Into the Shimmer
This experimental book design integrates Dan Friedman’s essay, Radical Modernism, with an essay on the movie, Annihilation, and an interview with Anastasiia Raina on Posthuman design. Considering Friedman’s writing through the lens of Posthumanism and the film Annihilation, I used the conceptual visual of The Shimmer as a material lens through which to view the essay. The various texts respond to their respective purpose, with the film analysis taking the form of an organic, vegetal type that encroaches slowly across the spreads, breaking the modernist grid.
The Shimmer is a metaphor for the earth’s reclamation of itself in a beautiful yet violent reaction to the destructive systemic institutions of extractive capitalism. The book seeks to evoke this process in support of a looser, freer, more generous methodology for design.