Designer, educator, works closely with fiction writers on hybrid image/text novels. (this has precedence in Dada, McCluhan, etc)
From Farrell’s page at SAIC
http://www.saic.edu/gallery/saic_profile_faculty.php?type=Faculty&album=467
Simply put, I write stories and explore critical ideas with design. I’m interested in taking traditional literary forms, the short story, the novel, the critical essay, and remaking these forms to include the methodologies, the vocabularies—the possibilities—of design. In the literary realm, writing and design are usually two distinct, non-overlapping activities. Most of the book pages designers labor over could be characterized as non-places. These book pages, although skillfully crafted, work tremendously hard to transport the reader to a transparent realm of language, dissolving the spatial and material aspects of the page. A lot of the work that I do pushes against this transparency and manages the flow of reading in different ways. My work still acknowledges that reading is about flow, and that one of design’s chief objectives is to manage and facilitate this flow. However, the strategies I use—the way I manipulate flow, arrange and organize texts, and employ a spatial approach to the page not unlike staging in theater —often encourage both linear and non-linear movement. Simultaneous stories may interweave, images and information graphics may interject. How this spatial, imagetext experience collides or coincides with the linearity of reading is of prime interest to me.
VAS: An Opera in Flatland, A Novel
Steve Tomasula, Stephen Farrell
University of Chicago Press, Dec 15, 2004
Printed in the colors of flesh and blood, VAS: An Opera in Flatlanda hybrid image-text noveldemonstrates how differing ways of imagining the body generate diverse stories of history, gender, politics, and, ultimately, the literature of who we are. A constantly surprising, VAScombines a variety of voices, from journalism and libretto to poem and comic book. Often these voices meet in counterpoint, and the meaning of the narrative emerges from their juxtapositions, harmonies, or discords. Utilizing a wide and historical sweep of representations of the bodyfrom pedigree charts to genetic sequences VASis, finally, the story of finding one’s identity within the double helix of language and lineage.
