2047
Emily Li
The year is 2047. The climate crisis is projected to pass the point of no return. The gap between the corporate rich and the working poor will worsen and widen. The surveillance state seeks to subdue the citizens they haven’t already rooted out. And yet, as capitalism seems fated to enter its final stage, the signs on the street signal a more radical future.
2047 is a story, a science fiction, and a speculative sculpture conceived at once in a mixed-media installation. In the foreground, the latest newspaper edition of the Harbinger heralds the success of a global general strike, while wheat-pasted ephemera covers the familiar sight of green construction walls. A lone security camera slouches in the corner, spray-painted and stickered, as if surrendering to the inevitable.
Here, form follows the function of resistance. Everything from Xeroxed punk posters to spoof stickers draws from the visual language of dissent. Networked printers can no longer be trusted, so the risograph is reworked to print large-format editions of the latest agitprop. Resources skew scarce, so dissidents repurpose shipping labels into sloganeering stickers instead.
Amidst the smattering of vivid stickers, tags, and symbols both familiar and foreign to us, participants parse through the dense layers of graphic information to place themselves in a more hopeful timeline. 2047 asks: Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism? As a designer, I believe it is our duty to imagine both.