Concept + Editorial
Cybertext
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Our initial premise for this project is based on the preoccupation with people's approach to information. Nowadays, we have more and more means of accessing information and each time awakening a critical and reflective sense about the information that comes to us. One of the phrases that served us as a reference was the following: "We know tiny about many things".
Currently, we receive notifications of the latest news on mobile devices (mobile phone, tablet, smartwatch) through online newspapers or news sites, but to what extent do we really know the context of the news? Do we even know if the news is accurate or just another case of "fake news" where not even the journalist has done the proper investigative work in order to be as quick as possible to finish the article?
Our project is divided into two parts. The first strand consists of an A3 publication divided into two notebooks with images/texts that allow the reader to create his own narrative through symmetry. The aim was to force the reader to adopt a more attentive posture to the information given to him/her. From the beginning of the project, we intended to present the publication in a space that suggested this same visual harmony.
The other aspect is the app we created that serves as a complement to our publication, this time in digital format, to allow us to work on the interactivity of images and videos with the reader/user. The app keeps the randomness of the publication content to be coherent with the rest of the project.
These were the first sketches that we made of the concept.
We selected a hundred iconic images and split them to create others.
The idea of cybertext in its broadest sense is understood as "a machine for producing texts". Being this the global permission of the project we start to a reflection of how the reader/user can unify and deconstruct text and image through a support/ medium analogical (publication), digital (app) and spatial (installation).
We wanted to build a non-linear reading and manipulation artefact since the idea of linearity "is not an intrinsic feature of the book's structure". With this comes the critical point of our work: the axis of symmetry (the central cut). The non-linearity of image and text reading agglutinated to the central cut allows multiple relations, narratives and symbologies. This constructive and destructive plurality is hybridized, producing in the reader synesthesia of connection and production of "texts".
More ideas for interesting relations between images.
The first details about the physical publication.
After defining the concept, the next step was to search and choose all the images and start thinking about some visual combinations we can make with them.
The idea of playing with surrealism and collages has always pleased us. This project has allowed us to explore this in addition to enabling different results for each reader of the publication.
For the installation, we wanted a geometrical area where we could transmit the same idea of symmetry. We draw a line up the stairs to divide into two similar areas.
We made an app to complete the psysical project. The idea of the app is to add the digital and interactive component from the user's smartphone, in this case, the image and the video, keeping the concept of the randomness of the order of images/videos. The images are the same ones that were used in the publication to maintain coherence, and the videos are of the same theme.
Feel free to try yourself our digital side and open this QR Code on your phone.
