A year in illustration, 2023 edition (part two)

mostlysignssomeportents:

A year in illustration, 2023 edition (part two)

A one-bit MacPaint tool palette, blown up.ALT

(This is part two; part one is here. )

A CCTV observation room, in which a blurry male figure watches a large bank of monitors. Each monitor is displaying a laughing clown, whose nose has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'ALT

The West Midlands Police were kind enough to upload a high-rez of their surveillance camera control room to Flickr under a CC license (they’ve since deleted it), and it was the perfect frame for dozens of repeating clown images with HAL9000 red noses. This worked out great. The clown face is from a 1940s ad for novelty masks.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

Three side-by-side pinball machines. The backboards have been replaced. The leftmost one is called UNION BUSTERS and features an ogrish tophatted capitalist dangling the Wall Street Charging Bull from his gloved thumb and forefinger. The middle is called CLASS WARS and features a tophatted pig atop an alarm clock whose minute-hand is a saber, on the verge of decapitating him. The right is called SLICEY BOY and features a guilltone superimposed over an interior from the Palace at Versailles. All three machines are displaying TILT messages. A Gilded Age cartoon of Roosevelt as a 'big stick' wielding trustbuster stands on the middle machine. His big stick reads 'Obey the Laws.' The wall behind the machines bears the crest of the National Labor Review Board and a framed official portrait of NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo.ALT

I spent an absurd amount of time transforming a photo I took of three pinball machines into union-busting themed tables, pulling in a bunch of images from old Soviet propaganda art. An editorial cartoon of Teddy Roosevelt with his big stick takes center stage, while a NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo’s official portrait presides over the scene. I hand-made the eight-segment TILT displays.

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