layering & transparency & simultaneity & other things that mean occurring at the same time.

this reading, which discusses two systems for expressing an overlap through time or space, is particularly timely for the book we're almost about to finish with. (it's as though we're trying to learn something!)

first, some quick to-see-if-i-get-it defining.

layering, i think, refers to the arrangement of (usually) disparate elements together in space or through time in a composition. in terms of static imagery, it refers to the generation of a sense of depth in a flat plane by putting some things in front of or behind other things, or even using such obviously separate pieces that they look as though they have been cut and pasted into one composition, hearkening back to the cubists. in terms of time-based work, such as animation, film, or music, layering refers to a sort of sensory multitasking: hearing a violin play the melody while a viola plays a harmony, for instance, or two scenes occurring at the same time, whether in split screen or jumping back and forth. the layering comes from the understanding that everything everywhere runs on its own parallel timeline, and they can be doing separate things but still doing them in a way that is "together."

transparency seems to oscillate between heightening clarity and obscuring clarity, depending on how it is used. it has the potential to be a sort of omniscient system of layering, showing all the things occurring at once without any of them blocking out any others, each being of equal importance, or with a subtle variation in priority, still while showing all things at once. alternately, transparent elements can keep piling up, and adding and adding until not only can you not read the first ones put into place, but nor can you even read the latest, what would be the top layer, because everything, all together, at the same time,  has become much more complex than any one or even several given things on their own.

in our books we get to layer WITH transparency. we may be unable to see through the text itself, at its full opacity, but we can see through the counterforms and around the perimeters of the shapes, and the rest of the composition should be "perfectly" transparent. This is crucial because we get to experiment with our compositions as complex, multilayered objects, with a unified image-based piece, and a unified text-based piece, juxtaposed to create a higher level of meaning.

our method for doing this is particularly valuable because we aren't just creating one composition with both text and image. we may be putting in one plus one and (ideally) deriving three, but we are also able to subtract and look at one or one independently, to see their value as a separate composition and then consider why they work together as they do to generate meaning in excess of what they could mean separately.

when text and image work together at their most effective, i think, you have that sort of a-ha moment. a quiet click into place of having comprehended one, and then the other, and then all of a sudden across the synapse jumps the realization of what meaning these elements, together, have created: ideally a related but perhaps more elaborate, hybridized concept utilizing the content of both the text and the image and even, if you're really good, the way the text is presented.

in terms of my own book, i will consider myself successful if the images and the composition alone have the capacity to give the reader a sort of familiarity, a sense that the relationship in the things depicted makes sense in a way that they may have known but may have forgotten, while the text acts as a jog for the memory, snapping the pieces into place, perhaps even providing the "missing link" to what the images have in common.

layering strikes me as something that will be particularly important to my book thematically because each page will represent the progression of time, and so, frequently, the imagery will stack up. the idea behind this notion is that you bring all your feelings and experiences with you since early childhood, and you internalize them and they color your present and even your future actions as you continue to accumulate more experiences and relationships that continue the process. in this way, i hope to echo some of the colors and textures from earlier in the book in small moments later on in the book, to give the sense of the layering complexity you develop as you grow up. it's not as though you become somebody different. it's just that you add layers to yourself, new and new and new, of varying opacities, and sometimes you can see all the way through for a long time and you're relatively unchanged, and sometimes you might develop a layer that's 100% opaque and feel like something wholly unrelated, but all your previous layers are still there. they're just deeper down, and they're underneath a layer you can't so easily see through.

the things in my book that i have control over are: my imagery, my compositions, my words, my typographical compositions, my material handling. the domain of serendipity currently contains: some of the interplay between my image compositions and my type compositions, and most importantly of all, the feelings and experiences that the reader will bring with them as they take in what i'm presenting and how it relates to them: everyone's own personal "hometown," that they've loved and lost or found or kept or made, and the people and relationships that it has contained.