Recently, I've been focusing on the idea of reinstating the necessity of human effort into objects- to create something finalized in form, yet more primitive in use, while maintaining some amount of practicality. This lent itself well to a recent graphic design assignment, which was to create an object that through manipulation of hand, would reveal the numbers zero through nine which until that point of revelation, are never to be whole in form. After one too many wildly profligate and ultimately failed attempts to design a ferrofluid zoetrope, I pursued the much simpler, modern record player form. I began by building slow and inconvenient motors, and circuits that utilized a compression button that the user would have to hold down quite firmly as long as they wished to hear music...I'm rambling. Long story short, I ditched the motors. Here now is the resulting prototype which hasn't been photographed properly as of yet:
1.
+Goes without saying that there isn't much to the form. This was really my first encounter with materializing an object, and have little to no experience with constructing in such a way.
2.
+The piece is accompanied by a rather unassuming white petal box.
+The piece is accompanied by a rather unassuming white petal box.3.
+The inside reveals a screen printed pattern made from record groove micrographs.
4.
+A gradient of "record sleeves".
5.
+The numbers were designed to form abstracted shapes inside of the cut outs.
6.
+Blah, blah, blah, a section of a number, in this case "3", blah, blah blah.
7.
+Missing From Photo: The all important glove element. The glove utilized in this piece, which has been lost during my recent move, has magnets sewn into the finger tips. This then establishes the user as a power source, as they must move their hands over the "vinyls" to engage the magnets and advance the disks in order to reveal the number at some point. And, obviously, there is no stylus involved here. So many run on sentences, so little time.
8.
+A visible number "3".
Additionally, here is a rather crude image of the number set designed for the records, all of which maintain an element of the circular shape of a 7" record label.
//MORGAN.
hahaha cool stuff. I like your typography. how'd you come up with the shape for the numbers?
ReplyDeleteThanks much.
ReplyDeleteHard to say really.
I began by drawing pairs of three inch circles, which is the size of the labels pasted on 45rpm records and began sketching very, very, roughly from there, trying to elude to the label form while chipping away at it logically. Having to maintain this fixed shape to a degree, while establishing some kind of uniformity in the set proved to be pretty challenging, yet, at the same time, made my life just a little easier since it completely prohibited certain ideas, and forced me in certain directions.
Hopefully that was even mildly coherent, haha.
actually that long sentence explained things pretty well.
ReplyDeleteI got the label impression immediately. the connection across the records is very nice, reminds me of a digital clock..