One of the requirements of second year of study at art college, is participation in 'live' and competition briefs, The first of which we encountered was the National Business Calendar Awards, as this was my second large brief, and the outcome for the conceptual book brief had come together so well, I decided that there was no sense in restricting myself with regards the outcome. Instead, I would go as over the top, outrageous and just plain crazy as I could.
Scale! Scale is everything, What I hate about 'business calendars' is their measly little to-do lists, the little clusters of post it sized, date riddled paper gradually fraying and becoming no use apart from as emergency coasters throughout the space of a year. The lack of impact alone in these creations is even less engaging than the executive toys you find in bargain bins and argos catalogues, magical stainless steel balls on wires, test tube birds that peck infinitely and stress balls shaped like a malformed breast.
I couldn't bring myself to make something which would get lost amidst a clutter of digestive crumbs and crumpled faxes, I had to do something that would become the focus of the entire room, something interactive which encouraged use and utilised the calendar structure as an image first, and a calendar second.. It was in this that I rediscovered a little tool I was fond of some years back when it came to creating aerosol free graffiti.. The Rasturbator!
Homokaasu.org's now cult tool allows you to transform even the smallest of images, into an infinitely scaleable collection of vector dots, similar to the halftone look of Lichtensteins seminal pop art imagery, printing each segment out on individual pages from any old domestic printer, and with a little putting together, creating epic visual statements only restricted by patience and imagination.
So this was it, I was going to effectively turn an entire wall of an office space into an ever-changing work of art. Using stock photography and chroma colour theory together to find images with colours best suited to the time of year. The calender would be 7 individual booklets across, by 5 booklets down, and would be hung on a wall as a grid system, each booklet pinning to the next. Over the space of a year, the user would have the ability to either keep a 'wallpaper' per month by tearing off perforated tabs, or use the cascading reveal style by tearing off a whole page a day, unveiling a new image over the space of a month.
