Reflective Statement

This first assignment certainly proved to be challenging, but in a way that benefited me. It’s safe to say that the creative process is not always easy. With minimal experience in using Max, I was already limiting my ideas to what was realistic. In my solo project, I decided to take the idea of an association between visuals and audio, but in quite a simple way. I chose to select colours and songs that I found a connection between, and then created what I called a ‘Colour Playlist’. I simply opened Adobe Illustrator, made some rectangles and played around with the colours until i created ones I personally liked. I then went through many of my Spotify playlists, listening for ‘soft’ songs, with minimal lyrics and more just sounds that I found fit well with my chosen colours. Once I had my materials, the process of actually creating the interactive art on Max was my next daunting task. I definitely overestimated my struggle. I think I doubted myself way too much when it came to creating my Patcher. My notes on what objects meant/did what were a lifesaver, and with assistance from Camille and my peers, I managed to figure things out over the course of the week. That isn’t to say that I didn’t struggle though. Even with notes and help, when on my own the mess of wires and my overthinking ended up with me confusing myself, even if what I was doing was pretty simple. I did eventually figure things out and have now gained more confidence in connecting audio and visual objects, as well as finally understanding how to connect certain actions to keys on the keyboard to allow for them to be triggered with ease. I am happy with the outcome of my solo work, but as I came to the end of creating it, I couldn’t help but consider that maybe making it more interactive would make it a better interactive art piece overall. In future, I’d like to think I could potentially develop the work so audiences can create their own places. I could allow them to piece colours and songs together, allowing them to express their differentiating options and ideas as to what songs they feel match what colours.

As for the group task, my group had a solid idea, each of us seemed content with the concept and through our discussion and planning, we had big ideas to include audio, create a broad range of filters and incorporate audio. Unfortunately for us, our experience and understanding with Max wasn’t enough to reach our exact visions. We had written in our project plan about having a diverse range of filters, and hopefully audio to go with each of these, but after a lot of trialling and playing around in Max, we realised we may have been biting off more than we could chew. Our idea was strong, but the process was hard when none of us were comfortable or educated enough on the program to execute as we’d hoped. For most of the process of creating our project, we found things quite complex and messy, we definitely got majority confused with all the wires and boxes scattered over the screen, and that was only after creating 2 filters. With the due date approaching soon, by Wednesday the 20th we’d decided to scratch the idea of audio, and decided instead of a diverse range of filters, we would only create a saturation, hue and brightness based ones that could be controlled via one object (BRCOSR). It’s unfortunate that we gave up on our original goal, but I think with more time to work on it and experience using Max, we’d be able to definitely fully develop our original concept. We definitely succeeded in partially developing our idea, although we limited ourselves I think we’re all relatively satisfied with the outcome. If we were to come back to this task at the end of the semester I believe we’d definitely be able to reach our full potential and develop the idea in full.

Overall, these tasks have definitely shown me that I know more about Max then I give myself credit for. I found towards the end of developing the work that I was using more of the keyboard shortcuts and was remembering the names of objects, messages and other items with ease (jit.pwindow, playlist~, toggle, message functions). I think I should be relatively content with the outcome, considering it is the first assignment, I think I’ve done what I could, although things could definitely be improved upon, I have to give myself credit for what I did do.

Artists Statements: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/lauren-bisignano/2019/03/20/artists-statements/