Undersign is inspired by everything political and graphical. Inspired by movements such as the Coletivo Mural Brigada Ramona Parra, from Chile.
"... y pintaremos hasta el cielo."
Después de treinta años, de los rigores del pasado reciente, y aún cuando quisieron destruirnos,hoy estamos presentes.
Por que pusimos los colores, por que pintamos los sueños y las esperanzas de toda una generación de chilenos y chilenas, convencidos de que fuimos un actor más en la construcción de la gran utopía, y porque fuimos y somos un aporte al arte y la cultura popular de nuestro pueblo.
Hoy por hoy, con una mirada independiente, sin la urgencia del compromiso político, manteniendo los mismos principios y valores de siempre, con nuestras conciencias y nuestras manos limpias,extenderemos una invitación sincera y honesta, a toda esa generación de chilenos que creyeron en nosotros, también a nuestros detractores, pero sobre todo a los jóvenes, a las nuevas generaciones para que conozcan, quienes fuimos, que hicimos y qué es lo que hacemos, sin otro interés que el de hacer una contribución a la construcción de la memoria histórica.
En el presente nos vemos enfrentados a una realidad sociocultural sin precedentes en nuestra historia; asistimos al fenómeno de la globalización un fenómeno que nos afecta, cambiando dramáticamente nuestros paradigmas, formas culturales, y de convivencia, el libre mercadismo impone una sola visión del mundo, la de él. Los ciudadanos ya no son tal, sino consumidores. Ante esta realidad nos rebelamos, creemos que desde nuestra condición de pintores populares, tenemos un aporte más que hacer. El muralismo en Chile forma parte de la expresión popular, arraigada en la tradición de lucha por la liberación, común con los pueblos hermanos latinoamericanos. Por esto proponemos ir al rescate de esta expresión que hace de lo propio, del sentir del pueblo plasmado en colores sobre los muros de nuestra ciudad.
Por qué dejar de soñar, porque dejar de pintar, si la esperanza no se ha perdido?
Video del tema "Mi Pais" del grupo nacional de rap Legua York en el cual se hace un homenaje a las Brigadas Muralistas de Chile como la Brigada Ramona Parra, realizado por ecos de contragolpe en el 2006.
The idea for this poster came when I was reading a book called "Falcão - Meninos do tráfico", written by MV Bill and Celso Ataíde. The book was originated by experiences and interviews taken from the documentary with the same name, portraiting the life of young people working for the drug traffic in favelas (brazilian slams). The independent production became popular when it was aired on TV. It was made between 1998 and 2006 and its term "falcão" is used in the favelas to designate someone who work as a vigilant and must inform when the cops or an enemy group is aproaching. Here is a 30 sec. ad for the documentary. Meu sonho - Falcão
Undersign poster. A commentary on religion, violence, tolerance, design, culture, race, colors, Kalman, and other things.
Tibor Kalman (July 6, 1949–May 2, 1999) was an influential American graphic designer of Hungarian origin, well-known for his work as editor-in-chief of COLORS magazine. Kalman was born in Budapest and became a U.S. resident in 1956, after he and his family fled Hungary to escape the Soviet invasion. He later attended NYU, dropping out after one year of Journalism classes. In the 1970s Kalman worked at a small New York City bookstore that eventually became Barnes & Noble. He later became the supervisor of their in-house design department. In 1979 Kalman, Carol Bokuniewicz, and Liz Trovato started the design firm M&Co, which did corporate work for such diverse clients as the Limited Corporation, the New Wave music group Talking Heads, and Restaurant Florent in New York City's Meatpacking District. Kalman also worked as creative director of Interview magazine in the early 1990s. Kalman became founding editor-in-chief of the Benetton-sponsored COLORS magazine in 1990. In 1993, Kalman closed M&Co and moved to Rome, to work exclusively on the magazine. Billed as 'a magazine about the rest of the world', COLORS focused on multiculturalism and global awareness. This perspective was communicated through bold graphic design, typography, and juxtaposition of photographs and doctored images, including a series in which highly recognizable figures such as the Pope and Queen Elizabeth were depicted as racial minorities. Kalman remained the main creative force behind COLORS, until the onset non-Hodgkins lymphoma forced him to leave in 1995, and return to New York. In 1997, Kalman re-opened M&Co and continued to work until his death in 1999, in Puerto Rico, shortly before a retrospective of his graphic design work, entitled Tiborocity opened its U.S. tour at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A book about Kalman and M&Co's work, Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1999. Today, the influence of M&Co is still strong, both as a result of its work and that of the many designers who worked there and went on to start their own design studios, also in New York City.
