This is a poster I made for the information design class of fall '07, that I re-did for the End of the Year show of summer '08. I'm only posting it just now because I couldn't get a hold of a certain font that I needed to show it properly (thanks Devin Kenny for being my accomplice in my font-robbing schemes).
Anyways, the assignment was to map a work of fiction, and I chose Trapped in the Closet. However, mapping it proved somewhat tricky because a normal character map in itself would already be thoroughly complex, nevermind a more, uh, philosophical approach. Simply mapping the interactions within Trapped in the Closet is completely uninteresting to me because it does nothing to show the absurd genius of the work. There's no way you can convey Trapped in the Closet better than it can convey itself, and this became the core problem for this project.
This is the same solution by Alex Kuo that I came across while teaching my summer class in California, 8 months after I made my poster. It's basically everything I didn't want to do in my project because it can only be a lesser imitation of the real thing, and I guess it's what hipster culture is all about. This is why Plato hates art.
This is my solution, which markets an as-of-yet fictional product based on Trapped in the Closet: the Trapped in the Closet Pinball Game. Instead of being a map of the actual movie/music video, its a map of R. Kelly's mind as he is making trapped in the closet, and it essentializes the rules within the storytelling rather than the actual story being told. Honestly, it's not the story itself that matters in Trapped, but rather the absurdity through which it is told. This project is both a representation and an extention of that. The abstract idea of physics relating to the broader idea of cause-and-effect is what gives rise to the mechanics of both Trapped in the closet as well as the pinball game.
A flyer I did yesterday for Devin Kenny and Daniel Oh's show on the 7th. Devin wanted elements that referenced current events. The economic meltdown and the election of 2008 are the big events I tried to incorporate both of them here, along with global warming and the decline of the American Empire. I tried to make the red stripes both the stripes of the flag, the declining line of a graph, and a tidal wave. With the names and times I tried to reference both a bar graph and skyscrapers. The blue was kind of a last-minute thing, because I wanted to get all the colors of the flag. It made this look too much like the comedy central logo, but I think it's a reasonable tradeoff.
