Squergil Action Theme (demo)

Ink No Brush

Okay, going to bring a couple of posts relevant to my EMP over from my main blog. Firstly, a drawing from my sketch book from early February. This is relevant as it's one of my first times using a Faber-Castell brush-tipped Pitt artist pen. I borrowed/stole a bunch from my girlfriend (now ex - for unrelated reasons!) and loved them.
However, prior to that, during the last couple of projects, I'd been getting more and more interested in inking with a brush. When I say interested, what that really means is that I enjoy doing it! I've been quite pleased with some of the results, especially when scanned in and scaled down.


This is a brush drawing from my Negotiated Practice sketch book.. it looks okay (if imperfect) at normal size, but scanned and reduced I think it looks quite nice, whilst having a bit more "energy" than a drawing rendered with no line-width variation.


For that reason, I've been very tempted to render my final images for this project with a brush. In fact, that would be my ideal scenario, in terms of enjoyment gained from making the images. However, with time an issue, even when the deadline was still somewhat distant, I was conscious of the possibility that my dissatisfaction with anything "imperfect" could be a big stumbling block with the brush option - I could imagine drawing and redrawing images countless times. So, it is with a little sadness that I have done the sensible thing (and what I would do if this were a live professional brief with a deadline of less than a year!) and decided to render the images with the Pitt brush pens. To be honest, this is hardly a compromise on quality - the images I've created so far look very nice and professional once scanned in and coloured.. and Elaine even posted a comment on the above "Shell" image thinking that I had done it with a brush! I am happy to do the images in this way and have more time to concentrate on composition, layout, and the audio.. hopefully this will make for a better final product.

I am looking forward to doing more brush work in my spare time though, and reaching a stage where I can use it in my work without fear of causing delays. Here are some CDR covers that I doodled, with a relatively large brush, whilst in Scotland recently (the CDs are of songs from my 100 Days project, which interfered slightly with the last project!).. I did them very loosely and in a care-free manner, but some of them actually came out quite nicely.

Gæoudjiparl – The Århus Warrior, and an extended thought ramble on the intentional obfuscation of language.

Early on in this project, I had been thinking about producing a less traditional narrative, which toyed with the reader's anchorage, as a continuation of things I've explored in previous projects and in my dissertation.
As time has gone on, and editing has been done, I've rediscovered my love for writing and Salvatore's workshop allowed me to see the writing of a more traditional narrative as a fun challenge at least equal to the writing of an experimental one.

In many ways, despite its audio-visual nature, this feels like one of the most "safe" projects I have done. The story has gotten simpler and simpler through the writing process and I'm left with something very close to the traditional story-book form. What does make it distinct is the seperation of the visual matter from the audio, and I would be very interested to see what people made of the story if it was presented to them without the audio ie. with no textual exposition.

I've recently been getting very interested in the music and art of Goodiepal. He has devised (amongst many other amazing things) a "compositional game play scenario" to challenge the rigidity of compositional practise as related to language ie. on a stave, or software sequencer, that reads from left to right. A lot of his ideas seem to be to do with context and its role as something which sets the human mind apart from any artificial intelligence in its ability to create subsets of complex information and therefore more easily find connections/meaning - for instance, in a book he has published for his composition project, the text is presented in an imaginary language, which is an amalgam of words from various Scandinavian language which are closest to other Latin-based languages (like English and French). The suggestion is that, even if you don't know the languages being used (including Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and Faroese) then there will be enough identifiable information for the reader to surmise the meaning according to association and context.

This is very similar to some of the ideas I touched on in my tarot/narrative projects and in my dissertation (and perhaps to ideas presented in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Kandinsky's writings) and I would be very interested to further explore this topic in the visual or audio-visual realm.

Whilst dealing with musical composition and aesthetics, Goodiepal's work also deals with notions of utopia in electronic music. Intriguingly, he sees hand-rendered text and imagery as essential to making notation "unscannable" by artificial intelligences (this idea of artificial intelligences reading music is really, I suspect, just a rhetorical device to focus attention on the unique capacities of human intelligence). It's very tempting to relate this to the recent turn towards the hand-made in illustration (and to the resurgence of folk-based music - something he seems to reference in his work).. it seems we have reached the top of the utopian curve and, with no hover cars appearing (and the best equivalents in technological advancement ironically being taken for granted now they have arrived) there has been a dip, a move back towards a notion of a retrotopia - a nostalgia for past times well exemplified in the music of artists like Boards Of Canada and the hauntology scene.

I've always seen a link between the exploitation of the human ability to reconfigure information (ie. in the work of Edward Gorey or any number of surrealists) and language (indeed, Breton refers to Surrealism as poetry). This is also the root of my interest in tarot cards and narrative, and, as mentioned, an important aspect of my dissertation (which analysed and compared the formal properties of the comic strip and screen-based graphical interfaces).

To me, this seems like an important part of the growth and evolution of a language - words (and contexts) being remoulded and reapplied. Of course, in a survival of the fittest, such explorations have little success due to their lack of functionality. But it's in literature and entertainment that such playful mutations can flourish - and occasionally, some odd figure, such as a fish on a bicycle, will enter the wider consciousness. The surreal comedy of Vic and Bob was a big influence on me as a teenager - they took quite extreme surreal and poetic language and placed it in a foreign context, with successful results. They would eventually follow this through to the mainstream success of the surreal game-show Shooting Stars. I think that humour is an important element in the success of such things.

The reason for this explanation is to highlight that what interests me is the question of what might come to be a new audio-visual format (assuming that in an increasingly multi-modal multi-sensory media world the future of music might in fact be in a new type of media container). What Paper Rad (scathingly?) call "The Future of Entertainment". It seems to me that something with a high level of humour might be the most likely to succeed in the first place. Comedy shows seem to have been the most succesful area in pushing these boundaries in popular culture - whether it be Vic & Bob, or Chris Morris' Jam, which combined hallucinatory film techniques with often unsettling electronica to great effect.

For now, I'm just drawing a squirrel thing in its pants, but, while combining audio and visual material, even in a relatively "safe" narrative, I'm finding it fascinating to think about what the future possibilities might be for such a form, and I'd definitely be interested in doing something more experimental in the future.

Also, I can't stop listening to Goodiepal!


See some of Goodiepal's Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra instructional/art objects here.

The Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough on Soundcloud.

Music for City & Ghosts

This project will not be the first time I have made music to go with a narrative.. however it will be the most complex and developed piece of musical narrative I've attempted so far.
I was really happy to be asked by Nozomi to do the music for her film City & Ghosts in February. It was a good reminder that these sort of things always take longer than you think, and a great opportunity to flex my musically-descriptive muscles (which have not been used for a while!). In particular, it made me think about how a sound can provide a non-literal representation of a mood or theme.. the music contains sounds of car horns and dogs barking.. but also more abstracted electronic beeps to represent the sound of a city at night, with the sound of a busy road floating up through still air to an apartment high above. I'm really pleased with how it came out, and looking forward to it being online so I can show all my friends!

Extended Major Project

So.. it might seem a bit odd to have set up a blog to write about my EMP this close to the deadline. But I've just been finding so much stuff online that is informing the development of the work.. and the final two weeks will involve a lot of digital compositing of what I've been drawing so far.. I'm intentionally drawing each page in parts, so that I can play around with the layout and composition in Photoshop, and that will obviously be easier to show here.