Ephemera is a metaphorical drifting within the typographic and conceptual landscape of the newspaper's frontpage, aiming to deconstruct its functional unity as sign and present it through a critical viewpoint.

The project is a visual and conceptual reading of daily press. It began from the assumption that the newspaper, being one of the most common, everyday items where design and meaning, form and content meet, can be extruded from its functional context and reveal its multi-semantic and ambiguous content.

 

In detail

Ephemera was structured on two levels, corresponding to the form and the content of the frontpage: the first level concerns the experimental visual analysis of the frontpage layout of five major daily newspapers during a randomly selected week. The second level regards the deconstruction and re-synthesis of their contents (texts) in poetic form.

 

The first level, that of visual analysis, it was based on the whole visual impression deriving from the layout and its various typographic elements, which were traced by hand using black markers- as concrete black blocks. The aim was to visualize the inner rhythm of the design grid regardless of its content (titles, articles). For this purpose the black and white compositions were used as metaphorical digits in a repetitive video sequence, much like a digital clock which gives the impression of time passing but remains illegible whatsoever.

 

At a second level, that of the content, certain phrases were cut off from their context and were in turn re-composed as seven "poems" with a critical character, under the title Poet in common time. Those were printed in plain A2-size posters, which formed the background for the projection of a static image consisting of black frames, resembling the way that newspapers are hung in Athens' kiosks. This static composition was placed next to the monotonous loop of the digital "clock".