What an exciting project this has been! Vanity is a current exhibit at Museum of Glass by artist Joe Rossano. It's an intricate and involving statement piece addressing extinction and human domination and destruction of the natural world, specific to eleven extinct species. Joe comes from a scientific as well as artistic background, so much of the accompanying information touches on DNA codes, historical accounts of each animal, and academic documentation of how they were driven to extinction by destruction of habitat or hunting/over-harvesting.
First up for me was creating digital assets (HTML pages of the historical accounts) in Dreamweaver to accompany each animal in the exhibit, accessible through QR codes attached to the inside of each individual "DNA cabinet."
Human DNA code was used to visually overlay and obscure the scientific name of each animal, signifying the manner in which humans have dominated and destroyed much of nature. A link was included at the end of each HTML page to view or download the entire matching PDF file, containing all the reference material as well.
The most exciting and challenging part of the project was the accompanying book of the exhibit. I love book design, so the opportunity to work on this project for the museum was a dream come true! It was a long and involved process, but I really enjoy the photo editing and placement process, as well as the typography and stylesheet creation. It's very satisfying to see a completed, tangible end result that you can hold in your hands. I'm looking forward to that when we receive the finished proof copy of the printed book later this week! Until then, check out this
link to a PDF "sampler" of Vanity, the book.
