SUBPARALLEL

Plug yourself in…

An entire existence with limitless opportunities fabricated by artificial intelligence. Forget the burdens of your stale reality to grow beyond human potential. Join a utopia so immersive the digital and real become linked as one. Enter the subparallel.

I've always had an obsession with retrofuturism, with the ideas of how people from the the time imagined what the future would look like. It birthed such a unique style that I wish was seen more today. It was even more special when it was reimagined by illustrators/animators with the capacity to make movies like Akira, Ghost In The shell, and Metropolis Rintaro. I remember particularly being inspired when I watched the Cowboy Bebop "brainscratch" episode. The main gang of protagonists were investigating their next bounty where civillians were being brainwashed into a cult through a video game headset. This idea kinda sat at the back of my head since then but I finally had a chance to try out modelling the chunky beige monitors and the rest of the project flowed from there.

Decided to try out photogrammetry for this project again. Shoutout to @thrvht for helping me scan the cervices (🍑) and then brought it into blender. Discovered a library of preset animations that I was able to try on myself. There's something freaky about watching a photoscanned version of yourself do fortnite emotes.

Typeface is something I always struggle with but I currently enjoy the super conceptual ones (that are often difficult to decipher). Mine is far from those, but in the process of trying I created the DIN of the future. These initial ideas start by spelling out the word, "subparallel", chopping/grouping up, and finding a way to make the reader puzzle it together like turning your head 90° counterclockwise. To break up the straight lines, there's a fisheye effect leaning to the right of the word and I threw in some pixelated tv static effects to sell the 1990s/2k anime intro feels.

One of my top faves, what did you think?