Ayreon, the blind minstrel
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Ayreon, the blind minstrel
Final/Only Experiment - Process: Editing and assembling the documented.
1. I documented the sounds possible from interacting with the bottle, primarily via its functions (swinging the bottle, using the cap) and striking the glass with a pencil or my knuckle using a Zoom H4n recorder and a Sennheiser M66 directional mic.
2. (Fig.1-3) I imported the raw audio into Audacity. I trimmed the clearest sounds I wanted from the sample track, moving them to new tracks that I named to categorise the samples, making sure to leave the individual sounds clear dead space between each other to isolate them.
I was originally going to export the individual sounds to reconstruct into a more selective arrangement, then I considered using the tracks as a whole and exported them as .wavs. After listening to the accidental arrangement after having the tracks on solo for so long, I found the whole idle enough to build upon. So instead:
3. (Fig.4) I exported the entire project then reopened that waveform in audacity. I added 2 tracks to mess with and set myself a time limit. I gave myself 5 minutes to cut, paste, trim and layer. This timeframe forced me to be erratic and random, while still maintaining the essence of composition as I filled in and extended spaces as I saw them, and extracted pieces without listening to them. I listened to the short piece after the time limit, pleasantly surprised that it didn’t sound overbearing or blaring, and the cuts weren’t overt, so I used it at the length it ended up being.
4. (Fig. 5) I looked at my Adobe Premiere Pro free trial, and snobbily tossed it aside in favour of the reviled iMovie, as I hoped it would swing my editing in a “bad”/worse direction. Again I set a 5 minute timer, and imported, edited, and sped up the video, to make it fit within the audio’s time limit. iMovie automatically adds a ‘Ken Burns’ feature to photos where it naturally zooms or pans the photo like a slide show which my SOMA tutor never wanted to see used in our professional work, so with a chuckle I left that in the first image to set the pace, and after trying a few black fades and overused powerpoint swipes I omitted any transitions in favour of the jumpily cut footage.
5. I exported the video. I could have uploaded it to youtube, where it would look more at home amongst millions of hours of poor quality videos, or on tumblr, hoping the buffer time would further break the ideas of good academic documentation, but instead I uploaded it to vimeo, a more respectable website so the contrast of the platform’s esteem in the short film community would really emphasise the unfinished nature of the work.
I learnt from Melletios that in photography the power of editing enables you to recover average photos by emphasising their flaws until they gel with the remainder. So if it’s going to seem unfinished, whether it is or it isn’t, better exploit that as best you can until it is.
FINAL EXPERIMENT - Preparation.
I decided that it would be interesting to cut the cups into small pieces and stack them - the intact pieces remaining a stack, whilst the areas that come into contact with the turpentine melt together like gooey slime.
I then taped these together. In my previous chemical experiment I had used tape to keep my material in one piece, and learned that once dry, the melted styrofoam does not stick to the tape. This created the perfect non-stick surface.
Went to spotlight today and bought 2 different white fabrics (img1).
The first is a simple polyester interlock (img2)
and the second is a dancetime satin (img3)
Final Experiment - Ayreon [#470]
Ayreon's Final Experiment on Stegzy's Music Project
Arjen Anthony Lucassen and his rag tag collection of musicians again this time with his first album under the collective name of Ayreon.
Final Experiment sets the ground work for Ayreon’s later works such as Universal Migrator and 01011001. Far off in the future, the remnants of the human race project telepathic images to a minstrel living in the past with King Arthur and Merlin in an effort to…
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Final Experiment- Shed
Shed’s music always seems to find a way to head straight for deepest and hallow spaces of your walls when you play it loudly. Lose yourself in the fragmented and disordered palpitations of “Final Experiment”, and you’ll most likely end up stomped by an unexpected bass kick. It’s a mesmerizing track that will take you no where, which makes it even more eerie.
ASSESSMENT THREE--
FINAL EXPERIMENT THREE -- Portrait of my Mother
After experimenting with all the various ways humans communicate through signs in my first experiment and how one might escape from this unrelenting process in my second experiment, I decided to try and escape it further by removing the ‘universal’ nature of facial cues.
To do this, I returned to my iteration process that I experimented with at the beginning and again began to break down a portrait into shapes and lines and change the form. I did this by way of drawing, digital illustration, and finally boxboard model-making.
To anyone viewing the final object, it is a simply an abstract collection of shapes, whereas to me it is a portrait of my Mum. The original photograph or drawing is instantly recognisable as a person, and the details allow the viewer to analyse, define and speculate endlessly about her expression, relation to me etc.
As the model is only clearly a portrait to me, it is no longer relatable to the rest of the world, and is thus a completely singular portrait/viewer experience. The singularity of this is appealing in a world in which analysis of others is subconscious, universal and constant.
ASSESSMENT THREE --
FINAL EXPERIMENT TWO -- Error 404 Face Not Found
The culmination of my experiments into how the distortion/removal of facial features effects our relation to a figure.
We are constantly analysing others/being analysed. Removing our facial features from the equation of social interaction gives some measure of privacy to the wearer, and more control over how they are perceived.