love is death, immortality
This typography project focused on the interplay of two texts, a speech on love as a form of immortality and a poem about love as a form of death. Typographic design was blended with images of cells and biological processes, conveying the anatomy, and tensions between love, life and death.
Japanese stab stitch was used as a binding method to convey the troubling relationship between these ideas, and the merging of the two texts themselves.
The book draws on the lifecycle of a cell: the way one cell divides to become two, and how, when it comes into contact with another, magnetic forces can push them apart. That pull between joining and repelling became a way into love as both a source of life and of death, holding two texts in tension: love is death, and love is immortality.
Magnetic fields can physically change a cell, deforming its membrane, rearranging its cytoskeleton and altering the signaling pathways inside it. Depending on the strength and duration of the field, this can shape whether cells migrate, multiply or differentiate. The study of steering cells this way is often called magnetogenetics.
