Written Response Brief 1: Position Through Iteration | MAGCD U2

Line of Enquiry

The first week started off with a lot of confusion and worry about the long-term effects of the brief we were about to start. The idea was to start off creating a set of iterations, leading up to a 100 of them one after the another. So for this particular brief, I selected the face masks that I touched upon in the Methods of translation brief. Using the mask and the faces as my snippet, I started creating a set of simple vector shapes that would be used to then create masks to depict varied emotions. These shapes took the shape of emotions due to a phenomenon called Pareidolia. Even a small changes in the shape’s position, size, or shape gave a different emotion. Following these initial information, I was inspired by the project “double trouble” that used the shapes to depict hidden emotions, and wanted to use these faces so created in the first week as a translation device for a film. For this particular set, I chose “The Lighthouse” as my source material. At the end of these iterations i was left with a small publication with the goal to see whether the shapes will depict the same emotions even when the pareidolia effect is broken. There still remains for me to create a system where these faces, can be used as a translation device for other mediums, reliably and with less and less arbitrary decisions.

Annotated Bibliography

RAYMOND QUENEAU
Exercises in Style
London: John Calder
[1947] 1998, pp. 17–26

With Exercise in Style, RAYMOND QUENEAU, taking in the same set of inputs, i.e., the story and arranges the story in different form and structure to create different emotions for the reader as he reads it. It serves as a good example of how changes within the structure of the writing can change the readers’ perspective immensely. This seems to apply to the faces iterations as well, although not literary like the Exercise in style, changes made in the structure, size, or the placement of the iteration can change the way the audience perceives the face. And the possible combinations and variations are endless.

ANDREW BLAUVELT, LUNA MAURER, EDO PAULUS, JONATHAN PUCKEY, AND ROEL WOUTERS
Conditional Design Workbook
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2013, Excerpt pp. ii–xiv

In their Manifesto, the authors emphasise on the importance of process and how it is the product itself. Using Input as our material and logic as our tool, they want us to avoid random and arbitrary decision. Thus, creating a world of design that represents the here and now rather than reminiscing about the past. The system used for the second set of iterations used some rules, but was still relying on arbitrary and subjective decision by the translator. But that being said, is it even possible to create a system for such a task, that of translating emotions from one plane to another?

Wodehouse, A., Brisco, R., Broussard, E., & Duffy, A. (2018).
Pareidolia: characterising facial anthropomorphism and its implications for product design.
Journal of Design Research, 16(2), 83-98.
Available at: [https://pureportal.strath.ac.uk/en/publications/pareidolia-characterising-facial-anthropomorphism-and-its-implica]

The Pareidolia effect by definition is the perception of apparently significant patterns or recognisable images, especially faces, in random arrangement of objects or shapes. This research paper extensively explores this phenomenon and how it affects the realm of product design. The fact that a set of shapes or objects arranged randomly can make the viewer connect it to a face can influence the emotion of the audience towards the said object. This is the phenomenon that my initial iterations took advantage of, using seeming random shapes to draw the attention of the audience to recognise it as a face showing complex emotions. The question that arises here is would the same set of shapes carry the same emotion when the pareidolia effect is intentionally broken by shuffling them around?

Vladimir Nabokov
The Art of Translation
August 4, 1941
Available at: [https://newrepublic.com/article/62610/the-art-translation]

This text, written by Vladimir Nabokov in 1941, describe three kinds of evils when it comes to translating a material, in this case literary. The first is being ignorant, second intentionally skipping parts of the material and the third and the worst, conforming the material according to ones wish and prejudices. Although the article focuses on the translation of written material, these principles can also be applied to other forms of translation, even the ones happening between two different mediums. Vladimir focuses on the fact that translator should not deceit the audience by hiding or omitting or masking information while translating the material. He also directs the attention towards how a bad translation can change the meaning that the original material’s author was trying to convey. All these considerations also come in when trying to use vector shapes as masks to translate emotions from an image or text, and the translator, in this case being I, will inevitably commit one of these evils while doing so.

Ekta, LUNDGREN+LINDQVIST, Sweden
160 Faces, 2019
Available at: [https://bpando.org/2020/09/23/art-book-design-ekta/]

Ekta in his project “160 Faces” drew 160 faces with a crayon and then ripped all of them in half only to reconstruct them in random order, forming a complex and varied set of faces. The project provided an interesting perspective on how even a small, accidental dot by Ekta within the circle can change how a person/audience perceives the emotion projected on the paper. The seemingly random squiggly lines transform the area within the circle into a playground of emotions, operating within the area of the Pareidolia effect. The studio LUNDGREN+LINDQVIST with the algorithmic sequencing provides each publication and its reader with a unique reading experience, giving the control of how the audience will read this book in the hand of an algorithm. Visually similar to the initial set of iteration, the collage nature and the publication algorithm provide this project by Ekta with a lot of depth.

Giacomo Favilla, Valeria Crociata
Double Trouble, 2017
Available at: [https://www.eyemagazine.com/blog/post/seeing-double]

With this project, photographer and videographer Giacomo Favilla and graphic designer and illustrator Valeria Crociata, try to question the authenticity of the content on social media. The tried to achieve this by using varied colours shapes as an overlay over the photographs to showcase a lot more information in a seemingly fun way. This project also touches upon the message that people on social media are wearing metaphorical masks to promote something that is not authentic and hiding their true-self. The combination of the images and bright-vectors and geometric shapes doesn’t give the subject any choice on how they are portrayed in the fabricated realm of social media. But can these vector forms, these mask, act as a translation device, and can it be used without making the subject humorous?