Thesis Progress

The more surfaces in my room that are taken over by thesis the better?

What If...My Classmates Were Helpful and Vann and William Were Gross

My Advanced Graphic Design 2 class (for which this blog is a requirement) did an exercise called "What If" for which we all signed onto AIM and joined a chat room to pose ridiculous questions to one another. As you can see, it was pretty interesting, and even helpful! Mariah volunteered me to talk, so I gave a brief verbal explanation of my project, a link to this blog, and away we went!

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Monday, February 15, 2010, 11:00-11:10 AM
Mariah Tarvainen: cara wants to go
Alex Glaeser: Thanks
William O'Connell: I like this system, fyi.
Cara Lichtenstein: http://transparentbooks.blogspot.com/
Jessica White: archerr
Mariah Tarvainen: archer is the neue helvetica neue
Alex Glaeser: Din is the new Helvetica
Dave Colson: david carson is not coherent and neither are his spreads
Vanian Roy: What if your book made people feel bad about themselves?
Tracy Kroop: What if your book was made into an audiobook?
Mariah Tarvainen: what if your book melted to the touch
Vanian Roy: What if your book could be used to catch a killer?
William O'Connell: what if your books left fingerprints in different colors?

William O'Connell: what if your books were etched to the point you could no longer see through them?

Mariah Tarvainen: what if everyone who interacted with your book altered it permanently

Vanian Roy: What if your book left it's fingerprints on your hand?

Ece Ciper: what if you used mirrors

Dave Colson: What if you had to alter the book with moisture, heat or finerprint to see the content

William O'Connell: what if touching the book destroyed the type?

Bryan East: what if your book could become a liquid then back to a solid
Vanian Roy: What if your book killed people?
Bryan East: like the terminator
Alex Glaeser: What if your book had moving images LIKE IN HARRY POTTER
Tracy Kroop: what if your book was 'written' as others read it?

Jessica White: what if your book wasnt clear?

Vanian Roy: What if your book were poisonous?
Ece Ciper: what if it changed colors when frozen

Mariah Tarvainen: what if your book was made from glass

Cecilia Oh: What if the book had pockets

Alex Glaeser: What if your book changed it's content

Tracy Kroop: what if your book was transparent in a metaphorical sense?

Jessica White: what if your book was a diary?

Alex Glaeser: on its own
Bryan East: What if your book was make out of ice
Bryan East: ?
Bryan East: made*
Alex Glaeser: What if your book was it's own diary
Alex Glaeser: and you checked it's entries
Alex Glaeser: often

Ece Ciper: what if you had more books inside of the book

Vanian Roy: What if your book smelled like strawberries but tasted like burnt rubber?
Cara Lichtenstein: One will be a sketcbook 
Cara Lichtenstein: Vann, please don't eat my book.
Alex Glaeser: What if your sketchbook belonged to an accountant
Vanian Roy: What if your cover were on the inside?
William O'Connell: what if your books had a sign next to them that said "do not touch"
Tracy Kroop: what if that was the title?
Tracy Kroop: (vann please don't eat my book)
William O'Connell: what if you MUST NOT READ FROM THE BOOK
Bryan East: What if your book your book could travel through time
Vanian Roy: What if your book belonged to someone who couldn't read?

Jasmine Sarp: what if the book was so sharp it cut you if you touched it

William O'Connell: what if your book caused blindness?
Jessica White: what if your book was binded with something disgusting?
Alex Glaeser: what if your book was mean
Vanian Roy: What if your book was too heavy to hold?
Bryan East: What if your book was sent to kill another book from the future
Ece Ciper: what if it could fly
Vanian Roy: throw it
William O'Connell: what if your book could be made into a soup

Tracy Kroop: what if your book was of found objects?

William O'Connell: what if your book contained soup?

Tracy Kroop: what if you couldn't control the materials?

