In this pamphlet, John Carty imagines promotional material for Paradice, the corporate lab run by Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. As Carty notes in his reflection, Jimmy, the novel’s narrator, worked in corporate publicity, developing the slogans and pseudoscientific jargon that would help sell unnecessary and often harmful drugs and supplements. Carty’s pamphlet, however, would be unlikely to convince anyone who read the fine print to buy in. Rather, under the soothingly familiar headings Community, Sustainability, Opportunity, and Commitment, the imaginary author of the pamphlet snarkily undermines Paradice’s slick corporate image. As Carty says in his reflection, he imagines the author to be a disgruntled employee seeing how much he can get away with — as relatable a character in a dystopian future as in current corporate America.
To list all the clever details in this work of conceptual art would be to spoil the audience’s fun. But two details are too good to pass by without note. The logo Carty chose for Paradice resembles neither Paradise nor a pair of dice; on first glance it perhaps looked like an orange slice with thick skin, three segments, and very symmetrical seeds. On second glance, however, it appeared to be a cog — a reference both to the lab’s scientific endeavors and to the author’s role as a cog in the corporate machine. On the back panel, readers are encouraged to “Like us on Facebook” — whether we should be comforted or horrified by the assumption that Facebook will continue to exist in the dystopian near future remains unresolved.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
