Laura Taylor MA Visual Communication - Graphic Design Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
CONCEPT PANEL C
CONCEPT
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Initial Starting Point
“The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls.�
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Initial Research
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Initial Research
Visual Editions - Jonathan Safran Foer - Tree of Codes
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Initial Research
Visual Editions - Composition No.1
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Research
In 1966 artist Tom Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page by painting, collage and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version. He found his threepenny novel in a junkshop on Peckham Rye, South London. This was an 1892 Victorian obscurity titled A Human Document by W.H Mallock and he titled his altered book A Humument. The first version of all 367 treated pages was published in 1973 since when there have been four revised editions. A Humument is now one of the best known and loved of all 20th Century artist’s books and is regarded as a seminal classic of postmodern art.
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Research
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Progress / Experimental
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Circular Theme
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Incredibly Close & Extremely Loud
Just two days ago she said that her life story was happening faster than her life, “What do you mean?” I asked with my hands, “So little happens,” she said, “and I’m so good at remembering.” “My life story is the story of everyone I’ve ever met.”
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Mapping
Ruth Bleakley “I made this cute, pocket-sized handmade book from a tourist's map of Heidelberg that I salvaged from a collection of maps my grandparents kept from their traveling days. I sewed the book with sturdy white Irish waxed linen thread, over washi-paper tapes. A thin blue strand is woven over the tapes for a decorative touch, and to go with the blue endpages (not pictured...they're like a fancy surprise). This tiny book lies flat when you open it, and has 64 pages of hand-torn drawing paper.”
“Living near the ocean, I know plenty of people who are fishermen or who work on boats. Just like you might have a road map or atlas in your car, many sailors bring nautical charts a long with them on their trips out to sea. Just like road maps these are updated almost every year (“SEA MONSTER HERE”) so the old ones are thrown out or recycled. The map I made this book out of depicts the coast of Connecticut near Fairhaven. I love the soft blues, browns and greens on this map, and they’re set off nicely by the bronze grommets on the covers - it reminds me of a sail on a sailboat.”
“The copper grommets look great with the blue thread. I made this book a while ago, but I was surprised that I never posted it! Well, summer is the perfect time for sailing, especially here on Cape Cod. This is a book I made as a special gift for a friend’s mom who works on Naushon Island as a shepherdess! The charts are originals and show some of the Elizabethan Islands that come off the tail end of Cape Cod near Woods Hole.”
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Mapping / Experimental
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Time Lapse Photographs / Journey
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Time Lapse Photographs / Journey
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Propositions
1 - There are endless possibilities when it comes to paper. 2 - I will push the boundaries with paper.
3 - Paper can become a 3D, solid structure. 4 - All of my concepts will contribute towards my final product - A book of possibilities. 5 - Interactivity is key - letting the reader handle the publication/book for themselves, tearing, folding, creasing etc to create personal/individual outcomes. Playful. 6 - A book is more than just a series of pages. 7 - Physicality over digital - Having a tactile outcome will show the importance of editorial design for me personally. Textures, smell, binding all play a part in this. 8 - The book will be an experience, show a journey for the reader.
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Objectives / Aims / Potential Outcomes
Objectives - Create innovative work to inspire a new generation of designers
- Consider a range of papers & textures / Book binding techniques
- Physical / tactile outcome vs. future of digital
- How will it be useful for others?
Audience - Collectors, publishers, designers & artists, gallery visitors (if a one off) Purpose - Interactivity is a key element for the project
- Hand made techniques
- Originality - Documenting a personal journey
- One off vs. Mass produced - explore both routes
Potential Outcomes / Title - ‘Book of Possibilities’ - Mapping a journey
- Photographing & filming journey from A to B and documenting in a journal style
- Stitching incorporated to highlight the specific journey
- Multiple journeys layered together?