Vanian Roy: What if your book reflected sunlight and blinded people?
Alex Glaeser: What if your 3 books didn't get along (sketchbook, checkbook, text book)
Dave Colson: What if your book was sold at Ok Natural?
Cara Lichtenstein: Do you think my book has to be transparent?
Ece Ciper: seriously, what if it could be transformed into a kite
Bryan East: What if your book could magnetically attract its pages
William O'Connell: what if your book absorbed light?
Tracy Kroop: what if your book your book was a prescription lens?
Cecilia Oh: what if your book controlled the world
Vanian Roy: What if your book emitted darkness?
William O'Connell: what if your book told this tour to go away?
Vanian Roy: LOL
Bryan East: What if your book could give tours of to other books
Jessica White: what is your book killed freshmen?
Vanian Roy: What if your book ate tour groups?
Alex Glaeser: Perfect TIMING
William O'Connell: what if your book was a horror film?
Vanian Roy: What if you had to rub the book on your face to see the text?
Bryan East: What if your book was a package of a horror film?
William O'Connell: what if your book was a house? or someone elses thesis? what if your book stole thesis(es?)
Vanian Roy: What if your book were moist?
Cara Lichtenstein: What if  you had to hold the book up to the light?
Jasmine Sarp: what if the books were barely existant
Mariah Tarvainen: what if your book was in braille
Cara Lichtenstein: VANN IS A PERPETRATOR OF MEMES
Cecilia Oh: what if your book was attractively good looking
Vanian Roy: What if your book was made before plastic existed?
Jasmine Sarp: what if the books were projected into smoke
Ece Ciper: what if your book was projected
Ece Ciper: whoa
Jasmine Sarp: hah
Mariah Tarvainen: twinz
Vanian Roy: What if your book were worth killing for
Vanian Roy: or dying for?
Cara Lichtenstein: it will be!
William O'Connell: what if your book wasn't worth dying for?
Alex Glaeser: What if your book could astral project

Vanian Roy: What if no body wanted your book?

Cara Lichtenstein: :'(
Bryan East: aw
William O'Connell: what if your book was bad?
Bryan East: Like Michael Jackson
Alex Glaeser: What if you met your book on a dating website like match.com
Vanian Roy: What if your book was actually an audio recording?
AM Jessica White: whoasaaaa
Soo Kim: what if your book was made of diamonds
Jessica White: no talk of MJ!!
Vanian Roy: What if your book was made of coal?
Vanian Roy: What if it left your hands smelling bad?
Alex Glaeser: Am I your book?
Jasmine Sarp: what if your book was made of gelatin
William O'Connell: What if your book was made of oil painting?
Mariah Tarvainen: what if your book was the rubens vase http://charmcitycurrent.com/culturecomment/2010/02/15/monday-art-object-of-the-week-2/
Tracy Kroop: what if your book wrote its own autobiography?
Bryan East: What if your book was thinking about going to MICA
Vanian Roy: What if your book screamed at people?
William O'Connell: what if your book was thinking of going to RISD?
Tracy Kroop: what if your book was a really scared potential student right now, with parents thinking wtf?
Alex Glaeser: What if your book was made of melting wax (hot wax, it would hurt)
William O'Connell: what if your book was laughing at other people?
William O'Connell: out loud.
Mariah Tarvainen: which artist would your book like to spend a day with
Vanian Roy: What if your book could only be read under water?
Jessica White: what if your book was about how i'm laughing too much, and i need to reserve myself.
Alex Glaeser: What if your book threw temper tantrums alot
Cara Lichtenstein: What if my book laughed
Tracy Kroop: what if your book was on backorder?
William O'Connell: what if your book made your eyes water like onions
Cecilia Oh: what if the book made you cry
Tracy Kroop: what if your book started at the end?
Ece Ciper: what if each book represented someone famous that you love
Vanian Roy: What if your book secreted a mysterious fluid?

Jessica White: what if the book was empty

Cara Lichtenstein: What if thyey were displayed in a dark room?
Cara Lichtenstein: they*
Bryan East: What if your book ....could book a job...
Bryan East: corny
Cecilia Oh: what if your book didn't have  cover
William O'Connell: what if your book started in the middle, and had no begining, no end, and no hope?
Vanian Roy: What if your book was already finished?

Jessica White: what if the book was a bible?

Tracy Kroop: what if your book was the spoiler for alex's movie?
Jasmine Sarp: what if the book only made sense when all the pages were looked at at once
Jessica White: like a super bible
Alex Glaeser: What if the book only opened for certain people?
Cara Lichtenstein: SUPERBIBLE
Tracy Kroop: ----------------------------------------------------------------------
William O'Connell: what if we filled the new potholes with dead hookers?
Vanian Roy: We could open a necropheliac brothel
William O'Connell: shag 'em and bag 'em?
Vanian Roy: haha
Cara Lichtenstein: OH GOD GUYS
Vanian Roy: What if our brothel became #1 in the world?
Vanian Roy: What if our brothel was also a grocery store?

