New addition to my arsenal, and very likely to become my main camera.

The first half of my senior year here at the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design is done and over. With half the year gone, half of the time I have to work on my IP project is gone as well. Three months of conceptualizing, discussion, and testing over, with just under three months left to finish more conceptualizing, more testing, and all my actual production work.

So, Where Am I At?

The concept I started with some months ago was to do general infographic work using a variety of data sets as the information I was to transform, then make some sort of fine art print of the resulting illustration using a medium such as woodblock, screen print, or what have you. Now, my concept has transformed from visualizing data in general, to visualizing a more specific sort of data, music. More specifically my concept is that I am exploring the connection between music itself, and static and moving visualizations of music. I had originally wanted to not visualize just music because I thought I might be pigeonholing myself into only showing in the end, to my eventual viewers, that I’m only able to visualize one type of data source. I thought it would be a better portfolio project if I showed how I can effectively visualize all sorts of data and show how flexible I am in the work I can do as an potential employee.

At this point I have three illustrations done on the digital side of things, three videos done, one complete set of woodblocks cut, one quarter of the blocks are cut for the second illustration, the silk screens for the third are ready and waiting to be covered in emulsion and exposed. The ideas for the fourth and fifth illustrations and pseudocode for the programs is in my mind ready executed.

What Went Right?

I am super glad I decided to visualize just music. It’s super fun; I like working the programming, I like turning music I like into illustrations, and as much as I like working on the computer, I love doing the hands on, fine art side of things. It’s even been suggested by one of my GSI’s that I could pigeonhole myself more, perhaps by doing something like sticking to one particular musical genre. Honestly, there’s too much music out there that I want to work on to just limit myself to one genre.

What Went Wrong?

Time management, plain and simple. Personally, compared to the rest of my class I’ve been doing pretty well with keeping up with my projected timeline. Sometimes though I’d get stuck on one problem and just spend hours more time on it than I should have and it all adds up, little by little. Combine my programmers-block with the time it takes to cut actual woodblocks by hand, and the time it takes to learn how to work RhinoCAM and all the in’s and out’s of the Roland 4-axis mill and you’ve got yourself quite a large chunk of time, not exactly wasted, but spent on the little things. In my endeavor to learn how to cut my second blocks on the Roland mill I wasted around eight square feet of MDF and something like 12 working hours making mistakes and tweaking the feeds/speeds and bit sizes, but I eventually got it right.

Another thing that went wrong is that I thought a little too grandiose in the beginning of the year with regards to what I’d be able to create in what is actually such a short amount of time. I had originally wanted to create at least eight final prints and two bronze sculptures. It doesn’t sound like to much to me, but in actuality, it is a lot of work.

Endgame

I think in the end I’m going to have five or six final prints, each with a video that will play beneath the print (with headphones to listen to the music) to show the relationship between the music, the moving visual representation of the music, and the static visual representation of the music. There will also be a kiosk that will have videos of each song rendered out using all the different visualizers so the viewer can see how the visualization changes with the various different musical inputs.

I’m very excited to continue with my project this next semester.

As some of you may know, I’m working on music visualization for my senior IP project. And recently I came across this rather unique way of visualizing music. It’s a bit masochistic, but hey, it’s damn interesting at the same time.

You Know I Love You from Alex Jacque on Vimeo.

Something I’m working on, an early version. Made in Processing.