I’ve just completed my second t-shirt design for Antiphrase.fr, they’ll be including it in my new online store at their site once I have completed a third so I’d better get my thinking cap on! What’s more they’ll be opening a retail outlet in France in September and will be selling both Body Electric and Viral Society via the boutique.

Here’s a preview of Body Electric…

Here’s the thinking behind the work:-

I came across a site the other day that revealed the gross inefficiency of the electric chair, and how many who are put to death this way suffer inexorable pain and torture throughout one bungled execution attempt after another. Some are burned to death, some with high blood pressure will literally explode from the inside, but many require lethal injections in addition to electrocution in order to die. Things are so bad that recently a toy was manufactured commemorating one of these bungled executions.

The barbaric practice of death by the electric chair reminded me of a  poem by Walt Whitman (1819-1892), "I Sing the Body Electric", a celebrated ode to the flesh, which has also had a great deal of influence on beatniks such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg almost 100 years later . Many describe the beat generation period of literature as the second-coming of American Transcendentalism. I hope we needn’t wait a century for the next, "cooking people to death" can not on any terms be described as civilized, and a wake-up call of modern society’s conscience and consciousness is sorely needed. However public fears see the extent to which government can now extend torture, punishment and control on an all more psychological and psychiatric level, as the science of neurology opens new doors to both the penal system and the wider constraints of social control.

Ironically it may take the final splutter of this fading superpower, an ever waning gas supply to dry up, a nationwide brown out, for only then certain States of America will review the use of electric chair as "an inefficient use of energy resources". Until that fateful day, the USA should expect to see their lights continue to flicker whenever another Death Row inmate is grilled over easy on a platter of cold hard justice.

Once the third has been designed I will point you to the store at Antiphrase.fr

This post is tagged antiphrase, Body Electric, commission, electric chair, I Sing The Body Electric, Paul Baines, t-shirt design