Liby Hays
(2025)
This collaborative design with artist Kati Kirsch parodies quarantine-era digital office culture and corporate bonding strategies by adapting them into dated, “shovelware”-style videogame cover art. The pixelated cutaway was inspired by the 1994 management simulation game, SimTower: The Vertical Empire.
The back of the shirt features the retreat’s Terms and Conditions, aestheticizing digital document signing and user-input feedback loops. The sub-menus, pop-ups, AI assistants and Screentime Supplement Ads accrete into an attention-grabbing collage.
The bottom strip featuring banner ads can be cropped according to style preference.
The design built on a preexisting facet of Conspecifics lore– our “shell corporations.” We invented a number of fake companies that were anagrams of Conspecifics and included them in our launch event photo-op. The Digital Corporate Retreat Tee references these shell corporations as sponsors.
Shirt documentation in a quick photoshoot at the Ford Center, shot by True. Models were found in situ.