Context of Practice

Turning point and development of final images

PAN records

After some further research, I decided that the best way to solve the problem raised in the previous post would be to do what the art director for electronic music label PAN describes as using indirect references, often ambiguous to convey a sound visually. This has allowed the artwork produced for the label to have a clear connection to the music it accompanies and the ambiguity allows for the viewer to draw further connections in their own mind between the music and the artwork. This last point is something that I have been interested in tackling throughout much of the work I have produced since first year and was therefore keen to bring it into the practical work for COP3.

Free writing

After a discussion with my personal tutor I decided that a good way to try and achieve this would be the process of free writing in which I would listen to pieces of electronic music and jot down the first words that came to mind and then distil these lists down into a few worst that fitted the music the best. This would in turn allow me to add motifs to my work that related to the work within falling into cliché and which would also allow for a certain degree of viewer interpretation.

Development of final images

Song: Helm - Eliminator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d0Ed0wpo_k

Words: Ancient, Rust, Extraterrestrial

Song: Die Partie - Allerheiligen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKL2ejYPD1I

Words: Defeat, Falling, Burst

Although I was happy with the first two images I created in response to this, going so far as to print the second image, I felt that they didn’t quite achieve the effect that I had wanted despite both capturing the words I had associated with them. I feel like this is because the first image is too abstract and the second is too figurative. Therefore, I think in my final images a need to create a careful balance between he two. Furthermore, I think the colours in both take away from the desired visualisation of the music in question. The first image, due to the black back ground, feels quite claustrophobic and lacking in movement. The second in contrast to this has too much going on colour wise and feels too colourful, giving it an almost childlike quality.

Therefore, with my final images I decided that I would go for a simple black and yellow colour scheme. This is because the crits had highlighted my most successful images, purely in aesthetic terms, as being the simple monotone prints. Whereas in contrasts to this, the tension between black, blue and yellow in my initial images had been suggested as the most successful way to visualise the sound and feel of electronic music.

I think in the final images I was also able to achieve a nice compositional balance that helped further the visualisation of the music. This is because they still retained some of the looser nature associated with my initial experiments yet they also have a strong sense of structure achieved through the use of collaged images and shaped that sit alongside the looser elements.