Wednesday 11 March 2009

Nothing In Moderation

Prepare your eyes, for I am about to unleash an incendiary payload of 'What Is A Line' work upon your heads. I've been trying to work out the best way to visualise sound with line, I've been using music software (Reason, Ableton) to create music visualisations, and to be honest, it's quite restrictive as to what you can do, there are only so many 'wave' and 'bar' visualisations out there. One way to get around this is to layer them on top of each other, this creates more interesting visuals, and some of them end up looking like landscapes - a lot like the 'Unknown Pleasures' artwork I was first inspired by.
Anyway, I was looking into Peter Saville a bit more after that initial atomic flash of inspiration, I've read the Factory Records Graphic Album [Where I first got the idea from...] in full, and from that I've been on his personal website. Take an eyeful of this:


That's the splash page on his website, see the bars making up mountainous terrain? I saw that and though 'Wow, Peter Saville, what a guy.' And decided to play around with his idea a bit to see what I could make of it. God bless Illustrator:


Copying that single wave and layering it has made it so much more interesting, all thanks to Saville. Staying up all night while my Leeds Met contemporaries slumber peacefully, all to meet deadlines, feels less like agony knowing that good ol' Saville will have done the same thing before I was even born.

In the image at the bottom, I've shaded it in Live Paint to give it more of a 3-D feel but, I'll avoid doing that with any final resolutions because it's escaping the entrapment of 'line' - and even if it isn't, I'll feel like I'm cheating.


I've used Illustrator [Swiss Army Programme] to replicate the Saville website, I started off with a set of lines drawn out, selected them individually and moved them around to line up with the wave lines produced by 'Evil Has Never' by Union of Knives. I really love the visuals I'm getting from this, and I don't feel the need to over-complicate my work when it comes to the What Is A Line brief, embellishment is a prison in this case.

1 comment:

lindseymarshallbagd said...

This is really interesting!! It reminds me of an album cover.. Andyrew brought a pic of it in when did tha last groupie thing with our contemporary designer research work stuff. I can't remember which album it is, but its good! Ask him. :)