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IN
In Situ My experiment for the first ‘In’ struck me one day while I was about to take a shower. Having long hair, I have a habit of putting any hair that breaks off as I’m washing on the shower wall so it doesn’t clog the drain. I had forgotten to clear it off from last time (we’ve all been there) and I thought, I bet I can form a word with this. I’d been wracking my brain for a while what to do for ‘In’ and what better time to make something happen than ‘in the moment!’ I figured the amount of hair would be able to form a small word, so ‘In’ was perfect, and I thought I could use the curl and natural bending of the hair to form a word reminiscent of a serif typeface. Conjuring up my best memory to focus on as I worked, I crafted the hair in the shower and formed it into the word. After documenting it, I allowed the hair to stay, photographing it again after it had dried, the hair wilting off the tile with its loss of adhesion from the water. Listen, I know, hair on a dirty bathroom tile wall? The aspect of disgust is not lost on me, but, when inspiration strike it strikes, and what better a representation of going all in on this experiment than by using my own hair as material! I can truly say, I really put myself into this one.
As strange or gross as it might be, I always see beautiful forms in hair on the bathroom wall. The way the hair bends and loops acts as a fascinating material consideration, dictating forms and curves that craft the overall ‘composition’ on the wall. Considering this made me imagine serif type from the curves of hair. I’m satisfied at how this experiment arose ‘in’ the moment, while ‘in’ the shower, and it went on to unwittingly capture other aspects of the word ‘In’ as I experimented further. Rendering it ‘in’ the digital space of the Out process, and eventually affixing it to clear sheet to place the bare hair form ‘in’ new novel contexts and atop new textures.
Taking the photo of the hair composition into Photoshop, I carefully masked out all but the hair, boosting contrast and masking with color selections to better facilitate background removal taking special care around the similarly colored grout of the shower. After isolating the hair lines, I imagined them in different contexts and got the idea to print the final digital design on clear sheet. Taking the clear sheet prints, I began to experiment with different environments and textures that the hair could live within outside the confines of the shower. Taking the hair from within the shower, I lead it to live ‘in’ different contexts in the outside world.
Taking the clear sheet word into out into the world, I experimented in placing it over interesting novel textures within environments that I was visiting for day to day activities. In a sense, a greater aspect of value comes into the piece with this activity. By bringing the formation of letters from hair in my bathroom shower out into the wider world, with me in my daily pursuits, I am effectively bringing a very intimate part of my personal activity into contact with my more public self, merging multiple ‘In’s together, the private ‘in’ and the public ‘in.’ Trying the sheet over different textures, I found it most amenable to flat surfaces with interesting texture, and less so as an object just held and photographed. If the letter-forms had more body to them perhaps they could work in the open air, but the wispy nature of the hair formations coped well on flat surfaces. The transparency also elicited interesting doubling effects from variable light sources, and reflectivity to add to the makeup of the scene.
FOR For Depleting Sonic Echoes When considering what experiments to perform with type, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to do something with sound. Way back in the day, over 10 years ago, I used to make Chiptune music (original compositions done in the style of video game music) using FL Studio. In that program was a device that could turn images into sound and I had found out that you could read that sound back into a visualizer to see it again in the ghost of the sonic translation. Even though it had been a while, I knew I must be able to do something like this still. I sat on exactly which word to use this approach on for a while, filtering out each one as more novel methods applied themselves to each word. I eventually decided to try it with ‘for’ as it stood as one of the remaining words to experiment with, and it stood with little enough resonant meaning by itself to do well in an experiment of any kind. ‘For’ is a word whose meaning changes drastically depending on context, and only really ‘means’ something within its specific context. I find it perfect then that it should travel back and forth through between visual and sonic contexts for the purpose of this experiment.
In reading about how visual to audio transfer software often worked, I discovered that negative space and color would play a big role in how a sound sounded, and thus how it transferred. White space sounded as full noise, and black space as empty of sound. Red color tone translated in sound as warmer dulled tones, and blues sharper. For the purposes of getting the best transfer, I decided that a blue on black type composition would be best to translate through. Knowing that audio frequency translation was decided based on vertical positioning, I wanted a form that had an interrupted shape to capture a unique aural profile and also offer opportunity for interesting iteration through repeat transference. So, I ended up with type that looks almost reminiscent of the IBM logo. Having the form of the letters, I replaced some sections with elongated ovoid rectangles to procure a more consistent treatment. The final effect has a feel like only computer monitor display, which I found appropriate for the sonic transference process since the displays of many of that kind of software look like old radar scanning outputs.
Initially trying the audio program FL Studio to map my sound image, I discovered that its image to audio transfer process warped the initial image too much to act as a proper transfer, instead flattening the image into a few lines so the text was unreadable. I found a suitable source online of image to audio creation and found an program that could visualize audio as image, and so my repeat process for In-OutIn was established. I took the initial design through the online reader, which resulted in an audio file as seen left. Recording that audio file, I could then feed it back into the sound to image capture, and then take the resulting image and create an audio file from it. In this way, the physical vibrations of sound represent the analog transference section of the experiment, text displayed only in code but text nonetheless, for the eyes of visualization software to read and decode. By repeating the image through this process, it degraded each time, changing the waveform of the audio and its interpretation in visual, each iteration fading the presence of the letters. Eventually, the word is near entirely gone, a proper result for a word whose use acts solely in service to pointing to another phrase or state of being. An interesting analog appeared as well: each new transference captured the side bar that lists the frequency values, creating it anew and destroying it, integrating it into the audio to create a new preamble to the text. I find it an interesting mirroring that both experiments with ‘for’ in this study have a motif of process transference, here with the meter for frequency and in the laser cut letters in the crop of the scanner bed.
OUTTA Initially with the ‘In’ made of hair, I had thought of recreating the hair in Adobe Illustrator using lines and curves for each individual hair. I think I thought it would be interesting if I could imitate the process of moving hair virtually as in real life, but practically this method was way too involved to work well. If I wanted to do an approach like this justice, it would be interesting some day to learn to write a bit of software code generating elements that move and bend like hair, that can be played with like wet hair on the wall. I’ve always loved the forms it forms, so it would be nice to have that aspect in a less hygienically unappealing context.
FL Studio, shown here, was my first idea for sound transfer for ‘for.’ The BeepMap present, shown left center, can be seen flattening out the image I tried to use for it. The sound it created was far too embellished for the use in actual music to be a good transfer tool, resulting in almost no image of text.
TAKES When I was floundering in finding any way to transfer image to audio, I considered other experiments I could do with the laser cut text I’d made in novel applications. I had cut a number of weights to use in consideration. Since Univers is a favorite typeface of mine, it was a good way to have a physical representation of it after the experiments were over.
This gave me the thought of experimenting with pastiche by recreating the original type image that displayed Univers’ flexibility in weight. I imitated the image, gave small indications of where the text would sit, and then printed a sample section to see where this idea might go. After trying it, the approach seemed a little one dimensional. I couldn’t think of a novel direction to go to from here. Sure, this could technically be considered a full In-Out-In exploration, but it still seemed lacking. I’m not now sure if this gave me the idea to try the scanning or if I’d already thought of that, but it was still a useful exercise regardless.