Author: Nathalie Rosa

Can an unpredictable practice produce deliberate work? How can abstraction yield specificity? These are the questions that have arisen from my week of experimenting with screen printing. Over multiple rounds of prints, I found that control of the work is as much a function of the placement of ink as it is of the gestural motion of pushing ink through a mesh. As such, unpredictability becomes a methodology in and of itself; these are works that cannot be thoroughly planned, but must still be anchored in an intent to possess a precision and clarity that allows them to resonate.

For the Methods of Translation brief, I chose to explore the 1995 film Clueless, directed by Amy Heckerling. I chose this film because it is well loved material for me and I thought familiarity with the content would be helpful within the proscribed period of time allocated for the brief. The film is also itself a translation of the book Emma by Jane Austen, and I liked that it already bore parallels with the direction of the project.

I began by exploring the soundtrack of the film, creating album covers for each song using characters from the film. I matched each character to a music genre and used album covers from the time to inspire a specific look and feel. I also began to break down the lyrics for each song and see whether it was possible to replace the words with excerpts from the script. In other experiments, I played with the idea of creating an illustrated diary from the perspective of Cher, the main character, or creating a yearbook using stills and outtakes from the film.

Based on the feedback I received after the first week, I found that the album covers were too obvious, and at the same time, too esoteric. For those familiar with the film, they lacked depth and potential for development. For those unfamiliar with the film, they were too difficult to explain with any real clarity. In contrast, the black and white illustrations had more scope for possible outcomes.

Over the course of the week I worked my way through the film script, picking out recognizable icons and illustrating them. I created 26 illustrations that I then organized into a small format coloring book, in the same order as they appeared in the film.

The feedback I received on this iteration of the work was that I needed to push the work further, creating new categories or compositions that generated new meaning. The illustrations were a good starting point, but it was suggested that I regroup them or find a new sequence that changed the meaning of the source material.

It was agreed that the ambiguity of the illustrations could work in favor of the project, as could the lack of color. In their starkness, the illustrations became reminiscent of a script or book, reverting the content of the film into its original source material. In contrast however, the ambiguity of the work gave no context for those unfamiliar with the film, creating the same problem as the album covers from the previous week. It was pointed out that the illustrations could become the basis of a game, perhaps playing cards or improv prompts.

The feedback was useful in seeing that the work needed to become a universe of its own. At the point of the presentation, it was still very much a literal translation of the film, rather than something that held its own separate value. The idea of turning the illustrations into a game is very interesting, and will give the work life beyond the film, thus fulfilling the direction of the brief more fully. A game will also solve the problem of context. Those familiar with the film will immediately relate to the illustrations, but it will no longer be necessary to have that background to be able to engage with the game itself.