Led Zeppelin

4

Led Zeppelin

Designing for the world’s biggest rock group focused my

analytical processes.  Here was an opportunity to create,

not sound packaging, but audio and visual art

in a combined arena.

In 1966/7 I had been working on a book called

‘One Line and a Box’ in the studios of the Royal Academy

in London.  People could ask questions about their

interaction with the environment using an evolution of

symbols and sequences.

Each page was built with layers of pierced rotating discs.

By rotating each page, participants would engage with

permutations of words, colours and pictures.

Some employed intersecting spirals that revealed

a kinetic animation as an astronaut tumbled in

a widening orbit away from the Earth.

This rotating book would lay the foundation

 for Led Zeppelin III in 1970.

I felt an immense responsibility to Led Zeppelin;

it had to work for them, it had to endure.

During the 60’s I had publicly questioned

the relevance of traditional formats.

I came to realise that exclusive modernism in

art education

betrays creative freedom.

I realised that all created realities and environments

are surrealist.  I came to redefine infinitely variable

concepts of space, scale and my perception of them.

I decided to make for Led Zeppelin, an independent space

in which some images appeared to move, have their

 own energy, while others could be moved in real time.

The square format became as a theatrical proscenium,

The space within could be infinite; the boundary dissolved.