Psychological Industries meets DKEtoys and Diamond Distribution

All of the designs prior to this post were from the 1st and second series sticker runs. They were split into these multi packs and were some of the first wholesale offerings made available from DKEtoys.com out of Hollywood CA.

The owner of DKEtoys was very receptive of Psychological Industries and prompted us to develop header cards and get the presentable slickness needed to step up to distribution. And seeing our designs next to other stickers from such artists as Zoltron, Dave Savage, OBEY, Lindsey Kuhn, Buff Monster,  & I Heart Guts was very humbling and exciting.

Starting with the Culture Jammer sticker packs which features 5 random designs from Series 01-03. These packs also contained various logos and limited edition collectible business cards.

The 3rd series of Psychological Industries stickers became known as the Red and Green series. They were divided into 5 different assortments pictured here.

These 5 assortment packs caught the attention of someone at PREVIEWS the comic book industry catalog published by Diamond Comic Distributors. Suddenly overnight Psychological Industries sticker pack assortment was all over the Internet and featured in just about every online comic book store based in the U.S. who knows where else.

For some weird reason everyone kept trying to sell the full assortment of 5 packs to people instead of listing each pack separately...

The Assortment was featured with the inclusion of some ad copy that Psychological Industries had nothing to do with. We still dont know who wrote it to this day...

Not a bad description at all. We did have our own descriptions for everything in the DKEtoys stock list emails etc, but everyone just ran with the text here as it appeared in Previews. Wish we knew who wrote it up as we would love to send them some free stuff...

Next Up: Designs, with descriptions, that went into Series 03.

AWARE by Psychological Industries

2005...

2008...

2012...

AWARE is a Memetic Campaign representing free thinking and a general state of awareness of the world.

The AWARE girl is an icon, an abstraction existing only to act as a poster girl for awareness itself, as a Memetic Ideology spreading device.

Now unleashed upon the world, nothing will halt the spread of the AWARE Meme, except for other more meaningful Memes.

AWARE Campaign

Pens and Swords...

Girl Needs a Gun, as it originally appeared, is one of those great accidents like when you are drawing and capture something you would never have thought to draw and maybe its even noticably imperfect in a big way but you know that if you try to draw it over and 'get it right' you will never do better...

It has a cool effect to it. Using dot fades, aka halftones was common in early designs from Psychological Industries. The text is actually a line from a song by the underground band My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult.

Economists Must Learn to Subtract. Inspired from some hand dawn scribbles that appeard in an old issue of AdBusters. The design utilizes a font containing money signs from all over the world further emphasising the faulty disconnect between commerce and nature.

The design contends, in a rather blatant text based way, with the issues surrounding Economic practices. In particular the writing off of nature and its thresholds as 'externalities' that are of no consideration to Production and Consumption. Basically the considering of nature as something of no value and of endless supply. This is the faulty program our entire society is based on.

OVER THE LINE was a first attempt at paying tribute the The Big Lebowski. The design was recieved well but would later recieve much needed improvements. Guns tend to appear in Psychological Industries designs quite often but typically in the hands of a woman, this design is the only exception to that rule.

BE THE MEDIA was design with a nod towards the indymedia.org network that developed a sudden and much needed world wide presence in major cities during the 1999 WTO Protests in Seattle.

Before Social Media sites, before YouTube, and before most people were even talking on cell phones during the late 90s and early 00s, IndyMedia was already a global network of citizen journalists taking to the streets and posting reports and photos/videos of local news and events.

This network prooved to be the main source for citizen news and networking efforts across the globe during the Anti-War movement from 2001-2004. Not really stuff that school children will be reading about in text books about the W. Bush Administration or the Iraq War of 2003.

From sweatshops to suburbia...

All of these early designs in this post and prior posts were printed between 2005 and 2007.

We have had great results using Seatthole.com as our sticker printer.

They even carried some of these early designs in their sister site / web store Merchbot.com .

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JUST DONT design is a straight activist message. Popular among gutter punk zines of the early 90s, the image of a 'trash sign guy' throwing something away like a swastika or a McDonalds logo. Sweat-Shop labor is a human rights issue that should not be ignored.

An earlier version of this design was printed as far back as early 2002 long before Psychological Industries was even developed as a company name.

Despite NIKE's hi-jacking of skateboard culture, including the acquisition of Chuck Taylor, and the rise of the 'sneakerhead' phenomenon, Oppression is never cool. Wearing shoes made in oppressive conditions with prison labor paychecks will never be punk rock.

LIGHT WAGES HEAVY TANKS a modern remake of an old classic.

