french graphic designer drummer gardener
DESIGN
BERTRAND MOUGEL
some becoming increasingly anxious and some intensely electric, excited by the night life to come.
It is a time of doubts and transformation but also clarity. I needed facts. I looked into anthropological studies but was not lucky. However, The New Scientist articles cover many similar facts about changes of behaviour in the animal kingdom. Birds can see Earth’s magnetic fields! Vespertines come out of their hidding place to hunt. Owls show off their strength by calling on an empty stomach. In the Australian sea, fish squawk, burble and pop! Last but not least, melon flies mate at dusk.
My head filled with Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgement creatures, David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Douglas Adams’s babel fish.
The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote “Milles Plateaux”, the philosophy book in which he developed beautiful concepts about “devenirs” (becoming): “devenir animal” and “devenir haecceity”. The devenir animal concept looks at how human behaviour becomes animal and vice and versa. Haecceity is the “thisness” of something: Dusk becomes the melon fly mating time and nothing else.
I wanted to use the exotic Indonesian words of the traditional kecak poly-rhythmic vocal chant. I improved the legibility and used the English evocative grunt, pop, burble, squawk etc. I explored ways to carve in the text and animate the type. I added to this "type chatter"
a simple collage of a men-fish doo-wop band. I looked into David Carson’s work to find visual solutions to integrate types and pictures together. New Scientist Article
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I thought about Hopscotch from Julio Cortazar, and how you can read his book in a different order, take a different path. I wanted to make a simple sentence become a complex path. I also wanted to make a sentence in which the words behaved like flies. Hovering, zigzagging, disappearing in the distance, but always gravitating around a big watermelon. According to scientific studies, the watermelon is an aphrodisiac. Its static presence enhances the movement of the flying words. New Scientist Article
