Final Exhibition thoughts

IMMERSIVE
VISUAL OVERLOAD
EXPERIENTIAL SPACE

I want my final exhibition to be a musical space which you have to enter to view. An insight into my musical self, my personal bubble.

I want it to be an immersive experience, where you are overloaded with colour and pattern, like the overload of sound and pattern in music.

I wish to show a lot of pieces because I think it is the exploration and progress of my work which aims to capture the aura of musical experience rather than a few finals.

I want a combination of movement, sound, imagery and tactility.
Posters, Prints, Vinyl Records, Video and Audio.

4th 7x7

4th 7x7

4th Reflective Post

Evaluation 4 - Refinement and Exploration

I decided to break the project in a more manageable chunk. I decided to hone in on the song ‘You’re The One’ by one of my top 10 bands Fanny and investigate that more thoroughly, rather than trying to explore 10 different bands. Feedback from my COP was to delve deeper rather than thinly explore multiples and this is what is necessary to examine in this project. I need to consider what I can achieve in the time frame for this module. It is a project that will ever evolve, there will never be a completed or resolved point. It is about the journey, the exploring and the experimenting, as visualising the aura of music can never be completely achieved. Therefore, this is something that will become my life long practice and investigation.

Serendipity is important in my practice as my experimentation relies on the boom and bust of having a break-through/discovery and then exhausting the idea.

I began to unpick each element in the song, exploring how I could most effectively communicate each sound - deconstructing the song entirely.

A huge discovery was applying these shapes into mono-print making. They were development, applying the research and instinctive responses into something more crafted and sophisticated. I was applying the genuine responses and creating lots of unique variations, like the uniqueness of experience. Creating many multiples of prints mean that I have a large body of visual responses to that song and they help capture the allure and essence of the music through their quantity. Having so many digital edits was quite overwhelming having so many files which existed only digitally. I was inspired by Jimmy Turrell to print them out as tiles, like storyboard.

I found myself singing the song like an earworm in my daily life, completely immersed in experiencing this song. It is such a fun song to sing and makes me feel so excited every time I hear it (even after studying it) and decided that I would record myself singing each part. This is another form of personal response to the music. I gave myself one chance to record each section, trying to keep the recording genuine and expressive. After applying it to visuals where I was listening to the original recording of the song, I realised that I have missed out a few little elements so not all the visuals completely marry up. I think that using myself singing gives an insight of myself, helping others relate to my experience of the song.

Turning my responses into music videos has been extremely important to this project. It is a method that really ties together my 3 passions, which create who I am.

The use of video combines time and visuals and adds duration into the imagery. Some of the videos include snippets of footage of my personal musical experiences. This mix of media maps the visual/musical exploration holistically. The videos almost work as an archive and portray all of the different variations of responses I have created in one place, in time with the music. Watching the videos are an engaging way for other people to connect with my artwork, even though they are extremely personal and subjective visual responses and experiences of music.

Tap sound video

Tap sound video

I wanted to create a video which visually had the lyrics with my images, had the rhythms of expressed tap dancing and my recorded vocals ... combining my response to the song in my 3 different disciplines.

I appreciate to some ears that this will just sound like a hammer banging on the inside of your brain. 
However to me, these were the steps that I chose to reflect the sound best. Just like with the deconstruction book I considered what sounds fit best, whether they were an up or a down beat, whether a shuffle or trapped beats sounded best, where my weight was. 
I think that perhaps the lyrics are too randomly dotted around and I could have better considered a way to guide the eyes around the imagery? Too difficult to follow?

Constructing this video I recorded each section separately. I compiled all of the sections into the video to find that when there isn't any pitch involved even though the layers work in the song, they sounded horrific when it sounded like unarticulated stamping, so I got rid of some of the sections to keep any listener sane.

Although there aren't any melodies in the tap dancing, only the rhythm, I know the song so well that I can hear the tune without needing the pitch. I think I could consider each specific image in relation to its imagery and colouring better. However I think the motion of the imagery is important for implying what the pitch would be... 
for example zooming in alludes to ascending melodies and the imagery scrolling down alludes to descending melodies.

Mixed media music video

Scrapbook music video

I have been creating this "music video" throughout this module. It has been a slow burner. I wanted to explore a way of combining music art and tap dance and a video puts these disciplines into one product and adds the element of duration and time which still imagery does not.

I appreciate that it is not professional (lots of thing were recorded at my home - no green screens). It is not something which could be used to accompany the song, as an official music video. This isn't the point of my project though. I have used this video to document (like a scrapbook) the work I have been doing, applying it in a different form.

This was created on Premiere Pro, a software I have taught myself, so this video has been about playing with the software, experimenting and exploring what I can do on it (hence all of the effects).

I think the graphics of the video aren't too random to accompany the song, it was created in the 70s when technological development was at its early stages, like my stages with Premiere Pro.

Here are some still which portray the overlap between dance and visuals in the same place.

Remy Charlip

Remy Charlip

This is inspiring. It is showing how somebody followed a career within interdisciplinary arts, combining art music and dance (the things I am passionate about) and helped support children through these art forms.

- passion and talent for art from an early age
- “being a painter seemed hopeless to me,” and he turned to other art forms including dance and acting.
-a dancer, choreographer and founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
- never lost sight of writing and illustrating for children, and eventually published more than 38 books, which he often claimed helped support his other pursuits.
-work cut across a wide spectrum of art forms, aesthetic registers and audiences. He drew no particular distinctions among them. All were forms of an “internal dance,” as he called it, that he liked to stage in his own and other people’s minds.
-dance and children’s books, shared some essential elements. Both speak in a visual language for the most part, and both move through a series of scenes.
-He became a founding member of the company and did publicity and designed flyers as well as danced with them
-Remy was an exceptional teacher and helped people of all ages and creative disciplines access their creativity with a whimsical and profound simplicity and holistic depth. His teaching brought together many creative practices and healing modalities.
-Remy wrote and illustrated many articles about his creative philosophy, teaching, performing and healing practices. CQ published five of these articles in the First Remy Charlip Reader (1986).
-He wrote a manual for teaching an interdisciplinary approach to teaching the arts to children.

He sent illustrations like this to dance companies, as a stimulus for them to choreograph dances as they interpret them.

His VS Mine. They both focus on the shapes and body language of the dances. His is before the movements have been created and mine is after the movements have been danced. Similar yet different.

Jimmy Turrell

http://www.jimmyturrell.com/projects/universal-yellowire/

I found this extremely inspiring. I love the combination of analogue and digital. It is thoroughly process driven.

I have been struggling that everything is digital, hundreds of files and file names that are tiny. They don't seem real and aren't helpful. This made me decide to print everything I had made off as little thumbnail show reels. It shows the work I have done but is analogue and you can see and touch it, it seems real and tangible. It helps see what works.