- Time lapse
- Traces
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Alison Barnes
Geo/graphic Mapping: 2003 This project, undertaken on the MA Typo/Graphics course at LCC/UAL, established my interest in developing work of a geo/graphic nature. New Basford is an area north of Nottingham city centre that was established through the burgeoning lace industry. It is an area that is predominantly filled with two up, two down terraces, some light industrial units (built following a ‘slum clearance’ programme) and a few remaining Victorian factory buildings. It is a place that one tends to pass through, rather than being a destination in itself—on face value it is a typical inner city area suffering from the usual problems of unemployment, graffiti and general deprivation. I wanted to develop work that probed beneath the surface of New Basford, going beyond the seemingly identikit streets and houses, and attempting to represent a sense of place. My methodology was that of the anthropologist, seeking out signs and interventions of a low-tech, personal and vernacular nature. These were recorded and used to develop a series of maps charting non-traditional elements such as graffiti, decorative brick features and memories. The maps (approx 900mm square) were produced on translucent stock that enabled two different maps to be overlaid and further conclusions drawn. The graffiti territory map reveals patterns of movement across the area. Some authors remain very local, perhaps only spreading across one or two roads; others travel further within the area. Through charting the graffiti, this map reveals the spatial activity of groups of friends; a bully targeting specific individuals; a foot fetishist; and, a politically motivated, left wing author.
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Theory / Roland Barthes
Barthes’s 1967 critical essay “The Death of the Author” addresses the power of the author in reading and analyzing writing, and the power of the reader or listener and the option to more or less ignore the work’s background and focus more on the work itself. When critically viewing a writing, “the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions” (Barthes 383) takes the spotlight; the author is forced to take sole responsibility of the failure or success of the work. Interesting examples of this idea are given by Barthes: “…Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice.” (383) With this viewpoint the creator’s work is a direct passage to the creator himself (or herself), which seems to take away from the text itself. The information not said within the work dictates the work. Research must be done on the era of the writer, the sociopolitical stance of the writer, the context in which the work was written, etc. All of those elements culminate into the limitation and constriction of interpreting the text as nothing but itself. Barthes goes on to discuss the text itself appearing as derivative, extracted from other works due to the “innumerable centres of culture” (385). The direct intent of the author may be muddled due to the translation from author to text to reader, the text ending up more of an “immense dictionary” (385) than anything else. The inability of text to truly capture the “passions, humours, feelings, impressions” (385) of the author are “lost, infinitely deferred” (385) due to the subjectivity of the reader. This point ultimately leads to Barthes main point: the reader holds more responsibility to the text than the author. The complexity of different connotations and experiences that come from the author into the text are flattened when it arrives to the reader. The reader comes empty handed and is completely impersonalized with the text. It is as if a sculpture, a three dimensional work, is photographed, reduced to two dimensions. So much information is condensed and made inaccessible to the viewer. Barthes makes the point that the origin of a work may lie with the author, but its destination is with the reader. “… The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” (386) Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Art and Interpretation: An Anthology of Readings in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Eric Dayton. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 1998. 383-386. Print.
