Music Mosiac

Link to What?? by Folke Rabe *note that the video says the title is was?? by all other accounts I have found the title is What??

Let me start off by talking about the experience I had with the song I selected.  I was sitting in the library going through various songs and came across What?? By Folke Rabe.  None of the songs I had listen to really effected me until this one.  As I listened I closed my eyes and had what I would describe as an almost out of body experience.  The low hum of the song reminded me of being in a parking structure late at night –an empty, dark feeling, yet brightly lit place.  I imagined sort of gliding through this garage yet it wasn’t necessarily me kind of like watching through a camera on a dolly. As I listened to the song it was a bit of an eerie creepy feeling.  It felt very new and unsafe but as the track continued the continual exposure to this uneasiness and darkness turned into comfort.  After listening I felt peaceful, calm and sort of joyful.  The goal of my mosaic is to express the emotions I felt during my experience with this song.

In all of the images there is a play between light and darkness.  The images are all shrouded in darkness with enough faith promoting light to beckon you in.   The blurriness extenuates the unknown. For some of the images the emotion is communicated through an implied narrative.  For example, the dark path with the light at the end especially beckons you forward.  Like the song it is dark yet maybe there is some hope to be found.  Also to me I see a sort of mistrust in the first image of the person walking by.  These narratives are abstract and will surely be different for each person but hopefully they evoke some similar emotions. 

But I want to emphasize that the point here is not to make a point but rather express my emotions.  In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at one point the author, Robert Perzig, talks about romantic vs. classic schools of thought.  He explains that romantic thought is all about feeling and ascetics and that classic thought is about form and functionality.  He gives the analogy that riding a motorcycle is romantic and fixing the motorcycle is classic.  I would put myself more in the category of a classic thinker.  Even with art, I pay attention to what it means and want to quantify it.  So I wanted for this assignment, to take a romantic point of view.  I don’t have a practical meaning with these images.

I am trying to take images from the streets of Provo and make them into something more pure and elemental.  As Annie Dillard explains in Seeing, “For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning”.  So that is how these photos are intended, to have at best an abstract narrative but more to give a reaction on a more elemental level; to aid in riding the emotions of the song.

Sources:

Seeing by Annie Dillard
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Perzig
*Link to What?? above.