CIM401
Week 1 Pre-existing Creative Concepts from previous modules
CIM400: My first event involving DJ and venue booking, marketing, ticket sales and live projection mapping
CIM417 Open Work: A sonic film in the form of a 3min+ MP3 file that conceptually connects the circle of fifths and the heroes journey
Week 2 Creative Sprint
Pre-class response: Interesting works of art from Yoko Ono and Mary Kelly. Ono's performative piece I find to be a commentary on social etiquettes and norms: if allowed to continue, would the actors have stripped Ono bare? Does the concept that it is performance art over-ride societies' responsibilties to intervene when a stranger's dignities are being removed? No doubt Yoko Ono is stating that she is merely a passenger in the seat of a socially unstable vehicle destined for chaos.
Mary Kelly's piece had a similar theme for me: The clinical, factory warehouse/ prison-like environment, harsh, self-awareness, dirty nappies and methodical analyses pointing to thoughts of humans being just a drab grey cog in the great machine. The observer forgets about the loving, caring nature of a mother-child relationship - no mentions of laughs, giggles and cuteness. I wonder if Mary Kelly has some trauma from her childhood that she is so desperate to get out. I found this artwork quite depressing.
In-class response - chatting with Cogniti’s Connie AI provided these prompts that I found interesting:
Empathy: Could Kelly’s stark portrayal be an attempt to foster empathy for mothers whose emotional experiences are overshadowed by the physical and societal demands of caregiving?
Resilience and adaptability: Engaging with challenging art like this can build emotional resilience. Instead of turning away from the discomfort, you’re exploring its source—showing curiosity and openness to growth.
Discomfort in art can be a catalyst for critical thinking and growth.
Balancing emotional reactions with intellectual exploration allows for a fuller understanding of challenging works.
Awareness of systemic critiques can help contextualize personal discomfort.
Conceptual/ Performance Art Idea
‘12 Steps’
Combining theoretical tools that use cycles of 12 in unusual ways. An interactive piece in an art gallery, where 12 pressure pads are available for the audience to step on. Each pad triggers a recorded piano note in a loudspeaker. 12 loudspeakers in a circle each connected to the individual pads creates an ambisonic environment. The pads with their loudspeakers are at different heights on plinths and are different colours. The piece explores themes of noise vs music, harmony vs dissonance, audience participation/ collaboration and human musicality.
The piece invites the audience to co-create in an immersive, spatial experience and the exploration of the number 12 adds symbolic and structural complexity. Interpreting the piece is done on many levels: physically, sensorially, intellectually. The opportunity for multiple audience members to step on multiple pads allows for both a musical performance to be executed, or chaos to reign supreme.
Potential directions to develop this idea further in include incorporating the zodiac signs, dodecahedrons, clock faces, as well as programmable lighting or projection mapping to re-enforce the multi-sensory environment.
Reflection
I found this excercise incredibly inspiring: by changing my core concept around it brought depth and new meaning to my focus project. Whilst still in it’s infancy, I’m exploring the meaning of the number 12 and it’s cyclical nature, and asking why it has so much value to human beings. Besides the obvious ease of dividing and counting in bases of 12 mathematically, it seems to possess some sort of spiritual quality too. I have been finding the number 12 in many deeply rooted technologies, wisdoms, tools and theories. My methodological process benefitted from this exercise with the addition of the audience participation element, the dichotomy of harmony vs dissonance, negotiation of meaning and human-centred design. This has inspired me to think of other directions I might take for my focus project: I have more questions in my head, like ‘how can I bring more conceptual depth to this project by interweaving different 12 step cycles together?’, ‘how will the audience know the true meaning of the artwork?’, ‘what other sensory elements can I incorporate?’
From a semiotic perspective, the artwork explores the culturally constructed signs of structure/ beauty and chaos in music with it’s theme of harmony vs dissonance, as well as challenging the traditional signs of musical expertise with the invitation of participation to untrained audiences. On a physical level, the audience signals their participation with the action of stepping (or otherwise physically triggering) the pads, and the resulting audiovisual stimuli provokes a reflective interpretation. The speed and amount of repetition of their actions allows them to intellectually and emotionally engage with the resulting sensorial experiences and derive different meanings from the artwork.
Week 3 Dadaism
After conducting research into Dadaism, I noticed its historical relevance to WW1 and drew connections to how, early in the war, there was a sense of glory, duty, and adventurism among the soldiers who signed up, which ultimately led to a total disaster, obscuring any other meaning than hell. I compare this to the ideals and romanticism of art before this time. In modern times, the allure of being an artist can equally become a nightmarish black-hole of insurmountable challenges and stalemates to the unsuspecting optimist. Everybody wants to be a rockstar.
