Onomatopee Projects

The Superstorm is a conceptual and narrative metaphor to illustrate the evolution of the relationship between political communication and new media technologies, which culminated in the tempestuous Western political visual culture of today. Within this vortex, complex and unexpected events occur, where politics is mixed with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternative realities.

As politicians refine marketing techniques applied to the electorate and online users become political trendsetters, designers face an impasse. But not all is lost in the Superstorm. Surprisingly, it might precisely be this uncertain future that holds the key for designers to question and reformulate their role and purpose within the political sphere.

In her first book Superstorm: Design and Politics in the Age of Information, Noemi Biasetton traces the development of the Superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers may consider on in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.

Three Becomes Two Becomes One Becomes None explores the medicinal and magical mandragora plant, and the many stories that grew around it across history. Artist Leonie Brandner's writing moves from the beginning of recorded storytelling toancient Egyptian and Greek mythology, tracing the lines the mandragora has left behind in medicinal books, folklore and eventually the impact the plant had in the hunt on so-called witches in the Middle Ages. Gently weaving her own perception and encounters with the plant through her rigorous historical research, Leonie Brandner creates a kaleidoscopical image of human-plant-imaginations across time.

A Tree, is about vegetal agency, plant knowledge, and the interaction between plants and people, with a specific focus on trees. Like all plants, trees make the world; they literally create soil, shape landscapes, and affect the climate. They produce oxygen. They provide fuel, food, building materials, and shelter, and form ecologies where a myriad of species come together to enter into various symbiotic partnerships. Trees are wonderful to think with, and humans have been doing so—through meditation, in all kinds of storytelling, and as partners in problem-solving—probably for as long as they have walked the earth. Trees are also time tellers, rather than following industrial time, clock time, or any time defined by human activity, trees relate to their own experience of time.