Impact7

John Phillips

Country

Affliliation

Biography

John Phillips, Director, londonprintstudio

John Phillips, (b.1951), studied Fine Art at Sheffield School of Art and Design 1968 _72 and worked as a free-lance graphic designer before co-founding the Paddington Printshop in 1974.

During the 1970_s Paddington Printshop became a model for community-based printworkshops and John became a key figure in the Community Arts movement in the UK.

John has led this workshop (now londonprintstudio) for the past thirty five years. He has been instrumental in development of numerous community-based projects in London and abroad

In 2005 he completed a PhD, which explores the social dimension of printmaking and its influence on the design and organization of graphic arts resources.

Paper

Abstract

The paper examines the changes in activist imagery and design during the past two decades exploring the impact of new technologies and the Internet on both design strategies and the social organisation of oppositional groups. The author proposes that design strategies have polarised into two distinct schools. On the one hand there are artist activists who are rooted in real-world campaigns, employing traditional technologies of image production to represent, visually and metaphorically, the people with and for whom they work. This group uses the Internet as a means of distributing its 'hand crafted' products to wider audiences. The alternative strategy, he suggests, draws its principle resources from the Internet's visual archive and from the symbolic and representational systems of corporatism, which it seeks to subvert via a strategy of visual derailment. The paper proposes that, despite its extensive engagement in global communications systems, the field of activist graphics is seriously deficient in developing, and widening the availability of the critical tools necessary to seriously evaluate its own potential.

Date

Tuesday 27 September

Session

Speaking

Email

Website