The Undersign project is in search of pop culture icons for its campaign. Our intention is to use them as an emblem of what we think and support.
The Undersign Blog is a receptacle of ideas, a growing oasis of inspiration and resource.
The Undersign project is inspired by artists like Saul Stacey Williams, who has been considered a powerful voice of the hip hop generation as a poet, preacher, actor, rapper, singer and musician. He is most known for his blend of spoken word poetry and hip-hop and for his leading role in the independent film Slam.
Saul Williams - Black Stacey
Now here's a little message for you. All you baller playa's got some insecurities too, that you could cover up, bling it up, cash in and ching ching it up, hope no one will bring it up, lock it down and string it up. Or you can share your essence with us, 'cause everything about you couldn't be rugged and ruff. And even though you tote a glock and you're hot on the streets, if you dare to share your heart, we'll nod our heart to its beat. And you should do that, if nothing else, to prove that a player like you could keep it honest and true. Don't mean to call your bluff but mothafucka that's what I do. You got platinum chain then, son, I'm probably talking to you. And you can call your gang, your posse and the rest of your crew. And while you're at it get them addicts and the indigent too. I plan to have a whole army by the time that I'm through to load their guns with songs they haven't sung.
Adbusters is a political magazine, founded by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz that is published in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada by the Media Foundation. It is an activist magazine, devoted to numerous political and social causes, many of which are anti-consumerism or anti-capitalist in nature. The Adbusters Media Foundation is a 120,000-circulation magazine, the main promoter of Buy Nothing Day, and one of the sponsors of TV-Turnoff Week. Adbusters is not-for-profit, and is reader-supported.
"We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. Adbusters is at essence an ecological magazine, examining the relationship between people and the environment, both the material environment and the mental environment."
From Adbusters.org
THE ULTIMATE REFUND: On November 24th and 25th – the busiest days in the American retail calendar and the unofficial start of the international Christmas-shopping season – thousands of activists and concerned citizens in 65 countries will take a 24-hour consumer detox as part of the 14th annual Buy Nothing Day, a global phenomenon that originated in Vancouver, Canada. From joining zombie marches through malls to organizing credit card cut-ups and shopoholic clinics, Buy Nothing Day activists aim to challenge themselves, their families and their friends to switch off from shopping and tune back into life for one day. Featured in recent years by the likes of CNN, Wired, the BBC, and the CBC, the global event is celebrated as a relaxed family holiday, as a non-commercial street party, or even as a politically charged public protest. Anyone can take part provided they spend a day without spending. Reasons for participating in Buy Nothing Day are as varied as the people who choose to participate. Some see it as an escape from the marketing mind games and frantic consumer binge that has come to characterize the holiday season, and our culture in general. Others use it to expose the environmental and ethical consequences of overconsumption. Two recent, high-profile disaster warnings outline the sudden urgency of our dilemma. First, in October, a global warming report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern predicted that climate change will lead to the most massive and widest-ranging market failure the world has ever seen. Soon after, a major study published in the journal Science forecast the near-total collapse of global fisheries within 40 years. Kalle Lasn, co-founder of the Adbusters Media Foundation, which was responsible for turning Buy Nothing Day into an international annual event, said, “Our headlong plunge into ecological collapse requires a profound shift in the way we see things. Driving hybrid cars and limiting industrial emissions is great, but they are band-aid solutions if we don’t address the core problem: we have to consume less. This is the message of Buy Nothing Day.” As Lasn suggests, Buy Nothing Day isn't just about changing your habits for one day. It’s about starting a lasting lifestyle commitment to consuming less and producing less waste. With six billion people on the planet, the onus if on the most affluent – the upper 20% that consumes 80% of the world’s resources – to begin setting the example.
Manifesto issued in 1964 by designer Ken Garland and a group of 21 colleagues. It was a call to arms for graphic designers; an encouragement, as Garland put it, "to think about the opportunities for graphic design and photography outside advertising."
