Products for Organising

Serpentine is delighted to present a monograph of Simon Denny’s work produced on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in London entitled Products for Organising.

This publication brings together, for the first time, key installation images, annotated by the artist’s extended captions, which sheds light on the development of his practice.

Architect and writer Keller Easterling has contributed an essay ‘KOH-wa-ee’, elaborating on the tools of espionage and the infrastructures behind information encryptions and the so-called digital war. In his article ‘The Cult of GCHQ’, Ryan Gallagher, an award-winning investigative journalist and reporter for The Intercept, reveals the culture of secrecy within the GCHQ. Economic historian Moritz Schularick’s ‘Dough for The Doughnut: The Private Finance Initiative’ provides an account on how the GCHQ building’s construction was funded through Private Finance Initiatives. The volume also includes an introduction to Denny’s work and the exhibition at the Serpentine by its curator Amira Gad.

The collaboration with graphic designer David Bennewith results in a publication that mimics Denny’s installations by including digitally hand-drawn interventions of advertorial pages. The fonts used throughout the publication are 'Helvetica Neue' and 'San Francisco', Apple’s former and current User Interface (UI) system fonts. 'San Francisco' is a custom design by Apple that comes as a standard feature with their new operating system 'El Capitan'. In the catalogue, both fonts can be compared and document a particular moment in Apple’s UI development – their attempt to create a font which is bolder and friendlier – additionally highlighting Denny’s interest in tech companies’ perpetual drive to develop.