The Pack of Orders poster project was dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the death of Aleksei Gastev. Often called 'the Ovid of miners and metalworkers' he was one of the avant-garde poets of the Early Soviet Union and its key labour theorists, pioneer of the scientific management. In both aspects of his work, Gastev was obsessed with blurring the lines between human and machine, convinced that this was key to both creativity and productivity.

The ten poems of the Pack of Orders describe the creation and operation of what we now might call robots or even androids. The mechanistic rhythm of the poems, their technical and austere language, and their form of industrial and military orders are all consistent with Gastev's experimental usage of words as a technical medium for creating a new world. This poetry is an action, a performance of a man-machine. The result of his experiments approaches the idea of the universal language. We tried to achieve the same thing in this poster series thinking of design as of universal visual language.

These ten posters also attempt to erase the line between human and machine creativity. Each poster is based on one line from each of the ten poems (orders) randomly picked by the computer illustrated by a random visual computer-generated effect, later augmented and fine tuned by us.

This project is a speculative experimental research aimed not only at testing ideas for sustainable everyday artistic practice and integrating automated workflow, but also at reflecting on the practice of experimentation itself and rationalisation of artistic labour.

Awards:
2019 Taiwan International Graphic Design Award (Finalist)
5th International Poster Contest, Museum of typography (Crete, Greece) (Honorary distinction)

Industry:
Culture