Mixtape Box

Here's a book I started years ago and plan to finish for my review board this semester. One of the first books I did along with a mixtape, around the same time Aubrey was doing his awesome mixtape tent project at RISD. Anyways, I had this one mixtape that I was really into - my boyfriend at the time saw the playlist and asked me "do you always listen to such sad music?" - I listened to it often and really felt it to be representative of my emotional state at that time. My uncle had recently given me this great book about sign painting, that featured a whole bunch of fantastic alphabets. I chose something like ten different letter sets, and decided I was going to try and compose text cards for each song, using the restricted set of letters and trying my best to express something about the song through the typography. I spent forever laying these out, and then tracing them, measuring everything - and then colored them in (I think I had restrictions about what colors I could use too? This project was all about making something out of limited resources). Then I took them to staples, had them laminated, and started the box.

I think I had drawn up the box before I started the cards, but I'm not sure. The box is so far unfinished. It needs its lid, I need bookboard. There will be a flip up lid and probably a title on the top of the box. I dig this box a lot and remember it as being a really fun challenge to make - especially figuring out the sexiest way to fit the tape in. I love making boxes. And drawing up plans.

The idea behind this project is lofty and fun - each card is a song from the playlist of the tape, and the idea is that the viewer/owner of the piece would listen to the tape and be able to re-order the tracklisting to what they feel is appropriate. Dreams about having a color printer/copier set up have me thinking that the viewer would then receive some sort of print out of the cards in the order they arranged (maybe from .pdf's that would be printed out into some sort of one page book?), and a copy of the tape. I mentioned Aubrey and his project earlier because our two pieces were riding the same wave and I we hadn't talked at all while developing them. I would describe his but I don't remember it in detail enough to do it justice - but it was great, and you could record things you were playing/hearing. It's been a real pleasure having him as my mixtape friend in art for all these years now <3.