"It's time to put our ideologies to work." {Rudy Vanderlans}
The manifesto was reissued in 2000, organized by Max Bruinsma and published on the web. You can find it in our links.
Cinema scholars believe that when sound was introduced on movies it interrupted the development of the cinematic language as a purely visual art form. I often think about that and how graphic design can be expressive without words.
This poster was created for the undersign project with that in mind. Let the image speak for itself. Mickey+Big Corporations+Nazi Propaganda. Thanks to Art Spiegelman and Bansky for the inspiration.
[General characteristics - define the concrete materiality of the object: the poster is a printed sheet of paper put up in a public space to convey information; hence it is a printed object without a verso, only a recto (a peculiarly one dimensional character, like a photocopy); then speak of printing, and thus of pigments, inks and techniques, but also discuss the format, weight and nature of the different kinds of paper; refer to their sequential passage in time, i.e. history, between reproducibility of text and image. Stress the specific relationship between figure and ground (in the context of the street, the city, outside the city, the enviroment and so on) as well as the perceptual "distraction" that it entails (forms of vision and interpretations of space, i.e. relationship with architecture and the enviroment; reexamine, from this standpoint, the German literature of the late 19th-century: Schmarsow tactile mobile visual space; Hildebrand tactile-proximal vision, kinetic or dynamic Bewegungsvorstellung, optical-distant Fernbild; Raumscheu or horror vacui of Riegl and his friends0; reflect on a printed form of mural art, in relation to the cultured as well as vernacular tradition of wall decoration (epigraphy, frescoes, stained-glass windows, murals) stressing the differences] I've taken this paragraph from Sergio Polano and Pierpaolo Veta's Book "ABC of 20th Century Graphics" because, first of all, it's about poster. and also because it has this interesting tone, reminding me how writing/thinking about design can be "scientific" or "academic" sometimes.
Imagine how happy I was after graduation. Besides not having to go to school for another year, I could finally put my hands and thoughts in a real world experience. Better than that, I had a job! I was an Junior Art Director in an advertising agency. My parents were pleased that their son could have prestige and make some money after all. The scenario was set and favorable. Not everything was perfect, though. Year after year I became more and more unsatisfied. It's not that I utterly disliked what I was doing. I was designing, communicating, trying to be creative and sell my ideas, which is a good thing. But inside of me there was a struggle between an individual with passion for his work and the will of today's faceless corporations, which claim to understand the needs of the mass audience. The client is always right, one might think, but I had a feeling that this was wrong.
Today,most media, architecture, product and graphic design have been disconnected from ideas and individual passion. They have been relegated to a role of corporate servitude. Our culture is corporate culture. There is a stuffiness and façade in our society, a false notion of paradise given by comercialism. America reinvented paradise and called it suburbia. Our creativity as designers should not be directed exclusively to corporations, should be used to promote wholesome ideas that mean something for our future.
Inspired by the 1964 manifesto "First Things First" by designer Ken Garland and a group of 21 colleagues, what I propose is not necessarily new. It's a move from product marketing to social marketing. As a designer who came from the propaganda industry, I would investigate the opportunities for graphic design outside advertising. How to be a political and social message-maker in an age where culture is generally sponsored by commerce. And, in spite of not being a novelty, this discussion never generated much of a debate within graphic design. Most designers - like most people in any line of work - would prefer not to examine their personal relationship to society too closely, particularly if doing so might mean they have to modify or even abandon their line of work.
My project will comment on trends and advertising in pop culture. I intend to fight the guerrilla information war with the same weapons used by the mass media: from print to video and web. I intend to explore the use of acessible communication. Simple printing technics which could be easily spread out like stencils, stickers, graffitti, screenprinting and posters. A short video for the campaing will be posted on the webspace using videoblogs such as YouTube.com. Furthermore, my research (including texts, photos, images, pdfs) will be available online in a blog, created by a free blogging tool such as blogger.com, open to and welcoming anyone for comments and colaborations.
I believe that in learning how to use our talents in different ways we can also learn how to play a very important role in creating the new future that we so urgently need.
Blog created to support my M.A. project in graphic Design at the University of Iowa.The Undersign Blog is a receptacle of ideas, a growing oasis of inspiration and resource.
