As I was working on my book project, there were some ideas which developed from my research and experimentation but I didn’t fully flesh out. Below are a few experiments I made based on these ideas.
After looking at the Codex Gigas I wanted to see how such a handcrafted and tactile object would translate into a digital image creation format. ASCII is a code language that converts images to symbols. I found a scan of one of the pages of the Codex Gigas online and played around with converting it into ASCII using an generator. It changes the identity of the publication and the contrasting elements of the code created image and the hand drawn become combined. It’s interesting to me also how the Codex Gigas was created so intricately by hand but a computer can replicate intricacy and precision to such a greater degree.
As I was scanning the covers of my books, I experimented with scanning the spine of the book. I wanted to see if you were able to pick up the intricacies of how the pages sat naturally on their edge. You can tell a lot about a book from it’s pages – how old it is, how many times it’s been read, the paper weight, you can pin point areas where someone has re-read it. It becomes a visualisation of data. Pages are universal to all books, in this experiment you don’t need to know anything about the book, but there are already things you can infer from it’s material and structure and the subsequent interaction with these elements. I positioned these linear forms in an architectural structure to see how they would balance alongside each other and create a more abstract interpretation of my concept. When positioning them I noticed you can portray depth somewhat by positioning columns in certain ways. Notably, I tried two different settings on the scanner, black and white and grey scale. Black and white extenuated the shapes of the pages themselves to a greater extent but Gray-scale created this illusion of depth almost making the linear strips look like columns. I can imagine using these strips to create a type face or take it a bit further in another way.
Finally, whilst researching the history of books I experimented with text from Beowulf. Beowulf is one of the oldest surviving stories, mainly being retold orally before being written down, I played around with this ideas of this stories heritage and subverted this struture. Inputting an extract into an ai it then created a subsequent extract based off the data from the previous extracts. The serif type face merriweather represents the original text whilst the sans-serif text represents the digitally created story passed on by the ai generator. I had previously seen a similar font on the cover of a copy of “Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep” and it struck me as being weird, it was like seeing a font from an old computer, it felt out of place. This is what I wanted to replicate. I interlaced the text because it shows how they do interlink and merge into one narrative despite their detachment,
Cameron Aitken Graphic Design 