MUSIC 256A: WEEK 3
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Chp 3: Visual Design
Principle 3.14: Savor Strange Design Loops
I found this principle the most interesting and thought-provoking concept in this chapter. I feel like so many of us are drawn to beautiful creepiness and strangeness, and Escher’s designs really embody that. It’s fascinating to think about embodying that same fascinating, roundabout imagery in visual design on a platform like Unity, where motion can add a whole other dimension.
I was immediately reminded of my favorite animated short from Short of the Week (it’s kind of one of my comfort videos).
This short captures so much of what fascinates me in art — the eerie, grating music, the way the voices overlap and feed into each other to form a new narrative built off of separate conversations. The part that this chapter specifically reminded me of was the animation style. As the audio narrative develops, the corresponding illustrations flow into each other similarly. A boat turns into an aging face, which turns into a fire, which turns into a desolate island shore. People’s tangents, natural parts of the way they talk and think, turn into entire visual journeys. Watching one image warp into another is so mesmerizing. It’s not directly a “strange loop” or visual illusion, but it’s an adaptation of the same idea to fit a more narrative structure.
Along the same lines, I was also reminded of Kiyan Forootan’s 3D digital art. He’s known for creating digital art that uses crazy textile and food-like textures, but my favorite works of his involve motion. My favorite pieces are the ones created by freezing a body in motion at several points of time, creating this beautiful, surreal digital sculpture, like in the videos and photos linked below. Every time I enter a digital art space, I think about his art, a bridge between the 2D art I create and am drawn to and the world of digital art in motion. In motion, the actual videos these screenshots come from capture such a beautiful sense of motion and time, but the 2D renderings captured in screenshots hold their own kind of beauty and motion.
I’ve been thinking a lot about integrating audio into a visual narrative. It’s easier to create a narrative out of audio — people’s voices or music or singing. It’s a whole other medium to create narratives out of a digital synthesizer, essentially. The case study on soundpeek and the way a sine wave with time-varying frequency creates its own visual pattern inspired me to think more about the ways audio and image intersect. I want to think about my audio in terms of the mathematical significance and visual output more than the auditory familiarity. I’m really interested in finding beauty in audio that sounds noisy or abstract.
