Adrian Park

I’m in love with the idea of visual poetry – images that, like literary poetry, are more evocative than meaningful. This is the idea that a lot of my photography explores.

I just stumbled across this collection of design that looks at images and poetry in a different way. It is a collection of visual themes for the annual Poetry on the Road festival and, in the designer’s words, “[w]hile the theme itself is changing, the underlying idea for the visuals is always the same: All graphics are generated by a computer program that turns texts into images. So every image is the direct representation of a specific text.”

So, Poetry Visualised <- link to the collection.

Related to some of the content in our Thinking/Doing lectures, I think the transformation of textual input to visual output is interesting. Being a person who has always had an uncomfortable acquaintance with literary poetry, perhaps the poems rendered as images can help me to ‘get’ the poetry?! Recently, when considering a direction for my research and project, I’ve been toying with the idea of transforming the photographic input (light captured as discrete units) to create an output other than the usual array of pixels. One of the questions I’m trying to get to grips with is how our ideas of what constitutes a photograph are changing. To do that, I need to understand what our current and past ideas about the nature of photographs are. I’m thinking that perhaps by disrupting the usual notions of what a photograph is and understanding what it is not might illuminate this tricky subject (dodgy pun entirely intended).

So this post is a bit of a mind spew but that’s what blogging is about right? Here are a few of my favorite designs from the collection.