CATEGORY

Today's television is packed with programs featuring crime scene investigation and their ubiquitous scenes of autopsy and forensic medicine. Existential questions about life and death are no longer only addressed on the philosophical level of Hamlet's famous soliloquy, but in drastic images. Splatter, horror and the Gothic are not only making their comeback in TV or in movies, but are influencing the current style of editorial design, illustration and photography.

Against this background, Black Magic/White Noise presents an unsettlingly fascinating collection of visuals that deal the physical and the psychological as interpreted by contemporary designers from around the world. The book seduces its readers into a conflicted world filled with chillingly beautiful illustration, photography, graphic design, collage, painting and installation. The title's "black magic" is represented by images of darkness, mystery and horror. Its "white noise" describes the unexpected infiltration of the irrational into broad daylight that can be found in some of the included works and that we have come to know and love from films by Alfred Hitchcock or books by Haruki Murakami.

Not for the fainthearted, Black Magic/White Noise is a potent cocktail of the drastic themes and motifs that are being used and finding widespread acceptance in today's creative disciplines and design.