Gorgeous new mock ups for the upcoming 7 of 9 tangible cards have been released today, and as a little piece of history, I'd like to offer some design notes on these.
They've been formally released with nice backgrounds and font, even when not complete — specifically in order to exhibit the design process. To prepare them for the dye cutter, whole new mathematically perfected versions will be made. The first image here, the COAGULA card faces, is primped up more than the others from the raw initial state. As you can see throughout the SOLVE series, they are not geometrically aligned perfectly and they appear to be all broken and made out of little triangles. That's because laying out a grid of triangles to play around with by dragging them to different positions, copying and pasting and deleting them as I go, has been what I needed to visually organize my aesthetic choices.
In the final display, I will be putting out graphics like this for them all as well as photographs of the physical cards with my hands, and I will be having them decrasingly messy as the spectrum goes through from the first SOLVE face to the final gold COAGULA. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to replicate this look and feel completely for the finished cards, though. I'm pretty sure I might be able to do something like that, but we'll see how it goes — I'll have to explore it visually.
The designs you see above are ordered as first 7, then 1 - 6, of a spectrum that progresses through 7 stages of laboratory alchemy. Visually the organizaton of geometry here has been intended to reflect that alchemical process :
1 ⨺ chaos
2 ⨺ dissolution
3 ⨺ sorting
4 ⨺ union
5 ⨺ new life
6 ⨺ refinement
7 ⨺ crystallization
The COAGULA card face is intended to look a bit like some kind of alien, crystalline signalling device — in resonance with the communication theme of the mass media, which this card face corresponds to. Crystals have repeating geometric lattices, stable symmetry and internal order that has “frozen” from a liquid state. That's the meaning of this coagulation stage in alchemy. In this stage, the volatile becomes fixed, the spirit becomes matter, and the essence crystallizes into form. The triangular channels look like routes or conduits. In modern diagrams these resemble circuit pathways, antenna structures or signal routing diagrams. The eye reads them as paths information could move through. The diamond at the top (and the diamond created by positioning two of these together into a diamond of 2 cards) could be seen as a transmitter, relay point, or a crystallization of signal.
In fact, it just so happens that in lore of psylocybin visions, there has been a common psychedelic vision which was often reported by many people who took this particular medicine. This was a mushroom teaching that in ancient days, the capstone of The Great Pyramid of Gaza used to be used as a communication transmitter — and the apex of a space travel system — that would allow human life to traverse galexies into communicaton and visitation with alien life in other parts of the universe, which was commonly done. In light of that, the overall series of designs has been intended to explore a process of visual development resonant with The Great Pyramid of Giza and its capstone dynamics.
There's a fairly critical transition between the 6th SOLVE face and the 7th, the COAGULA. These are the only 2 images that feature a diamond at the apex. In the SOLVE face — which symbolizes the distillation stage of alchemy — there is movement or escape of the diamond conveyed. This represents the volatile spirit rising or essence escaping the vessel which happens during this stage. The visual encapsulation of that same diamond in the COAGULA then represents crystal structure and final integration directly emerging from that process.
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