The Situationist of Paris in the 1960s inspired global strikes against the Society of Spectacle much in the same way Occupy has caught the worlds attention today. The original poster was in French and the design is basically unchanged.

Developed anonymously during worker strikes and student uprising which numbered in the millions a university press was occupied and utilized to produce street posters such as this one. It felt a fitting and needed statement in the time it was released during the second Bush term during Gulf War II.

WOMEN TAKE OVER is a design found on a cheap paper sticker, on the streets of Austin Tx in the early 00's .

It was touched up and reprinted for fun and proved to be one of the most popular sticker designs adopted and nurtured by Psychological Industries.

It has been re-printed more than once since 2005.

YUPPIE is another design 'adopted' by Psychological Industries developed by someone else.

Sometime in the early 00's a website was discovered hosting the YUPPIE campaign. Unfortunately locating it again has proven difficult as the name of the site and the original artist escape memory.

What is memorable was the explicit intent of the artist for others to print the design and spread it around.

YUPPIE has been spotted on shirts and other products across the internet including eBay and Etsy.com

CHE by Alberto Korda Photographer was developed for the sole purpose of  reminding people that the image once belonged to someone who never seemed to get the credit he deserved for it.

Being the most widespread and well known and heavily co-opted photograph in history an attempt was made to blur the image even further with a halftone effect to emphasise the degration of the image as time goes on, in stak contrast to the name of the photographer himself .

Of course this image was developed prior to the huge coffee table retrospective CUBA: By Korda that hit bookstores across the world with the original photo blown up on the cover back in 2006.

Various Sources

These three developments came from 3 very different sources of inspiration. Yet all stick to a common theme of activism.

The first, Pop Grenade, is a thinly disguised, to those who know it, Invisibles Grenade from the comic book series by Grant Morrison. Nothing about the design from the comic book was changed at all in this case. Grant Morrison even blogged about Psychological Industries once back in the MySpace era of the Internet.

Next is the Barcode Flag design. Being a combination of 2 different culture jammer designs featured in past issues of Adbusters magazine. Such agit-prop images are developed specifically for the public to develop into greater and greater memes.

The development of Psychological Industries had a great deal to do with the creating alternatives to crass consumer capitalism and the cultural homogenization of humanity as a whole. AdBusters, during its early years at least, was a great source for discourse on activism. AdBusters content having become more and more irreverent and self-serving has affected the strategy of Psychological Industries. Part of the goal is to develop into more effective and productive agency in the world, to actually practice what AdBusters manages only to preach.

The Third image, Info Hazard, is taken directly from the Happy Mutant Handbook by Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.net . This design was one of many intended for just such permissive usage even long before Creative Commons even existed. It is intended to be placed on books or devices of a low factual caliber. Such as a Television or FOX Pundit's book of the week.

Basically, communal designs are everywhere, you just need to know where to look. There are many Memetic Developers who actually want to see their creation flourish. Its not always about presonal props, and sometimes the spreading of a good idea is more important than making of a buck.

Anime Inspired

Early on experimental designs featuring Anime characters occurred.

Reminiscent of early 90s indie skateboard companies and an unfortunate habit they tended to maintain of using other artists work from popular media. Often the 'homage' was borderline bootlegging and these designs also got too close to the line in the same way.

They did look cool though...

Only 100 of each of these test designs were made and most were given away and used for street promotions around Austin and Denver areas.

Early Experiments in Feminism

Womens rights, self-defense and other issues have always been a core part of Psychological Industries.

These early sticker designs show clearly a deep respect. Respect, Dignity and Justice are very important to anyone who has ever lost them. And those who have never suffered these losses seldom understand how important they are.

MISSION STATEMENT:

Psychological Industries is an organization disseminating information designed to liberate thinking minds from the passive slumber inducing effects of the military/corporate/media complex.

Psychological Industries exists to offer (r)evolutionary ideals and strategies to the growing population of higher primates living among the didactic minded masses.

Psychological Industries objectives are as follows:

- To help contribute to the movement of patriotic dissent as a counter to the current onslaught of fear, inducement and warmongering in the corporate media.

- To oppose the forces/institutions which willfully and malignantly usurp the rights of free peoples.

- To help bring about the destruction of the forces/institutions which display a history of clear design to subjugate and economically, mentally, and physically oppress humanity at large.

- To spread ideas that oppressive regimes fear will fall into the hands of the lower classes.

To this end we pledge our property, our honor and our lives.

2005

From the Beginning...

1998

An independent clothing designer takes leave from making experimental raver pants for 'family' to develop a line of hand made Hemp clothing for young women.

After much positive attention and sales an informed decision was made to begin developing a proper selection of graphic designs to further improve the appeal of Hemp products.

2005

Psychological Industries takes form.