La Macchina Morbida // The Soft Machine
La Macchina Morbida (The Soft Machine) is a book written by William S. Burroughs, one of the main and most discussed author of the Beat Generation movement. The book is very complex, it tells about a world between organic and inorganic where drugs represents the only “universal glue” which connects the human beings, meanwhile the paranoia, present in the mind of the individuals as well as in the society, is the only language that allows the various characters to understand each other.
Burroughs have written this book with the “cut-up”, a technique that consists in cutting the various parts of a text and then to recompose them in a casual order.
To realize my visual book, I’ve decided to make the reading “mechanic”, as well as the author used a mechanic writing method. To do this I’ve divided the chapters in separate papers, the format of the various papers changes according to the lenght of the chapter, but the size of the closed sheets is always the same. To read a chapter, you have to take a paper, open it and twist it, in a process that become more and more machanical. Since the drugs are presented as an “universal glue”, I’ve decided to attach to every chapter an image representing a type of drug.
I’ve ralized the images with the technique of “marbled paper”, inspired by drugs seen under the microscope, and then I’ve altered them with photoshop. On the back of each card there is a description of the drug represented on the front
Politecnico di Milano
September 2014
