With just a month before Christmas, the pressures of present shopping are slowly increasing as each day passes. For those of you data-heads with a particular penchant for influential German electronic pop-meisters Kraftwerk, you may be interested in the latest project from London-based ‘Data Illustrator’ Stefanie Posavec – a glossy print showing the length of cassette tape needed to record Kraftwerk’s Computer World.
Stefanie, who has been a prominent name on the data visualisation circuit over the past few weeks and has previously been involved in notable projects such as the Literary Oragnism, the Left vs. Right project with David McCandless and the design for the iPhone app edition Stephen Fry’s latest autobiography.
As you move your eye along the poster’s internal typographical maze, you see the physical representation of the length of tape needed to record the album (51.625 metres), with each individual track’s position similarly encoded along the journey.
I was interested in working with an obsolete technology that we all have fond memories of: the cassette tape. After recording a song, the song becomes an object with a specific length. Through this conversion to an object, time and sound become tangible. I chose to work with Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer World’ album because it praises the future of technology in a way that seems dated now. This album seemed an appropriate way to represent the lost feeling of excitement of the cassette tape as a new technology.
If the path is cut from the poster, and left to hang in an tangled strip to the floor, one is able to touch a tangible representation of the length of tape needed to record the album.
Posters can be purchased now for £35 + P&P. A signed edition of 200 prints are available. 25% of all profits will go to Ganet’s Adventure Fund, a registered charity that benefits a small primary school in Northern Malawi.
[Incidentally, you can see other design-related gifts that might trigger some ideas via this collection from Wired Magazine.]