International Design Festival of Chaumont

Ceci tuera cela. (This will kill that.)
– a 72 page book – concept & design by M-A-D, with essays by Mark Petrakis and others
– included in the “Babel on Demand” collection, an artistic and editorial project by Étienne Hervy and Émilie Lamy for the 23rd International Graphic Design Festival of Chaumont. Printed and distributed by blurb.

This book refers to a line from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, that echoes the shift of dominance from architecture to the printed word. Today it is the supremacy of the book that is being terminated by the apparatus of bits and bytes. Each new medium has always been seen as having symbolically assassinated the previous one, but today the question is no longer “what innovation have we lost?”, but “what creator are we losing?”

Amidst the collateral damage of innovations, the barbarity of capital punishment also exists in some countries. Ceci tuera cela.’s “death row sentence” aims to reveal conceptual tensions between faces, letters, words, sentences, languages, pages, pixels, culture, oppression, executions and infamy. When death is by design, how must we design for new ideals?