The Future Is Already Here – It's Just Not Evenly Distributed
The Biennale of Sydney is Australia’s largest contemporary art festival, with more than 200 artworks on display by 83 artists from 35 countries with over 600,000 national and international visitors. Its aim is to broaden the reach, awareness and engagement with contemporary art with existing and new audiences. Under the artistic direction of Dr Stephanie Rosenthal, the 20th Biennale of Sydney is organised around the over-arching theme of 'The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed’. This theme, inspired by a quote by science fiction writer, William Gibson, suggests that we have already bypassed our own expectations of a future yet to materialise, and that today’s reality is closely interwoven with the virtual world of the internet.
The 3 month event takes place across Sydney in 7 key locations including a museum, a state gallery, a railway station, an island, and a multitude of in-between spaces where the virtual and the physical worlds overlap. Positioned as 'embassies of thought', these unique locations are individually curated around clusters of ideas. These are the Embassy of the Real, Spirits, Disappearance, Non-Participation, Translation, Transition and Stanislaw Lem.
With such a complex and futuristic theme, spread across a host of locations, the key challenge was to connect the different venues and sub-themes, while also building awareness and connecting audiences to the diverse array of art and experiences. The identity explores the larger theme and the idea of embassies, to create individual iterations of the larger identity. Each embassy has its own typographic language and lettering forms, colour palette, and stylised delegate entities, developed in direct response to the clustering of ideas within. Each embassy is represented as a section within a continuous reel of information, conveying a fraction of the total experience and the distribution of art and ideas throughout the city. As we move from one venue to the next, their individual identities begin to converge and assimilate each other’s characteristics – merging in a dialogue of cultural exchange within the in-between spaces.
Typeface design by Mathieu Reguer www.mathieureguer.com
