Nat Rosa
MAGCD Musings

Tag: Development

Categories
Methods of Investigation

Investigation – Development

Following the third week of feedback, I decided to develop the idea of scoring the soundscape as if it were music, creating my own notation for each sound.

The initial experiment fell short of my expectations, but allowed me to realize that I was missing the most important part of the soundscape: silence. Showing the silence in between each sound gave the work structure and allowed for legibility.

Furthermore, I became aware of the importance of showing sound in the way that it is experienced, rather than the way that it is intellectualized. That is, when a plane passes overhead it registers as a plane, not as a collection of sounds (whirr, roar, whine) like I had been working with. 

Creating a notation for the physical sound itself (airplane, footsteps, passing car) gave the work the context it lacked. 

Finally, arranging the sounds in a circle with 60 spokes (one for each minute in an hour), created a structure that was both repeatable and easily understandable, resolving the ambiguity that had plagued the project from the beginning.

Categories
Methods of Translating

Translation – Development

Following the final week of feedback, I found that again, my project lacked enough context to be understood, especially by those who were not familiar with the film.

I also found that while I was successful in translating the medium of the source material from film to illustration, the meaning remained essentially the same.

One really useful piece of feedback pointed out that the way the coloring book was structured was reminiscent of playing cards.

This led me to the creation of my own version of a Loteria, a Mexican game similar to bingo played with 54 cards. Each card depicts a single item or person, and while some subjects are generic (sun, tree, watermelon), others are quintessentially Mexican (nopal, flag, chalupa).

Seen from a foreign perspective, Clueless could be perceived as a tale about a girl living the American Dream. Cher, in a sense, has won the lottery. Her world is made up of the wealth and material possessions that people dream of.

In this project, the illustrations of the film becpme icons of her existence, things that as a whole painted a picture of a life lived in American privilege.

Creating the Loteria it became possible to transcend the narrative of the film itself, to capture more than just the zeitgeist of the 90s, but a more profound truth of the aspirational nature of the lives depicted.

By keeping the cards in Spanish and using Mexican slang specifically for various cards, the game also became a social commentary, poking deliberate fun at the world of the film while also acknowledging it as something to aspire to, like winning the lottery.

Categories
Methods of Cataloguing

Cataloguing – Development

Following the feedback from the second week of this project, I reflected on how to give the color catalog context and include more of the source material in the outcome.

I experimented with the idea of creating individual fish profiles, anthropomorphizing each amphibian and using the names of their corresponding colors as if they were dating profiles.

I took a page out of New York Magazine’s Lookbook, an irreverent compilation of New Yorkers at events around the city. The idea was to inject some humor and lightheartedness in what I felt had become a lifeless project, despite it being about color.

The outcome is as yet to be defined, but this experiment comes closer in spirit to the work I envision this becoming.