Typography Poster- Lateralus

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

~Howard Phillips Lovecraft

This is the typography poster that was supposed to fulfill the requirement of creating a poster chiefly with words that were meant to relay a certain message. The color scheme I used was one of a rectangle, containing red, blue, green, and orange/yellow. The fonts used were Times and Systema Encephale.
This piece, simply dubbed "Lateralus", compiles all lyrics from every song of the cerebral celebration of our humanity. The purpose of the poster was to relay a message of "drawing way outside the lines," as Maynard James Keenan sings in the title track, "Lateralus". One purpose of the message is to notice the difference between the image up close and the image from a distance. When observed up close, one will notice that the poster is made up of interconnecting (but not perfectly aligned) puzzle pieces of text. While this fact in and of itself is a reference to the renowned quote "I know the pieces fit" from the single Schism off of the album, it is also, after one gives careful thought, apparent that pieces fitting together is very reminiscent of the human mind itself. There are many separate parts of the human mind, from the compelling frontal lobe to the minuscule pineal gland. This is done for both the showcasing of knowledge of relaying scientific principles of art, as well as relating the speculated origin of the name of the album, Lateralus. The name, as one can easily perceive, is not one common to the tongue of any average person, as it is not part of proper english, so the question is, what is the word?. Naturally, where this mystery there are always those who attempt to solve it. After gathering sources and information, I have come to the conclusion that I believe the name Lateralus is a combination of the name for the part of the brain, the lateral cerebral sulcus. Later- from lateral, -al from cerebral, and -us from sulcus (this idea is not my own, it is a compromise between opposing fan theories). Now the question is, what does the lateral cerebral sulcus do? In short, it is the barrier (or, as some believe, the bridge) between the frontal lobe, which is responsible for processing our sensory information, and temporal lobe, which is responsible for retaining information, or processing our sensory information into derived meanings. So, the lateral sulcus is literally the bridge between our reality and our perception. These are two parts of the brain that aid each other in a certain task of perceiving our reality. This is relayed through the piece in that, when viewed closely, there are specific alternations of text and shapes that seem almost random, but when a step back is taken and the piece is viewed from a distance, everything comes together and forms a shape, an image, a story. How is this not precisely analogous to our mind, to our very humanity?

Another way of relaying the message of the album (something whimsical, celebratory, cerebral) was through scattering the numbers of the fibonacci sequence across the piece, and including multiple examples of spirals. As is known, the fibonacci sequence is a sequence of numbers beginning with 0 and 1 that increases by adding together the past two numbers in the sequence. This is a profound mathematical concept that is seen everywhere in our universe, as when the sequence is graphed it forms an infinite spiral. In Lateralus, there are many examples of this sequence, from the time signatures of the guitar riff in the intro of Lateralus to the time signatures of the drum beat throughout the entire album (the drummer Danny Carey is a follower of sacred geometry and was thus able to graph out the spirals and drum out the sequence). The one profound way that the band uses the spiral is when lyricist and singer Maynard James Keenan uses the spiral as an archetype of human will and perception (a technique very reminiscent of Jungian psychology, which the band has shown hints of following in earlier albums), and uses the metaphor of the spiral being infinite to imply that human beauty and intelligence is boundless. To relay this as it is in the album, numbers of the fibonacci sequence were, in relative vertical order, scattered about the piece. This leads the eye around the piece once the pattern is noticed, and the discovering of the pattern itself is a rewarding feeling of conquering a mysterious aspect to the piece itself. This was also done through the means of multiple iterations of the spiral across the piece, including in the bottom right hand corner where one is shown being made up of the word "Lateralus", as well as in the top right hand corner and other places where the word "spiral out" has been distorted to form a spiral. 

The resulting imagery is one of constant mystery; there is always some puzzle left to uncover no matter how well one deciphers the piece. At a close glance one will notice the piece is made up of words, and, upon closer inspection and reading of said words, the pieces will seem to come together as one reads. There are multiple pieces to the puzzle that do not include specific words, but also half-ending spirals and numbers. However, if one were to take a step back, one would notice that the entire piece comes together to form one specific image, and the pieces may just come together.