20:00:18 10-05-81

Artist poster project
Production: Graphic Design Festival Breda
Breda, The Netherlands, May 2010.

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GDFB 2010 main theme: "Decoding".

The portrait I used in the poster 20:00:18 10-05-81 is actually the first data vizualisation I've ever seen in my life. This picture was generated and shown in a live broadcast on French national TV on the evening of the 10th of March 1981 at exactly 8pm, to announce the presidential elections' winning candidate.
About 18 seconds after the portrait of Francois Mitterand showed up on a few millions of TV screens, a very brief image distortion happened. Probably no one ever noticed. After some researches, I found the original footage and did a freeze frame of this strange "bug": it appeared that it was not that easy to identify which one of the two candidates was depicted.
It made me think about the importance of the decoding/translation process from one type of raw data (here, the number of votes) to something that is understandable by the people (a picture, a symbol), and resulted in the poster specially made for the GDFB poster project.

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