Classify This
Graphic designers have for decades been instrumental in the production of visual systems for ordering and indexing, the creation of visual taxonomies, processes for navigation and reading. The function of the design is to deliver factual information with authority and efficiency. But is it possible to use these visual processes, which are inherent within graphic design to create either fictional games or use them with ironic intention? I created a piece of work that tries to answer this question.
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges and filmmaker Peter Greenaway, I made an encyclopaedia. The idea was to parody the system we live in. We have forgotten what it is like to make our own choices without fitting into a system or category. The concept was to classify the unclassifiable. In order to do so I had to come up with something that cannot be classified in conventional terms so I classified blank pages.
The world has become so complex and complicated it is overly classified. The blank page is to represent everyone’s ability and right to classify things according to their own individual opinion and the way they see it. In this book for example I classified the A-Z using swearwords, another day I classified it differently. It is up to the reader of the book how to classify it. This is an interactive book where the reader is engaged with different challenges throughout.
The index pages consist of opposites. When I see the moon, you see the sun, but when the reader goes to the actual page there is neither a picture of a moon nor a sun.
In the ‘deconstruct’ chapter you find footnotes at the bottom of the pages but no story. In the ‘what do you think chapter’ the reader is confronted with a question and needs to correspond accordingly; a typical example might be ‘paint by numbers and then tell us what you see‘Â. In actual fact there aren’t any numbers on the page and yet the reader needs to come up with an answer.