This is my second time exploring how sounds can affect the listener in order to achieve my artist purpose, and I realized that I still need a lot of practice with it and keep improving myself.
My exploring theme is identity and my topic is fantasy. The object I choose is my favorite adventurous fairy tale, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. So it’s not the object of the book itself that I want to focus on but the story that the author is telling.
It’s a story involving magic, love, adventure, growth, and war.
In order to develop an artwork around this “object”, I made a mind map to clarify the component.
In this mind map, the vocabulary ” Imagination” and “storytelling” really interests me.
This gets me thinking …
- Did the author want everyone to have identical imagination in order to better tell the story?
- Can something be entirely fanatical? In other words, can something be created without any reference?
- What was the inspiration of inventing magic?
Answers:
- It’s the author’s intention to “show less” and leave space for imagination, especially in fictions, because half of the content is not realistic. Because imagination is bottomless, all the unrealistic forms in thousands of different shapes by the reader’s imagination. That’s why people usually say books are better than movies because once you give visual evidence, people imagine less and depend on the visuals. (Tuck,Lily. “Reading With Imagination”. New York Times. The Opinion Pages. (April 2015). )
- There is no answer to that online, so I try to create a creature without using any real-life reference, then I realized that I cannot, all the things I draw are all somehow similar to real animals, or dozen of them combine or aliens. This really confuses me and lead me to think how I used to create all kinds of a creature when I was small and no longer could, I guess I have seen too much to the point where my imagination could no longer create without references. This gets me thinking of fictional authors have to go through some process to “delete” what they’ve seen and imagine and create something new and unfamiliar.
- Magic was originally formed within the western cultured religion and illusions in science. Later on become a popular component in fictional book or movies, Magic spells or magician are all evolution of magic. Magic is a reflection of people’s desires of extraordinary changes. (Law, Stephen. Warburton, Nigel. “Belief in supernatural beings is totally natural – and false”. aeon. December 2015. https://aeon.co/ideas/belief-in-supernatural-beings-is-totally-natural-and-false); (Jolly, Karen Louise. Gilbert, Andrew Robert. Others. “Magic, Supernatural Phenomenon”.Encyclopædia Britannica. December 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/magic-supernatural-phenomenon.); (“Magic (supernatural)“.WIKIPEDIA. March 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(supernatural).); (Wolchover, Natalie. “Why Everyone Believes in Magic (Even You).” livescience. April 2012. https://www.livescience.com/19665-belief-magic.html)
Which inspired me to explore some other medium that can tell a story but meanwhile do not take away the ” imagination” component. I thought of sounds!
I used Garageband and put different sound effects such as cat bell sounds or even my own voice or recording, together, and created this little fanatical music, that is supposed to inspire listeners to imagine the scene.
This is an illustration of the scene I am trying to create.
The character in this illustration is called Tin Cat, and is a character I created in my childhood, I wrote stories, drew comics for him and still now is frequently coming to my dreams. He is gentle but crazy and mysterious, he is the one that I dreamed of to go on an adventure with and dreamed of coming to my window and take me away. I used him to explore and symbolize my fantasy.
Here is the final result:
Reflection: I am a starter in sound art, and I am not satisfied with the final result, I wish I am more familiar with the medium and gain more skills on how to manage it. And I am not confident of showing it to others because it was my own personal fantasies and also recorded in my own voice. It’s a very personal artwork, which would be effective because eventually, I am exploring my IDENTITY.
