December 2023

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Parts per Billion is an essay synthesising fragments of a visual-research on density, politics of space and its occupation, maximalist traditions of excess and ornamentation and their vestiges in algorithmic aesthetics. Departing from problematising the use of ‘breathing space’ in art and design, this part-polemic eulogises Horror Vacui—employing it as metaphor for diverse social fabrics of the majority world which allow for the presence of many contrasting worlds in airtight proximity. 

Through the use of a language of excess and noise, the essay provides a conduit for exploring the personal, through the poetics and the body of the multitude. The dissolution of one’s individuality is portrayed as a vantage point of solace.

Parts per Billion is a part of Issue 8; a collection of thesis essays of the Sandberg Design Department.

This essay inspired a two-part graduation piece titled In Coalescence of Excess. The video essay appropriates prompt input image generations and features a phantasmagoric rendition of familiar scapes. Additionally, it intersperses the immanent codification of aesthetics in these outputs, that blur the threshold of the real and synthetic. Aesthetics of density and the machinic choreography of the everyday are mirrored here, conceiving meaning through the congestion of noise, keywords and enormous datasets. Through seaming the seamless, the fabric collages indicate a constellation of worlds existing in proximity to each other. The subject found a vessel in generative AI, a tool built on historical colonial instrumentation, whose fringes seem ‘infinite’

Akash Sheshadri is a designer-researcher and visual artist working through the integration of a variety of digital mediums; to produce images—both static and dynamic—and is interested-in their manifestation as artefacts. Akash tries to situate an artistic practice of expression and critique, that is synthesised from the many urgencies of the socio-real and hyper-digital. 

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press)

Augusto Boal, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed, trans. Adrian Jackson,(Oxon: Routledge)

Rethinking Density: Art, Culture and Urban Practices, ed. Anamarija Batista, Szilvia Kovács and Carina Lesky (London: Sternberg Press)

Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, trans. Erik Butler (New York: Verso Futures)

Walter Benjamin, Howard Eiland, and Kevin McLaughlin, The Arcades Project (Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press)

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Photography by Clemens Stumpf and Sander van Wettum.
Issue 8 designed by Kaiyu Wang, Naomi Hubèrt and Sandy Richter.