Utopia
Utopia
OVERVIEW
Utopia is a satirical zine that started off as a school project and evolved into a passion project. It explores my beliefs about social and political issues through a fabricated future. Set 80 years from now, the world reflects the potential impact of today. It’s not a unique concept, but it is the result of a love for science fiction and the desire to see my own interpretation come to fruition. What might exist 80 years from now and how did it come to be?
My goals were not just to create a design, but to begin forming a world and aesthetic compelling enough to carry several projects from start to finish— projects which would continue exploring and reacting to the impacts of our actions as a society today.
After slowly working on this project for almost a year now, I’ve come to view Utopia as the medium itself. It’s allowed me to explore different aesthetics and speak on current events in a creative way.
Brainstorming and Medium
My initial brainstorming for the project brief included six aspects of my identity. I was most intrigued by the intersection of culture and the Gen Z community. I drew from my own interests and fascination with the ways science fiction portrays our future to start creating this world that could act as a medium for social commentary.
I chose to begin with a zine as an introduction to this world. A zine envisioning the future where current social and political issues are being pushed to the extreme to convey Gen Z’s values.
Zines were born from sci-fi culture in the 1930s and popularized, largely, by counterculture punk rock movements in the 1960s and 70s. They gave unknown people a voice– a fitting start for the goals of this project. Visually, UTOPIA is rebellious, despotic, and cyberpunk.
Inspiration and Visual Language
Final Zine
The final zine is nine spreads + the front and back cover. It discusses climate change, immigration, population, wealth disparity, etc…, in the form of a look back on the year 2099. To bring more relevance to the project from our current world, I included QR codes are on every page of the zine and take people to news articles, videos, and reports discussing the issue each spread is inspired from.
Dystopian worlds aren’t anything groundbreaking, but thinking about and creating the products that might arise from this world is something I found myself very excited to explore.
PART 2
AI Album Cover
In part 1 of this project, two spreads mention Joi, an anonymous musician from the “underground.” Part 2 of this project expands on her music and discusses the increasingly common use of artificial intelligence in our daily lives. The images for these album covers were created using the ai image generator Dream by WOMBO. There’s tension in the conversation about ai, jobs, and creativity. How will ai come to affect the work of a creative? Will it be a revolution or make human creation even better? This cover seeks to explore those questions.
Image Selection
All of the images above were generated using the prompt, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” from Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man Album. The images I found most compelling were the ones that showed a revolution in the midst. From there I designed and explored two different versions of Joi’s album.
