Are lines limitations or liberations? Amy Fang, a multimedia designer, explores that question with her experimental book Line_Boundary_Trace that dives into the ideology behind borders. Are they a place, the separation of areas, or not a place at all?
The publication explores the meaning from a topographical and typographical standpoint, continuing the push of boundaries both literally and figuratively.
Line_Boundary_Trace is an experimental publication (160 pages, 5” X 7.5”) which explores the border as a divisive line from the dual perspectives of humans and machines. Archiving both satellite images of land characterized by border conflicts and artificially generated images of those same landscapes using RunwayML, the publication’s contents become animated, evolving fluidly, when the reader flips through the pages. As images of different locations become distilled into a singular gestural stroke, losing specificity and familiarity, the book is a speculative archive as well as a challenge to the arbitrariness in which we lay claim to our borders.
How does a border function as place and non-place? As line, as boundary, as trace? We are left to challenge and to speculate, to enact new ways of seeing, in order to view these divisions for what they are.
Project Credits
Designer: Amy Fang
Mentor: Parag Mital