Posterwall for the Twenty-first Century

Poster Wall for the Twenty-first Century. Jeroen Barendse (Dutch, b. 1973), Thomas Castro (American, b. 1967), Dimitri Nieuwenhuizen (Dutch, b. 1971), and Daniel Powers (American, b. 1983), Lust. Client: Graphic Design Museum, Breda. The Netherlands, 2008. Video projection, motion sensors, computer. Courtesy of Lust

In addition to working with commercial software applications, the Dutch design collective Lust writes its own code. Members focus on designing an initial set of rules and then allowing the visual form to emerge automatically, thus shifting the design process from the search for an ideal solution to an analysis of initial conditions and the construction of a system. The end results of the process are variable and unknown. The Posterwall for the Twenty-first Century was created for the Graphic Design Museum in Breda, the Netherlands, where it is projected at the end of the exhibition One Hundred Years of Dutch Graphic Design. A computer program gathers content from the Internet about cultural events in the Netherlands and automatically formats the data into digital posters. By automating such familiar design principles as repetition, layering, dynamic angles, and contrasting scale and color, the code produces a new poster every five minutes, yielding 600 unique compositions per day. The resulting pieces are raw rather than polished, using default fonts and randomly assembled components to comment on the ubiquitous texture of digital media.