Internetting with Amanda Hess
2019
Role: Art direction and design
Collaborators: Tala Safié (design), Amanda Hess and Shane O’Neill (authors), Erik Carter and Tracy Ma (artists).
Role: Art direction and design
Collaborators: Tala Safié (design), Amanda Hess and Shane O’Neill (authors), Erik Carter and Tracy Ma (artists).
I wrote about designing the section here.
The section is drawn from a series of psychedelic video essays edited by Shane O’Neill and hosted by Amanda Hess, a critic at The New York Times who writes about the internet. It covers everything from the rapid ascendance of dog memes to the dark side of parenting YouTube.
The internet is rife with interruptions and distractions, so Amanda and Shane annotated the essay transcripts with fresh context, digressions, and comments from viewers — all of which appear only in print, breathing new life into the essays and adding extra layers of nuance to the arguments.
We often experience or consume content on the internet in a fragmented, free-associative way — an article here, a video there — and so each essay lives on a discrete sheet, not a page. Full-sheet poster illustrations by Erik Carter and Tracy Ma in the style of found imagery break the text flow; and the posters, too, are peppered with overlays of decontextualized thumbnails.
By putting “Internetting” in the paper, we hoped to touch on a truth long heralded by artists like Paul Soulellis and Hito Steyerl: As the internet bleeds into “meatspace” in increasingly distressing and creative ways, internet culture becomes culture, and it’s important to understand lest we find the world suddenly unrecognizable.
To bring the online offline is to cut it out and see its edges. When translated to print, the interruptions and distractions that feel seamless online are jarring and challenging. How do you disconnect without unplugging? It’s a feature, not a bug.
The section is drawn from a series of psychedelic video essays edited by Shane O’Neill and hosted by Amanda Hess, a critic at The New York Times who writes about the internet. It covers everything from the rapid ascendance of dog memes to the dark side of parenting YouTube.
The internet is rife with interruptions and distractions, so Amanda and Shane annotated the essay transcripts with fresh context, digressions, and comments from viewers — all of which appear only in print, breathing new life into the essays and adding extra layers of nuance to the arguments.
We often experience or consume content on the internet in a fragmented, free-associative way — an article here, a video there — and so each essay lives on a discrete sheet, not a page. Full-sheet poster illustrations by Erik Carter and Tracy Ma in the style of found imagery break the text flow; and the posters, too, are peppered with overlays of decontextualized thumbnails.
By putting “Internetting” in the paper, we hoped to touch on a truth long heralded by artists like Paul Soulellis and Hito Steyerl: As the internet bleeds into “meatspace” in increasingly distressing and creative ways, internet culture becomes culture, and it’s important to understand lest we find the world suddenly unrecognizable.
To bring the online offline is to cut it out and see its edges. When translated to print, the interruptions and distractions that feel seamless online are jarring and challenging. How do you disconnect without unplugging? It’s a feature, not a bug.
