Ben Sisto

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Ben Sisto

Free SVG 12”

March 25, 2020 Ben Sisto

Created for Bait / Switch, July 2020.

This is the initial email Bait/Switch sent me. The concept is essentially the same as a work I did for the website Parallelograms a few years back. The main difference is here, Bait/Switch was explicitly asking about process and documentation. For t…

This is a detail of the artwork I was assigned to respond to.

I didn’t have any initial feelings about the prompt, so I opened the file in audio editors and text editors to look at it differently.

When opened with a text editor, a little line stuck out. Below the header; I thought it looked like an emoticon. Maybe even a clown face and arm.

So I copied that line out into Adobe Illustrator and changed the text to Papyrus because…why not.

In Papyrus, I thought it looked a lot like birds in flight with a sun in the background. Maybe the side of a mountain.

Google’s image search seemed to agree, and added the idea of musical notes.

I switched settings to see what open license images might be available.

The 3rd image was of the Canary Islands. I liked that it was from a site called “freesvg.org”. I imagined SVG to be something other than a file extension. A hacker, a rapper, a writer, etc...

So an image search produced these results of files in the Wikimedia Commons. I liked the looks of the last one on the top row; maybe because it seemed most abstract.

It turns out the image is from 1901 and thus, is in the public domain.

The file summary had a book title, which links out to a Flickr page where the image was first uploaded.

Here’s the main page for that Flickr set. It’s from the Internet Archive.

And here’s a different image that came up in the photoset, which I thought looked nice and, it was one of the larger options so I thought I could play with it more.

Converted to black & white ,

and edited levels a tiny bit for better contrast.

This is the result. Initially I thought maybe this would be the end; my final project would be a poster. But I kept thinking about the music notes that turned up in my initial searches.

I took the map of the Canary Islands and laid it out on some blank music sheet lines, basically until it spanned the width.

I sent the score to my pal James. I thought he’d be the kind of musician who might be interested and also, I thought James would appreciate the “Free SVG” title once I told him about it later on.

And here is James confirming.

I’d noticed on instagram that a DJ / producer friend was playing around with some new studio gear; I thought maybe he’d be up for a collaboration.

Here’s the email I sent them explaining things a bit more.

I thought just having an MP3 file maybe wasn’t taking things far enough, so I looked up a few of those 1-off LP printing services

I opted for a picture disc, using the image of birds’ nests borrowed from Wikimedia Commons

In Artwork Tags [F-J] Projects, [F] Projects, 2021

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