Tuesday 7 October 2014

Machines For Living

The new project title of "Machines for Living" gave me the idea to use a typewriter i had recently found to create a piece of work. I want to create a large piece around two or four times bigger than a1 on the wall, displaying an image, composed entirely from a typewriter. The idea of using the typewriter appeals to me as it is a defunct piece of equipment with little to no use in the 21st century, but historically had great significance, creating the largest female workforce of its time and revolutionising print and communication systems.

This style of work would have links with Divisionism, an art style deriving from impressionism that uses the separation of colours into dots to form an image, as a typewriter would print work in this style. It would also take inspiration from concrete poetry as it uses form and shape to contribute as much to the poem as the words of the poem themselves. Whilst looking at concrete poetry  i came across an art movement in the 1950's called "Typewriter Art". I found the array of styles and their techniques very visually engaging as often not only is there form or shape but also text to read/decipher.



I created several responses drawing from what I'd seen of the "Typewriter Art" book as i felt i needed to get to grips with actually using the typewriter as a tool, as well as figuring out the best font size and spacing. I included the template as i found it interesting to see alongside the finished studies. the panda was a quick study done just form looking at a picture which explains its obvious imperfections, but it helped as it makes it clear i'll need a template or outline for my large piece.

I progressed onto thinking about what kind of image i would like to actually have for my large piece and the idea of it being biological appealed to me, as people often experience some form of paranoia when it comes to new machinery, wether it be in the form of replacing their job or the fear of something going wrong with the machine that may be keeping them alive or upon which they are dependent.















I used x-rays whose colour I inverted in photoshop and then proceeded to see what sort of look different shades of text would have, however when printed, the shoulder x-ray didn't distinguish well between dark grey and black so the tone and therefore shapes weren't as clear in the outcome. It did get the shape well when i used font that small with a total of 6120 x's being used in the shoulder and 3918 0's being used for the skull. It made it clear to me that using a part of the human anatomy would be a strong image, leading me to think of maybe using a frontward facing skull or human heart in my final image.

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