Nick Sousanis - Unflattening-Harvard University Press (2015)

NOTES
The following serves as notes to the visual and textual references.
You need not read these notes to understand, enjoy, or disagree
with Unjl.attening. But some of you may be curious to see the backstory,
the hidden influence, behind my words and drawings.
CHAPTER 1: FLATNESS
Pages 3-5: Piranesi's Carceri, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Diego Rivera's
industrial mural in Detroit, and Anton Furst's architectural designs
for the film version of Gotham City influence the opening pages. The
sleepwalking figures themselves reference the Borg from Star Trek,
shrink-wrapped, stone, or plaster statues (Denise Fanning's Detroit
installation of plaster figures carne to mind), Munch's Scream, Kiühe
Kollwitz's anguished figures (though I never let mine be anywhere near
as expressive), Giacometti's almost alien figures, and Death from The
Seventh Seal.
The sleepwalking, marching figures first raised-or, rather, loweredtheir
heads during my time in Detroit and were the centerpiece of the
public art billboard I installed along Woodward Avenue in April of
2004. For the project, I sought to address and depict transformation
by embedding two images-two concepts-in one piece. The primary
image used space as standard, flat billboards do. On a series of equally
spaced slats, I encoded a second image, the edges of which faced
oncoming traffic such that they
nearly invisible. However,
alongside it, drivers would ""'rnP'~~q~~~~~~~~fi
fleeting transformation as the
lined up to reveal the second uuawo:+ -. 11
...,... 1411
,.,
~j~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ã-=