I recently reviewed Antiphrase, an independent French arts t-shirt label at my other blog Buy-Tees.net. As it happens they liked my art and invited me to submit my own t-shirt designs.

I spent (most of) the weekend coming up with "Viral Society", and I’m pleased with the results. Here’s a preview of the t-shirt design and an explanation for the work…

"Viral Society references a correlation between the original Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 and the modern day swine flu. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. The fact that the world is quickly becoming overpopulated, people are more likely to travel far further than ever before, as cities grow larger, and land is sold at higher and higher premiums, we cannot escape the most successful virus the planet has ever known. That being the human race. Human beings behave like no other organism on earth, that is excepting biological viruses.

We consume everything, we over breed, we reduce our natural resources to nothing, and finally will be the death of ourselves. Diseases in general have begun to "compete" with the human race over the last few decades, be it Swine Flu, Mad Cow Disease, Ebola, AIDS, we as a race are facing the final defense of our planet to control our explosive population count. Our mere existence has accelerated global warming, the pollution of the world’s water and air supply, and the destruction of a vast majority of bio-diverse species and regions of the world.

As we combat the side effects of our increasing demand for every natural resource, the chemicals we produce, the fuels we burn, the materials we manufacture create bi-products that contribute to the toxic soup that continues to seep into the groundwater, root systems, and glacial regions of the planet. We are a disease, we are a virus, we communicate quickly across a hive mind, we extract and process raw materials faster than a swarm of locusts, yet we are doomed."

It should be available for sale as a t-shirt in the near future at www.antiphrase.fr, do take some time to check out the other artists there too, which include quite a few respected graffiti and street artists, plus some illustrators. I particularly like Goin’s stencil art.

This post is tagged antiphrase, art, baines, French graffiti, swine flu, t-shirt design, t-shirts, virus