While working on my diploma project, The Lifespan of a Fact (2012) piqued my curiousity.
This book is written in a non-traditional format, which could be divided into 3 layers of content:
1. What Happens There, an "article" by John D’Agata; 2. Its fact-checking by Jim Fingal; 3. Conversations between author, fact-checker and editor.
Its composition is rather unique, with What Happens There being in the center of the page and everything else glosed around it.
But while I expected the glosed fact-checking and exchanges to be objective, these ended up becoming a space of conflict about authors' creative freedom: what is thought to be an article is actually an essay.
Intrigued, I chose to imagine an alternative layout of The Lifespan of a Fact, transposing the main question of the book to my role as a graphic designer: what liberties am I allowed to take as I shape someone else's work ?
My aim was to share my own reading experience, and visually express the conflict and the importance of the positions taken throughout the book in order to guide readers towards a clearer understanding of the subject.
The result of my research is a set of 3 books.
What Happens There, which I wanted to exist on its own as D'Agata first intended, has been set apart from the rest of the book and is available in two iterations:
one is D'Agata's unaltered essay, while the other has been annotated with shapes and numbers based on Jim's fact-checking.
The Lifespan of Fact was re-imagined to only include the fact-checking and exchanges between the 3 parties of the story, although it can be linked back to what happens there through numbered quotes and pages. The pages are divided into two camps: Jim's and John's. This allows for a clearer distinction between the two characters and their opinions, which eventually clash and drift apart during their discussions.
