"the earth is(n't) humming" started as a way to document both the visible and invisible objects that permeate our personal spaces. As designers, we strive to have complete control over our creations, to show truth with visual language. These publications became works of documentation as well as works of fiction. At first it was difficult to forgo our traditional design tools - our beloved InDesign, our perfect rags and clean margins.
After generating both text and visual elements as a result of that documentation, we created publications based upon our findings. My publication, titled "the earth is(n’t) humming", became both a love letter to my personal space as well as a reaction to being quarantined in it. I began to think it was slightly ironic that I was documenting a space that I was now spending 12+ hours a day in. As I worked, I began to imagine the words I had created filling up the space, overflowing it, pouring out of every visible and invisible object - perhaps this was a small nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story I had re-discovered at the start of quarantine. The narrator, locked up by her husband, imagines figures moving around her room in the wallpaper. Instead of figures, I imagined text. I wanted to capture that feeling of moving through words like one might move through water, or as invisible particles, vibrations, waves move through us every day.
My publication is a work in two parts: the printed material, and a virtual world. The printed publication contains full-spread layouts of all my maps, with the running text overlaid on vellum, filling the negative spaces of the maps. A reader will also be able to take their mobile device, scan a page, and see the maps re-created as virtual spaces, with text overflowing the space.
After generating both text and visual elements as a result of that documentation, we created publications based upon our findings. My publication, titled "the earth is(n’t) humming", became both a love letter to my personal space as well as a reaction to being quarantined in it. I began to think it was slightly ironic that I was documenting a space that I was now spending 12+ hours a day in. As I worked, I began to imagine the words I had created filling up the space, overflowing it, pouring out of every visible and invisible object - perhaps this was a small nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story I had re-discovered at the start of quarantine. The narrator, locked up by her husband, imagines figures moving around her room in the wallpaper. Instead of figures, I imagined text. I wanted to capture that feeling of moving through words like one might move through water, or as invisible particles, vibrations, waves move through us every day.
My publication is a work in two parts: the printed material, and a virtual world. The printed publication contains full-spread layouts of all my maps, with the running text overlaid on vellum, filling the negative spaces of the maps. A reader will also be able to take their mobile device, scan a page, and see the maps re-created as virtual spaces, with text overflowing the space.
