Thursday, December 18, 2008

Community Inquiry Project- The Poster

So one of the components of our community inquiry project is a poster presentation. Which is in about 4 hours actually. So while I was finishing up the paper I was thinking about and gathering materials for that.

I decided to divide my poster into three areas, left, center and right, and go with a different focus with each or them. In the center I had a copy of my paper abstract, a copy of the map from my walkthrough of Newark and a few graphs of information on substance use prevalence and the influence of risk and protective factors on substance use. So mostly pure information.

The right side I went with quotes from people I heard speak in AA meetings, along with a couple sets of song lyrics that have a lot of personal meaning to me with regards to substance use. I used multiple fonts and orientations when attaching them to mimic random conversation and make them seem more like they were coming from many different people. Which they do.

The left side I went with photos related to substance use. They start off at the top, well organized and depicting mostly "nice" casual scenes of substance use. As they descend down the poster the pictures get more serious. People passed out, police giving breathalyzers, addicts shooting up, etc. At the bottom is a body bag being led past a cop car (that pic is from Heath Ledger's OD, just to let you know). The pictures become progressively more skewed and chaotically arranged as you go down. My goal was to visually depict the continuum of substance use, starting with "normal" recreational use and proceeding through the descent addicts suffer, both in terms of visual consequences as well as the emotional and psychological consequences most people don't see.

At least that's what I was shooting for. I'll try to get a picture of it up later.

2 comments:

Maria DiDomenico said...

Looking forward to seeing your poster, I think the idea of a prgression into chaos is a good idea. Often drug use/ alcohol use starts out fun and exciting and mostly social but can lead to an almost "tortured artist" state, were you use/abuse in a love/hate fashion. I don't think anyone starts using with the thought " I want to be an addict" you just wind up there and routines are hard to break.

Bezzie said...

The picture of three hot blondes guzzling beer was especially nice.

I was impressed with your google-picture-fu in finding those progression of pictures.