How does this impact my focus project at this stage?
Key Points - With the help of Connie AI (https://app.cogniti.ai/agents/)
Emphasis of concept over form
Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity
Celebration of Chance and Spontaneity
Technological Integration
Image: Dadaism in practice - Shut Up! by Chris Daly
In the above right Dadaist ‘Readymade/ Assemblage’, I took just the nearest objects on my desk and snapped a black and white photo of them. The juxtaposition of a microphone being an instrument of aural magnification, and the earplugs being the opposite, with the third object being a pair of heavy duty snips arranged in such a way as to mimmick the action of cutting the cable from the microphone; I called the piece ‘Shut Up!’. My intention is to invite the audience to find the message by asking why these objects were chosen, and placed in a particular way, in order to ascertain a conceptual meaning instead of an aesthetic.
This particular Dadaist direction has me thinking about my focus project in the following ways: what meaning do I wish my audience to find based on their expectations of the physical objects they find in my performative piece? My idea is as follows:
What if instead of the outcome being purely musical in nature (as I discussed in my Week 2 ideation), the pads were triggering phases of the Hero’s Journey? This could be displayed by visuals from a projector. The result being a randomisation of the order of the Hero’s Journey, unwittingly ordered in time by the spontaneity and abstract performance of the audience as they step on their chosen sequence of pads. They could write a sequence longer or shorter than 12 steps, with repetitions and exclusions. Re-writing the traditional Hero’s Journey in a collaborative, immersive, conceptual environment.
Week 4
Experimental Ideation 3 - Poetic Inquiry
In forests, family and fortunes
Come challenges, criticisms and conflict
Guarded and gated
Disciplined and dedicated
Adventure, allies, adrenalin
Engagements, evil enemies
Bloody battles, burdens
Gauntlets, grief and grudges
Decorations, distinctions, donations
Apotheosis, atonement, acknowledgement
Empirical exhultations, elixirs
Bounty, beauty, bliss
Above, I present a poetic inquiry, inspired by one of the core concepts of my focus project - combining the Hero’s Journey and the Circle of Fifths. I am exploring what happens when I combine these two cycles of 12 parts as part of a qualitative research methodology. Each line of my poem represents a phase of the Hero’s Journey, matched with a tonal centre of the Circle of Fifths, i.e. The first line is ‘In forests, families and fortunes’ - this line is informed by the tonal key of F, and the first phase of the Hero’s Journey ‘The Ordinary World’. The second line follows with ‘Come challenges, criticisms and conflict’ - we have modulated up a fifth to the key of C, and the second phase of the Hero’s Journey ‘Call to Adventure/ Trouble in a faraway land’, and so on. The tonal key dictates the first letter of each word, and the phase of the Hero’s Journey matches the choice of each word in that line. In this way the poem creates an informed narrative that cycles through both the Hero’s Journey and the Circle of Fifths.
The main poetic tool used is alliteration, with some uneven iambic, tri- and tetrameters, odd rhythmical stuctures, some rhyming couplets and lots of other poetic devices. I tried to use words and synonyms that create the imagery dictated by the Hero’s Journey, with the strict limitation of alliteration constrained to the letter of the corresponding key in the Circle of Fifths. Another thing I aimed for was keeping with the number 12. The 10th line is 12 syllables, the last 2 verses are comprised of 12 words each (3 words per line x 4 lines per verse).
Week 5
The last week was spent exploring divergent ideas that might contribute towards my focus project for this module. The foundational concept based on previous work is the exploration of combining theoretical circles of 12 - specifically the Circle of Fifths, the Hero’s Journey and the RGB Colour Wheel, in ways that they weren’t designed for. These ideas came up this week:
Core Games (https://www.coregames.com/) - a virtual gaming space that could replace a physical venue for a performance piece. Currently my chosen venue Otherworld is closed for 2 months for winter. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgtjXMQS5II
Touch Designer (https://alltd.org/tag/kinect/) - This software is used for interactive installations such as those found at Otherworld. My initial idea is that it could replace the pressure pads from week 2’s concept.
Installation pitch - rather than doing a performance piece at a venue, I could create marketing content and examples for an art installation pitch to be presented to art galleries such as Otherworld.
Sonic Film Performance - expanding on the work I did for CIM417 - A 1hr DJ set that emotionally follows the Hero’s Journey and Circle of Fifths, with programmed lightshow that utilises 12 subdivisions of the RGB Colour Wheel
