Quickness: Graphics

Finally! When looking for an entry that could relate to Quickness I immediately went to the chapter on Time & Motion thinking that surely, I could find something that related to time… and motion. But nothing really jumped out of the page at me. I really played around with the idea of doing something relating to musical notes but I decided against it. Then as I was flipping through, I saw the Design Project for Typographic Layers: 

Typographic Layers In everday life as in films and animations, multiple stories can unfold simultaneously. A person can talk on the phone while folding the laundry and hearing a song in the background. In films, characters often carry on a conversation while performing an action.

This typographic exercise presents three narratives taking place during a two minute period: a news story broadcast on a radio, a conversation between a married couple, and the preparation of a pot of coffee. Typography, icons, lines, and other elements are used to present the three narratives within a shared space. The end result can be obvious or poetic. Whether the final piece is an easy-to-follow transcription or a painterly depiction, it is made up of narrative elements that define distinct layers of visual channels

Let’s backtrack.

In Calvino’s memo on Quickness he tells a story from one of Boccaccio’s novellas. It’s about a man who is telling a story to a woman he is escorting. He’s trying to tell the story well but he’s doing a terrible job; he forgets events, the details and overall he has no rhythm. The mistress gets tired of his story and says “Sir, this horse of yours has too hard a trot, and I pray you to set me on my feet again.” Essentially, she was saying that his storytelling skills were terrible and she would prefer it if he would just stop trying. His story was bad because he didn’t have the quality of Quickness.

Now to the graphic pictured above.

I think that this graphic is a good representation of Calvino’s Quickness because it utilizes time in different manners. If I had to judge, I would say that the graphic in the bottom right hand corner, by Menon, is the best example of Quickness. It is obviously the most simplistic: it looks like Arial font with different colored highlighters which allows the reader to assume the sequence of events. It is the easiest to understand and the sequence of events isn’t convoluted like it is in the other examples. The only other contender would be the graphic in the top right hand corner, by Osmanof, but the lack of line breaks between the text on the right margin of the canvas makes it really difficult to understand. After reading the graphic in the bottom right hand corner, I have no desire to look for meaning in the other 3: they are examples of the horseman’s bad story telling skills.

Lightness: E-Lit Example

After deciding upon my Emblem and Analogy for Calvino’s quality of Lightness, I ventured into the deep dark chasms of the E-Lit anthologies provided by Professor Ulmer:

• E-Lit Anthology
• E-Lit Vol 2
• More E-Lit

Honestly, going through some of these sites was painful for me. I thought I would irreparably damage my laptop with all the Java appelets these sites were designed for running. But then I realized that I’m just really spoiled with awesome places on the Internet to hang out. It also blows my mind that there have been so many advancements in such a short amount of time. So then as I was clicking around I finally found something awesome:

The video above is my exploration of Type is Art. Like the website explains, it is a public interactive art project. The aspects of your canvas can be made up of any of the 21 distinct parts of a letter form.

I’m going to backtrack a bit so that I can explain why this E-Lit site is a good example of Calvino’s Lightness. In his memo on lightness, I recall that he spent some time mulling over the diction of Danté and Cavalcanti in a specific passage. Both authors were trying to describe a mountain. Danté used the word “alpe” and Cavalcanti used the word “bianca” (white). Calvino said that Cavalcanti’s diction was better because by saying alpe, Danté is making the vision more concrete. By using bianca, the reader is able to envision “an atmosphere of suspended abstraction.”

This had a snowball effect for me. From my experience as an English major and a lover of all things literature, I know that the specific arrangement of letters within a carefully curated word can convey intense meaning (exemplified by Cavalcanti and Danté in the aforementioned excerpt). However, this E-lit example takes the weight out of these letters and transforms them into a different art form. This website design makes it clear that language can be atomized down to it’s individual parts like the serif, but language can also be pulled apart and take on a different meaning. The photo above is my attempt at making visual art through letters.