/ / / / / /Bunker
Faith
ElectricSoul This is Ratio (Wilf Whitty), a flyer for the Elemental project at Glastonbury and a sleeve for Voice Stealer: The All Electric House. Wilf’s work is full of metaphysical references. He’s a designer who intuitively understands the relationship between design and spirituality, often using practice to navigate faith. The top image formed a set of flyers distributed at Glastonbury- I love the setting of ‘pray’ against the Stealth bomber, it’s beautifully ambiguous. US Christo-Military complex, invisible power, profane icon, who knows? It’s a wonderfully open image that invites debate. Wilf is well versed in McLuhan, I know he has several URL’s referencing ‘electric’. Yet the technological ambivalence and latent spirituality also invokes the work of Paul Virilio, a theorist (who like McLuhan) converted to Catholicism, describing himself as an ‘anarcho-Christian’. Voice Stealer (bottom image) provides a great example of design as text. The user-pervert destabilising meaning and rewriting the object for ones own needs. I’ve always read the hands clasping the motor through a mythological lens, be it Eve, Pandora or the Madonna. Listen to the music (neo-electro), run any of these narratives against the image, and you get a very pleasing result. Its so pertinent- one track is a fetishistic ode to a mobile phone! Wilf (of course) totally denies that any of these meanings were present at conception; somehow he’s mined a powerful archetypal vein.
design | spirituality | ratio
