The goal of the work was to explore visual tactics for directing attention (drawing attention to something, or alternatively drawing attention away from it).
This work evolved from an imagined competition between two rival agents who seek to draw attention to different messages. The two rivals from Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” comic personify the opposing forces. The rivals deploy visual tactics for directing attention (drawing attention to something, or alternatively drawing attention away from it), such as those used in graphic design. Example tactics for drawing attention include large size, bright colors, arrows and other pointers (e.g. eye gaze), circling or highlighting, and invitations for the viewer to interact with the work. Example tactics for deflecting attention include erasure, strikethroughs, occlusion, overwriting, distorting, and negating. The rival messages they are attempting to send are taken from the Cola Wars: logos and advertising copy from Coca Cola vs. Pepsi. The process for constructing the work involved turn-taking, as in a competitive game: One spy uses a turn to either create or amplify their own message or, alternatively, to deflect attention from their rival’s message, and then the other spy does the same. In this sense, very broadly, the general “opponent process” for making the work was designed in advance, but the specifics of how the work was built, turn by turn, was contingent and improvised. As the conflict between the rivals escalated, various constraints on what was considered a permissible move were violated. For example, initially the messaging was constrained to remain on the surface of the first two (left-most) panels, but later new layers of paper were added over the top of those panels, and third panel was added on the right, and later still the messaging pushed outside the panels altogether, eventually reaching the floor.
