What Does This Symbol Mean?

article by Ben Lincoln

I like symbols that can be interpreted in many different ways. They act sort of like Rorschach tests — giving the viewer the opportunity to see themselves reflected in their perception of what the symbol means.

One of my all-time favourites is Daniel Cabuco's symbol for Kain, the vampire emperor from the Legacy of Kain series. It's possible to see a crown, bat-wings, fangs, flames, smoke, and many other elements within it. It's an abstract, tribal design, but it captures the essence of that character as portrayed in the first Soul Reaver game.

When I got started on my multispectral photography project, I wanted a name for it that would evoke the fact that I was capturing images of the world that were hidden to us sort of my own personal "sub rosa". I love the imagery of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. The idea of enormous, ancient cities built by god-like, alien beings in the distant past, lost at the bottom of the ocean is one particular element of them that stuck in my mind. This is the core of the design — the towers of R'lyeh viewed through a fisheye lens, with ocean waves crossed in front of them.

There were many other images and influences that went into it, however. For example:

The "towers" are intentionally warped to look somewhat like spread wings.
The "waves" can also be seen as a broken Mobius loop rotated by 90 degrees ("infinity is always just out of reach", or "nothing lasts forever" for a more gloomy interpretation) — this was inspired by a minor detail in one of Greg Bear's novels.
The entire symbol is supposed to simultaneously look a bit like a flower — one of the most interesting subjects of multispectral photography is the patterns on flowers in the ultraviolet that are completely invisible to us.
The "waves" are also somewhat inspired by the insignia for the Borg in Star Trek.
The entire silhouette was intentionally designed to look vaguely like a bat, a manta ray, or an insect, without looking exactly like any of those things.

Symbol Explanation

The core concept

One of the many additional meanings

There really is a flower hiding in there

Wax Seal

Made using a computer-controlled laser at Metrix on Capitol Hill in Seattle, 2014-10-02.