In his essay, Barthes argues against the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author’s identity — their political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author’s work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive “explanation” of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed: “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny (a notion similar to Erich Auerbach’s discussion of narrative tyranny in Biblical parables). Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a “text is a tissue [or fabric] of quotations,” drawn from “innumerable centers of culture,” rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the “passions” or “tastes” of the writer; “a text’s unity lies not in its origins,” or its creator, “but in its destination,” or its audience. No longer the focus of creative influence, the author is merely a “scriptor” (a word Barthes uses expressly to disrupt the traditional continuity of power between the terms “author” and “authority”). The scriptor exists to produce but not to explain the work and “is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, [and] is not the subject with the book as predicate.” Every work is “eternally written here and now,” with each re-reading, because the “origin” of meaning lies exclusively in “language itself ” and its impressions on the reader. Barthes notes that the traditional critical approach to literature raises a thorny problem: how can we detect precisely what the writer intended? His answer is that we cannot. He introduces this notion in the epigraph to the essay, taken from Honoré de Balzac’s story Sarrasine in which a male protagonist mistakes a castrato for a woman and falls in love with him. When, in the passage, the character dotes over his perceived womanliness, Barthes challenges his own readers to determine who is speaking, and about what. “Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? … We can never know.” Writing, “the destruction of every voice,” defies adherence to a single interpretation or perspective. (Barthes returned to Sarrasine in his book S/Z, where he gave the story a rigorous close reading.) Acknowledging the presence of this idea (or variations of it) in the works of previous writers, Barthes cited in his essay the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who said that “it is language which speaks.” He also recognized Marcel Proust as being “concerned with the task of inexorably blurring…the relation between the writer and his characters”; the Surrealist movement for employing the practice of “automatic writing” to express “what the head itself is unaware of ”; and the field of linguistics as a discipline for “showing that the whole of enunciation is an empty process.” Barthes’ articulation of the death of the author is a radical and drastic recognition of this severing of authority and authorship. Instead of discovering a “single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God),” readers of a text discover that writing, in reality, constitutes “a multidimensional space,” which cannot be “deciphered,” only “disentangled.” “Refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ ultimate meaning” to text “liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.”
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Bibliography
Visual Editions. (2010). Tree Of Codes [Online]. Available at: http://visual-editions.myshopify.com/collections/posters/products/ve2-tree-of-codes-poster (Accessed 21st January 2014). Visual Editions. (2011). Composition No.1 [Online]. Available at: http://www.visual-editions.com/our-books/composition-no-1 (Accessed 19 February 2014). Anon. (2013) Visual Editions - Welcome. [Online]. Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/197947346093999370/ (Accessed 19 February 2014). [Online]. Available at: http://24.media.tumblr.com/eb3024fd69fe4e5633c6b204b47a86db/tumblr_n0de99RtzS1sjwjpvo3_400.jpg (Accessed 2 February 2014). [Online]. Available at: http://24.media.tumblr.com/d7b211d0d50959bb29ef0cb19d7d7cf6/tumblr_n0de99RtzS1sjwjpvo5_500.jpg (Accessed 2 February 2014). [Online]. Available at: http://24.media.tumblr.com/b734e594abd5177904c21b74ff9b01cd/tumblr_n0de99RtzS1sjwjpvo7_400.jpg (Accessed 2 February 2014). [Online]. Available at: http://31.media.tumblr.com/2a571db0b74fa6e10823c95b8b3ddcec/tumblr_n0de99RtzS1sjwjpvo9_r1_1280.jpg (Accessed 2 February 2014). [Online]. Available at: http://24.media.tumblr.com/09065c4b95974f00f0190fcb0ff70d4f/tumblr_n0de99RtzS1sjwjpvo8_1280.jpg (Accessed 2 February 2014). Phillips, T. (2012) Humument. [Online]. Available at: http://humument.com (Accessed 4 February 2014). Phillips, T. (Undated) Humument. [Online]. Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/342062534168035695/ (Accessed 4 February 2014). Phillips, T. (Undated) Humument. [Online]. Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/125749014567296907/ (Accessed 4 February 2014). Phillips, T. (undated) Humument. [Online]. Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/542965298795894843/ (Accessed 4 February 2014). Urbanska, P. [Online]. Sky Map. (2014). Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/565975878142759275/ (Accessed 5 February 2014). Anon. (2014) 1910 Celestial Star Map. [Online]. Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/320459329706984657/ (Accessed 5 February 2014). Anon. (2013) Circular Wave. [Online]. Available at: http://designspiration.net/image/1563732820963/ (Accessed 5 February 2014). Dear, M. (2012) Beams. [Online]. Available at: http://bench.li/images/20063 (Accessed 7 February 2014). Dear, M. (2012). Beams. [Online]. Available at: http://bench.li/images/20062 (Accessed 7 February 2014). Dear, M. (2012). Beams. [Online]. Available at: http://bench.li/images/20061 (Accessed 7 February 2014). Wood, O. (2013). Flatland. [Online]. Available at: https://www.behance.net/gallery/Flatland/7664765 (Accessed 7 February 2014). Bleakley, R. (2013) Pocket sized Heidelberg Journal. [Online]. Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/217298750745032362/ (Accessed 20 February 2014). Bleakley, R. (2014) Fairhaven Nautical Chart Journal. [Online]. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruthbleakley/12135079125/in/photostream/ (Accessed 20 February 2014). Bleakley, R. (2010) Naushon and Pasque Islands. [Online]. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruthbleakley/6006289512/in/photostream/ (Accessed 20 February 2014). Cook, J. (2012) Student Work - John Cook. [Online]. Available at: http://lovelypackage.com/student-work-john-cook/#more-26400 (Accessed 20 February 2014). Maptote. (Undated) San Francisco Mapnote. [Online]. Available at: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/217298750743369909/ (Accessed 20 February 2014). Lester, H. (Undated) European Vacation 2. [Online]. Available at: http://www.herblester.com/collections/barcelona/products/european-vacation-2 (Accessed 20 February 2014). Witworth, R. (Undated) Rob Witworth Photography. [Online]. Available at: http://www.robwhitworth.co.uk/Time_Lapse.html (Accessed 21 February 2014). Vaughan, J. (1966) Time lapse - Gemini -Titan Launch [Online]. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/x-ray_delta_one/7046805963/ (Accessed 22 February 2014). Van Der Hoeven, T. (2012) Sunset Time Lapse.[Online]. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tyler4missions/6733440213/ (Accessed 22 February 2014).
- Laura Taylor
- Concept / 2014 / 7VC502
- Bibliography
Harker, E.J. (2012) 400 South. [Online]. Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/98562477@N00/12532174354/in/photolist-k6qEPC-imgPAG-imhrE3-imi11p-imgXoW-imfL9y-e8Zqjf-7BeuDW-8iqkVG-8FkPGt-jCLY8P-bMoPmT-8ozGK1-8GKsMf-jBxteP-jBxRjZ-9vSZof-bucxKM-8hfpemedxYtw-7YLraB-j7aUFt-aEfGmE-7XsBNs-a3x9cv-aDwVT7-7ZNSA4-9w1RjW-c3NgLy-cqRkrm-9mXgsF-av4pAM-av4pyc-bCHB17-bRCk9t-bRCjpt-bRCjd6-bCHDRC-bRCnMZ-bRCp1M-bRCnoV-bCHE9d-bRCoqM-bRCnY4-bCHEgU-bCHEkW-bCHCrQ-bRCnHn-e8NDB5-cTe9DWdLo1sW (Accessed 22 February 2014). Barnes, A. (2003) Geo/graphic Mapping. [Online]. Available at: http://alisonbarnesonlineportfolio.tumblr.com/#4683385735 (Accessed 22 February 2014). Barnes, A. (2010) Food Miles. [Online]. Available at: http://alisonbarnesonlineportfolio.tumblr.com/#4686888452 (Accessed 22 February 2014). Barnes, A. (2010) Food Miles. [Online]. Available at: http://alisonbarnesonlineportfolio.tumblr.com/post/4686888452/food-miles-2010-the-food-miles-book-developed (Accessed 22 February 2014). KDO. (2012) Roland Barthes – “The Death of the Author” – Critical Summary. [Online]. Available at: http://artblog.catherinehoman.com/roland-barthes-the-death-of-the-author-critical-summary/ (Accessed 22 February 2014). Anon. (2014) Death Of The Author. [Online]. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author (Accessed 22 February 2014).
Safran Foer, J. (2010) Everything Is Illuminated/Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) Poyner, R. (2003) No More Rules: Graphic Design & Postmodernism. London: Laurence King Publishing. Losowsky, A. (2013) Fully Booked: Ink on Paper: Design and Concepts for New Publications. Germany: Gestalten.