As Primeiras Horas

Book [2009]

Poetry book for Maico, published by Chiado Editora. The lines on the cover are the baseline guides I used to typeset the book, a reference to Maico’s meta-poems.

Un Singe de Beauté

Poster — 420 × 594 mm [2007]

Having as a starting point Oulipo’s manifesto, this project’s aim was to create a poster out of it.

Oulipo was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, and dedicated its existence to the syntactic deconstruction of language through the creation of constraints, which often consisted of mathematical formulas.

This poster features a sentence generated through such a process, the homophonic translation, which was taken from the last sentence of Oulipo’s second manifesto. The original sentence by John Keats—“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”—thus became “Un singe de beauté est un jouet pour l’hiver!”.

Translating this process into a design practice meant deconstructing the word form. I therefore adapted a Scriptographer script to randomly destroy and branch the input it was given, originating an unpredictably shaped tree. I meant to create a cross dialectic with the Oulipian processes and language by approaching their work in the light of the chaos generating tools that we now dispose of.

Simultaneously, and without prior knowledge, this poster is also a reification of Deleuze’s thoughts:

Deleuze draws a picture of an abstract logical space anterior to the divisions and up/down, high/low moments within the great Platonic tree—a space that inhabits a force or potential that constantly submits its branches to unpredictable, even monstrous variations.

—in Constructions, by John Rajchman (1998)

The temporal shortcut was found, in pure ‘pataphysician tradition.