Sans Surveillance Sans

Artist’s statement

Statement, 2019.

The present video was subtitled using Sans Surveillance Sans. Sans Surveillance Sans is a typeface I designed to raise questions about today’s ubiquitous surveillance and the Orwellian rhetorical figures of speech attached to it. We are living in the age of Surveillance Capitalism. Yet political leaders, government agencies, and the industrial complex shaping the surveillance apparatus prefer to market their programmes and technologies under appealing buzzwords — while failing to acknowledge the resulting societal risks.

Exploiting ligatures in a liberal way, Sans Surveillance Sans automatically replaces oxymorons, euphemisms, and technical jargon, as they are written, with more straightforward and honest language. While traditional typeface designers utilise ligatures to improve the legibility of texts, here I go one step further and utilise ligatures to improve our ability to make sense of the world we live in.

This is how big data becomes big surveillance. Ditto for smart anything, personalisation, data collection, and other keywords in use today. The next time you read or hear something that sounds too opaque, too innocuous, or simply too good, try typing those words in Sans Surveillance Sans, and let this typeface do the translation for you.

The original video — Cambridge Analytica: The Power of Big Data and Psychographics — is distributed under a Creative Commons licence by Concordia. Here I appropriated an excerpt of it, and I reframed it under the lens of my typeface.

Media sample

Credits

Source footage: Cambridge Analytica: The Power of Big Data and Psychographics, distributed under a Creative Commons licence by Concordia; excerpt appropriated and re-framed.

Typeface design, subtitling, and edit: the author.

Release status. The typeface exists and was used to produce this work; it has not been released, and no release has been committed. Stated here, not omitted.