Based on the feedback I received on the original experiments, I decided to take a chance and explore the illustration path more deeply.
I began by working through the script, drawing each item that I thought was key to the universe of the film.
I arranged them in the same order as the film and began to create a small format coloring book that would tell the story of the film through illustrations and short quotes.
From the feedback I received on the experiments I presented, I decided to continue working on experimenting with reinventing the Burkhardt collection as a catalog of color palettes.
I knew I wanted to maintain the spirit of each of the original entries created by Burkhardt, channeling the specific type of information included and the format it was presented.
I created various experiments to find the right way to represent the proportions for each color, a challenge which I thought would be best resolved before trying to compose a more complete catalog.
Representing the color palette as fish did not achieve the aesthetic I had in mind, so I continued to iterate, but this time using more abstract forms and shapes to represent colors.
I decided to iterate with circles to represent each color, as it made it easy to show the proportion of each color by varying the size of the circle according to the percentage it represented in the color scheme.
Just to sense check the idea, I also created an image where the colors did not correspond to any proportions and were merely aesthetic.
The iteration that followed was closer to the objective that had been percolating in the back of my mind.
I wanted to capture the idea of the fish, without using the actual drawing. I also wanted to emulate the aesthetic of the original collection.
Lastly, I wanted to be thorough, ensuring each item in the catalog could be read as a repository of information, much like the primary source.
The feedback I received in my first tutorial confirmed my suspicion that I had a compelling subject, but had not yet landed on a winning investigative method.
Counting sounds lacked depth to make it interesting, and the abstraction of sound needed to be able to tie the conclusion to the premise. The typographical experiment resonated the most, and it was suggested I explore this space further to see whether I could flesh out a full narrative.
During this week I went back to the McLuhan reading The Medium is the Massage having been piqued by the idea of how prehistoric societies communicated using their ears, while writing turned our eyes into arbiters of truth.
I decided to explore the beginning of written history to understand how people first visually communicated sounds and concepts. This led me to Assyrian cuneiform alphabets, a series of triangles and dashes derived from earlier pictorial symbols depicting the world of the ancient Sumerians.
My work this week explored the creation of a semantic alphabet for the list of sounds I had gathered. Using lines and circles, I built a series of symbols that I felt captured the tonality or meaning of the sound it represented.
Once I drew all 53 sounds, I then attempted to write short narratives with the symbols.