creators of The Age of Earthquakes used. Different styles meshsed together such as the copy of the amasteurish Sonichu #0 comic contrasted with the bold and graphical rendition of Yakub make for an interesting mixed-media read. I showed this to my peer who's quite online and the readability has certainly improved, topically it was more obvious. I have to be careful to find a balance internet esoterics that isn't too cryptic to the point its indicipherable even to internet-dwelling NEETs.
The collection of paintings above I did as the very first assignment we were set over the Summer holidays, 4 lies and 1 truth. I chose the topic China out of many others as we tend to underestimate our susceptibility to propaganda. Major Western powers paint China as an authoritarian Communist state, Orwellian and technocratic. Because of it I created art based upon harmful stereotypes: China being a surveillance-state, having globe conquering ideas, being un-democratic, the Chinese being smarter than the average Anglo (a sort of race-science-y stance).
Seeing David Dees' art in La nueva carne, I came to appreciate the artistry behind schizocollages. Dees has inspired unironic contemporary propaganda in the form of memes with his insane works. They capture the absurdity of conspiracies like QAnon, 5G, and Tylenol and vaccinations causing autism (very sane, Trump).
It has spawned waves of satirical and serious modern Agitpop graphics, and I hope to employ some of these digital collaging techniques to evoke the same feeling.
I submitted this piece to the Illustration Open Challenge, the process can be read about in more depth here.
