Tag: progress

Janus deck beginnings

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  1. I secretly want to flip out that the FYP Viscomm criteria was only sent today, and I feel a little sad that I’m the kind of person who feels reassured by documents even after years of declaring that I’m ready to buck a system that still needs guidelines WHO AM I
  2. I’m actually really liking the starts I’ve been making on the Janus deck and getting a little bit into this wayfinding thing.

So what is this Janus deck? A crafted fortune deck meant to use recognizable tropes from Greek mythology for the seemingly directionless or fearful individual (me sometimes) to divine sensible responses from the gods. Janus is symbolic of beginnings, and personally significant to me because of how I kind of needed a new beginning for my project as well. (I will draw more bizarre-looking cards, I promise. I know these two are terribly tame, but they’re very early experiments.)

Here is my to-do list.

  1. Read up in greater detail on Greek mythology (this means another trip to the ADM library), symbolism, divination, etc. to beef up the research basis of my project
  2. Make more cards, with increasingly bizarre imagery, with more Harry Clarke/Beardsley influence. Grotesque readings over the past two months will back up my illustrative style.
  3. Start working on book ideas. Make first, think later. Probably going to try incorporating dioramas and foldouts in my book because I want to draw a lot of things, and I pinned a lot of creative layouts and they’re really inspiring me.

The way I’ve been working is sort of an adhoc make first, conceptualize later thing so I can fulfill my almost neurotic compulsion to feel productive. Making also helps me calm my thyroids (or wherever my FYP anxiety is stored). I’ve been chasing after this lofty idea of The Perfect Most Beautiful FYP Concept Ever and that probably curtailed my desire to do anything, since it didn’t live up to whatever vague castle in the air I had in my head. The more I make the more material I have to choose from, which is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing anyway. More cards tomorrow, more book-related thoughts, and hopefully back to some kind of professional standard of blogging that doesn’t sound so much like a stream of consciousness.

MC Escher

“As from 1950, Escher dedicated himself to manipulating space and perspective, experimenting with gravity and the construction of impossible spaces and architectures. The ambiguity of these scenarios in which different worlds converge simultaneously and cyclically, constitute a subjective framework of highly thought-provoking work, the product of the artist’s imagination.

Escher’s attraction towards strange and impossible spaces, with vanishing points that are distorted and only apprehensible in the imagination, is likely to have stemmed from his initial architecture studies and particularly the engravings by Piranesi, the vedute, with which he became acquainted on his travels to Rome in his youth. On setting eyes on lithographs such as Relativity (1953) or Convex and Concave (1955), it is impossible not to bring to mind the Carcieri (prisons) of the Venetian artist, from which Escher would learn the continuous and infinite spatial relationship and the cyclical perspective with no beginning or end. These spatial fantasies are conceptual constructs, which uphold the Einsteinian discourse on the relationship between space and time.”

from www.eschergranada.com

I’m coming into a haul of Usborne Puzzle Books very soon and I thought that doing some preliminary research into Escher might very well help me construct my own visual puzzles, because I’ve never done that before and it’s an intrinsic part of the puzzle book genre.

 

expo-ambito7-obra-007Up And Down (1947)

expo-ambito7-obra-012Ascending And Descending (1960)

expo-ambito7-obra-006Other World (1947)

Visual puzzles are also integral to The Merlin Mystery, a book that inspired my Dictionary project almost as much as House Of Leaves did. I never got to use the visual puzzle aspect of the former, but after I get through the pile of Usborne books that I’m going to get my hands on soon it’s likely that I’ll want to experiment with my own strange Escher-esque puzzle universes that build on the virtual reality/Gemini storylines that I already have.

As of now, FYP progress looks like this:

  • I like world-building and user interaction but I still want to play old-school and have illustrated puzzles/books instead of digital UIs – for the most part, I like keeping things analog with references like Fighting Fantasy and Usborne puzzle books
  • Castor/Pollux storyline is dormant; I might want to include or turn the storyline to be more about Janus (the Roman god of beginnings and doorways, appropriate for armchair adventure stories)
  • I am still very into bizarre and disturbing things (the dark side of virtual reality, body horror, macabre illustrations)