Metahaven is a research project who became known for their identity design for the Principality of Sealand, located on a former war platform in the North Sea, now hosting the world’s first ‘data haven’, or lawless information vault. The work of Metahaven aims for a return to politics in design, and seek to develop discourses and visual approaches related to both resistance and power. Meta Haven’s founding team consists of Tina Clausmeyer, Vinca Kruk, Adriaan Mellegers, and Daniel van der Velden.
For On Purpose Metahaven have been invited to look at the identity of Arnolfini and to rethink it within the format of exhibition preview invitations. Entitled Future Echo the project is a redesign of the traditional Arnolfini invitation card as a set of stamps. The imagery on the stamps references a variety of sources including the identity of where the name Arnolfini name originally came from, but also where the image is available from through open source platforms, such as wikipedia. Metahaven have actually designed three sets of stamps to be mailed out at different times over the period of one year. The latter two sets of which, the ‘echoes’ if you like, will play with the conventional approach to marketing, as the exhibition will also be promoted in the future after the exhibition has ended.