A quick digital collage to accompany Percy Shelley's sonnet "Ozymandias", which has remained firmly in my mind since I first heard it. I don't know any other poem which quite captures the same sense of entropy, the sense of smallness in the spatial and chronological vastness of nature.
I think of the design as a web of references and themes — often quite divergent from each other (collage lends itself to this). There are the elements we might expect: a fallen statue, a traveller, lone and level sands. But the composition goes further; I tried to depict the scale of nature by mimicking some Japanese landscapes I once saw. Hence the characters at top left*. Furthermore, I was looking at a lot of Macroblank album covers.
The use of the Japanese characters inspired another facet of the piece: its analog aesthetic. The picture grain, moon landing imagery, typewriter-style monospace, and punk-rock-mutilated title are meant to evoke the late 20th century — the late '60s to the new millennium — when Japanese products became known and prominent in the US, among other significant developments.
*They read "meat and egg rice bowl." An homage to human ignorance, the reputation of which I find unfairly maligned.
