Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Farrell further explains, “DNA's most frequented analog is a string
of letters that casts our genetic selves as a piece of writing, a grand text,
a magnum opus that science has dubbed 'the topic of life.' Through
this analog, a human body is suddenly a stream of text, a living novel,
a reference guide and technical manual, a printing press running
off copies of itself, an agglutination of letters that, when sequenced,
form flesh and blood. The genome is a raw manuscript with stories
of longevity or disease, chemical balance, sexual development, the
acquisition and loss of motor skills and language—a many-layered
story which a body acts out and carries to conclusion.”
While reading
VAS
, one comes to realize that the concept of
DNA and the popular analogy of DNA as a long text chain provides
both the subject matter and structural framework for the topic.
VAS
draws together this language model and the double helix model of
DNA to build the topic's narrative structure and its compositional and
typographic structure (Fig.
10-15
).
A symmetrical five-column grid of hairlines running vertically
through the pages stands for the unwound DNA scaffold of the double
helix (Figs.
10-16 to 10-18
). Readers feel as if they are traveling a tiny
stretch of genome and reading its contents. Three layers of historical,
ontological, and narrative text threads assigned to the scaffolding
cascade down the pages in a coiled sequence mimicking DNA. This
grid provides the armature that adheres the texts and constrains
them to discrete horizontal positions. This grid slips into other guises
throughout the topic: the lines are hair, a scalpel's path, suturing thread
dipping in and out of flesh, a musical staff.
In one spread, the lines swirl into flight patterns of moths to
a flame, light rays plotted in curved space, Galileo's telescope, and
an abstract plot of normal vs. mentally ill children. Quotes from
influential scientists, government officials, famous authors, and the like
pierce the DNA strand with ideologies, each given the authority of an
encyclopedic tab.
In
VAS
, fonts make flesh, and print technologies are analogous to
body technologies where materiality of the body and materiality of the
body of the text become one. Readers become fully immersed in a book
printed in three colors: black, flesh, and blood.
(Farrell actually matched the red to a drop of his own blood,
and the “flesh” color to Crayola's discontinued “flesh” crayon, which
happens to be a very close match to 3M's official designation of “flesh”
for their medical supplies.)
Three dominant typefaces were selected for the three dominant
voices of the topic: Clarendon, Univers, and Cholla. Many accent faces
were also used, including Synchro, Fell, Winchester, and Comic Sans.
The choreography of the texts and the palette of typefaces provide a
sense of coherence, intelligibility, and narrative pacing to the disparate
and interlocking narrative fragments.
10-14
A page revealing the essence of I, a story
about how we represent our biology and how these
representations allow us to see our bodies, think about
them, and manipulate them in various ways.
