Anonymous Empire — techno record sleeve archive

The thesis runs in three parts, poverty, politics, post-industry: this graphic language was never designed, it was produced by the conditions the music was made under. Twenty written scene texts, Detroit to Tbilisi, read each city label output against its economics, which logos were drawn with a ruler for lack of a designer, which sleeves stayed near-blank after money arrived, which faces were withheld on purpose. The corpus itself was assembled through the Discogs database, vinyl pressings only, each sleeve keyed to its release record, and that one dataset drives four orderings of the archive: a grid, a chronological timeline, a geographic map, and a resort by dominant sleeve colour. The site then enacts what it documents. No portraits, no nostalgia framing, a single display face against a locked #0a0a0a ground with typography carrying the full load, built in vanilla JavaScript with no framework and no build step, on the cheapest static hosting: an archive of no-budget records built like one.

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