Tell me about the website, how does it work?

TH: The website works by randomly pairing an image with a piece of text. The images are a set of prompts, some are easier to identify and some are more ambiguous. I found that this mix was able to offer more stimulating responses than when they were all simple or abstract. The texts have all come from contributors: when contributing to the site you are presented with a pair of random images and invited to write a short text that is discursive, descriptive, detailed or abstract, anything from a thought, phrase or poetry that is read between the images.

All these images and texts are then randomly paired when you generate a card, and if there is a pair you like it can be saved to the gallery. The gallery then becomes a space for autonomous and unpredictable stories and conversations.

There are over 150 unique images so far, but I am still adding to the site. The more contributions I receive the more inspiration I have for a drawing. I wanted there to be a cycle, image to text, back to an image, and so on, to maintain this circulation and for the World2 website to be an interesting space for people who haven’t contributed yet.

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Is there anything you’ve noticed about the contributions from site visitors so far that you didn’t expect?

TH: Loads I think! I wanted this space to surprise me and put my work into new contexts. From the gallery there are some great cards, they invent stories and comment on the world in really interesting ways. I love looking through and can’t help not reading deeper into them, having the captions force the images away from what I know them to be, and puts them somewhere else.

It’s different for everyone I think and it’s great to imagine what people were thinking when they submitted to the gallery. I love how poetic and relevant some of the contributions have been, sometimes I know what pairs they could have seen, whilst others are completely unexpected. A lot are so emotive of how people are feeling right now and I’d love for this project to have an afterlife that showcases all of the contributions, as it would be a shame for them to just remain on a database.

Was the pandemic a contributing factor in creating this interactive platform?

TH: Completely, if it wasn’t for losing studio space and the access to physical and material workspaces this project wouldn’t have manifested. I’m interested in language, circulation, and authorship but I had intended for my work to take on a more material approach in expanding the representation of illustration.

The pandemic put me in a position where I had to realign my research and focus on those qualities more directly. But I’m happy it took this direction, I think I was able to produce a piece that can communicate with more people, that focuses on the importance of staying connected in a time where people are more alone than ever and create a space for collaboration that hasn’t existed before in my work. This project is hopefully just a starting point for research-led work that evolves into more out of collaboration.

What are the pros and cons you see in having a digital graduate show? 

TH: This is a grey area as it’s so unfamiliar, I think the results will become clear as more graduate shows launch. It’s good to remember though that they are a necessity for students at the moment, in our current climate, as an outlet and an endpoint. A digital space promises a wider reach, easy access to people's work, and it can be a better tool for navigating work – finding connections between classes and students, it creates a new space for digital workshops and online talks.

But, it’s not a show, not in the same sense, there isn’t an explosion of people working together having fun or falling out to put it together. There isn’t the same sense of closure or a big celebration, and most fundamentally it can’t showcase work at its best. Scale, presence, immersion, texture or talking to the students in person, a digital show is a medium but it never replaces a real one.

What was it like collaborating with a digital design studio to put together the site?

TH: Twomuch.studio were great. I know them from my undergraduate days so I had complete faith in them, but what made them a studio I wanted to work with is that they have worked on other collaborative open-source projects like twogether and boook.land. It felt right for a project that is all about collaboration, to team up with a studio that embraces that so intrinsically. The process was pretty simple, I drew up some wireframes for the functionality, we spoke about the design, and then they put it all together in an interesting way: fun to use and looks good!

Links

About Thomas Hedger

Thomas mixes strong line work, geometric and fluid shapes, and bold colour to create punchy illustrations and 3D installations. He takes inspiration in particular from nature and architecture, exploring isometric dimensions and ambient spaces. 

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