Tech Terra - A Paradoxical Complexity

Non-didactic "Manifesto" in the form of a book, exploring the relationships between ecology, technology and religion

This 468 page book includes ideas about nature, wellbeing, spirituality, religion, symbolism, environmentalism and technology as both friend and foe. It is an abstract visual compilation of my research for my "Tech Terra" project.

The book comprises of found content and imagery, paired with my research and some of my own work and experience of the subjects, which I compiled and edited (really taking on the role of designer as editor). It also very subtly references popular culture and the ways in which we now experience and engage with these topics through social media and other digital means. Whilst technology often encourages people to spend more time in front of a screen, it also encourages us to get outdoors. We read about our environmental disasters on the internet more than in the newspaper and we document our time in nature rather than just experience it. This is neither good nor bad. It just is. And I wanted this to be present in my work, which it is but very subtly.

The book is an attempt to marry my interest in nature, technology and religion with my design practice. It is like a visual essay, tackling the relationships between these topics. I had done a lot of research into all of these big concepts and found many links between them so this book was a good output for me to bring all the ideas together and show the complex overlaps.

I want the book to be an object that people can spend as much or as little time with as they want. Most of the content is imagery but there is also text which could be read if desired, although it isn’t actually that detrimental to the overall experience of the book. I want it to be something that viewers can interpret and make connections themselves and take what they will from it. I’ve tried to provide them with something to think about however they may, rather than necessarily tell them what to think.

Contextually, I think that the book fits somewhere between Metahaven’s political-style work and Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau’s book S,M,L,XL. I used S,M,L,XL as an aesthetic reference because I liked the diversity of page layouts, the use of found content, the collage-style layering, and the use of the indexing as a strong and consistent design feature. It’s very similar to how I envisioned my own book and I think that my work echoes these elements. I was also interested in the large size of the book and the idea of the book as an object. This is something I have kept in mind when designing my own and is one of the reasons why I have made the book a one-off. Content-wise, I wanted to reflect Metahaven’s work. Kruk’s critique of graphic design was that there wasn’t a space where there was a field for theory or something that you could develop without it being finished. She was much more interested in developing design languages addressing different political viewpoints, than in promoting a single ideology. Metahaven see themselves not as exponents of a particular ideology but as reporters, attempting to filter and explain the time they live in.

You can view the full online version here: https://view.publitas.com/sarahjones/tech-terra

The book is organised into 7 chapters, each one printed on different paper stock because the spread layouts are for the most-part fairly consistent throughout the book so a change in paper stock is a nice way of differentiating the sections. Each Chapter title page is a different colour so the start of the chapter is easy to find.