Introduction

The form of my creative sound work is still at question. My current sound practice has shifted through forms in an agile manner, jumping around techniques and styles and failing to properly adopt one to create my end of year piece. In the year I have created works in installation, sound for film, music and performance, enjoying and exploring these forms to some extent. But as mentioned in the previous blog post, I found my self in a point of great indecision, not knowing what path to take towards the creation of the end of term sound work. In this blog post I will lay out an array of ideas, inspirations and concepts with the purpose of organising my thoughts and start planning my piece.

Visual Media

This year, my life and artistic work has been influence by visual art as no other time before. I have explored mediums such as photography, film and abstract painting, developing new activities such as analogue photography. As I’ve been working in the sound design for a film of a friend of mine I have investigated an indulged into art cinema. I watch films by directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Eric Rohmer, and payed detailed attention to its cinematography and image. Furthermore I have become obsessed with quite abstract painting, artists such as Joan Miro and Nicolas de Staël that are characteristic of leading their art through tone and texture instead of clear define shape and narrative. What I like about the directors and painters I just mentioned above is their ability of freezing or distorting time through the use of image and tone. When experiencing pieces of any of these artistI find myself hypnotised, frozen to the place and time I find my self in. Instead of focusing in the narrative of the pieces, I focus in the details of the texture and extract from them abstract messages, similar to dreams. What I would argue that these directors and painters share (at least in the works I have seen) is the ability to induce peace, calmness and tranquility in the audience. But at the same time I think that this induction in the audience is a by-product of the visual aesthetic instead than an objective of the artist. Mark Le Fanu (2017) for an essay for the Criterion Collection described Tarkovsky’s Stalker as “marvellous moments of peacefulness, silence and sleep”. For my creative sound work I would like to create a piece that has a similar effect as the works I have mentioned above, create a sonic object that induces calmness, satisfaction and hypnosis in the same way visual art causes it.

The videos and pictures below are a small example of the visual art I have been inspired by. The video essay is an analysis and comparison of Rohmer’s film My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend and paintings by Nicolas de Staël.

Memoria (2021) – Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The Sun (1949) – Joan Miro