Look, See

Zen Arcade 1-23, 2004, HTML, dimensions variable

I finished a short group of four drawings, each representing one of four sides of the LP of Husker Du's Zen Arcade, on 20041128, and at that time wrote a fair amount about how they were a reaction to a previous series in terms of size and effects. I said that I had thought of, but had decided against, doing twenty three drawings, one for each of the songs on the album. Having written that, however, of course the next day I decided to do the twenty three drawings, at a pace of three drawings a day, rushing through the series in eight days instead of my normal practice of one drawing per day, which would've made this series over three weeks in length.

I needed a gimmick for these drawings. I knew that each day I would consider three song titles and try to respond with an HTML drawing, but I felt I needed something else: a system, a conceptual anchoring, a contextualizing visual cue. So here's what I did:

• I found the total number of seconds of each song at the Husker Du Annotated Discography: the first track, Something I Learned Today, is 1:58 or 118 seconds.
• I found the (approximate but very close) square root of the number of seconds in each song: the square root of 118 seconds is 10.86 (and change); I rounded up to 10.9.
• For each square root I moved the decimal point over one place: 10.9 became 109.
• I used this "adjusted" square root to determine the size of each drawing as a square. So, Something I Learned Today is 109 x 109 pixels.
• By doing this I was able to represent the "volume" of each song relative to the overall LP(s). The largest drawing is the longest song, which is the final one on this album; Recurring Dreams is 13:47, or 827 seconds, with an approximate (adjusted) square root of 288.
• This method means that many of the drawngs are quite small, resulting in grids with a just a few rows and columns, in some cases as few as five or six, which doesn't allow for many options.
• Other than the system I've just described, these drawings use a more or less pretty familiar vocabulary.
• See, isn't art mysterious and profound?