This is the The Complete, In-Depth, Totally Useful, Really Good, Illustrative, Audio Guided, Pocket Guide to the Fine Art of Deep Freezing. The project was created from an exciting brief based on second-hand books. The brief was to buy a second-hand book and create a piece of work in response to it. I scouted around a few charity shops and came across two books that I really loved, and thought would be interesting to create work from.
The first book I picked up was 'A Complete Guide to Deep Freezing' by Morag Williams. First published in 1958, the book gives in-depth advice on deep-freezing, which was still a developing method of storing food in its time. The book just seemed really obscure and at times quite comical, giving immense detail on how to label food parcels for freezing with dates and times etc. and giving instructions on how to cook and freeze animals that would rarely be dealt with in our modern day homes - such as rabbits and venison.
The second book I picked up was a Jungle Book interactive sound book. It brought back nostalgic memories of playing with one as a child. I instantly pressed the sound buttons and reminisced for several minutes in the charity shop with a massive grin on my face, I got some funny looks from the elderly women.
The idea occurred to combine the two books into an interactive, tongue-in-cheek, satirical book with sounds placed within and around the obscure instructions and advice of how to deep-freeze food. Ideas raced around my head, "What if after the sentence, 'Pick young vegetables, preferably early in the morning.' had a completely irrelevant jungle sound after it?" I then played around with the sounds and fitting them into the sentences and decided to relate the sounds in some way to the text. For example, if the book told you that you MUST do something, the alarming sound of the elephant would follow and if it mentioned something going wrong it would play the sound of the banana slipping out of Mowgli's hands.
I designed, printed and bound the book and also redesigned the soundboard with new symbols. For the cover, I screen-printed onto the cloth then created the hard-back in the same format as the Jungle Book book, as to fit the soundboard on correctly. As the shape and size of the book was restricted due to the soundboard (and not having the facilities to make a new one) I would have liked to play around with the shape of the book and the way in which it could be read by designing my own soundboard. I've also thought of other ideas where this idea of pointless sounds could be implemented, such as restaurant menus and tourist guides.