Designed to converse with the featured artworks and fiction pieces as well as disorient the viewer, Chloe and Natalie’s creative direction prompts feverish questioning, as every page is crammed with a literal nonsense, but an emotional sense. “Why is there a piece of cheese obscuring a pull quote?” asks Natalie, rhetorically. “In the world of Elastic, a beautiful wedge of cheese on the z axis (floating above the surface of the page) trumps standard magazine hierarchy. We want people to perceive and enjoy the tensions in our manipulations.”
Elastic, as described in Hillary’s editor’s letter, is interested in taking walls down. Or more so, demonstrating that the walls were never really there. The magazine brings the viewer as close as possible to a natural high, with gestures of misprinting (some letters repeat, or entire artworks) and colours that are expressed through glowing swashes. One page depicts a MS-Paint-esque drawing of a figure lying beneath a fireworks display of cosmic hallucinations, whereas another page will have a simple egg. “Elastic’s table of contents is sticky, carrying across the interstitials, repeating over and over – in a sense, existing through time. In these spreads, the magazine literally begins to disassemble, becoming illegible and interpretive,” says Chloe. “The interstitials are crucial to ensuring that reading the magazine from beginning to end is, itself, a psychedelic experience.”
Elastic’s abnormal aesthetic interests are set to continue with a second issue surrounding the theme of interspecies life, exploring intimate, hostile and even psychic connections between all sorts of lifeforms. Expect fungi and microorganisms along with a dose of functional weirdness as this promising team of creatives collide with the artistic climate of banality.