Beth Gray

This was a group project where we were given the task of creating a subversive magazine, I was working with Alice, Louise and Green.

We named our magazine ‘Phubbed’ after a term derived from the combination of the words ‘phone’ and ‘snubbed’. The theme of our magazine was a subversive review about how technology surrounds us and blatently invades our lives.

My contribution focussed on surveillance, highlighting that UK’s citizens are the most watched population on Earth and that privacy is increasingly and perhaps worryingly becoming a thing of the past.

My submission for the front cover attempted to showcase this surveillance theme. I  photographed a crowd using a long shutter speed meaning the lens, rather than taking a quick snapshot was almost watching people’s movement. I chose this distorted visual theme to evoke a suspicion that something is ‘off’, and not quite as it should be. This allowed me to play around with text and image distortion and similar glitches within my body text and contents pages.

I took a 15 minute walk and photographed each visible CCTV camera I encountered, showcasing just how much we are all being watched and don’t necessarily notice in day to day life.

Given that no magazine can survive without advertising revenue, we each chose an animal and created a satirical advert in a 1950’s style, showing the absurdity of targeted technology for our pets; from apps, to CD’s and DVD’s it seems nobody is free from the grips of modern day tech. A fun twist on an otherwise potentially gloomy magazine!

Pages were numbered in binary; a language in which few of us are fluent but none of us can apparently do without.

‘How to fly under the radar without crashing’ a guide to going off grid, of course handwritten on various scraps of paper and not typed on a traceable computer!