Field of Confusion

“A series” 2020, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. A monologue from The X-files, an encyclopedic entry on dark matter and a cooking recipe is among the texts found in this collage. The composition is made according to the A series system. The top part is A3, the lower left part is A4, the middle right part is A5 and so on. Only parts of the texts is visible and words are cut off making room for interpretations and misunderstandings.

“New Age Phonetic Alphabet” 2020, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. The NATO phonetic alphabet is properly the most well known spelling alphabet, even though several hundred variants exist. A spelling alphabet is an alphabet where the letters is represented by words to make oral communication often via radio more clear. I have created an alternative spelling alphabet with words related to new age discourses. The metaphysical and quasi-scientific words is contrasting the rational military nature of the NATO alphabet. Maybe it could be a tool for ethereal communication with the deepest corners of our souls?

“FEMA” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. The three sentences being gradually deconstructed on this poster is all seen in the intro sequence for the television show The X-Files. The show mixed b-movie plots with 1990s paranoia and distrust in government to created some highly effective and exciting television. The somewhat provisional intro featuring the eerie X-files theme song captured not only the mood of the show but also pictured the zeitgeist of the era. This is a piece of fan art through a typographic interpretation and homage to the iconic intro sequence.

“Stairway to Heaven” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. From the modernist idealism of Mies van der Rohe (Less is More) to the postmodernism of Robert Venturi (Less is a Bore) over the sarcastic nihilism of Philip Johnson (I’m a Whore) to the neoliberal pragmatism of Bjarke Ingels (Yes is More). A century of architectural discourses simplified and distilled into a list designed like a stairway that can be both ascended and descended. There is probably more people who have chipped in on Mies original quote (notably Rem Koolhaas with “More is More) but I feel that the ones selected for the poster is sufficient to describe some mega trends in the past century of art history.

“Untitled” 2020, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. Various spaces, spaced out, separated by space, typography stretched to occupy space, vertical space, horizontal space, physical space, mental space.

“The History of Art” 2020, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. This poster is based on an audio / visual piece I made in collaboration with composer Emil Sylvester Jakobsen. On the poster various events is placed on a timeline. At first glance the poster could look like an authoritative account of history, but on closer inspection it seems more like an idiosyncratic stream of thoughts going through the head of a designer deliriously connecting politics, art and pop culture into a highly subjective personal account of the past 600 years. The events runs of the poster and the timeline is completely unevenly distributed. The final event and the conclusion to art history so far is the introduction of the family car Fiat Multipla in 1999.

“Oh, Oh, Oh” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. This poster consists of choruses from various pop songs organised into one continuous lyric. The respective choruses all have in common that they are based on nonverbal sounds instead of actual meaningful words. Songs using these kind of choruses has been the subject of their fair share of ridicule, so the poster is a kind of homage or support to this lyrical phenomenon.

“Complementarity” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. “When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry” is a quote attributed to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr made significant contributions to theoretical physics especially to quantum theory. One of Bohr’s key insight was that the realm of quantum mechanics (the theory governing the world at subatomic scales) was fundamentally different to our everyday understanding of reality. It can even be argued that reality, as we know it, breaks down at those ultra small scales. Bohr did not find language sufficient to describe what was going on in the indeterministic world of quantum mechanics and thus evoked the comparison to poetry. On the posters the quote is gradually dissolving as a kind of metaphor for the counterintuitive world of theoretical physics.

“Prefix Movement” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. Movements within art and politics seems to be having a weak spot for prefixes. Here the prefixes has been liberated from their stem words and is floating around the poster in a spacious grid. The prefixes is left by themself and can attach to whatever words comes floating by. A kind of meaningless manifesto of sorts.

“M-theory” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. Various concepts from theoretical physics and astronomy organized in a circle and gradually dissolving towards the center. The circular layout could be referring to the accretion disk of a planet, radiation from a star, the event horizon of a black hole, the orbits of planets, the electron’s paths around the nucleus of an atom, a wormhole through space and time, elementary particles or gravitational waves propagating outwards.

“Kaboom” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. This poster features a poem consisting only of onomatopoeia (words imitating sounds). The words is organised is a casual manner almost like a drunk wobbling through a narrow side street on the the way back from a long night at the dive bar.

“Financial institutions designed by starchitects” 2020, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. Avant-garde architects, major financial institutions, high profile locations, enormous budgets, suspicious money flows, branding, speculation and brilliant architecture.

“Brackets Only” 2020, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. Jens Reimer and I made a playlist consisting only of songs that has part of their title in brackets. On the poster the main part of the title has been left out and only the bracket part is included. The two column layout shows where the bracket part is situated in the name. You can have a little party game going, trying to guess the actual title of the songs.

“Into the dark” 2020, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. The quote “The cold remove of Rem Koolhaas” is lifted from a somewhat obscure article by David Rodin, that appeared in the magazine Kill Screen. The article is about a little, Arkanoid like, game on the website of Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and how that game, according to the author, shows the superficiality of Ingels architecture. The quote appears in a part of the article where Bjarke Ingels’ work is compared to his former master Rem Koolhaas and his apparently cold approach to architecture. This quote, for some reason, stuck with me and I realized that it could be a pretty cool name for an industrial goth record or maybe a black metal album.

“Utzon” 2019, digital print on 170g silk A2 posters. This poster features a list of locations where the Danish architect Jørn Utzon has build projects. Utzon achieved worldwide fame with his winning design for the Sydney Opera house. The list is a testament to the distinct geographic scattering of his buildings while the relatively few locations points to Utzon’s turbulent career. Utzon left the Sydney Opera House project half way through due to political pressure from the Australian government. Afterwards Utzon struggled to get commissions partly due to massive distrust from the Danish architectural community. He did however manage to complete masterpieces like The Kuwait National Assembly, Bagsværd Church and his own houses on Mallorca. The poster is a kind of Utzon fan art that seeks to highlight the bumpy career of this remarkable architect. He was ahead of his time and did only received the recognition that he deserved very late in his career (He received the highest honour in architecture, The Pritzker Prize, in 2003 as the only Dane ever). The typography on the poster in inspired by printed matter from Utzon’s architectural studio where he often used bold extended typefaces with all letters in lowercase.