tender buttons: final motion graphic!

when we last left off with my gertrude stein animation, i was just getting started and just getting excited. in a few brief class periods i've gone from there to a final piece! that shouldn't be surprising. that's how this is supposed to work. in any event, for a quick catch-us-up, i've gone from this:

 through this:

to... (drumroll)

gertrude stein's tender buttons is famously believed to be an exercise in sound over sense, and meaning through repetition. i graphed her words by their grammatical parts of speech to see, visually, the repetitive structure of her syntax. the poems are graphed using a system constructed to maximize readability from left to right while the y-axis is organized top to bottom as follows:
articles
adjectives
nouns
conjunctions
prepositions
pronouns
verbs
adverbs

this structure i could convert into do re mi scales, apply to a musical key, and in so doing, produce the music of stein's poetry. a music box come to life!

that! my first ever after-effects trick. hopefully the first of many in a series of ever-increasing impressiveness, complexity, and technique.

as for an obligatory "what did you learn at school today, sweetie?" address: over the course of this project, i have gone from opening after effects once or twice by accident and panicking when i saw its icon bouncing on my dock to being able to actually do a handful of things in it with some level of accuracy and understanding! i've also really experienced for one of the first times how well a legitimate concept can carry you through an execution without as much waffling as when you're less sold on your own idea, which itself was a lesson about a new way to generate a concept: what kind of information can i extract from this source? through what new system can i look at this information? what, then, can i do with that information in the system? i would love to think gertrude stein, with her highly, dazzlingly combined analytical and instinctual creative method would be intrigued.

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.

how to read gertrude stein's tender buttons

i was in an experimental poetry workshop by anne boyer this summer (an amazing class that i highly recommend to anybody, whether you're actually fixated on poetry like me, or even if you don't care about poetry but are just looking for a super fun way to get a lit credit)

the first thing we did in that class was read tender buttons, and our first homework was to answer the question, "how are you supposed to read tender buttons?" this could be answered in a set of directions, or in a frame of reference, or any way you wanted to answer it. claire brankin, for instance, if i recall, wrote that you were supposed to read "food" as a recipe. etc.

here was my answer:

do not read tender buttons alone. read tender buttons over someone's shoulder, or they over yours, so that you are scrolling or turning pages hesitantly, trying to predict where they are, re-reading and jumping ahead to keep up with a speed you can't predict. be constantly aware of the fact that you're reading. alternate between speed-reading, eyes zagging across the lines, and slow-reading, letting the voice in your head self-consciously pronounce every word silently behind your mouth. preoccupy yourself not only with the text and your own thoughts but with unshared predictions of your partner's parallel thought-trains. try to think totally around everything, back and forth, all in the instants between words, the speed, the meaning, the text, the repetition, every possible way you and your companion can interpret things and every relationship and juxtaposition between your two readings. all while you're still trying to decide when to scroll down.

the next day in class, we had all brought objects, and we were to describe them like gertrude stein might. i wound up looking at this bizarre baby-doll head thing cast out of kind of swirled black rubber? it was pretty horrifying. this is what i wrote.

out of sight, don't look, old and young, disintegrating. hollow and hollow and heavy staring. staring out staring down staring empty staring staring. closed. staring strong stars. under there is a swash and under there is a jab and under there is. and flesh wishes it were and isn't, glinting and matte and velvet. satin. eggshell. a swirl, a swash, a dent, a drip, a dent and you didn't, you didn't, did you. you didn't and she couldn't. disintegrating, can be seen through cannot do the seeing. can't do the seeing, the saying, the sighing the sewing the suing the selling.  a surface, a seam. a give, but no reverberate. no pulse, a morbid a mordred. impermanent but not breakable. sssssibillance. skin pilled, pooled. a foam, a foam a foam, hollow and wrapped heavy, dipped heavy. heavy and accusatory and glaring and staring and daring. not caring. swashes of flaw, not of fill but of flow and drop and bounce. and bounce and jar. and jar and fling. and fling and stain and stain and dab and satin, velvet, eggshell. matte. made unmade, raw. flat. unsmooth. round but split. round but empty. a wooden jab, a pop. a pock. apocalyptic. a shine. a dent. don't you? won't you? will you, still, still will you? still? a ruffle. a tug. this feels a little like a murder, and the glance, and the gash. and the rub smooth. and the wide open, the open wide. the tried. the cried. the fried.

sorry for the shameless writing plugs. but i am super exciting to be working with this poetry because i <3 tender buttons.

belated amsterdams

(i'm using this weekend to catch up on some blogging!)

the first thing we did in type 3 was an expressive typographic exploration with a given piece of text.

"born in amsterdam– a city that's steeped in history, yet prides itself on being quite progressive. a place where open mindedness always trumps convention. a city that doesn't know the meaning of status quo. a unique spirit indeed."

here's what i came up with:

this... did not go particularly well for me. the first assignment in a class is always somewhat terrifying, nevermind being under a new teacher, and expectations are hard to predict. these three compositions are the result of me ignoring my instincts for how i wanted these to look and pushing and pushing and pushing because i was afraid of looking like i hadn't done enough. they were also almost last in critique, so the class had already heard "too much! saying too many things all at once!" over and over again, so by the time we got to mine, i was just kind of like, "sorry... we don't have to say it again," and felt foolish. so, with the rocky start, i set the bar low for mr. kidwell's expectations of me, so hopefully from here on out, my work will look much better.