My wife and I finally got COVID last November. Two days before we were supposed to leave on a trip to designercon. For my birthday.
We ended up being sick in bed for a week and a half and it was the best week and a half in my adult life. Both of our symptoms were incredibly mild so it was basically hanging out and watching TV for 11 days. We’ve never relaxed like that in our lives.
While in repose we came up with the idea to start a fan club for ourselves. Not so much to glorify our existence but to do an art project together that had a monthly deadline.
We made a list of friends we would enroll in the club and got to work.
Since we we’ve always been into silk screening we decided to make tshirs for our “fans”
Donna had a train of thought one day that led to a realization about how we’re all controlled by our devices and social media. At first she was contemplating how people she was having trouble dealing with were controlled by news platforms. Directly after this she was thinking about how she had to post a reel on her Instagram (@the.cut.up) that afternoon to get maximum engagement which instantly revealed she was also under the control of another entity.
She came up with the slogan, Controlled by an Algorithm, I did the work on the design and we mailed them off to a group of friends thus enrolling them in our Fan Club.
As people got the packages they had very different responses, depending on which algorithm was controlling them. Some posted unboxing videos, some posted pics of them in the shirt and some sent texts. Many wondered if they were doing it right by even acknowledging the shirts.
Since we all operate on different algorithms, every response was exactly what it should have been.
New Art Hero 