Graduate and undergraduate students from the elective course ‘Graphic Design 
and Politics,’ taught by Anther Kiley, recently staged an exhibition of work in CalArts gallery A402.

The course, intended as a forum for critical engagement with the tumultuous world events 
of the last few months, took form as an all-art-school ‘Design and Politics Reading Group’ coupled to a studio class. Through a series of provocative readings and viewings, the class traced a meandering political through-line between various economic, technological, and social phenomena associated with late capitalism: the economics of neoliberalism, the technology of the cloud/stack, cultural states of ‘hypernormalisation,’ etc.

The seven pieces in the exhibition responded to this line of inquiry, often by envisioning dystopian scenarios of the near future. The work spanned several modes and media of design, from a browser plug-in, to an AI interface, to a video art installation, to a series of digital portraits.
 

The design of the exhibition situated the work within a dystopian domestic setting, complete with wallpaper, furniture, and (of course) fake plants. The intention was to draw attention to the way that economic and political macro-structures are increasingly embedded in our personal lives and daily interactions.

Participants: Julianna Bach, Onyou Kim, Sohee Kim, Nadia Korepanova, Marco Lukini, Dameon Waggoner, Guanyan (Wing) Wu