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The "What If..." exercise was a very helpful thought experiment for me; I was a bit stuck in my thinking, and this allowed me to open up and relinquish some control of the process. Highlighted in blue are things that are applicable to my "What If..." project or potentially applicable to my thesis (ideas with which I'm interested in playing). The italicized statements are those applicable to my "What If..." project specifically and off of whom I based my "What If..." book.

In Which Cara is Characteristically Stressed Out

I'm stressed about my thesis project. I thought that I would make a list of some things that stress me out to varying degrees. Tomorrow I will try to post a list of things that de-stress me.

Since this doesn't relate directly to thesis, I thought I'd give the option to read it or skip it. There's a reward, though.

Tabs That Have Been Open in my Web Browser for Obscene Amounts of Time.

I've been looking at various works from a multitude of media. I think I've been trying to saturate my brain with art and ideas in order to inspire some sort of inner dialogue. I should really be recording my ideas as I come up with them, which is why I can't wait to get into Dolphin to cut down paper for my somewhat-transparent sketchbook. Stupid snow. ::shakes fist::

...Wait, a place to record my thoughts. Isn't that what this blog is for? Without further ado (in no specific older):

The New Spencerian Compendium Of Penmanship, 1879

I found this via Luke Williams' blog. Luke is a MICA alum with an eye for type, and a designer whose work I really enjoy. The Compendium is pretty exhaustive, and I haven't had the time to look through it all yet. I'm pretty sure that's why I'm so excited to have stumbled across it.  This page, however, is gorgeous. (Luke posted this one, too). Not sure if it's relevant to my thesis work specifically, but everything is pretty relevant right now.

Jeff Canham's Sign Painting (and Art & Design)

 

This particular print is called "The Coast is Clear". I have really been enjoying Canham's lettering and his drawing style. This particular print resonates with me for its simple layering and use of transparency. There's not much of it, but I like the way it's done (especially the tight registration on the rays of the sun!)

Andrew Bannecker's Gorgeous Illustrations

Andrew Bannecker's work is gorgeous. His use of color, texture, and the illusion of overlaps & transparency is really inspiring for me right now. Bannecker's work has a sense of whimsy to it without employing unrecognizable imagery. Bannecker takes the banal and re-contextualizes it to create moments in an impossibly beautiful world. That might have been a little flowery. Reader's Digest™ condensed version: I've been obsessed with his work for a little while now, especially with this particular piece, which is called "No Turning Back". As my obvious fangirlishness relates to my thesis, I would like to incorporate ethereal textures into my work, and have started to do a little research on paper made from Abaca to begin to achieve that effect.

Mikey Burton's Thesis Work (and the rest of his work, too)

 

Mikey Burton re-branded a bunch of books we all had to read in Middle School and in High School. If they looked like this at the time, I would likely have been more excited to read them. I enjoyed reading a lot (and I still do!), but dissecting literature was never a passion of mine. Burton's work, like Bannecker's, employs gorgeous textures (though the textures are very different). Burton uses a lot of letterpress in his work, a medium (process?) of which I've been a long-time fan. Mikey Burton's thesis project is a good source or inspiration for me because he successfully re-invented books. I'd like to re-invent the experience of the book. In a way. (This is obvious from the title of my thesis project.)

Studio on Fire's Letterpress work and Design





















Studio on Fire is an awesome Letterpress shop & Design firm in Minneapolis, MN. They create beautiful work, and I love looking at their client jobs and reading about the specific hurdles of each project on their blog, Beast Pieces, but their design work is stunning as well, especially when they experiment as they did with this piece for the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul, MN. Letterpress is a great way to work with transparency. I wonder if I can effectively letterpress on clear paper?

Jessica Hische's Amazing Lettering and Amazing Everything Else, Too.

HolyCrapILoveJessicaHische. That said, I really do admire her work. I think her particular brand of Ilustrator-drawn-illustrations is unique and either hilarious, adorable, or classy depending on the project. She does beautiful lettering and design, and her book cover and layout work (much of which was designed while she worked for Louise Fili) is just as well-considered; it is perfectly designed to every last detail. How does this relate to my thesis? It...uh...it's pretty! In all seriousness, I'm looking at drawing letters as the content for one of my books, and Jessica's work will certainly be open in my web browser for the entirety of that process. Maybe I should use her Drop Caps for my blog. Maybe that would be overkill.

