The Mohawk Show
Tim Belonax's Judge's Choice Award:
"RPG Gothic" by Kara Gut
RPG Gothic is a 262-page catalog of free fantasy fonts sourced from the internet by artist Kara Gut and designed by New Archive. Kara Gut’s work questions ownership of digital spaces and how they mirror/perpetuate oppressive systems. The resulting pieces are subversions of power: at times manifesting as imperfect relics, holding hidden but ineffable magic. RPG Gothic is one such relic.
Fonts are highlighted by faux-pangrams—bits of text clipped from forums, comment sections, and stock-image descriptions under the search query of “fantasy." RPG Gothic reimagines the font catalog as an appropriated internet archive.
When designing and producing RPG Gothic, New Archive's goal was to subvert and create an intersection between the fine art, graphic design, and video game/internet communities. Their aim was to produce a book that was seductive to a viewer coming from any of these particular communities while subverting and changing the suspected meanings the book could take. RPG Gothic is a highly-designed catalog of freely sourced “low brow” fonts using content from specific internet-based communities.
