Objective

Through a reiterative process of materials exploration, experiment with the potentiality of meaning and juxtaposition of expectation and presentation.

Content
The art of the Tweet. The power of 140 characters and the hash tag. Links to images, animations, videos, articles... networks of followers. Twitter has been called a cesspool. Explore it’s recesses through the use of found tweets to follow conversation and argument. Give the text a sense of life, pushing dimensions of contrast, scale, color and texture. It should both delight and inform!

Form
The Medium is the Message (or the Massage)—Marshall McLuhan may have been talking about the Mass Media, or Mass Age, depending on the book or interview, but essentially he was trying to communicate that the medium through which we communicate, are a message unto themselves. This project applies this concept to the mediums in which designers may communicate their messages.

Though design is most often thought of as an intellectual and somewhat logical exercise, in which the designer may utilize intuition to some extent, it is frequently not open to chance. Be open to “happy accidents” you are encouraged to explore an unfamiliar medium and explore potential meaning as it is revealed.

Research

I initially began by using paper mâché to cover ordinary objects. Like the other explorations, there was no intent with what was being made other than to explore the media in which we were working.

I then began exploring the use of black and white photo, extremely close to objects. This black and white treatment led me to exploring the scanner, somewhere I have explored many times before. Since I had explored here, I decided to use it in a different manner. I began by making each found image black and white and added a noise filter, I then printed and cut out the images, scanning them back into the computer as a 600dpi raster and as a 150dpi text–dithered image. I then combined these two in order to create a unique kind of digital texture; one that occurs organically from the scanner, but also in a pixel–based, controlled manner. This exploration was more directly applied to my work in artgr510.

Form/medium exploration — black and white photography

 

Form/medium exploration — scanner–based image treatments

Twitter Scraping

We were asked to search 10 topics on Twitter and collect information about them. What I noticed about the results is that an unexpected theme could be found within them. This led to the creation of the final product of this project.

Final

I decided to create a zine that shows the unexpected themes found within the search results. Though not accidental, this situation is similar in sensation to Google’s well–known “did you mean ...?” when the user searches for something thats perhaps they didn’t intend to. In my case, I searched for “pizza”, but did I mean to search for “conflict”?

I began by printing the collected tweets out, cutting and arranging them in a loose configuration per search term, and then processed them through the scanner the same way I had in the form/medium exploration. These compositions were then arranged into a zine format, printed, wrapped in non–symbolic, repetitive Astrobright cover, and then carefully pamphlet stitched together. The form of the zine — in its combination of new and old methods, digital–turned–analog content — is intended to run parallel to Twitter’s ability to be overstimulating while also vapid and void of meaning.