Competition Thoughts:

Tangled up in the logic of digital production and its new requirements regarding diffusion, posters are now more often than not the printed topic of a piece of screen work, a master visual, designed indifferently for all sorts of platforms, may they be digital or physical. This visual, if skilfully screen-printed or if low-cost printed, is already not really the same... Just as it is not the same on our computer screens or smart phones. This visual’s experiences are hence multiplied and all around us, new formats and production modes emerge and become essential to our graphic production. In a certain way, current graphic creation seems to be applying the digital logic of the couple code (virtual)/display (actual). On its own scale, the visual has substituted the code and the graphic designer becomes the author of potential visuals whose topicality complies to or even surpasses the technological requirements and display marketing. As of now, Google Glass, advertising video screens and other QR codes are the new instruments of a moving retro-futuristic utopia, for which we will soon be asked to merely produce the layout, the graphic setting : the problems posed by display are in the hands of engineers and posters will soon disappear under the layers of digital information promised by the technologies of our augmented reality. Thinking out display rather than the poster, is like thinking out seating rather than the chair. It means rethinking the modes of existence of our productions. It means thinking about a gesture rather than an object and by doing so, reinventing its format, its production and diffusion techniques ; in the end, it means recovering the design of the relationship between our creation and the audience. This gesture means taking a stance. Whether on a physical or a digital medium ( or somewhere between... ) we invite you to seriously reflect upon this question of display in its technical, technological, political, economic or social dimensions, by meansof a project of your choice and of whatever nature it may be. Whether it means recovering forgotten display systems, parasite systems, existing ones or inventing them, they will need to be anchored in the reality of a project, in the ambition of your personal communication, in order to exist. This means not thinking about a 2.0 display but rather a topical hybrid…

by Pierre Vanni, 2014