BOOK MAKER*

This project was an exploration of identity through the curation of books. After analysing my own bookcase, and how I organise my books within it, I collected photographs of other people’s bookcases and essays discussing how and why we organise our books the way that we do.

Following on from the replacement of punctuation with typographic processes, I took the text from a traditional book format, to a more unconventional roll of print. The whole piece measures 1.46m wide (the width of the longest sentence) and 17.02m long (the length of the whole text).

I propose a new methodology of reading: instead of left-to-right, top-to-bottom, from the first page to the last, the reader would read the first line of every page before going back to the first page and reading the second line. I rewrote Course of General Linguistics and introduced ‘line numbers’ as a page number replacement. The spine of the book features the numbers 1 to 27 - the number of lines in the text, and the end pages feature these numbers 70 times each, as there are 70 pages in total.

Using Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, I removed all punctuation and replaced it with typographic processes, so that when read it would have the same effect on the reader as if the punctuation was there. These typographic processes are based on my own voice intonations when reading. The spine title and cover is the order of punctuation as it appears on the first page of the text, and the end pages feature a print of all the featured punctuation, in order, of the whole text.

2 Emilio Fantin, ‘The Art of Conversation and the Aesthetic of the Process’, in Slow Reading by Ana Paula Pais and Carolyn F. Strauss, pp. 74-5

2 Emilio Fantin, ‘The Art of Conversation and the Aesthetic of the Process’, in Slow Reading by Ana Paula Pais and Carolyn F. Strauss, pp. 74-5

1 Ellen Lupton, Deconstruction and Graphic Design: History Meets Theory, Typotheque [29.11.04]

Rotoscope animation based on video footage of our group dancing. The audio track Déjà Vu was made by creating black out poetry out of Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek’s book The Privatisation of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia, and running these lines through Typatone, which converted this into sound to be overlaid onto an existing track.

For this brief I chose the prefix ‘post-’ to base my visual essay on. I decided to focus on memory as an extension of ‘post-event’, with a focus on how memories can be distorted or changed over time. I found wold family photos and I wrote down everything I remembered from the time the photo was taken, and I then interviewed my sister about the same photos and asked her what she remembered about them. Comparing our responses, I was interested in finding how each of us remembered slightly different things despite us both being there in that moment in time. To communicate this concept of altered images I distorted each photo using various methods, and accompanied each photo with a transcript of the recorded conversation.

For the Pop-up Museum brief I wanted to create a virtual reality experience which displayed and informed visitors about Fata Morganas, an optical illusion found in polar, desert, and oceanic landscapes. I designed an app-mock up where the user would have three virtual reality landscapes to choose from; and I created an illustrated virtual reality experience in a polar landscape, where informative text accompanied the illusions.

For the book project I decided to base my book on the theme of conflict, specifically the conflict between ethics and aesthetics when it comes to material choice. The book I created contained two spines with two different paper stocks (chemically made, printer paper, and ethically sourced, recycled paper made under fairtrade industry principles) which ‘fought’ as you flipped through the book, each side moving to and from the middle. I also decided to use an ‘inbetween’ paper for the cover, which was ethically sourced but made from cotton pulp which is very industry intensive.

(click to view gif from beginning)

One year after this workshop, the Glasgow School of Art burnt down for a second time.

Obsessive Texts of Thoughts: a stream of consciousness installation // A-level coursework 2013

Obsessive Texts of Thoughts: a stream of consciousness // A-level coursework 2013

Three Books Project: The Story of Gold-tree and Silver-tree // December 2015