Interdisciplinary 5
The road goes on…
An overview of this semester so far:
At this point in time I’m about 25% on my way to completing my original milestone of a 5 minute film. Last Friday was critical in terms of work completion. If I can get at least two more full days a week in town and in the darkroom over the next 3 weeks, I will be able to surpass my original goal.
The prints are a bit dark – but I personally quite like how they’ve turned out. But as they will be scanned in anyway for the film, they will be naturally lit by the scanning procedure anyway, so they will look their best once inserted into the film. It has been nice to utilise the skills I learnt last year in a different module (Photography 3) to now use in my third year for I.P5, it feels like serious progress has been made over time in terms of my personal development/learning.
I do wish to create some form of soundtrack for this film or soundscape, I used to use Logic but as I don’t own a MAC anymore this will prove difficult, as I will need to buy/download a lot of sound packs to boost Presonus Artist One’s (DAW) free but lacklustre sounds (in comparison to Logic’s). I will approach this once the prints have been completed and the timeline is in place within Davinci Resolve.
I am glad I went down the route of film and not digital, it feels more substantial and real to me, especially for this project as the photos taken could not live without the light or the given mechanical nature of the camera – this also goes for the times of day I have tried to work around, in regards to lighting. When you see prints you feel a personal and constructed feel to them, especially when the artist has developed them himself.
*Insert scans of work here, with audio*
Annotations from Sutcliffe’s ‘An Introduction to Magic’
Here are my findings and personal takes from the reading, in preparation for this week’s class:
‘’What would it mean for us to accept the mysterious currents of magical intrigue that animate human cultures with the spirit of speculation as an unceasing continuum? What if we had never really been disenchanted?’’ (Sutcliffe, Introduction//Magic: A Gramarye for Artists)
– This extract says to me that at one point in human existence we were of a spiritual people/society and that somewhere along the line we lost our way. This is something I personally believe, and that belief is that spirituality once governed us as a species, but we have forgotten that path due to distractions, capitalism and indifference. What Sutcliffe is saying to me here is that what if we accept that way of thinking again and what if we had never truly lost it? The question beckons a lot of answers.
‘’Artistic interest in magic’s diverse cultures has commonly mirrored their resistance to conservative, consensual realities, from the hetero-normative structures of monogamy to a rejection of human exceptionalism and the mechanized destruction of the environment…’’ (Sutcliffe, Introduction// Magic: A Gramarye for Artists)
– My interpretation of this is that the art world and the art created these pioneers of the renaissance especially, are essentially fighting back but in the way of art. That true magic comes in the form of artistic expression and can make an especially big statement of the changes of the society norm.
‘’Magic is mythopoetic, it sustains itself on the active creation of inhabitable myths’’. (Sutcliffe, Introduction// Magic: A Gramarye for Artists)
– This means that magic has carried on existing in the form of legends. From King Arthur to Hercules and more. To me it’s that the mythos we inherit through word of mouth can ignite the soul of the human spirit. Making us feel something powerful or mystical about the tales of old. We feel a sense of magic when we hear of the legends of the past, or of courage in the face of adversity.
On a side note, this is something that Tolkien wished for, because in English mythos, there isn’t much to go on. For instance, King Arthur is a French mythos and tale. Tolkien wished for The Lord of the Rings to become a mythos of some kind for English heritage.
Bibliography
Sutcliffe, J. (n.d.). Introduction// Magic: A Gramarye for Artists. In J. Sutcliffe, Introduction to Magic (p. 13).
Sutcliffe, J. (n.d.). Introduction// Magic: A Gramarye for Artists. In J. Sutcliffe, An Introduction to Magic (p. 16).
Sutcliffe, J. (n.d.). Introduction//Magic: A Gramarye for Artists. In J. Sutcliffe, Introduction to Magic (p. 14).
