OFFF Report: Neville Brody On Freedom

Graphic designer Neville Brody gave the opening keynote speech today at the OFFF media arts festival in Oerias, on the outskirts of Lisbon, Portugal. He talked about his work and projects and the idea of freedom. He told the audience that people have given up their identities – that all that we do is being recorded and those recordings are being owned by someone else – a government or corporation. He said that we cast a data shadow in the eye of this dataveillance and that we need to be expressive despite this:

For the first time in living memory we’re in a space where the future looks worse than the present. We think that the world for our children will be worse than it was for our parents. One hundred years ago the future was fantastic, today we think the world will collapse.

Companies own us, our entirety. The job is to liberate ourselves to do something new and risky. We must move beyond living in a place of fear – not to a place of hope either – but beyond hope where we believe in what we can do.

Neville Brody