Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The Phone Hammer, non-reversible stop to obsession
Can the sometimes catastrophic ‘unboxing’ of new technological products be considered ‘luddism’? Actually, it’s the opposite, as we can see in endless YouTube videos. Still the accidental destruction of an expensive smartphone generates chilling reactions in the audience, who are emotionally attached to their own devices. As a direct response to what conceptually lies behind this, Garnet Hertz has customised a series of small ‘emergency’ hammers labelled as ‘The Phone Hammer’ with an integrated cable cutter, which have been freely distributed as a limited edition to the audience. In the explanatory video he performs the destruction of a smartphone through it, embodying the seemingly natural aesthetics of surreal YouTube videos, together with the political argument: the need for a deliberate and non-reversible physical break in connection with our virtual world.
Garnet Hertz – The Phone Hammer