Searching for Clues

Detective stories are the ultimate source for graphic objects, because they rely on clues to drive the story along. Clues, however, are more narrative; there are so many other opportunities for world-building. Mark Wolf says that inviting audiences to participate in your world “[depends] more on the fullness and richness of the world itself than on any particular storyline or character within it.” I chose Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man as my next source of translation and set forth designing both narrative and peripheral objects from the text in order to reconfigure a pre-existing text into new worlds and stories.

Anachronism featured prominently in these translations as I sought to find ways to disrupt expected objects. Using Kenya Hara’s principle of exformation, how could I make something seemingly familiar that, when examined more closely, subverted expectations of what that object should look like? And what could that instance of subversion tell you about the larger world in which that object might exist?