This was my Media 2 final. I was just notified that it is also a semifinalist in the Adobe Achievements Awards, even though I don't think it's terribly good. But whatever!
Showing posts with label media 2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media 2. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 5, 2015
Monday, March 23, 2015
I made my first book!
It's called The Complete Encyclopaedia of Humanity and it's very ironic yet serious and modern yet vintage. Here are some photos of it:
This book took me a long time to finish (and I may or may not have turned it in late...) because there was so much writing I had to incorporate. I went through several drafts of writing types before I finally found the one I wanted to do, if only because I was running out of time.
Like I said in an earlier blog post, these photographs are from books I find at thrift stores that I like to hoard for no particular reason. I spend time categorizing these photos into relevant topics and themes, and I keep it all to myself—I haven't shown or shared these photos until now. While looking through my photos, I realized that I was drawn to photographs that specifically featured people; I didn't have a lot of landscapes or flowers or urban environments. I was interested in exploring the personal environment of strangers that I would never meet and never know, and I wanted to push that even further in this book, especially in terms of universally-experienced psychological thoughts and behaviors. So I ended up writing little stories for each photograph, fashioning it like an absurdist encyclopedia. I began the book with an entry on "anxiety," because I wanted an "a" word and because it set the tone for the rest of the book. I also included an entry on "breath," because I love Virginia Woolf and there was a particular sentence in her first chapter in The Waves that I wanted to include, also for setting the mood.
Here's one of my favorite entries:
snow—A morning of mist and an afternoon of snow, alive and breathing in the face of industrialism, and my feet and nose are cold and wet, and I can see the top of my eyelashes turning white while the ground around me turns grey, a pallid grey, and I’m overcome with sensation and beauty and dread and bewonderment, and I am at once trying to walk home while trying stop and admire the flurries, though I know tomorrow will bring news reports of accidents and wintry poverty, yet I don’t care, for it’s not happening to me, and right now I cannot think of anything but how the world is conquering me, how the snow overpowers human construction, how I long to be consumed.
Anyway. This was a fun project. I also made a website for it.
This book took me a long time to finish (and I may or may not have turned it in late...) because there was so much writing I had to incorporate. I went through several drafts of writing types before I finally found the one I wanted to do, if only because I was running out of time.
Like I said in an earlier blog post, these photographs are from books I find at thrift stores that I like to hoard for no particular reason. I spend time categorizing these photos into relevant topics and themes, and I keep it all to myself—I haven't shown or shared these photos until now. While looking through my photos, I realized that I was drawn to photographs that specifically featured people; I didn't have a lot of landscapes or flowers or urban environments. I was interested in exploring the personal environment of strangers that I would never meet and never know, and I wanted to push that even further in this book, especially in terms of universally-experienced psychological thoughts and behaviors. So I ended up writing little stories for each photograph, fashioning it like an absurdist encyclopedia. I began the book with an entry on "anxiety," because I wanted an "a" word and because it set the tone for the rest of the book. I also included an entry on "breath," because I love Virginia Woolf and there was a particular sentence in her first chapter in The Waves that I wanted to include, also for setting the mood.
Here's one of my favorite entries:
snow—A morning of mist and an afternoon of snow, alive and breathing in the face of industrialism, and my feet and nose are cold and wet, and I can see the top of my eyelashes turning white while the ground around me turns grey, a pallid grey, and I’m overcome with sensation and beauty and dread and bewonderment, and I am at once trying to walk home while trying stop and admire the flurries, though I know tomorrow will bring news reports of accidents and wintry poverty, yet I don’t care, for it’s not happening to me, and right now I cannot think of anything but how the world is conquering me, how the snow overpowers human construction, how I long to be consumed.
I know "bewonderment" isn't actually a word but I don't care. I ended up writing a lot about humanity and its powerlessness in the face of nature. I think I was influenced by Al Jarnow, who I gave a presentation on just two weeks before I started making this book.
Anyway. This was a fun project. I also made a website for it.
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