Dark Patterns

Charli/Eben Kling, 2019 
28 pages 
Full color 
8.5"x11"

First published at the Sequential Arts Workshop, Gainesville, FL.

"Dark Patterns remind us that something has gone awry. We are just not ourselves. 
Where are we? We are explorers, lost deep in the dead-end tunnels of “choice architecture.”

As “users” seeking to understand dark patterns, we are not whole, nor are we wholly the subjects of this book. Like swarms requiring constant re-orientation merely to remain assembled, we must make efforts to suspend ego and forgo any hope of self- realization.

A textual and visual travelogue chronicling several species of devious digital traps, Dark Patterns collapses the devices of economics with our traveling bodies: oft slumping, awkward, unkempt. The book alludes to the fact that we are in transit; unwilling participants in hallucinatory subplots of our over-designed systems set loose."

- Aude Jomini