Omkväde
June, 2024.
An art book by the poet Lina Ekdahl & the generative artist Jimmy Herdberg.
In the beginning of the year I was asked if I wanted to do an art book. They wanted it to be a collaboration with another artist.
Over the years, I have expressed myself in various ways, often by combining sound, image, movement, and rhythm to evoke a sense of something. It rarely ends up in written text.
The book and the written story are something special. As a reader, you have to fill in almost everything yourself. What does a person look like? How is the room, the landscape? How do the lilies in the garden smell? This allows each reader to imagine their own story.
I did not know Lina Ekdahl before, but we live and work in the same city, Gothenburg, Sweden. I was captivated by her playfulness, her depiction of everyday life, her naivety and simplicity. She opened a door for me into the world of poetry.
We decided to create a series of images and texts, about 50 spreads. Lina wrote 50 pieces, and I wrote a code that would generate 50 images. We would then combine the text with the image to create a narrative.
We decided a theme together, to give our work a direction: Seeing time as circular or nonlinear. And using repetition as a tool to solidify or unsettle.
Writing a text for an abstract image charges the image and provides the viewer with an entry point into the picture. This turned out to be a very different way of creating a story! We generated new images, rewrote texts, and pieced everything together over several weeks.
The book was released during the Gothenburg Bookfair 2024. Here is a little preview of a few images. All images are made from the same algorithm:
Thank you for reading!
JMY
