Pandemic Pictograms
Are you sitting down to read this? Perhaps you should stand up. Sitting might just be what kills you, warns the title of the first episode in a new video series by director and conceptual designer Alexandre Humbert, premiering here on Disegno.
Don’t be afraid, this isn’t a Halloween sequel to 2019 indie horror flick Killer Sofa featuring a possessed and homicidal recliner. You don’t need to set all your chairs on fire or call a priest. Humbert’s latest series is less concerned with haunted furniture and more about what has happened to public seating during the Covid-19 pandemic.
With social distancing adopted worldwide, chairs all around the world began to reject their purpose for the good of public health. Practically overnight, a flurry of ad-hoc warning signs appeared to bar people from sitting down on certain chairs. It’s these hastily devised pictograms that are the stars of Sitting just might be what kills you.
“Since the lockdown, I have been fascinated by the intuitive way of making these signs that popped up all over the world in completely different places,” explains Humbert. “But they were constructed as a last minute decision.” Humbert and his researcher, Lou Hacquet-Delepine, scoured public spaces from cinemas to bars, collecting one thousand examples of these signs, which presented together are a rosetta stone for “do not sit here” in design language.
The signs all use simple shapes, sometimes but not always accompanied by text, to communicate that sitting is forbidden. Humbert has arranged them by category, starting with X’s and universal no signs, which then evolve to include chair symbols of all shapes and styles.
Chairs morph into rows of chairs, then chairs with people sitting on them. In one brief instance a panda on a chair flashes up to demonstrate where not to sit. The pictograms almost morph together, they flash so fast across the screen. Despite all the different languages they are almost interchangeable, a piece of convergent evolution in design triggered by a mutation in a virus.
Humbert’s rapid-fire pictogram animation is accompanied by a dramatic classical piano soundtrack – an original composition by Arnaud Pujol – that adds to the drama of the short. The atmosphere is a little spooky, like a fast-forward through the opening of a documentary on the end of the world. “All the signs accumulating bring a sense of stress,” says Humbert “But the idea is it's also a form of database that is highlighting a specific period of time.” When the pictograms run out, it cuts to a woman in a red dress spied voyeuristically through some bushes as she transgressively sits down on a public bench. “I wanted to end up with a confrontation to build context, which is just someone going to sit in a public bench,” he says. The bushes, he points out, frame the woman on the bench like a circle in a pictogram.
The unnerving title of Sitting might just be what kills you is lifted straight from one of the warning signs. Of course, it’s not the act of sitting that will hurt you but sitting close to other people that’s the risk. Humbert was tickled by the hyperbole of the phrase, and the amount of variation between the signs that simply forbid sitting and those that tried to explain to the public why they could not sit. “I like the tension where, okay, the act of sitting next to someone is not something that is dramatic, but you have the signs that are really dramatic.”
Confronted with all the images of chairs unable to fulfil their function also got Humbert thinking about other questions, such as mass production and overconsumption. “Suddenly facing all those seats that were not able to be used really made me question the number of seats there are on the planet,” he says. “It's a really interesting tension, not only about the quantity of seats that we are not able to use but more largely about all the seats that we produce.” There’s no exact figure for how many chairs there are on Earth, although Humbert conservatively estimates that chairs and humans coexist at a ratio of three to one. Author Vybarr Cregan-Reid – who argues that the human “lust for comfort” has made the chair the symbol of the Anthropocene – put it as high as 60 billion.
Even if they’re not an incubus of viral plague, chairs and the sedentary lifestyle they encourage have been accused of being as bad for your health as smoking – a headline-grabbing line that scientists are trying to debunk. Endless empty chairs have certainly captured Humbert’s imagination; he already has two more short films that pick up where Sitting might just be what kills you left off, called Thank you for practicing distancing and Please keep this seat free. So, stay in your seat.
Film written and directed: Alexandre Humbert
Research production: Lou Hacquet-Delepine
Original music composition: Arnaud Pujol