My midterm for The Poetics of Space attempts to address the blank space of the Unity development environment, but also the blank space of starting the act of creation. This is a heavily auditory experience, so please watch with headphones:
There are a few things happening here.
First, technical. The sounds you hear outside of the dialog are 12 small portions of a recording of the words “green apples”. Two different recordings of “green apples” were taken, each sliced the same way, for 24 samples in total. Each of these very small snippets of sound are assigned to a block, and looped. One block is blank for each take.
Therefore, each block emits a droning sound. “Gr” of green is one slice: looping as”GrGrGrGrGr”. The next is “re”: “rerererere”, and so on. This is the droning you hear as you get closer to the blocks. However, upon having the blocks approach you linearly and at a certain speed, you hear the original recording.
Conceptually, I’m thinking of ways to imbue meaning to what may otherwise be ‘featureless’ or ‘boring’ objects in digital space. I asked my friend Akmyrat to choose the color of the focus of my piece. He not only provides a color, but provides a story and a context to this color. What may otherwise just be observed as green rectangles now have meaning. Someone chose this green. There are old friends and rituals in this green. There is food there. The green is constructed from associations and memories of someone who has now whispered in your ear.
To further the metaphor, I’ve placed his words into the objects themselves. The green apples are inside of these shapes, letting themselves be known as long as we have the proper context and perspective with which to understand and experience them. The rectangles speak to us when we know how to listen to them.
These are the things that can possibly be embedded into our digital art practices. Discrete decisions of color, movement or shape can carry a potential worlds inside of them. However in our final output, these worlds can often be overlooked (even by our own eyes).
As creative coders/creative technologists/net artists and so on, we try to create meaningful art through technology. We try to find ways to make pixels, polygons, frequencies, letters, numbers and electrical states of on and off into something compelling and soulful. I’ve tried to intellectually boil down the challenge of this practice. If I can make a rectangle, a color or a fraction of a second of sound into a kind of human connection… I can have a fundamental approach that scales to many shapes, many colors and many sounds.
A digital take on Mark Twain’s quotable could be,“Don’t use a five-dollar polygon when a fifty-cent polygon will do.”
Akmyrat’s Green Apples RGB colors are 56, 177, 81