Your Flight
Has Been Cancelled
Has Been Cancelled
13 artists explore non-places and stock landscapes
project authors: Ksenia Kopalova, Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva
contributors: Hilde Kramer, Tânia A. Cardoso, Mia Newton, Ilia Shatokhin, Sarah Nesti Willard, Maria Massimi, Irina Troitskaya, Guzel Garipova, Nadia Zhelieznova, Olesya Shchukina, Polina Zinziver
What does stock landscape illustration say about the ways we perceive physical space, movement and migration?
Built upon Catrin Morgan's idea of the 'nomadic illustration', the project unites works by 13 illustrators
to explore the less obvious possibilities of stock landscapes, — and imagines them as digital 'airports': non-places that connect us to particularities of individual experiences.
Built upon Catrin Morgan's idea of the 'nomadic illustration', the project unites works by 13 illustrators
to explore the less obvious possibilities of stock landscapes, — and imagines them as digital 'airports': non-places that connect us to particularities of individual experiences.
research behind the project
research behind the project
research behind the project
research behind the project
The research for this project was mainly text-based and was fundamentally inspired by Catrin Morgan's concept of the 'nomadic illustration'.
Can the concept of 'nomadic illustration' be used to describe stock images?
Can stock landscape be regarded as a digital “non-place”?
Could stock imagery be a doorway to a more humane and personal space?
Morgan's idea of looking at low-quality images on par with commissioned illustrations made me recall the debate around stock illustration and uniformity of the overused Alegria style or the so-called 'corporate Memphis'
As I am interested in landscapes and place-making strategies, I started looking at landscape images in stock image libraries. I was intrigued by the ambiguity of these images: what seemed to be ultra-inclusive, was paradoxically alienating. In an attempt to explain this paradox I referred to Marc Augé's concept of a 'non-place'.
'Your Flight Has Been Cancelled' is an attempt to create an unlikely point of connection, where an alienating image becomes a temporary hub that connects individual experiences.
Marc Augé
“The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations, only solitude, and similitude”
Khoi Vinh
“Looking at the former and the prevalence of a single, monocultural aesthetic that seemingly almost every startup and tech company and would-be industry disruptor out there has adopted, it’s worth wondering if there’s some other voice—or even a different modulation of this same voice—that could be appropriate.”
Catrin Morgan
“It is important to look online at low-quality images functioning as illustrations, whose authorship is either unclear or impossible to define, and to consider them as of equal interest or importance to the images created by illustrators. ”
Catrin Morgan
“Nomadic illustrations are single images that are repeatedly repurposed and recontextualized. ”
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