This project combines imagery with sound through a conscious delivery system. It is the conscious consequence of how a sound affects a chosen subject area within a location photographically—a sensory creation through a visual output. This project was created while travelling around Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto, and Hiroshima.
This project was a personal experimentation for creative rehabilitation after graduation. An opportunity arose after graduation to retain my grip on the art I've been creating. After leaving university, it's normal to subside in creating; people go years without new creations.
By September, I felt deflated, struggling creatively and travelling to Tokyo after landing from a twelve-hour flight. I wandered aimlessly, ending up in a park. I sat on a bench, put my headphones in and started photographing what I could see. I realised how often I prefer to photograph with music. This concept developed, photographing whilst listening to music everywhere I went, from songs I enjoyed to those more unpleasant, documenting their conscious effect visually.
Though I was responsible for taking the photographs and selecting the songs, I'm not convinced of the amount of outcome control I had, of why, or what I was photographing. Within the merging process, 90% control is relinquished, as the images and sounds connect on a physical level. The three images are each composed of three photographs from one location, and a single song from each place.
The variations in photographic style (digital, film: colour, black & white) and the music also varied (from vocals to others instrumental or electronically made). The experimental nature of this work is subjected to tests and experimentation that is required. It is the combination of the lyrical impact it has on our consciousness, documented through visual imagery. Choices in sounds significantly impact consciousness, becoming held within a moment. Focused and actively unaware of how the music is affecting our chosen subject.
The more control we involuntarily release, the more we grasp to retain. However, it is the unawareness in the modern technological age of how lyrical devices use the data we accumulate, deciphering our individual preferences and how these feed into the technological consciousness we create. This mass information we have collected. In the age of millennials, born into the advancing technological age, it's almost like having a second consciousness. Only this one lives in code, in data in a non-biological form. This project is part one, developing into turning an image into the frequency it admits. Reading colours, grain, and pixels is similar to reading the symbols of music; if we can see sound, then possibly we can hear imagery.
