Lexisemantosyntaxical Mapping & Transmogrification of Gertrude Stein’s Poem A Long Dress [An Oulipian & Oudespian Adventure, Illustrated]
Designer; co-author: illustrator
The Oulipo (which is a contraction for the French phrase, “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle,” which roughly translates as “workshop of potential literature”) is a primarily French group of writers and mathemeticians who create works of literature using constrained writing techniques. In this project, I took Oulipian ideas and applied them to a poem both verbally and visually. The verbs, nouns and adjectives in Gertrude Stein’s poem A Long Dress were assigned shapes and colors, creating a map/diagram of the poem. Lescurean permutations were then applied iteratively to the poem, creating new poems and new visual patterns. Each map/diagram was printed on a transparent sheet and bound into the book to overlay the poem it represented.