Content Desert
Content Desert is a book that collects the 2-D graphic work of artist Mark Price.
The collection’s title presages an almost unfathomably absurd question to pose in 2017, “What would a moment without content look like?”
Content Desert is a post-internet object, a journey through graphic refuse amassed and extruded over several stylized chapters. The book brings together a multitude of hijacked glyphs, damaged vectors, stolen sentiments, and product mockups reimagined and recontextualized at the moment of content’s obsolescence. The resulting volume of deeply compromised images occupies a liminal space in the world of intelligibility.
Through the transformation of once-was content into high contrast and stylized detritus, Content Desert is an envoy from yesterday to tomorrow, delivering its anti-message through deconstructed forms, abandoned logos, and nonfunctional iconography, operating as though it were reliant on a befuddled and obtuse navigation application.
The 450-plus pages anachronously proceed from its obnoxious tag line of “1,000,0000 years of broken graphics … load more, know less”.
“Content Desert is a way to view the internet the way the bots might. A broken window into branded nightmares, a treasury of all the aesthetic pieces we are leaving behind without a second thought. This tightly constructed volume is the perfect physical distillation of a digital world. Chaotic, powerful, funny, at war with itself and you in the best way.”
— Maxwell Neely-Cohen, Author of Echo of the Boom
“Content Desert is an ominous graphic novel, that, at its heart, yearns for meaning. It skewers the consumer class hunger for more, especially when promulgated in the aesthetic of less. Yet, despite the assault of “anti-meaning,” we ultimately want Price’s labor—which feels arduous—to matter. It’s in that desire that we experience the intimacy of Content Desert: in the dissolution of superlative individualism, what is value?”
— Jenna Crowder, Founding Editor of The Chart
“Content Desert is seemingly without precedent or clear genre. It’s an artwork, graphic anti-novel, brand identity, art book and conceptual object. It’s also a work of dadaist poetry. It cannot be scrolled easily though you should not give up trying.”
— Lee Tusman, artist and curator
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