Festival Grounded 2018

The second edition of Grounded asked about intimacy in the age of artificial intelligence. We answered with one gesture: a mechanical hand holding something soft. A brain, an eye, a block of bright silicone. The hand is jointed brass and carbon fibre, the thing it holds is glossy and vulnerable, and the whole tension of the theme is in how carefully it is being held.

We kept the colour flat and confident, cyan, magenta and violet backdrops with no gradients to hide behind, so the objects read instantly at poster size and from across a street. The materials do the storytelling: polished metal against rubbery pink, a hard machine being gentle.

Typography is a monospaced face for the title, a nod to the machine doing the talking, paired with a friendly rounded sans for dates and the festival mark. The system ran across the poster, a series of square variations for each object, and the printed tickets.