Erasing.tumblr

Erasing is a tumblr art crawl curated by Scott David Herman of Erasing.org. I didn't actually know this until just now, trying to figure out how to write this paragraph. Honstly, I have yet to look at Mr. Herman's work, but I love the theme of his tumblr: everything is mostly white art. The simple palette lends itself rather nicely to my project, as I'll likely be working with a limited palette as well. Looking at this tumblog (is that even correct?) collection of images has been a good way to open up my mind. There is some really excellent work, and I find that there are a lot of images I want to come back to, which is a characteristic I'd like my books to have. This particular image is entitled "Perfect world II" by Veli Granö. (I love the third figure in this image.)

Evelin Kasikov's Printed Matter

In stark contrast to the Erasing collection's "all white all the time" aesthetic, I've been obsessing over the work of Evelin Kasikov—specifically her "Printed Matter". Ms. Kasikov has been stretching the bounds of printing by embroidering CMYK halftone patterns by hand. She has a set of four books full of research, experiments, and exploration of creating type and image using embroidery in a new way. I especially love when she combines computer generates graphics with her embroidery; she creates a new sense of dimensionality and tactility that really sets her work apart.

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Whew! This blog entry took me forever, but this time, when my laptop runs out of batteries, I'll have all of my links in one convenient place.  Please, if any of these interest you, browse through the websites. There's some amazing work to be seen here.

Note: This thing was obscenely difficult to format for some reason. Does anyone else have a work-around for this?

Note2: Apparently I can't have left-justified images. Center-justified images don't really work any better. :(

Let's Start at the Very Beginning

In last semester's Artists' Books class, I took it upon myself to design a book which would draw attention to the binding and the reader as content. I chose a size, researched materials, bought some acrylic & Duralar, and started to experiment. This book was the result. I enjoy my transparent book as an art object, but for my thesis, I wanted to use it as a jumping-off point to explore the experience of a book and challenge the way we read.

I'm interested in recording the readers' experience and experimenting with media with which I have little to no experience. This blog will record my thoughts, research, failures, and (hopefully) an ultimately victorious endeavor.

Senior Project Proposal

concept | the transparent book
The book is a unique experience, relying on the reader to interact and engage. As such, the reader is an integral part of the book. The visual book is seen through the reader’s eyes, interpreted through the reader’s brain, and held by the reader’s hands. Weight, tactility, and scale are as important as legibility and narrative to the experience. The transparent book inserts reader as content; the reader becomes part of the experience.

audience | the inquisitive reader
These books will hopefully attract designers and artists, lovers of aesthetic and experimentation. They’re meant to be held and looked at and loved.

subject | the book as experience
This project aims to result in a collection of similarly sized transparent books with a wide array of experimentation and technique. The subject of each book will vary; I will be incorporating various materials and mark-making techniques, hopefully including screenprinting, which I will have to learn. This collection of books will focus on the nature of interaction as content and layering as narrative.

deliverables | the collection
Studies of the Book as Experience will result in a collection of transparent books with varied content. I would like to experiment as much as possible within the constraints of a single scale. I would like to have 10 different books (some in small editions depending on technique?) by the end for the semester.

goals | the book as experiment
This project is meant to push me to experiment and to create a body of work. I crave more variation and freedom in my work, and feel like this project will allow me to make breakthroughs in my process. Ideally, these books will intrigue and inspire the reader as much as I hope they inspire me.

influences | the things i look at
I’ve been looking at sign painting (Jeff Canham), the work of Marian Bantjes, paper cutting, coptic book structures, exploded photography (Adam Voorhes in particular), letterpress work (Studio on Fire, lately), various works involving transparency and decorative lettering.

research | books for reading
Lupton, D.I.Y: Design It Yourself, 2006
Lupton & Phillips, Graphic Design, The New Basics, 2008
Lupton, Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book, 2008
Lupton, Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide, 2004
Mann, Lettering and Lettering Display, 1974
Smith, Structure of the Visual Book, 2005
Willen & Strals, Lettering & Type: Creating Letters & Designing Typefaces, 2009