One of the biggest struggles I’ve had with developing my Assignment 4 (besides a little sickness) is my indecisiveness when it comes to picking what I want to ‘notice’. Throughout Assignment 3, my main theme/idea I focused on noticing was the interactions between nature and industry and their byproducts. While that came quite naturally to me, new ideas for the audio-visual component of Assignment 4 have not come as easy. Throughout this semester of Seeing the Unseen V2, I’ve had this fascination with ‘stillness’ and ‘movement within stillness’. Almost like a real-life cinemagraphs. While I’m not entirely sure how and where I want to explore noticing through stillness, and small movements, something that inspired me to lean towards stillness was this poem by Myronn Hardy named STILLNESS.
While this poem has nothing inherently to do with this course, they way Hardy builds this scene and has the reader go through this delicately crafted journey where everything feels still and silent. Hardy’s beautifully constructed passages tell this emotionally gripping story about lost childhood, empty promises and torn relationships. But to me, it feels so self-driven. While Hardy has meticulously crafted the structure of this poem, I feel like I am exploring it alone, the first time ever. That feeling is something I want to evoke in my interactive final piece for Assignment 4.
If I were to visually imagine this poem, the whole world would be still, with a camera panning around to these focal points within a story, all taking place in one location, a house alone on a hill overlooking the coast. This isolated, still, moment in time location is something I might consider focusing on for the audio-visual aspect of my Assignment 4. Like one park, one house, one room. These are just first ideas, but I feel a lot more confident in exploring noticing now for my final assignment after unpacking that poem.
Hardy, M. (2015). STILLNESS. Callaloo, 38(2), 328-329,426. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/docview/1680991007?accountid=13552