ICONIC shows the audience how arbitrary visual systems are by misinterpreting icons in a comical way.
Present day viewers step forward in time as they attend Hidden Figures, an exhibition taking place in the year 2643. In this time period, the world has undergone an ecological crisis and an event called The Great Digital Blackout, where solar flares caused all digital footage between 1990 to 2400 to be lost, the grid to collapse, and the technology itself difficult to reproduce.
Because iconography works due to a shared visual language between members of a society, as both the visual dictionary and the digital photographic evidence are lost, so are the icon’s original meaning. So, when an archaeologist stumbles upon an unexcavated area of what once was London, they have to piece together the behaviour of 2000s humans using nothing more than artefacts and pictograms. Interpreting these according to their understanding of the 2000s era, its mysterious technological wisdom, and the ecological crisis that ensued, they are taken by their findings, and present what they believe life was like in the 2000s at this exhibition.
Inspired by the out-of-context style of the British Museum, the exhibition is called Hidden Figures, a reflection of both the newly excavated icons and the hidden visual dictionary and biases that are brought to light.