My name is Ken Wu and I completed my music poster on Misfit Lunatic by Missio.
When creating the poster for Misfit Lunatic, I reflected on my experience with “One Black Square” where my compositions tended to be more abstract, but were focused on creating movement with the combination of geometric shapes and organic shapes. I found that compositions that have a variety of shapes of different sizes could express movement more vividly as compared to works that were more symmetrical and similar in shape and size. Thus in my work, I tried to include various shapes of letters to shift the movement between my work. Moreover, I used “I’s” to create the visualization of sound to represent the rhythm of music felt when listening. As the song includes vibrations and movement of sound waves, I felt that it gave off a feeling of sound coming from all directions hence I represented this with sound waves occurring everywhere.
I focused specifically on Gestalt’s theory of similarity to create my work with the sound waves being of similar shape. Moreover, his theory of proximity was also applied throughout the work to create a sense of unity in between the chaotic rhythm of the song, essentially to represent the chaotic unity within the piece. My work doesn’t really imply a clear figure and ground which was intentional as the nature of the music doesn’t seem to have closed boundaries that it stays within.
When I was creating the work, it was a process of replaying the same song dozens of times throughout the whole time of creating the poster. At first, this was to obtain a mental image of the poster for inspiration, but this later became my method of constantly refer to the music when creating the poster. Due to this, it helped create my full perception of this piece that continuously developed when listening. The most significant steps that I took throughout the process would be experimentation of creating the illusion of value and of sound waves through putting different thicknesses of lines together. Failures didn’t really happen after the initial mental image was created, but it was only after many listens that the image was seen. Before I had the mental image of the poster, my mind was empty and my design looked rather “jazzy” as compared to the “electronic vibrating” vibe that the design ended up being. When I showed my design to the class during the mid-critique, it seemed to me that the feeling of the design matched the music very well. I received feedback to experiment with using lines to create more movement through shifts of composition which was attempted but I ultimately did not make major changes as the movement shifts didn’t convey the energy I felt from the piece of music.
I’m personally very satisfied with how my piece represents the music. I don’t think that there are major alterations I would make if there was more time. In the case that there was a more time, I would most likely spend it on slightly altering the geometric style of the bottom half to include some curvatures for smoother transition.
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