The moment has come when the logos, whatever condition they’re in, have to be cut loose from the cozy confines of my desktop and sent out into the wilds of the blogosphere.
MacNab argues that in each disaster there is pattern of energy that is its essence– that is in fact characteristic of each disaster’s human element (all disasters have them–we are such messy solipsists as a species). Numbers, especially, have deep psychological and cultural resonances, even as they simply mark what is present structurally in the disaster or entity. The figure that I chose to embody the disaster was, oddly, a mathematical probability graph. It is dissying possibility as well as a tacit acknowledgment of its role as a phantasm: nothing can really graph the disaster as it’s happened– no probability curve, no spreadsheet is up for it. In most of the images, I’ve chosen to figure this abstraction as a monster: Leif Erikson and Odin each get to take shots at it. It also reminded me of a post-industrial incarnation of the beasts that attack in Ragnarok, the end of the world in the Norse Eddas.
It is striking graphically: primary colors for the boxes and a tripartite structure of rigid squarish branches and more triangular branches. MacNab writes that “In the third, the tension is resolved and the lost unity is restored,” and, as in dialectical thinking, it is composed of the prior one and two, and yet more than it. Three often apears in these images: a figure (human), the monster (the probability graph) and some graphic element, be it an additional picture (foreclosed house, etc) or just a shape.
A further pattern I’ve noticed in my designs is a fondness for gradients. Although I am still getting thehang of Adobe Illustrator after a couple years away from it, I found the gradient a useful way to convey visually and affectively what I thought the disaster was about: the opposition between hard and fast rules (the graph monster) and the areas of gradation in our strange late capitalist lives. It was also a rather effective way to evoke both explosion (nuclear, perhaps) and implosion (black holes, even) in the same circular pattern. MacNab doesn’t make use of gradients, but I presume that’s because she’s primarily working as a print artist: there are certain limitations when working in a printed medium. One of the parameters of this assignment was that the logos be easily disseminated and intuited.My images are actually rather easy to replicate (I could assemble the raw bits in less than ten minutes, usually) and intuit and yet, I hope, there is a feeling of both dread, of a choice made to “defend” ones territory, even against the absurd and terrible abstraction of the credit default graph. I didn’t limit myself to the confines of print media but instead thought about what would via an electrate sensibility.
I have two favorites from this batch of logos and one chosen, final product. The first is the the rainbow gradient protester-cum-copper with the default graph in the background. I feel that this juxtaposition of images captures what Klingmann deemed as essential in branding experience in casino architecture: the visual icons of the disaster. In my case, a term came into usage about half way through my blogging experiment (my disaster is still on going!): the saucepan revolution. The images of protesters and a cop, nailed with chunky fermented dairy product, have, if my blog stalking is any indication, reached “icon” status. The placement of these images on a square, shifting background from warm, fiery colors to cool colors at first glance oversimplifies the possible subject positions one can take up in the disaster– participant (warm color) and enforcer (cool color): however, I feel that the gradient challenges this simplistic, but intuitively potent construct.
The second favorite is the one I’ve chosen to go with. Its much simpler and cleaner, in terms of design. In it, Odin is tangled up in some plant or snake life–I like the ambiguity as it could be either/both: Odin was impaled in a tree for several days while he learned runes AND he fought snakes during the Norse end of the world: Ragnarok. During Ragnarok, volcanoes explode, things flood, a battle that is all but certain defeat for the gods is waged, anyways, because that’s what norse gods do: yes, the norse gods die, although the survivors on earth (about two of them) restart human civilization.
Even if this allusive baggage isn’t immediately intuited from the image– although Icelandians and probably Scandanavians in general would do so–the image of a man tangled, knifing his way through, speaks to the subjective experience of the economic crisis as well as ironically commenting upon it. This is the great “battle” of our times, only it is fought against mathematical models, indifferent banks, and lots of red tape. The simple positioning of “us” and “them” becomes less possible, although the urgency to take up “arms” (pots and pans!) does not. The Credit graph lurks in the back like a further snakey, viney thing to be taken contended with. The “third” figure in this image is the yellow–>black radial gradient. Yellow was chosen because, first, it was the only primary color not present in the graph. The radial itself also evokes images of an implosion or explosion: the limits of human production and experience as well its implied subsequent nadir. It also, as MacNab argues, is a circle: it is both everything and nothing, unity and void. As noted elsewhere in my blog, I think that this sums up the contradictions that the present economic crsis has laid bare.
None of this is to say, however, that I planned any of this like this in as cooly formulaic terms as laid out. For me, what was most important was the confrontation between a single figure and a strange monster, even as the use of a graph and a mythological figure pointed to the impossibility of such a cofrontation in “real life”.
