Mixed Messages — exquisite corpse book and lenticular poster
At the time I was developing the concept for my senior design project, I was wrestling with a fractured friendship. How could an email message I thought was friendly and innocuous be interpreted by my friend to be hurtful and insulting? What was I missing?
Humans constantly create verbal and visual messages and send them to imagined or specific audiences. But can any sender anticipate the myriad ways a message might be interpreted? Can a recipient ever fully understand the sender's intended meaning? Chance, context, juxtaposition and an individual's experiences and mental filters all affect how a message may be perceived.
In Mixed Messages, I wanted to make the interpretive role of the message recipient more conscious. Both the exquisite corpse book and the lenticular poster require physical interaction with a viewer to be complete. When a viewer 'activates' the objects, she transforms from passive recipient to interpretive participant in the process of creating meaning.
Winner of two Design Competitions:
Best in Show, 2014 FIT Graduating Student Exhibition, Graphic Design BFA, FIT Museum
Best in Show, Perceive: 2014 Media Design Club Exhibition, Helen Mills Event Space
Best in Show, 2014 FIT Graduating Student Exhibition, Graphic Design BFA, FIT Museum
Best in Show, Perceive: 2014 Media Design Club Exhibition, Helen Mills Event Space
Conceived, designed, and written by Alane Marco
Cloth bookbinding and lenticular poster construction by Alane Marco
Poster/book printing and spiral binding by Digitech Printers
24" x 36" Poster viewed from left
Interactive Exquisite Corpse Book (9"x12" closed, 9"x24" fully open) has a single back and two front covers that open gatefold-style from both sides.
It's a little Dada, a little Surrealist, a little Fluxus... The left side is The Serious Side of the Book; it relates the happy accidents and art movements that inspired the concept for the right side of the book. The right side is The Fun Side of the Book, an exquisite corpse game that mixes verbal and visual messages depending on how you turn the pages.
Vintage ostrich illustration in public domain. 'Giraffe on Penny Farthing/Spiffy Drawing #1' illustration by James Badham, 2012.
When the quotations are aligned, the images are mixed up.
I created the "Pistols" illustration entirely from type.
When the images are aligned, the quotes are mixed up.
Translucent vellum pages in The Serious Side of the Book add visual texture.
Tri-part pages in The Fun Side of the Book are based on the Surrealist party game, Exquisite Corpe. They enable the reader to mix up famous quotations and iconic images to get funny new results.
