David Pescovitz has a great piece on Boing Boing today about the iconic 90s Schwa art, including some of the more memorable images and an interview with its creator, William Barker:
In the early 1990s, adman/fine artist William Barker’s Schwa became the iconic artwork of the cyberculture underground. Barker’s paranoiac stick figures, faux-corporate undertones, and conspiratorial overtones embodied the high weirdness of the time. And of course there was that alien head, that damned alien head. Loved by everyone from Terry Gilliam to Noam Chomsky, Barker unveiled the Schwa world through several books, Web experiments, t-shirts, prints, calendars, and comic strips that appeared in the bOING bOING print ‘zine among other places. Now, Barker has re-opened the portal to Schwa with a new Etsy shop – -alaVoidDistribution – where you can purchase original Schwa artwork, the books, prints, ephemera, apparel, and other manifestations of the other within ourselves. Below, a brief interview with the man behind the madness, and a handful of his favorite artworks, annotated by the artist himself.
Read the whole piece here.
William was generous enough to give me use of two of his Schwa images for my book, Borg Like Me. They perfectly illustrate the first essay, Chapter Zero: The Launch Party.
And William has an Etsy store and is selling a lot of the original Schwa art and some of the original merch. Trust me, you want this stuff!
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