PARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOXPARADOX

MICHELLE LEATHERBY//MICHAEL SELBY//TYPE 01

A VISUAL ESSAY

“To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things — machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work — his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed; Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half of humankind. To see, and to show is the mission now undertaken by a new kind of publication… ”

PARADOX PARADOX

Paradox can prove to be very revealing about human nature and the way that

we speak. If someone says to you “I’m a compulsive liar,” do you believe them

or not? That statement in itself is a paradox, because it is self contradictory,

which is precisely what a paradox is.At the most basic level, a paradox is a statement that is self contradictory

because it often contains two statements that are both true, but in general,

cannot both be true at the same time. In the aforementioned example, can

someone be both a compulsive liar yet telling the truth at the same time?

KILLIN

G ME

THERE SEEM TO BE two modes of thought currently in the “graphic design” and “graphic design as art” worlds. One prescribes to the process of quick and constant creation, the formation of a set visual language, and repetition. The other relies on an investigation into thought processes, the exploration of concrete ideas and concepts, and offering visual interpretations as such. While by no means an expert, and not to belittle the other process, I personally lean towards the latter of the two, and find it much more interesting. I recently exhibited a small body of work that allowed me to explore this process as much as my free time would allow. I treated it as an experiment, and it truly helped me define the reasons why I enjoy what I do.

“We are connected byour differences.”

BITTERSWEET.

BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.

BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.

BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.

BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.

BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.

BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.BITTERSWEET.

Contemplating Hegel’s stages of development lead me to work in an even more structured and mathematical sense, and how to apply that to processes and modes of thinking. At the same time, while reading Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, I found myself incorporating both of their ideas into some sort of unified method. Synergetics,* a concept coined by Fuller as a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, could be applied to my earlier spiral and sequence of events idea. In the piece Comprehension, I represent seven different events as circles (see Fuller’s book for a much more detailed representation). The lines show the potential ways to connect each dot to the other (or “minimum number of interconnections of all events”). On such a small scale of seven, it is possible to visualize the connections, but imagine applying this to every single persons sequence of events.

After examining the examples from works of literature, one will see that a paradox is not just a witty or amusing statement. Paradoxes have serious implications in the world of literature, because they make statements that often sum up the the main ideas of the work.