#this is my humble request to send me sp art

[existential-extrovert]

The way everyone draws teen Stan is so gender I love it sm

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Interim - A Mad Dash

Beyond our Instagram group chat; a huge chunk of group organization takes place in our dedicated "Planning Slides" document.

Olivia had taken the reins with getting our progress and ideas jotted down; which has really helped keep us all on pace.

Alongside a timetable, these slides act as one big checklist - with sections for planning materials, room painting, and a moodboard.

We all invited friends and family to the exhibition, with an estimated 40 people checking it out at once - to which we've been informed could be on the unsafe side, as 2E Dark is not the most crowd friendly.

The room is also a little inconspicuous. Sandwiched between two studio spaces, we should aim to draw people in with wall text. There's also talks to remove the door in favor of a curtain.

On the first Tuesday of the study break, (almost) all of us met for a discussion. Written atop this note page is the 'pipeline' for getting our space primed and ready for presenting.

Two days later, we met up with Mike Bridgeman to lock in our equipment requests.

There were bundles of extension cords, a projector and three spotlights already in our space, so a lot of the borrowing would be on my end.

This was a little humbling. Turns out - I don't know much about mixing. There was an expectation that I would be practicing mixing in my own time - or in the very least learning more about it, and I watched Mike's smile quickly fade as he had to explain that there are different inputs for mono and stereo sound, and different audio jacks, too! If I wanted to play music from four different MP3 players, I'd need a very large, expensive mixer for the task! And amps are a thing that exist too! Jesus Christ.

It needed some more thought; and I have a lot to learn. From this, I started re-drafting my presentation. I was not letting go of my driving concept, but how could I adapt it?

I came up with an alternative, and emailed Mike.

Back at home, I started toying around with SM64 loops in Audacity, with the idea that I could load them onto my SP-202, and divvy the mono tracks up from there.

It's a unique challenge - create four 'songs' that can play over each other at different timing, all in the same key and timbral range.

I amassed seven loops in Audacity, and arranged them in a song format for your enjoyment.

While some of the more 'textural' sounds that came from this are worth looking at further, such things as drum beats and chord progressions quickly become a slippery slope.

The same problem forms as did back with my presentation back in Week 6 - where the processing is too clean, and the action of sampling is lost on the listener.

Instead, the loops have to be rougher. Simpler. More jarring. The SP-202 was going to be used regardless, but instead of Audacity being the middleman, the SP-202 is where the bulk of the composition takes place, and I'll load sounds right into it.

This was also the time that my group began drawing up our pamphlet. I let my creative desires get the better of me and largely left myself with designing the whole thing - however I did consult the group every step of the way, sending screenshots and drawn-ideas:

As a successor to our proposal document, I made sure to format the pages in Word, as this meant the formatting could actually transfer all the symbols over to a PDF. Microsoft Word also comes with some ancient, deep-down features that can still be used: like this palm tree border which really ups the tackiness factor.

The cat you see was picked by Ruby and I, when we were Googling 2004-2010-era cat images. This one is from 2010, and immediately struck us as representative of our shared concept.

To match the font-graphics theme, I gave the image similar treatment - using point-and-click-paths to give this clean look without any line wobbliness. I also turned the whole thing into a vector, allowing it to be infinitely scaled, like a font!

And I wonder why I'm sleep deprived.

I was battling a bit of music block at this point, but Em was a great motivator for getting my sampler back out and jumping back into it.

The workflow was straightforward. No pre-preparing samples in Audacity, just recording them straight in and going from there. Old school.

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Lethal Lava Land

Koji Kondo - Inside The Castle Walls

Koji Kondo - File Select

Recording back into audacity, I would then trim-up the tracks, loop preferred sections, and bring up the volume. No further polish from there, this was time for the SP-202 to shine.

Listening back on Time Isn't Real Strategy, copying the mono tracks into each ear and pacing them slightly didn't cut it, and the resulting sound was hollow. With the mono inputs of the mixer in mind, it was best to let that mono goodness shine.

Mike got back in touch, and the ball was rolling once more. This time, he'd acquired four MP3 players, along with a mixer, which for the meantime, was still sitting in the Block 6 recording studio.

This meetup was a godsend. My two-MP3-player-audio-split idea could work, sure, but with the power of a stereo-to-mono jack converter, using four MP3 players was possible again.

We tested on the mixer, and I got a crash course for how I'd be wiring up my project in practice. I needed four 3.5-to-3.5mm (stereo) cables, two of which he could provide. An equal amount of 3.5mm-to-6.5mm (mono) jack converters were also needed, of which I'd also need to buy another two.

Hooking one MP3 player up with this 3.5-6.5mm, stereo-to-mono array, we tested the mixer audio - which was great! The cables, jacks and all four MP3 players were provided in a Tupperware container, and I head off to Jaycar to get the rest of my equipment.

Back with the team, I locked my attention into getting the pamphlet done, first and foremost. Olivia and the others went into our newly assigned space for some mapping, as we needed a top-down view. These were their notes, along with some format planning for our pamphlet.

By this point, the first page of the pamphlet had shaped out nicely, with all subsequent pages following suit.

Following another pamphlet-making session on Word, I got back around to my sampler, and loaded up all eight pads with enough material for three whole tracks.

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Game Start

Koji Kondo - Peach's Message

Koji Kondo - Powerful Mario

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Dire, Dire Docks

In-Game Ambience, "Outside Peach's Castle"

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Cave Dungeon

Koji Kondo - Inside The Castle Walls

The text on the front of our pamphlet was tricky, as we all had a fair bit in common, but enough differences that making one big mission statement would not be easy. Olivia shared around a word document with the first draft I made, and we each had a hand in editing in/out parts that best represented our works, to which I made the final edit, which the others greenlit.

We went with the following:

"OH HI – we come from internet. It’s been around for about two decades longer than we have. In that time, it has expanded exponentially alongside the development of the devices we now glue our minds and fingertips to. We frolicked freely in these pixelated fields, while the world played catch up. Where did those good times go? It was all so fun, but how much of it was real? At best, it was a lens. At worst, a mirror.  "We didn’t feel alone, but nobody else was in the room with us. It wasn’t an exclusive experience, our consciousness was part of a collective, our realities fractured and sewn back together. The emotions of self and stranger were intertwined and projected back out; and as we retrospect, simulated familiarities pull us back into the maelstrom of bygone emotions, a haze of ‘better days’ to feed into our past, present, and future. How do we get back there?  "The digital age is a perpetual melancholy, the past unobtainable – but that is all the motivation we need to chase it endlessly. Each of our artworks follow memories and experiences in these real and virtual spaces; familiar motifs spoon-fed into our young minds, and the lives that are both fictional and our own.  "From thereon, we are what we eat.  "This is Personal Storage."

Stevee-Renee's portraits came in, and we each got to submitting our individual work profiles for adding into the pamphlet, to which I formatted like so:

I then got back into Audacity for the rest of the tracks...

…pushing through a couple late nights...

…until everything sounded just right!