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Awe for the everyday - physical things

An experiment that’s a development from my ‘Poetry of Modern Life’ book from last year, where I gave strange definitions for everyday things.

The idea is that having the actual object there when confronted by the strange nature of it might somehow hit home more than seeing merely the illustration as the reader did in last year’s project.

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Spray-painting coins, my old phone, and my old watch:

Trying the same with a lightbulb that’d been painted blue, and getting the following strange result!:

It seems that the white primer spray paint works as paint stripper! Managed to wipe the blue off though:

Had masked off the face of the watch and the screen of the phone, as I imagined they would look great with those details unpainted. However, on removing the tape I felt that the screen and the watchface weren’t in-keeping with the feeling I was after, of making archetypes of ‘the watch’ and ‘the phone’.

So I painted over them:

For the coins, I wondered if I could simplify a textual definition that I might have had before, into a more subtle, stranger, symbol…

I also wondered if I could experiment with making a strange alphabet, that’d use my previous definitions but in a way that’d have to be decoded/discovered.

What came to mind was Sara de Bondt’s ‘ET’ adaptation of Futura, which she notes as the typeface for ‘The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art’!…

Also, one of Emigre’s fonts that I found a picture of a while ago:

Reading A B C D E N O P Q R.

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Anyway, here’s my first try:

Watch: ‘Steadiness through slow and fast times’.
Lightbulb: ‘Reminder of our lonely star’
Phone: ‘The string of air that bonds us’

I used a Sharpie felt tip, as I felt the primary colours were inkeeping with the idea of an archetype. However, on actually trying it out I wasn’t all that keen. Ideally I wanted neatness, and the lettering style looks more gimmicky than what I had in mind.

Some of the coins work better though I think; the three with text on are the same as the other objects, with the definition instead of ‘Slice of earth passed around’. The three with images though, from top, mean:

- ‘This coin has the same value as this object pictured’
- ‘This coin is one of so many’ (the red dot amongst all the black dots)
- ‘Imagine the path of this coin over time’.

Paper choices

Left to right: The book paper I used for my ‘Poetry of Modern Life’ project last year, newsprint and Bible paper. The Bible paper, besides being relevant in its religious links, feels far better for what I want. It has a delicateness that matches the hazy photocopied pixels; both ideal for my urge to emphasise that the pixels have now been made physical.

Through pushing the tactility of the object (making the materials more noticeable/unusual) my hope is that the reality behind our relationship with Google is made more clear, and feels rightfully strange.

Updated blog entries

Have updated the following entry about previous experiments!:

http://blog.willquirk.co.uk/post/5484291745/google-as-god-book-shrine-text

‘Prayers to Google’ book

Based on my previous experiments with calligraphy, I felt the book needed a stronger sense of neatness. I decided, then, that in lieu of siting in a dark room with a lamp on for weeks like a monk (!), I’d use the computer somehow:

I’ve decided to develop the original ‘pixellated shrine’ illustrations from a few weeks ago, and to use a single page of the book for each of the best epic prayers to Google that I’d found before.

As with the previous experiments, I’ve tried to reference religious iconography in having mirrored compositions around a dominant central element. With this new imagery, however, I’m also including elements like the mouse cursor, scrollbars and windows, in an effort to express that these things are the equivalent of an altar or stained glass windows in church, or the decoration on a manuscript… They are there, part of the architecture, as our Google-searchers share their thoughts with the ether.

Computer pixels aren’t an arbitrary choice of course. They stand for similar things in this project to the pixels in my slow website as, in both, they can be taken to reference the gridded mass of knowledge and technology that we’ve built around ourselves.

Google book

A possible inspiration for the cover of my prayer book:

As it’s only 10 or so sheets of Bible Paper, it only wants a thin soft cover. Something precious though…

Done!- nearly!

Content’s all in there; think I’ll leave it like that more or less!

http://willquirk.com/SLOW/WEB/FINAL-200/1.html

The only thing is: testing it out on another computer, the ‘code’ background of the white section is a bit too subtle.

Need to replace the files with amended ones in that case; shouldn’t take too long.

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Here are some process images for the last part:

Above: trying out the ivy.

Above: Trying different effects with texture overlays.

Above: trying out a photograph behind; not as strong as just white, I felt.

Overall, I prefer just having the subtlety of the GUI being broken, and in ruins. Plants overgrowing (in the way I’ve tried it at least) seems too much.

Gap-fix: Put the image as the background instead, with no repeat. Then, being as there’s no button, I’ve put a transparent gif of the same dimensions above, as seen here:

The popup windows containing the gifs are looking good!- the only problem is this white gap right at the top and left hand side:

Going to try and find a way to get rid of it somehow…

THE GIFS

There’s to be a series of 3 gifs, which (like with the hands, and my previous experiments with the forest image) get smoother each time (each with different text on though of course).

I think I’ll have to choose an image that looks a lot like trees, because the above doesn’t really work all that well, being so abstract. I had to make a small crop instead of having a large image because large it looks like this:

There are more colours in the image and so it can’t fit them all into the 256 colours allowed.

Also: I’m choosing to have them spreading across individual pop-up windows, because that’s the only way I feel I can break out of the GIF’s feeling ‘square’ like the rest. I’m attempting, here, to convey a feeling of change, and of breaking out of the familiar.

Here’s a test of that:

I did think of having a vignette effect around it, but it looked terrible:

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Looking at the pop-up window test above, I wonder if it’s a good idea to still have the hole in the wall visible. Surely it should feel like you’ve gone through it, so perhaps the window should be set to cover that…