The Serpentine is delighted to present a monograph of Simon Denny’s work produced on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in London entitled Products for Organising.

Within the last few years, Simon Denny (born 1982 in Auckland, New Zealand) has emerged as an artist whose work challenges numerous themes rooted in our globalised world of technology, consumerism and the dissemination of information. He creates sculptural installations that include print, graphic design, moving images and texts. Denny’s complex and layered installations explore the commodification of information, branding and marketing strategies as well as the relationship between the private and public sectors.

This publication brings together, for the first time, key installation images, annotated by the artist’s extended captions, which sheds light on the development of his practice.

Architect and writer Keller Easterling has contributed an essay ‘KOH-wa-ee’, elaborating on the tools of espionage and the infrastructures behind information encryptions and the so-called digital war. In his article ‘The Cult of GCHQ’, Ryan Gallagher, an award-winning investigative journalist and reporter for The Intercept, reveals the culture of secrecy within the GCHQ. Economic historian Moritz Schularick’s ‘Dough for The Doughnut: The Private Finance Initiative’ provides an account on how the GCHQ building’s construction was funded through Private Finance Initiatives. The volume also includes an introduction to Denny’s work and the exhibition at the Serpentine by its curator Amira Gad.

The collaboration with graphic designer David Bennewith results in a publication that mimics Denny’s installations by including digitally hand-drawn interventions of advertorial pages. The fonts used throughout the publication are ‘Helvetica Neue’ and ‘San Francisco’, Apple’s former and current User Interface (UI) system fonts. ‘San Francisco’ is a custom design by Apple that comes as a standard feature with their new operating system ‘El Capitan’. In the catalogue, both fonts can be compared and document a particular moment in Apple’s UI development – their attempt to create a font which is bolder and friendlier – additionally highlighting Denny’s interest in tech companies’ perpetual drive to develop.

Year: 2015
Author: Simon Denny
Editor: Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Contributors: Foreword by Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Texts by Ryan Gallagher, Moritz Schularick, Keller Easterling, and Amira Grad.
Publisher: Koenig Books
Language: English
ISBN: 978-3-86335-867-9