THE REDACTED HISTORY OF THE I■STITUTE OF C■NTEXTUALISM
Winner of Best Designed Independent Book at the Australian Book Design Awards 2017, this self-published project blurs the line between archival art and absurdist fiction.
The book presents an alternate history of a forgotten art movement that never existed - complete with found photographs, fabricated drawings, altered archive footage, and “recovered” artworks. Every detail was meticulously crafted to feel authentic, from the typography to the water-damaged pages. To deepen the illusion, I built an ecosystem around the book: a website that tracks your IP, a cryptic Instagram account, and a Facebook page full of debates between fictional academics and confused onlookers. It became less a book and more a narrative experience - part Cold War hallucination, part art-world prank.
Equal parts satire, homage, and design experiment, The Institute of Contextualism was created to make people question what’s real, what’s art, and what happens when we give myth a website.
