Why the Weirdest Designs Start With Something Normal

 

Originally published as part of Kunt Commentary by Kunts Live Forever.

By Rose Baxter

Anybody can start with a monster. I think it’s more interesting to start with a Tuesday staff meeting and figure out how to ruin it.

Although calling anything around KLF a traditional “staff meeting” might be generous.

Kunts Live Forever is still a very small operation. I’m here in Alabama, my daughter Violet works with me here, Chad is in Ohio, and my daughter Alyssa...better known around here as Ultra Kunt...provides an impressive amount of unsolicited creative fuel despite not technically being on payroll.

Alyssa is also an asshole.

I say that lovingly.

Mostly.

Ideas get thrown around, something completely normal gets mentioned, somebody says something ridiculous, and ten minutes later I’m wondering whether it belongs on a shirt.

That pretty much explains how some of the stranger ideas at Kunts Live Forever happen.

I don’t usually sit down and think, Today I’m going to make something weird. Most of the time, the idea starts with something painfully normal..a meeting, a customer service call, a road sign, an employee of the month plaque, the weather. Things we see all the time and barely notice anymore.

Then you change one thing.

Suddenly, everything is f*cked.

Normal Makes Weird Better

If you start with something completely insane, sometimes there isn’t anywhere left to go. Giant monster, exploding city, demons everywhere. Okay. We get it.

But take a perfectly ordinary ROAD CLOSED sign, put it on an empty American highway, add some government vehicles and let something enormous be barely visible behind the fog.

Now I want to know what happened.

Why is the road closed? Why aren’t they telling anybody what’s out there? Why are government vehicles sitting around? And exactly how strongly should I take the advice that an alternate route is recommended?

Your brain starts writing the rest of the story.

That’s what makes it interesting to me. The strange part works because everything surrounding it looks familiar enough to be believable.

And admittedly, my brain has had years of training for this.

Apparently Watching Weird Sh*t Together Has Consequences

Violet, Alyssa and I have spent plenty of time watching paranormal shows together.

Violet will happily add serial killer documentaries to the rotation. Alyssa, meanwhile, gets into the paranormal stuff enough that I’m occasionally surprised she hasn’t grabbed a camera and started demanding that whatever is haunting the house give us a sign.

So when your entertainment regularly involves haunted buildings, unexplained noises, people wandering around in the dark and documentaries about things going horribly wrong, apparently some of it follows you into work.

Not literally.

Hopefully.

But it changes the way you look at ordinary settings.

An empty road isn’t necessarily just an empty road anymore.

An old building has possibilities.

A strange noise deserves at least a second thought.

Fog is suspicious.

And if somebody says a room feels weird, there’s a decent chance one of us is going to investigate instead of leaving like a sensible person.

That mindset fits Strange Days almost too easily.

Take This Meeting Could Have Been an Abduction. Most people have already sat through a meeting wondering how they got there, why they’re still there and whether anybody would notice if they disappeared.

Changing email to abduction really isn’t that much of a stretch.

Now that ordinary fluorescent conference room feels different. Maybe somebody sitting at the table isn’t human. Maybe the PowerPoint contains something nobody was supposed to see.

Maybe somebody has known about the aliens the entire time and just neglected to mention it.

Honestly, that sounds about right.

Bureaucracy Is Already Weird

Then there’s Cryptid Employee of the Month.

An Employee of the Month plaque might be one of the most aggressively normal things ever created.

Put Bigfoot on it and suddenly I have questions.

What does he do there? Does he have a desk? Has anyone actually met him? How did he beat everyone else in sales when nobody can even get a clear photograph of him?

And is he getting dental?

The funny part isn’t simply putting a cryptid in an office. It’s everything that has to be true for that plaque to exist.

Somebody hired him. Somebody put him on payroll. Somebody reviewed his performance. Management apparently decided Bigfoot was doing such a fantastic job that the man deserved public recognition.

That’s a much better story than just drawing Bigfoot.

The same thing happened with Please Hold...Your Reality Is Important to Us.

Customer service already gives us most of what we need. You call. You get put on hold. The music loops. A recorded voice periodically tells you how important you are while twenty seven minutes of your life disappear.

Eventually you begin to suspect that you might not be that important after all.

Now let the telephone cord disappear through doors that shouldn’t exist. Every door leads somewhere different. Nobody ever answers. The same pleasant voice keeps repeating that your reality is important to them.

At that point, I don’t need a chainsaw.

Customer service has become psychological horror all by itself.

One Wrong Thing Is Usually Enough

That’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned while making some of the stranger KLF designs: you don’t have to make everything weird.

Sometimes you only need one thing to be wrong.

That’s the idea behind The Weather Inside Is Worse.

It’s an ordinary house. Nothing particularly remarkable about it...except it’s snowing in the kitchen, there’s lightning in the hallway and fog has taken over the bedroom.

The house doesn’t need tentacles coming through the windows. It doesn’t need blood running down the walls. There doesn’t need to be a giant creature standing outside.

The weather simply forgot where weather is supposed to happen.

That’s enough.

And I think that’s also why I don’t like explaining every detail in a design.

If I show you exactly what’s standing behind the highway barricade, I’ve given you the answer.

If I only show you the fog and something that might be moving inside it, your brain gets involved.

Your version of what happened might be completely different from mine.

It might even be better.

A lot of the Strange Days artwork is really just a collection of unfinished stories. You don’t need twenty pages of lore explaining every character and every object.

You need enough information to make somebody stop, look again and think:

Wait...what the fck happened here?*

That’s usually enough for me.

What’s the Most Normal Thing I Can Ruin?

KLF can absolutely be loud. We have plenty of artwork that makes no attempt whatsoever to be subtle.

But weird doesn’t always have to scream.

Sometimes I like making the designs where everything looks perfectly normal for the first couple of seconds.

Then you notice one thing.

Then another.

And eventually you realize the entire damn situation is wrong.

Those are the ones I tend to stare at longer.

They’re also some of the most fun to make because instead of starting with the question:

What’s the craziest thing I can draw?

I get to start with:

What’s the most normal thing I can ruin?

Turns out there’s a hell of a lot more material that way.

And apparently living with people who willingly spend their free time watching investigators provoke ghosts doesn’t hurt either.

Rose Baxter

Originally published on Kunts Live Forever: Why the Weirdest Designs Start With Something Normal.