COUNTERFORCE LAB: VISUAL IDENTITY
The symbol for the lab is an abstract expression of the Newton’s Cradle, a device that demonstrates conservation of momentum and energy using a series of swinging spheres. At its most basic, this device illustrates ‘cause and effect.’ With this symbol we point towards the huge effect that modern civilization has had on our earth. How small we are in the relative history of the earth and how much effect and impact we have had. How we dominate! In the last 70 years our fleeting species has had more impact than all natural processes combined.
‘Drinking water from a plastic bottle kills a marine bird somewhere, buying tomatoes grown in a greenhouse in Spain murders a whale, having perch for lunch impoverishes a child in Lake Victoria, driving your car to the gym deprives a polar bear of its habitat, an intercontinental flight to visit your parents in motherland, deprives shelled fish of their shell.’ These are the words of my former student and now renowned artist Pinar Yoldas, ‘causality, the relation between cause and effect, is the brain’s way of organizing data and we are hardwired to perceive causality. In the age of the anthropocene causality is broken.’
There is a rift between what we know and how we behave. The CounterForce Lab addresses this rift.
The visual identity was designed by my UCLA, Design Media Arts students Jason Lee and Simon Pinkas. Jason refined the visual identity with the design of the posters below.
‘Drinking water from a plastic bottle kills a marine bird somewhere, buying tomatoes grown in a greenhouse in Spain murders a whale, having perch for lunch impoverishes a child in Lake Victoria, driving your car to the gym deprives a polar bear of its habitat, an intercontinental flight to visit your parents in motherland, deprives shelled fish of their shell.’ These are the words of my former student and now renowned artist Pinar Yoldas, ‘causality, the relation between cause and effect, is the brain’s way of organizing data and we are hardwired to perceive causality. In the age of the anthropocene causality is broken.’
There is a rift between what we know and how we behave. The CounterForce Lab addresses this rift.
The visual identity was designed by my UCLA, Design Media Arts students Jason Lee and Simon Pinkas. Jason refined the visual identity with the design of the posters below.
