Notepad is an act of protest and commemoration disguised as a stack of ordinary yellow legal pads. Each ruled line, when magnified, is revealed to be microprinted text enumerating the full names, dates, and locations of each Iraqi civilian death on record over the first three years of the Iraq War. The designers imagine each printed edition of one hundred notepads, meant to be covertly distributed to United States representatives and senators, as a sort of Trojan horse, injecting transgressive data straight into the halls of power and eventually filed and memorialized in official archives. SWAMP is now working on an edition that takes into account the American incursion into Afghanistan; with the disclosure of confidential information by WikiLeaks, the designers plan to continue updating the project.
Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects, July 24–November 7, 2011 .
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