After looking around Matt’s Digo tags for some inspiration I came across an audio work that appealed to me, called the Sonic Body. It is an interactive audio instillation piece. What appealed to me with this work was it’s ability to take the user away from the art gallery space and into a whole new world. Looking at this work also reminded me of an exhibition at the Gallery of New South Wales, the Space Odysseys. The Space Odyssey exhibition worked similar to the Sonic Body project, taking the audience to a whole new world, using modern multimedia. After thinking it though I decided that using multimedia as a means to take the audience to a ‘new world’ would be something that I would like to incorporate into my project.
Idea 1 – After looking around the web at images of lounges, I developed an intrest at looking at pictures of abandoned lounges on the streets. From here I developed my first idea, I wanted to use an old abandoned lounge and a sophisticated surround sound, sound scape of the environment of the abandoned lounge on the street. The idea of this being to take the audience ( in the lounge chair) away from the art gallery and into a ‘new world’. With the use of surround sound i wanted to capture the feel of the environment, birds in trees, cars and people passing by and etc.
Idea 2 – in search of inspiration for an idea i moved to my lounge room (which in my house and I’m sure in many others is also the tv room). Here I observed my brother channel surfing, and whilst each channel was completely different in content he was still memorized and absorbed in the tv. From this came the concept of my second idea, I wanted to recreate that absorption and feeling of memorization present in the modern lounge room, and use it in a similar way as the sonic body project, to create a form of escapism . To do this I was thinking of combining an audio and visual seamless loop. The visuals being a loop of simple shapes and soothing colors, operating similar to that of a screen saver. The audio being a seamless looped audio that creates a relaxed and trance like feeling to the user.
Where to now:
I feel that my second idea has a stronger concept and can be explored more and expressed deeper, so I want to progress with that concept. To progress I feel that I need to explore and research my ideas. Firstly I wanted to find any similar projects that operate like mine, either conceptually or physically. I also wanted to look at the way music and visual stimuli can memorize the viewer, with a content that is superficial and has no intellectual content. Firstly I wanted to look into trance music, as it has the ability to en-captivate peolpe with a repetitive cycle of sounds. I also wanted to look into visual concepts of subliminal messages and hypnotism, seeing the psychology behind visual stimuli. Another direction I wanted to explore was the ideas of meditation, looking at acts that don’t engage one enough to stimulate but enough to distract oneself from the outside world.
