Discipula

How Things Dream (2016–present) is an ongoing project that uses the brand identity and corporate communication strategies of AURA, a fictional tech corporation, to imagine and explore the consequences of today’s growing relationship between technology, neoliberalism and new forms of control. By manipulating specific elements of corporate aesthetic and combining them with more eclectic references, Discipula envisions a transnational company, AURA, whose power permeates all aspects of everyday life down to the deepest depth. Through IoT applications and the analysis of BIG DATA as a source of information on patterns of human behaviour, AURA provides essential services in areas such as domestics, healthcare, security, education and governance. AURA’s communications, both appropriating and distorting the real, represent a window on one of many possible futures: a post-democratic world characterised by the final imposition of a corporate-centred global regime; one in which surveillance and control are fully accepted and integrated in the commodification of daily life. Actualizing Discipula’s interest for the mechanisms and techniques of advertisement, AURA’s slogans and visual imagery are often slipped into the daily information flow via magazines, outdoor advertisements and performances. All this with the intention of creating a tension between context and content through which to further highlight AURA’s underpinning ideology and message against the backdrop of real-life.