OUGD404 - Studio Brief 02 - Design Ideas

Inspired by DR. ME's talk on their creative practice and the work of collage artist, Adam Hale, I decided to experiment with contemporary hand-cut collage as my cover designs. Taking secondary imagery found in various magazine and flyers, I took those images which I felt represented some of the themes of the three books and pasted these together with masking tape to give it more of a hand-made aesthetic.
These experiments also included imagery of relevant philosophers, most of whom wrote the books or had some form of inspiration/input into beliefs conveyed within the books, such as Plato, Aristotle, Boethius and the Greek God of love, Eros.

Themes:
The Consolation of Philosophy

• free will and determinism.
  puppet on strings could represent determinism, cogs/process of thinking to represent free will - the idea of making a decision freely.
• the problem of evil.
  how can an all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing God allow evil to happen in the world?
  attributes of God.

De Anima (On the Soul)

• the body/soul distinction.
• Plato - dualist (believed the body and soul were separate).
  Aristotle - interdependent (need each other to function).
• believed the mind is the connection between the body and soul.
  the soul is the form of the body.
• Analogy of the eye - if the eye were an animal, sight would have to be its soul. When the eye no longer sees then it is an eye in name only.
• flowers/animals - nature, different types of souls.

The Symposium

• the nature of love (Eros - Greek God of Love).
• gender roles/sex in society/sublimation of basic human instincts.
• Platonic love - same gender relationships.
  humans originally created with four arms, legs and heads with two faces, condemned to spend life looking for their other half.
• "he whom love touches not walks in darkness".