Method of Iterating 03
Final presentation
After the second iteration process, I decided to change the object and think about what I’m going to ‘deform’ with C4D. Following the feedback on the last tutorial, I started to find some kind of signs that I could put into my process. Since I’ve been focused on the ‘blurry border between 2D and 3D’, I also wanted to find the signs that have two different aspects that could be cross the lines whenever it is needed.
While I was considering diverse signs, I found that the ‘Special Characters’ are fit into my idea. The basic function of Special Characters is to support sentences for legibility. However, at the same time, in contemporary digital society, people use these Special Characters to express their emotions as emojis.
The first role of punctuation marks is to clarify the content, but as a formative element, they create a visual sense of rhythm in the sentence, making it look richer visually than when only letters are listed. After all, beautiful prints are made by beautiful fonts, their matched operation, and auxiliary but punctuation marks.”
Cheng, K., Noh, M.J., Lee, Y.J., Sim, W.J. and Park, H.S. (2015). Micro Typography: Punctuation Marks and Numbers. Seoul: Workroom Press. p.127.
With the development of type-printing, professional books with high legibility were distributed, and special characters that only needed to be viewed without reading became a widespread type. Special characters based on these formative symbols are different from punctuation marks which have orality.
Cheng, K., Noh, M.J., Lee, Y.J., Sim, W.J. and Park, H.S. (2015). Micro Typography: Punctuation Marks and Numbers. Seoul: Workroom Press. p.144.
The reason for the tendency to use Special characters as elements of emoji is the idea of ‘Pareidolia’. Pareidolia is the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. This means that people used to find emotion in the gathering of characters unconsciously.
Some people consider these emojis as new hieroglyphics in our contemporary digital society.
From this finding, I tried to make special characters like emojis by using the process at the previous stage. It’s a different way from simply combining them like conventional emojis. But from this project, we can expand the idea from a single concept of 2d and 3d to the ambiguity of the other aspect of the world.
After making these signs, I considered how can I show this outcome in real life. Since my basic focus of this process was the idea of ‘2d and 3d’, I found two different ways to cross the lines between them.
First, I made a flipbook. Then secondly, I made them into AR. By scanning the cover image of the flipbook, we can see the moving image of this cover which is based on the emoji sign I made.
Working with special characters, this iteration process works as a communication method presenting two
different aspects of characters. It communicates the idea that we have maintained and created new “non-
verbal expressions” in non-face-to-face digital space by using the characters in a different way. This idea can be supported by the quotation, “Man has developed the unique capacity for “information processing,” as it is now called, whereby the input of signals are transformed into symbols and interpreted as meaningful messages”(Kepes, 1966). In this perspective, the project can be expanded its boundary from these specific concepts to diverse aspects in society for the further process.