After being given lots of advice from different sources, I needed to get the final bit of my position brief clear in my head. The message I want to communicate and the means by which I intend to do so have evolved a bit. However, everything I did prior to this was essential for where I am now. After talking to both Joel and Gregg, it was clear the system I was previously working under was too closed. It didn’t allow for either my own graphic interpretation, a criticism mentioned by Marcus, or any exciting deviations from the inherited processes which I attained from Dissecting the Imagery and feel of text based adventure games such as “The Hobbit”. I think there was also a cross roads that became apparent when Joel and I discussed coding, a topic of which the technicalities of, I know very little. I would incorporate coded elements by using online, easily accessible generators and software. Whilst this is fun and interesting, it perhaps limits the outcome in a certain way. I tried to negate this by creating long stringed together processes that create multiple outputs, however, I think more depth is still needed. I will definitely be interested to learn some coding later on, and have been given some great resources to so, but for this project I think I will try and achieve my communication through different means. I thought the best way to get out of this digital system was to start bringing my process into an analogue environment. I think it would really be interesting to see how this affects the communication as it was originally purely digitally created. There is the idea that everything coded can be transferable in someway, there is no such thing in the analogue. I think this also reflects a yearning to work in an analogue fashion and with my hands in a different way.
I thought back to the thing about my initial topic I was originally drawn to which was this image. There was something about the bright artificial colours and boxy composition that really stuck with me. I think the hazy perception of depth is really interesting and how the image in areas is far more abstracted to enhance this effect. The red font against the blue background is quite unnatural and hard to read at a glance, making it become quite an active process to interpret. The image is also quite clearly bordered in the bottom but due to the fact it utilises the same blue as the background it blends in the top given it a sense of irregularity within it’s composition.
As Joel and I discussed, these images would have initially been drawn out on graph paper to realise how they were to be coded. I made the initial link to the loom and how these technologies used a grid to create imagery. It’s steeped in this ancient process of craft which I think would be effective to re-contextualise this image under. I also thought about how screen like and flat the prints created using Japanese woodblock printing methods are. However, in the time frame I decided to explore how the image would be effected by screen printing. I attended an induction and have booked a slot for Monday the 2nd of March. What I liked about this method was how it uses a halftone which is a direct comparison to a pixel for the screen to work.
This also will feed into the typograhic exploration of my project looking at the narrative of this communication. I initially set myself 3 areas of interest within the digital – media archaeology, digital sustainability and my own label “the interpersonal digital” in other words, looking at the more meta physical connections to the digital we have, and how in the case of text-based adventure games it can facilitate a real immersion and allow our perception to work in different ways. However, I liked one strand which tied some of the aspects of these threads together and is a nice way to bring my work into the analogue. During a talk by the editorial strand leader – Linda Byrne. She mentioned how she views interacting with a book as moving around a physical space. A connection, as I understood, partially inferred due to her interlinking of both architectural and editorial areas of interest. It triggered a memory of a chat I had with Marcus and how by destructing the conventions of a narrative by introducing branching paths which you can interact with, the physicality of a book becomes challenged. Before text-based adventure games there were choose your own adventure books. However, the digital, because it isn’t limited by physical tangibility, can expand to a far greater extent and take this form of communication so much further. The physicality of the end product has always been on my mind. I will try and envision how the intangible digital space of the text-based adventure game could be realised in a tangible, analogue form. I began to sketch this out to visualise my outcome.
There’s the idea of branching paths, almost like a route structure creating a complex trail of different narratives to follow. The image is central to my project both metaphorically and actually as the strands of text work off it. I want to think about the theory behind my experiments. How I can take my understanding deeper. I thought it was really stimulating working off a classical text during the Sapere Aude project so I aim to look at the Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” a philosophical text in media theory that has underpinned my practice and built into my understanding of the digital. I think it would also be interesting to build in text from the book “Beowulf” which has also been very present during this project and understanding of narrative and communication. There is a nice link as Tolkien was heavily inspired by this text, so there’s this nice multilateral chain as the image was taken from a text-based adventure game based off his source material.
Cameron Aitken Graphic Design 