The Self Design Academy (EN)

We are not only consuming visual media en masse, we are continuously interacting with images, distributing and producing them as well. Our likes, shares, memes, comments, clips and tags are a welcome contribution to the online presence of celebrities, politicians and fashion brands. They play into the free labour of the prosumer by crafting their branding strategies according to levels of meme-bait, shareability and the ability of the stories and images to be framed and reframed. Through the almost inescapable and endless reproduction of images, we daily sculpt our identities and our own versions of mass culture, while being co-opted in creating the next hype on behalf of someone else.

By overlaying our apparel with statements from the digital realm, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air shows the breakdown of barriers between politics, social class, ownership and authenticity. It hijacks the viewer into a constellation of various levels of the self: the "individual-self", the “other-self” and the “Other”, each facing their own actions and responsibilities.

Face Filter via Instagram @paradyme_zone 

About PARADYME

PARADYME is an Amsterdam and Berlin based Practice for Visual Culture that works across the fields of creative direction and consulting, visual strategies and design as well as artistic and cultural research.

Through an eclectic background in design, art and social psychological research, PARADYME developed its unique viewing lens through which it investigates not only contemporary visual (sub)culture as a concept, but also its various contexts such as the influence of new technologies, identity, social values, ethical implications, the ways it mirrors dominant belief systems in our society and its power to transform those.    

Whether for their commissioned or self-initiated projects, PARADYME uses various crossdisciplinary, collaborative and multimedia formats such as graphic design, interactive art works and on- or offline spaces to create visual narratives that are inviting the spectator into a subjective experience of personal introspection.