Kathryn Frey and Ieva Lygnugaryte

In the Spring semester of 2019, Art, Media and Technology sophomores had the unique chance to create a large-scale installation for the 2019 OECD Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum, a meeting where policy-makers and industry leaders discuss the risks and opportunities technology brings in the fight against corruption. The OECD selection committee selected Carded by Kathryn Frey and Ieva Lygnugaryte to be produced full-scale and installed at the conference.

About Carded:

The possibility that lies within a deck of cards is unquantifiable. Its timelessness and universality gives it a quiet power.  In the variation of designs across cultures and centuries, one element remains consistent: each card has two sides, a unique face and an indistinguishable back. Each player hides the face of their cards from the others. Is not the strategy of card games to take advantage of another player’s blindness to their own deck? And yet each player is subject to the other’s bluff. What if the cards were made transparent?

Carded seeks to not only play on what happens when transparency and strategy become intertwined, but also gives a redesign to traditional card faces, replacing them with symbols of new technologies. If we see these new technologies as symbols of progress toward a more connected civilization, culture, planet, and humankind, the house of cards can become a symbol of hope. These different technologies can each function powerfully, yet their strength can ultimately come from the support each gives to the other.