GLAD

glad is something i loved making. it was exciting to make, put together, keep track of. like all mmyope books it was made quickly. as quickly as it could be done.

there was another dimension to the expedited process, the story holds no conflict. that conceptual premise is both true narratively and machanically. any choice made was to be the kind choice. any avenue of turmoil could be resolved with the help of others, all mistakes were forgiven and understood, loneliness gave way to embrace.

how fruitful this all turned out.

ariana freitag put together an mL gan model that would give us
tree pictures. as the model learned how to produce these images of trees ariana took samples. this let us use the steps of the model's process toward high-fidelity 1028x1028 pixels images as we pleased.

it was clever, cool, and in the end - absolutely wonderful.

in the book there are some 16 qr codes. scanning them returns a different set of images from that experiment. it is an important echo to one of the central emotional pillars of the story.

zoe kress provided this heartbreaking poem.

it was used to safeguard the two intersecting journeys of the book.

zoe kress was asked to write a poem about motherhood. she handed in something entirely whole. it is beyond words and i have tried for a long time to adequately thank her for it.

the poem holds the book together at a perilous moment along the thread. it grounds the piece, and articulates with such insight the idea of kindness that is attempted in the pages surrounding it. zoe was kind enough to let it be manipulated to fit the images, as such it is itself anchored by its would-be speaker.

there are many ways to engage a reader. glad chooses to lay it all out and let you put it back in shape. wherein every choice was the nice one. a story without conflict. what would it look like?

kindness based story-telling. the square shape of the book carries the content. as well allows for each spread, the possibility of a landscape.

much of the book is available on the mmyope website, mm-010 to mm-018