This final project is meant to tie in the literary text of The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan with the experimental sound art that is Wochende. The Medium is the Massage states that the interpretation of one's message may be distorted when one changes the medium that is being used to communicate the message. In connecting this text to my work, I am attempting to change the medium of the proposed sound art and interpret it through a remix video and a visual art form. I will be recording a sound file that includes the sounds that happen in my day and using that as the inspiration to create the remix and the visual art; in doing this, I am hoping to see just how distorted the message will become. I will be asking the class after my presentation for a general consensus on whether the message seems to be coherent and cohesive with the sound art. Whatever the outcome may be, I will embrace it as part of the creation process.

When changing the medium of a message, is it necessarily terrible for that message to be skewed through the implementation of new media?

"Sound art or sonic art is an art form that focuses on sound as a fundamental (literal or implied) element. Its definition is constantly changing as more and more established and emerging genres are now covered by the umbrella of sound art or sonic art. (Salazar, 2015)."
Sound art has been traditionally recognized as mainly sound sculptures created by traditional artists. However, there are multiple new media forms that it has taken. Wochende by Walter Ruttman being one of the most famous examples. Wochende translates to "weekend" in German. In this sound art, Ruttman recorded the sounds that he encountered within a weekend and set them against a black background. This set the basis for creating sound files that represent the essence of a location. Using this as inspiration, I created a sound file that fits within those parameters. I titled it Ma Journée in order to create continuity within the three forms of media that I created. In this file, the sound recordings of what occur during my day are set within. Alternating backgrounds of the primary painting colors; red, yellow, and blue switch every 5 seconds. This is representational of using the bare minimum to create the plethora of colors that a painter works with; a metaphor for life.

A remix is “a variant of an original recording (as of a song) made by rearranging or adding to the original (Webster, 2018).” Remixes often work in contingency with sound art as artists and designers will implement aspects of or even fragments of sound art files in their work in conjunction with other media in order to create a work that is multimodal and transcends into many spaces. In my case, I chose to continue this remix in the same format as the sound art file. In the remix, I changed the tittle screen to a black background and I changed the text to white. I kept the primary colors rotating on the screen, but then I added in the secondary colors of orange, green, and violet in their corresponding order in the color wheel. Orange was placed between red and yellow, green in between yellow and blue, and violet placed after blue. After these secondary colors have their cycle in the remix, I implemented black and white to represent the shades necessary to add depth and value. The addition of these new colors was to add more dimension to this file and to represent how life continues to become more chaotic as you add more into it. Laid out on top of these colors is a text layer with the binary code for the name of each color. This code was placed in there repeatedly to reinforce the abstract message behind it. I wanted to include the code in order to create more chaos, and to have an aspect that continues from screen-to-screen in order to also add unity to this work. When working with the auditory aspects of this remix, I chose to rearrange them in order to create a different layout to the previously rendered day in Ma Journée. This was a conscious choice as I felt that not all days have the same layout; sometimes life hits you with a surprise and you have to omit or include a different factor into your day in order to fully proceed.

In working with visual space and typography, I began by listing out all the aspects of my day on a piece of notebook paper in class. I chose what a typical day looks like for me, and then I arranged them in the preferred order that they occur. Using this rough outline, I went about my day and recorded sounds that happened and that adhered to that rough format. The white background represents the clean slate of the beginning of a day, and as more actions happen, there is no longer a blank slate. I chose to typographically display the components in my day as a list and then I chose to distort them by skewing them and rotating them, so it became more difficult to decipher each individual action. This is an ode to the complications that come in understanding what one does in a day, when one has a lot going on at once. The vivid red text intersecting throughout the digital piece provides the same energy of chaos and confusion as the abundance of text throughout. This piece is meaning to be unbalanced, chaotic, and difficult to understand. After creating the file, I made it a clickable link that includes the transcript of all that occurred in that day with detailed timing of when each action started within the sound art and remix.