The Digital Cutup Process    
My printer was screwing up, spitting out all these weird characters instead of legible text. So I selected 5 recognizable letters from the character set of the first line, and then counted their numeric value in the alphabet. I wrote down the 5 letters and 5 associated numbers on a piece of paper, and then introduced the scissors. Cutting each alpha-numeric character into an identical sized swath of paper, I then dropped these into my NASA baseball cap, mixed them thoroughly, and then successively drew out 2 pieces of paper for a total of 5 paired draws. The combinations were a letter paired with a letter; a number paired with another number; or a letter/number alpha-numeric combination.

Next, I googled each of these combinations—first as a pair, then incorporating the word “maze”, and last incorporating the word “labyrinth”. The google results enabled me to make an editorial choice in that I looked for entries which seemed as though they might be visually or textually interesting. However my rule was that once a site was selected, there was no going back. From each site I then copied (cut & paste) 5 elements which I then saved into a folder on my local hard drive. At this point, the chance operations gave way to straight-forward design-sensibility, using the working folder for all the sources then layered into Illustrator.

  
   

Selected works of Brian Comerford
(E23, Doghead Cola, Neoconjob)

creative | academic | exploratory