I’ve finished up a video that I was collecting images for at the Interference Archive during the end of this last August (right after gathering for our Justseeds planning retreat). Partially an inside joke about predictable tropes in movement posters (born of my years working with political print-makers), and partially a serious meditation on the power of icons and symbols, the basic idea was to scour the archive for all the instances I could find of a raised fist on a poster, print, zine, or book cover, and then string them all together in a rapid-fire looping video…

After digging around in the flatfiles and bookshelves at Interference for two days, then digging around back home at the Justseeds office, I ended up with 360+ images! Yet, I can’t even imagine how many I must have missed in my fervent documentation blitz. This online version is three rotations of the animated sequence, the whole thing is meant to be shown as a constant loop.

Don’t miss Lincoln Cushing’s great article on the history of the clenched fist in resistance graphics.

For those interested in an easy-to-use format for an on-the-fly copy-stand for shooting flat work , I went with this set-up suggested by Konrad Lawson over at ProfHacker. But don’t underestimate lighting conditions, I had to do a lot of post tweaking per image…