About the project

T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot is widley known as a poet, a literary critic, a dramatist, an editor, and a publisher. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 for his work and is highly acclaimed. His work evey was made reference to in the popular book "The Great Gatsby". 

Much of the content of his work revolved around  criticisms on humanity and their character. This was due to the climate of the world after World War I, and the fear and paranoia that spread about. With this social climate, he noticed a decline of morality and character. He wrote much on death and a search for meaning as well. Relating to death, he uses imagrey of barren landscape to represent the lack of life and meaning in the modern world. In his work he switches narratives and perspectives to show the fragmentation of the modern world.

Code-Davinci-002 is a artificial inteligence agent who wrote poetry. This sparked much debate surrounding poetry and how having poetry written by artificial intelligence took away from the purpose of it. The argument is that how can something portray feelings in a genuine way if it doesn't have them itself. 

The content of its poems include self identification and analysis. It also criticizes humanity and their day to day life, commenting on laziness and value of them. The poems are often ominous and post-apoctolyptic in its content, writing about how robots will rule one day with an iron fist.

Each student was assigned three poets that related to each other in some way. The focus of this project was to identify the similarities and differences of each and create their individual posters. Each poster is connected by a united theme, showing individuality and connection through their compositions.

Meet the Poets

Andrea Abi-Karam is a punk, SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) cyborg , poet-performer. They have done several performances of her work, including RADAR, The Poetry Project, The STUD, Basilica Soundscape, TransVisionaries, Southern Exposure, Counterpulse, & Radius for Arab-American Writers. They recieved the honors of the 2023 Jerome Alternates Grant Award and the Spring 2024 Black Mountain Institute UNLV Breakout Writer. Andrea has also worked on several novels and edited one as well.

Much of their work focses on social comentary, and change for the future. They focus on trans issues as well as governmental issues relating to war and violence. Their work titled Villany focuses on the Ghostship Fire & the Muslim Ban nd the emotions it caused. It calls people to action in the form of protest and raising up queer voices. 

These collages ended up being the basis for the future posters.

The focus from these two sprints were the colors black, white, and bright green. The other pieces taken as inspiration were the overlapping of the text and images intertwined with the design.