salome
guerrilla campaign, app & brand identity
created at Savannah College of Art & Design
Conceptually, Salome is an imaginary government-run app targeted at teenagers and young adults to create a more compliant, submissive, and uniformed citizenry by obstructing the free flow of information and altering it to be more shallow. The project includes the Salome app, a guerrilla campaign, and brand identity.
The app supplies users with manipulated information by way of news articles that purposely obfuscate the truth. It also has virtual reality and quick response code functions. On plagues that relay information about historical sites, Salome has placed its logo and a QR code. By facing the phone’s camera toward the code, the app reveals a message prompting the user toward an article which gives a distorted view of the plague’s historical information. Users are prompted to continue using the app by acquiring points on the leader board, watching short brainwashing videos, and completing repeat after me exercises.
The guerrilla campaign is based in Savannah, GA. Words are projected onto buildings where acts of cruelty happened in Savannah’s history. Those words are written in such a way as to downplay the more unsightly aspects of Savannah’s history while also promoting the app. Locations for projection include a City Market building, which sold slaves during the 1800s, Savannah’s Visitor Center, which was built over the Creek Chief Tomochichi’s grave, and The Pirate House, where many seamen went missing after being kidnapped and forced into servitude by pirates.
The brand identity for the app uses the graphic of an abstracted face to symbolize the silencing of individual voices, through the cross on the mouth. It also represents the spread of misinformation, through the covering over the eye, while a rounded sanserif typeface was chosen to keep a sense of youth and playfulness.