Today’s session was delivered by Sarah Macdonald rather than Hannah and focused on theories related to collaboration and how to engage with those projects. To me, the ideas didn’t really present much excitement, and rather just reinforced the same ideas I already had. What I did enjoy, though, was visiting the “Igloo” 270-degree screen in the Creative Technology Lab, where we got to see some previous students’ work using the elaborate setup, but also the experience made some issues with the medium extremely apparent; the most being that this format does not beneift a sound based work because the fans for the series of projectors is far louder than ideal, rendering subtlety useless unless there is intentional interplay between the fan sound and my own, which would also create a site specificty to the work that I am not so fond of. Also was for the visuals, with so much happening in all directions, I felt like it wasn’t clear where to be drawn to with works that didn’t feel like that overload was intentional, but to me I think the overload sensation could be useful for engaging in maximalist works to fully embrace the psychedelic aspect and closeness to my own interests, but at the moment it seems like a flawed medium.
As for people I would like to work with, I have thought up a couple ideas regarding projects I could do with friends as I have recently started a new band with a bunch of ‘non-musical’ friends called eunoia playing heavy drone, we could build that into incorporating everyone’s ‘professional’ practices (Izzy does makeup + hairdressing, Charly is a Creative Writing Major, Prince is a Tattoo artist etc) for a cross-practice performance back home in Liverpool. But the only issue with this is that it is a gamble on whether or not everyone will be down to rehearse something enough to perform it, as every time I’ve wanted to jam, it is a 50/50 chance if people show up or not due to everyone else having erratic availability because of various medical reasons.
As for more ambitious ideas I could contact Igor Ruz, who is an artist I really adore and feel like has similar aesthetic interests to me in relation to ‘extreme’ and ‘queer’ arts (expressed through visual art rather than sonic). Something I particularly like by him is a publication (that I sadly missed out on getting a copy of) dedicated to the Russian filmmaker Svetlana Baskova, who is most known for her amazing film The Green Elephant as it became a meme/shock video in Russia due to a scene (allegedly unsimulated) where a character eats shit off of a plate, but other than that shows some amazing psychedelic, nihilistic, maximalist portrayal of the horrors of war, effects of isolation and degradation/phoniness of masculinity from an aggressively feminist perspective. The opportunity is there surely, with my idea to be creating a sound & video tribute to the film using Igor’s illustrations and video collage work he also does (which he does usually in a more ‘Mondo’ kind of style), with my sounds further illustrating the themes of the work. But to me, this feels very idealistic. I am quite a reclusive person, and I can’t imagine working up the gumption to get in contact, as much as I would like to do it.
So far I clearly don’t have such a solid idea as what I would like to do, but the Immersive Reality students will be displaying their work as of next week, so I am hoping that gives me some new ideas, but at the moment I am pretty stuck in doing my personal Noise projects again so I would like to make something aesthetically adjacent.