Portfolio Experimentation I

Over the past few weeks, I have been experimenting with how I can approach my individual pieces to fill my portfolio and add variety. Before my arrival to London, I was mainly using paint to portray images I had in my head, whereas over the last two-tree years I transitioned to using sound to convay and interpret these images. For these few pieces I have conceptualized, it has almost felt like a resugence and a conjunction of my previous practice and my current practice. I recently learned of this electromagnetic paint that opened my eyes to lots of different methods regarding sound in an installation/sculpture/tangible setting. With this paint you can essentially turn whatever the paint is sitting on into a sensor for sound, rather it be a synth or just a sampler type of situation. From this is where my ‘synth quilt’ idea stemmed from and evolved a bit. In a whole installation setting, I had this vision of the quilt being the center piece and surrounding it is eight screenprints designed in tangent to the quilt. With the electromagnetic paint, I can turn the quilt and the screenprints into individual sound sculptures and have the installtion placed in a spatialized way where the sound coming from the surrounding screenprints (tangently setup with each monitor) is individually creating a sonic enviornment with the trigger of each print. I still need to work on my research and my references for the development of these pieces, but this was my initial idea and I am still experimenting and working with it.

Some of my favorite pieces of work over the last few years has been centered around a feeling of home, missing home or portraying what I believe home to be. In these past visits home I’ve had, I have collected recordings of special moments in time with my family that I have turned into ambient synth-led soundscapes, which has kind of led into a vein of work inspired by these soundscapes and recordings. These few pieces I wanted to feel famlial or almost tribuatory to these moments. From Milo’s lecture where they spoke of AI image generation and how it can help jump start an idea, I wrote into DALL-E the best description I could of these recordings and moments I experianced to generate images in a stylized way. With these images, I took them into photoshop and colored and cropped them into a way I wished (I was going for a cyanotype feel) to screenprint. Below is the first experimentation with the screenprints, my next step is to paint on the electromagnetic paint in a way that I see fit that will be inviting to touch and interact with. After this inital testing, I will begin to curate the designs for the other screenprints and string together the sonic enviornment I want these prints to hold. Right now I am a little intimidated to get into the hardware side of creating a synth or a sampler, it is just not my area of expertise, so I need to discuss and research further into these methods.

*synth quilt is going to come after this string of work is fully underway.