Earlier this week I spent a couple of days in Derby, doing a mini residency at QUAD as I have been selected as their Digital Participation Artist (?)! It’s actually my first time ever doing a residency, which is possibly a bit surprising considering that I have been active as an ~artiste~ for a number of years now.
I got given access to a studio, and basically spent most of my time holed up in there, moving between my laptop and my tablet and my sketchbook, mostly trying to plot out the details for the upcoming show I shall do at QUAD, opening late September 2024. I’ll be in what they call “extra gallery spaces”, which are basically strange inbetween spaces spread across the building, so figuring out the setup in quite fun/challenging.
Because the spaces can be thought of as running in a line as you walk through the building, and because I’ve been thinking about narrative structures again, I’m leaning towards revisiting the ‘monomyth’ (hero’s journey) setup in the exhibition and making bits of new work to reflect on that mechanic. I say revisit, bc I already structured a major body of video work around the hero’s journey, the Monomyth: gaiden series I worked on between 2018-2022. I can’t fully trace the thought process back right now, but at some point I had a vision that I need to look at the structure MORE, or at least differently, maybe because the Monomyth: gaiden series was more about the subject (the hero) as they go through the journey across the multiplanar worlds/cosmos, but I yearn for the abstraction of the structure itself, AND I could title in Shin Monomyth !!! Like the Shin Godzilla etc films. It also brings me back a bit to the Youtube video that’s titled something like ‘Maeda Jun’s monomyth’, which I only half-watched bc it’s less abstract and more an analysis of Key’s narrative setups/the nakige 泣きゲー (crying games) formula, but I nonetheless think about it, because I’ve been mulling over Maeda Jun’s works for a good while now, and making an effort the slowly work through his repertoire. And I kind of want to grasp the monomyth in a way that connects to what I feel at the core of Maeda’s works, but this is a connection that’s not concrete enough yet to put into words, though it is a bit like that sudden moment in Charlotte when Tomori Nao talks about how listening to Zhiend makes places her up against the sublime (my reading), and thus she wants to get into MV editing. (Digital editing !!!!!! Something about porous materials, flowing between different screens, slicing into the world….)
In any case, this is the vague idea, and during the residency I sketched out segments of it, mostly the beginning (‘Departure/Call to Adventure’), because as always I’m uncertain where I will end up.
Because the spaces can be thought of as running in a line as you walk through the building, and because I’ve been thinking about narrative structures again, I’m leaning towards revisiting the ‘monomyth’ (hero’s journey) setup in the exhibition and making bits of new work to reflect on that mechanic. I say revisit, bc I already structured a major body of video work around the hero’s journey, the Monomyth: gaiden series I worked on between 2018-2022. I can’t fully trace the thought process back right now, but at some point I had a vision that I need to look at the structure MORE, or at least differently, maybe because the Monomyth: gaiden series was more about the subject (the hero) as they go through the journey across the multiplanar worlds/cosmos, but I yearn for the abstraction of the structure itself, AND I could title in Shin Monomyth !!! Like the Shin Godzilla etc films. It also brings me back a bit to the Youtube video that’s titled something like ‘Maeda Jun’s monomyth’, which I only half-watched bc it’s less abstract and more an analysis of Key’s narrative setups/the nakige 泣きゲー (crying games) formula, but I nonetheless think about it, because I’ve been mulling over Maeda Jun’s works for a good while now, and making an effort the slowly work through his repertoire. And I kind of want to grasp the monomyth in a way that connects to what I feel at the core of Maeda’s works, but this is a connection that’s not concrete enough yet to put into words, though it is a bit like that sudden moment in Charlotte when Tomori Nao talks about how listening to Zhiend makes places her up against the sublime (my reading), and thus she wants to get into MV editing. (Digital editing !!!!!! Something about porous materials, flowing between different screens, slicing into the world….)
In any case, this is the vague idea, and during the residency I sketched out segments of it, mostly the beginning (‘Departure/Call to Adventure’), because as always I’m uncertain where I will end up.
For the project at QUAD I also came up with an idea for a workshop about maps of different worlds and games, loosely based on the various diagrams I have drawn in my sketchbook (example in pic below) over the past few years, trying to pin down the topologies of multiplanar-realities, ie. how you may draw a map for a place that exists across multiple dimensions at once (like an anime pilgrimage location, both on the map in the real worlds but also in the world of the anime), or a place that is at multiple different coordinates at once (like a fictional town that is built up of segments of different IRL places, for example the town in Air that is a patchwork of very different IRL points across Honshu).
The idea is to start the workshop with an exercise building on this, then use the maps made this way as a basis for an interactive little game, using the phone-based game making tool of Downpour, where you can very simply make clickable game screens using photos and text and digital pics. There will be more of these taking place in September too, around the show’s opening.
The idea is to start the workshop with an exercise building on this, then use the maps made this way as a basis for an interactive little game, using the phone-based game making tool of Downpour, where you can very simply make clickable game screens using photos and text and digital pics. There will be more of these taking place in September too, around the show’s opening.
Other Derby explorations included Otaku World, the local anime/weeb shop, which actually had some rare and unexpected stuff in stock; also I learnt from QUAD that they are involved in organising screenings and various other cultural activities, which seems awesome. I bought a small item to support them. I was also impressed they had a Spoon 2di magazine from 2018 in stock, seemingly random, and it had an Idolish7 tokushuu, parts of which I read - some bits of an interview with Abe Atsushi, where rather serendipitously he talks about the song Maybe (a solo song for his character Osaka Sougo) that I happen to have been obsessing over in recent weeks. I nearly bought it, but couldn’t quite bring myself to buy it at the price of 34 pounds, even though it may actually be a rare back number……… (Also covered Banana Fish! Which I happen to be reading atm! So many coincidences.)
Otherwise I ate lots of nice food, and went for a long walk along the river in the one sunny evening I had. Every decent city must have a river in it, otherwise it doesn’t feel real.
Otherwise I ate lots of nice food, and went for a long walk along the river in the one sunny evening I had. Every decent city must have a river in it, otherwise it doesn’t feel real.
Lastly, this excellent pic I took at the Museum of Making - my artistic practice should come with a “beware of trains” warning too….
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