A historical timeline of financial rise and fall

Tobias Revell is a second-year student on the MA Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art (to which I moved in November 2011 since my last post to this blog).

At the recent Work in Progress exhibition, he showed a big timeline representing the vicissitudes of the world financial system from 50 to 2160 AD.

Tobias says about it

In its earliest forms, this was an exercise for myself and the studio audience in understanding the precedents and patterns of how power and finance have interacted throughout history and also as a way to show my research beyond scribbled notes. The idea being that I would then build smaller works off this context. However, I found that it came to be a piece of work in itself, a product of the research that went into it. It's also fulfilled its purpose of inspiring debate perfectly - I spent almost the whole private view talking to people about it with objections, opinions and questions of their own (in particular the assumption that as an artist/designer I was out of place in condoning rampant capitalism, something which I'm not doing nor was trying to show.)

I think that showing the research I'd done in such a graphical and open way allowed people to engage with the subject matter straight away without having to try and get to grips with curious new forms.

Timeline (detail). Tobias Revell 2012. Reproduced with permission.

Go to Tobias's blog.