Mindscape In Cyberspace

Book Cover: A Roof over Every Head [IRASEC]
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Based in Bangkok, the Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC) is a member of the network of research centers of the French Foreign Ministry. They were looking for an overall visual identity for their next series of studies on different political and economical issues of South East Asia. They often used real-life photographs of objects from the region being written about, which failed to give any idea about the exact cartographic location to the global readers. They also needed an identity that stood out from conventional covers using photographs. I decided to use drawn illustrations for the covers for their publications.

For the cover of the book on housing policies of Singapore - “A Roof over Every Head”, I used the conventional idea of a metropolitan skyline with high-rises, tweaking it substantially it by imparting a hand-drawn texture suggesting the thickness and solidity of built form.

More details about this book can be viewed here

Rampage
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Being an avid gamer I used to spend lots of time on various versions of famous game series GTA – scheming a ‘rampage’, planning ‘bomb blasts’, executing a ‘mall shootout’ or simply ‘riding’ through the city ‘killing gang members’. This image is a kind of extension of my visual memories of those virtual images of deaths and blood and blasts, juxtaposed against our real context – a blasting population, often threatened, disturbed by deaths and murders, mass killings and genocides. It’s all about our time - restless and anxious, like the central character of GTA, standing in the middle of the blood and bodies of ‘wasted gang members’.

The Bengali text on the image says, ‘Our time’, repeatedly.

This work has been featured on the cover of Autumn 2007 issue of International Journal, published by Canadian Institute of International Affair (CIIA, Toronto), currently known as Canadian International Council (CIC). Thanks to CIC and IJ.