The aim of the first assignment was to get to know one of your classmates better. We had to make, a poster to represent whether we were a match or not. We had to talk a lot with each other, to see if we had something in common or not. The subject of our poster was: do you like the sauce on your French fries on top or next to your French fries? My classmate Marceau prefers his sauce ‘erop’, wich means it is on top. That is why we covered his face with sauce. I, instead, like my sauce next to my fries (dutch: ernaast). That is why my face is more visible. Wherever, as you can see, with our favorite sauce, we had a match, it was ketchup.
An abcdarium is a book or a poster to teach a little child the alphabet. In this book or on the poster each letter of the alphabet is associated with the beginning letter of a word. The subject of my abcdarium was ‘Holidays’. This was a very good, but difficult exercise. We had to make an assiociation between words and images. But if I can believe the comments of my tutors, the result of my exercise wasn’t that bad. From the 28 excisting pages of the book, I selected my favourites for you.
We had to make a design based on a quote. My quote was: ‘De dankbare mensheid en haar grote mannen: Socrates vergiftigd, Aristoteles verbannen, Jezus gekruidigd, Giordano Bruno verbrand, Spinoza vervloekt, Rousseau gehoond, André Chenier onthoofd, Chamfort tot zelfmoord gedreven, vavuvenargues van armoe gestorven, Lichtenberg vergeten en Mozart als een hond in de grond gestopt’. The original quote was written by Julien De Valckenaere. The initial idea was that all those men were important historical persons, who add some positive value to the human society. The quote and my work describes the imens gap between what they meant for mankind and how they lived the last days of their life or how they died. As a way of presenting my work, I used death notices as in a newspaper.
The next challenge was to create a cover for the soundtrack of a movie. I chose the movie Rosemary’s Baby. It is a horror movie from 1968. The story of Rosemary’s baby is the story of a young couple, Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, who move to an apartment building in New York. They discover that their neighbours are a very friendly elder couple named Roman and Minnie Castevet. Guy begins to spend a lot of his time with them. Strange things begin to happen, Rosemary meets a young woman in the laundry and she commits suicide a few hours later, Rosemary starts having strange dreams and hearing strange noises and Guy becomes distant. Then Rosemary falls pregnant and begins to suspect that she can not trust anyone anymore: her neighbours, her doctors, …They all have special plans for her child. It appears that they see the child as the son of the devil.
The front of my outersleeve are pink clouds and a blue sky, because Rosemary is living on a pink cloud, where as she is pregnant. The back of my outersleeve are black clouds and a red sky, the colors of the devil, because everybody around her has evil plans with her child. The innersleeve is an echo of a baby. I made sure that all the colors were matching: the outersleeve, the innersleeve and the labels.
The last big assignment of the first year was to produce a newspaper reporting a mistery. Poltergeists was what I choose as a mistery. Above this text, on the left you can see the first part of the story, it presents a tv screen with a hidden message. On the right side, I jump immediatly to the end of the story, a rather creepy ending. With each part of the story the content gets a little bit creepier and accordingly, the message on the screens gets each time a bit more visible.
