THE SHORT OF IT

This poster project began as a crystallization of my love of science fiction and cyberpunk. It is painted using acrylic inks on illustration board at 12” x 18”. The lettering in the typography on the poster is also hand-painted: after positioning the typeface on a Photoshop file, I used a grid to transfer a drawing of it onto the illustration board and paint it.

Why did I chose to paint it rather than scanning in the final illustration and digitally adding in the typography on top of it? I really just wanted to know if I could do it, paint typography and get as close to the likeness of the typeface as I could. I also really wanted this piece to exist as a physical analog object, rather than a print-out of a digital art piece. Simply put, I wanted this piece describing artificiality and simulation to be produced in an organic and hand-drawn way.

THE LONG OF IT

Given the choice between inhabiting the real world, or residing in a flawless artificial world, which option would you choose?

In my adolescence, I devoured movies like Blade Runner, Akira, and The Matrix, as well as books like Neuromancer by William Gibson. They attempted to envision where human beings were going by extrapolating current social, economic, and technological realities.

Cyberpunk, the literary and cinematic genre that many of these stories fall into, is usually pessimistic in its view of human nature and cynical in its prognosis of our species’ abilities to rein in corporate greed and alienation from nature. It tends to focus on a punk, anti-establishment, often anti-corporate, anti-capitalist stance by depicting severe class division and ecological destruction at the hands of our current systems. This was a really appealing and validating perspective in my youth because I felt angry and disappointed with the way things were.

I continue to feel that way today, but I now look for something to balance this pessimistic outlook, simply because it gets depressing envisioning the world heading towards ruin 100% of the time.

As a result, this poster tapped into an internal clash within me regarding my ideas on the ‘Real’ versus the ‘Artificial’. In addition to all the alienation and isolation cyberpunk associates with artificiality, the simulated could also offer warmth and comfort. This idea juxtaposed against some ideas I have of Nature as peaceful, pastoral, and affirming. Nature is very important, and it fills me with a particular kind of feeling of being glad to be alive to experience its beauty, but Nature is also often brutal and difficult.

It’s strange and comforting to me to imagine a Matrix-like artificial world existing centuries into the future full of plants and animals rather than rain-soaked city streets and neon lights.

There is a genre named ‘solarpunk’ which some these ideas feel very similar to. It seems to have come about in recent years as a response to climate pessimism and posits an opposing perspective to cyberpunk: a vision of the future where social and environmental ills have largely been solved, or are at least being dealt with by the human race in a manner where the ecology and human dignity has survived. I like this idealism, even though in reality that is perhaps not possible. It fills me with hope and it helps to combat many of my uncertainties regarding the future.