folly sketches, part two

through class critiques, we went from 50+ thumbnails to three concepts to move forward with. we then had to generate five half-page sized sketches for each of those three concepts, for a combined guest critique with chuck haddix, a local jazz expert. the three concepts i moved forward with were an idea about hands painted to look like piano keys (a personification of the piano object), a mashup of my playing card row, and a mashup of my magician/showmanship row.

my sketches looked a little something like this:

which puzzled mr. haddix, because they were somewhat too tangential to the idea of peter nero, a pianist, coming to play a concert. which is an absolutely, totally valid critique. the trouble i'm learning with using rhetoric as a device to come up with ideas is knowing when you've gone too far on an idea and you've lost track of the point you were trying to make in the first place.

from this, the ideas i'm moving forward into digital iterations are the painted hands with the context of the piano keys already there, meaning my intention would be more like this

than just hands representing a piano by themselves; some of my rotational imagery from the playing cards minus the overt playing card outline and numbersystem, and the piano keys turning into birds, which is the last sketch on the middle row. i'm growing increasingly fond of that one, i think, as an idea, but it'll all come down to if i can execute that illustration satisfactorily. (i hope so.)

it's time to blog some vislang: the folly & rhetoric.

(sorry, vislang! the trouble is, we've been all analog so far, and it's easy to keep moving on and forget to document and digitize the process.)

as i said in my post about peter nero, we're working on posters for the folly theater.

we will be the third year of kcai design juniors to have worked with the folly theater's jazz series to design for their concerts! which is an awesome, awesome partnership to get to be part of.

we got to take a field trip to the folly and take a tour, standing on a stage that world-renowned performers have walked and danced across off and on for 111 years. as a theatre-arts-lover, the stage felt something like holy to me, to have been so old and so well-seen. it was pretty incredible.

this project started, for us, with the moodboards we made for our artists. these were to help us generate ten ideas/objects/images to combine with rhetoric to create new ideas.

rhetoric. yep, the same rhetoric you think of with the ancient orators of greece. we took a pre-quiz to see what we had already known and through an uncannily lucky series of guesses educated by greco-latinate etymology, i did pretty well. the purpose of this project, at least the early stages of it, is to educate us about how to use the basics of (persuasive) verbal communication for our visual purposes. it makes more sense than it doesn't, honestly, because as ryan said in one of the very first classes, designers are first and foremost communicators. the visual aspect is critical, but supplementary to the fact that it is our sacred duty to take information and convey it, to persuade people to take it in.

the rhetorical tropes we've been looking at for this project are the following:

personification: giving something human attributes.

hyperbole: exaggeration, often of scale, for emphasis.

pun: replacing one thing with another that is visually similar.

antithesis: comparison of two opposites to heighten the differences.

irony: the contrast of unexpected relationships.

metaphor: comparison of two unrelated things to show resemblance.

metonymy: using a simplified idea or image to stand in for a more complex.

synecdoche: part of a thing standing in for the entire thing, or the entire standing in for a part.

allegory: a concrete representation of an abstract concept, usually moral or political.

parody: humorous reinterpretation of recognizable imagery.

we were to build a matrix of sketches, those ten rhetorical tropes on one axis, our ten images along the other.

my ten images were:
tuxedo, piano/piano keys, awards, hands, martini, old cartoons, showmanship/magician, white hair & goatee, top hat, and playing cards.

here are some shots of my matrix:

tender buttons: the motion

as a testament to my occasional inability to see the forest for the trees, i was so caught up in the idea of my music box cylinders and the ways i could bring that to life on the screen through crazy 3d stuff or analog rotations etc etc, i totally failed to recognize the simpler, clearer and more concise musical visuals i'd already been creating: sheet music! it took my whole class to point that out to me in progress critique. whoops. a lesson i think i'm going to keep learning over and over again until i finally hope i get it: simple can be enough. i don't have to keep pushing and worrying that it doesn't look like i've "done enough." so when i brought my typographic composition into after-effects and brought it slowly and gently onto the screen word by word, i was fretting that it looked like i had just thrown it together, and thinking about all the complicated things i should do to it to make it look more "done," tyler and my classmates were reassuring me that it was actually a reasonable solution, on its own.

from a thing like this:

to a thing like this:

especially with (and this is the part that i'm most excited about at the moment) my sound design.

i realized that i have enough parts of speech to go up a scale from "do, re, mi" all the way through up to "do."

i. am going to turn gertrude stein's poems into melodies! based on their grammar! i'm working now on figuring out how to impose rhythms, (perhaps based on syllables and punctuation?) and i'll be trying out lots of different timbres because i'm not sure if i should try to still reference music boxes or if i should let this be a different but still related experience?

either way, i'm actually really excited about this project, and i just hope i can get it from the awesome-thing-it-is-in-my-head to an awesome-thing-in-real-life.

tender buttons, the text

reading tender buttons, and being around so many people reading it, and all of us struggling with it, trying to milk meaning from it that we can understand, and collectively being unsuccessful... these things made me want to think about new ways to look at her poetry. her grammar is so ambiguous, her syntax so unfamiliar. i decided to analyze the grammar she uses, to reveal the repetitive structures of her phrasings. i built a graph in which to plot her words by parts of speech. (remember parts of speech? i've been relearning all my grammar...)

my first graph looked like this:

it did the job, and was easy enough to read across each row and then down to the next, but it certainly wasn't much to look at. next, i ran my parts of speech up the y-axis rather than across the x.

this, i think, looks much more lyrical. it reads across left to right, without regard to up/down variation. your eyes, then, are zigzagging down and up between every word.

seeing a long string of this text, and the way that sliding vertical bar helps to decode the order of the words, reminded me of rotating music box cylinders, studded with little note-bumps to strike the tines of  the comb to make a melody. kinda like this:

which helped me decide that the aesthetics of my book should be charged with the idea of the music box! which means i'm constructing a box to house my book, and maybe including a comb-piece to drag across the words if reading across is difficult.