Remember this?
That was the creepy and much maligned logo for the Total Information Awareness program that looked like something ripped from an Illuminati training manual or a Robert Ludlum black helicopter novel. It was so creepy and maligned, it got yanked from the website and went to the Memory Hole. Fortunately, the program is dead, too.
At any rate, that was, in my estimation, the worst piece of government art I had seen. At least until this:
Could someone tell the Trotskyite geniuses at MARC that maybe they should lay off the STASI or North Korean secret police style art-work, particularly when asking people to report ‘suspicious activity.’
Just a friendly suggestion, you know. I don’t know how often Bob Barr gets to Baltimore/Washington, but he has been pretty freaked out lately (justifiably so) and he has a shitload of loaded guns.
(The MARC picture was stolen blatantly yet apologetically from Articulatory Loop, so go visit and give ’em some traffic.)
Tim F
Man, I hope like hell that some overeducated middle-manager’s idea of a joke.
Jim Henley
I feel a case of Gary Farber Syndrome coming on, but I had that days before Articulatory Loop did. Only difference was that I linked to it rather than reproduced the image. Hindsight is powerful.
John Cole
Weird- I missed it, Jim.
Rick
I take it that poster was unveiled on May Day.
Of course, Maryland *is* something of a People’s Republic. Maybe that’s why they chose a Cyrillic-ish typeface.
Cordially…
Randolph Fritz
(to repeat myself) Actually, Stalin suppressed that style, in favor of an overblown heroic realism called (you know it) Socialist Realism. That poster is Constructivist, a style that was developed in the brief outburst of Soviet creativity in the 1920s.
(It was probably some lefty graphic designer putting something over on the gummint.)
DecidedFenceSitter
Considering my graphic designer friends Randolph, I say that’s entirely possible. And hey if the graphic designer managers aren’t aware enough of history to recognize the style, and are actually drawn to the style and type, well, that says something to. Perhaps, similar minds, perhaps simply the power of the artistic form.
Forgetting History Repeating and all that.
p.lukasiak
The next poster in the series, dedicated to promotion of religious freedom, will be a adaptation of “Piss Christ”.
Jim Henley
“Piss Christ” seems a strange thing to bring up in this context. Do you think about it a lot?
Dave Schuler
Ah, yes, Socialist Realism. Those were the days.
Jim Henley
Constructivism, actually. Socialist realism came later.
Losing Faith
Geez, this is insane. It’s getting more surreal by the day. It makes me feel like a conspiracy nut in some book.
Mike Trettel
I made a couple of comments on this topic over at UO when Jim first raised it, but since then I’ve found buried away in my cruft a MARC commuter pass protector sleeve (a plastic doohicky you stick your monthly ticket in) that has been printed with the same logo-identical typeface, message, and all. Genuinely weird. I still haven’t seen the poster yet during my daily commute-hell I’d be tempted to steal it. Still, MARC is an actual target-low security, thousands of daily passengers, and they run some two dozen or so trains daily into and out of DC’s Union Station.
Albert
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