coming soon
Free Download Series
When viewing the world through the hazy glass of a crystal ball, it is oftentimes difficult to distinguish tools of liberation from tools of oppression. The internet-utopians of yesteryear, with their visions of a liberatory free exchange of information, did not, clearly, foresee the hellscape that is contemporary online life. To quickly peruse, say, fiverr.com—a site whose marketplace provides the architecture for an almost sublime act of collective wage reduction—is to witness the internet not as emancipator but as jailer. Indeed, if the web has liberated anyone, it is corporations from their needing to exploit us; via our reliance upon rentier platforms, we now take care of the exploiting ourselves.
And yet: is there not room for hope in this desolate landscape of 1s and 0s? Are there not corners of the internet where the world’s bulletin board has produced, if not liberation, at least worthy oddities—perhaps even art? With the Free Download series, Familiars Strangers asks these questions and more. Specifically, this series examines the altruists of online life: those individuals who upload their creations for free on platforms ranging from DaFont to 3DWarehouse. These are the types we download when we are in a bind, the 3D models we need for a quick rendering. Can examining these works reveal how the pressures the internet exerts–or the opportunities it provides–affect the art we produce? What impulses, this series inquires, lie behind these producers’ profligate creativity?
When viewing the world through the hazy glass of a crystal ball, it is oftentimes difficult to distinguish tools of liberation from tools of oppression. The internet-utopians of yesteryear, with their visions of a liberatory free exchange of information, did not, clearly, foresee the hellscape that is contemporary online life. To quickly peruse, say, fiverr.com—a site whose marketplace provides the architecture for an almost sublime act of collective wage reduction—is to witness the internet not as emancipator but as jailer. Indeed, if the web has liberated anyone, it is corporations from their needing to exploit us; via our reliance upon rentier platforms, we now take care of the exploiting ourselves.
And yet: is there not room for hope in this desolate landscape of 1s and 0s? Are there not corners of the internet where the world’s bulletin board has produced, if not liberation, at least worthy oddities—perhaps even art? With the Free Download series, Familiars Strangers asks these questions and more. Specifically, this series examines the altruists of online life: those individuals who upload their creations for free on platforms ranging from DaFont to 3DWarehouse. These are the types we download when we are in a bind, the 3D models we need for a quick rendering. Can examining these works reveal how the pressures the internet exerts–or the opportunities it provides–affect the art we produce? What impulses, this series inquires, lie behind these producers’ profligate creativity?
While we hope to find answers to these queries, ultimately the Free Download series is interested, simply, in discovering who these anonymous creators are. Just as the oral historian Studs Terkel used his tape recorder to “capture the thoughts of the non-celebrated” and, in so doing, transformed “‘statistics’ … [into] persons, each one unique,” our profiles will arrest the ceaseless flow of anonymous digital content to reveal the individuals behind its production. We do not know whether this act of nominalism will have the power to counter the evils of the fiverrs of the world, but we do know that spotlighting the work of the unjustly non-celebrated will leave us, in the words of Terkel, “constantly astonished by the extraordinary dreams of [so-called] ordinary people.”
Free Download Type Designers is the first book in this series. It will highlight the work and lives of self-taught type designers from the website DaFont.com.
Free Download Type Designers is the first book in this series. It will highlight the work and lives of self-taught type designers from the website DaFont.com.