Merry Christmas.

I am on Twitter now, I think.

twitter.com/nthnsmth

and you can’t stop me. I just do.

A series of 60 screenprints visually expressing the live audience response to the BBC Question Time episode featuring Nick Griffin of the British National Party, shown on 22nd of October 2009.

This isn’t finished; I just felt like uploading something.

for Hillsong Church London.

two-page-spread design for Hillsong London’s Abrupt Magazine.

I promise. I’ll put some new work on here soon. Really. Honestly. I promise.

Exhibited at LCC Foundations Show. Winner of “Best in Show” award.

Culture (Dominant culture): Defined by the dominant classes. Comes from the relationships, likes and dislikes, and prevalent attitudes of those cultures in a given time period.

Popular culture: Defined by the ‘great masses;’ the middle and lower classes. Consists of their struggles with (for and against; accept and rejecting) the dominant culture.

Counterculture: Extremist popular culture. Complete rejection of the dominant culture. Highly idealistic.

Counterculture is extremism of popular culture. Its ideals are ultimately unrealistic, unachievable, or illogical and hypocritical. For example, the first-wave punk counterculture essentially advocated anarchy, seemingly unaware of the longer-term complete impracticalities of a society dominated by anarchistic policy. Modern society, however, requires the existence of idealism and extremism to present it with new ideas and catalyse change.

Counterculture is shocking to culture; it relies on its own scandalousness to distribute its ideals. Shock tactics attract (usually negative) media attention. Regardless of the negativity of this attention, the counterculture influences the world it thrusts itself upon.

While in theory it would seem that positive media attention would produce a more desirable distribution of ideals, removing a counter culture’s shock value would also remove the very reason it had received attention at all. More importantly, it would also require counterculturalists to compromise their principles. Counterculturalists aren’t idiots – they simply believe in a cause so passionately and absolutely that it is all they can consider. I don’t think I have ever felt that way.

myspace.com/andampersandampersand