I think the concept of someone anonymously making a graphic piece of misinformation (both purposefully and accidentally misinformed) and injecting it into the ether to be consumed by anyone is interesting to me
Someone’s aspect of understanding being so real and authentic to them but removed from myself
North America and middle Canada and US has always been interesting to me because it’s easy for me to ridicule while living in my highly diverse, populated, metropolitan city
The two sides of giver and receiver, how Richard Doty can purposefully spread misinformation for the journalists to latch onto and make their own conspiracies. Spreading misinformation that he, himself, knew was incorrect but the public believed to be true.
I think as designers we secretly love to make up fake science and menial graphics for things that don’t need it. Oh I’m talking about a philosophical concept? Here’s a graphic that is a box and a circle with some arrows because surely that’s the correct way of doing it. My thoughts about these things are sooooo important I have to make a graphic to go alongside it. I also think in that way we can empathize with these conspiracy theorists because these graphics feel, well, incredibly gratifying. It feels like I am proving myself correct. That once this graphic is made, you HAVE to take me more seriously. Because at it’s reduced form, we’re in the business for you to take things seriously. My job is to communicate to the public that this thing is important for you to think about even for a second. Serious can still be fun, wanting for you to take my playfulness beyond face value. It must be satisfying for conspiracists when they make these graphics, they must feel like well now people CAN’T ignore what I have to say. We both can’t help ourselves to an illustration that might not mean anything for the purpose of making sense
I’m a cynic
I am fascinated with this hyper paranoia as a result of surveillance state, for people, myself included to see signs in everything. As a result of being watched we are doing self fulfilling section of the panopticon where we are surveilling ourselves and drawing conclusions in a way that makes sense to us (believing that a higher power must have control over the people that control us)
daily cryptics, parameters of a conspiracy, what makes people believe in these theories
conspiracies as a way to talk about X through the form of Y/pseudoscience graphics OR
X as a way to talk about conspiracies through the form of Y/pseudoscience graphicslike an oscilloscope was the vessel to address perversion through the form of readymade objects
I want to do more and learn more with this but I am already concerned that this is corny and overdone because it’s been a very popular thing to talk about these days and I’m sure everyone has an opinion on it. It’s a tight rope to walk for whatever the project is to be serious or for perception to be the genre of contemporary art people roll their eyes at.