back to the rejects

I decided to revisit my favorite from the "reject" pile - I never really Rejected it but I did move on.

The piece in question:

What I like about it is the confusion. It's satisfying to look at, difficult to read, and everyone has their own first-glance impression of what it says. Almost like the Odyssey and its translations? Dang, that's cool, someone should make a thesis about that. Anyway, uh

I decided to mess with some digital versions of it. I'm thinking of Alyson Provax and H.R. Buechler's works, especially the many-small-pieces component of H.R. Buechler's Text Not Text installation from a year or so ago.

The words I chose are most (I'm willing to bet I missed a few) of the words used to describe Odysseus in the first two chapters of Wilson's translation. 

I like how the hard letterforms are softened by opacity and layering. I like the confusion. I can see people peering closer to make out words, or standing back and taking in the whole effect.

I'm working with ways to integrate the map idea here, but it's difficult -- finding connections between words is harder than I originally thought. I'm also trying to integrate more color, because my work so far has been grey and grey and also grey, but it's challenging to do so at this stage, after I've spent this much time working with.... grey. I'm reluctant to add color that isn't "justified" -- that is, not described in The Text (TM). 

As for books (I refuse to not make books for this damn show) I'm thinking the translucent letterpress technique printed on translucent paper. I've got an example of this type of thing that I'm going to bring in. Instead of words, though, it'll be full phrases, like "rosy-fingered dawn" and "teller of tales" that have interesting variations in translation. 

I'm thinking my issue is that I can't really settle on one thing, one way to show these ideas -- I try to settle on a direction, but get stuck quickly. I don't know how I'm going to solve that. I'm going to solve it, because there's a pretty hard deadline, but I don't know how. We'll see! It'll be fun. An adventure. A really stressful adventure.