My terrible planning and organisational skills kept me from getting to class on the Monday but I caught up on the week’s reading, Soar’s ‘Making (with) Korsakow’, outside of class and I pulled a quote to help guide myself through the reading.

“Korsakow films require attention and a reasonable investment in time without distractions.”

This is definitely something I noticed in my experience with projects created in the software. At every moment I’m aware of how much time I’m committing to certain things and I’m always asking myself internally whether it’s worth my time – this is part of the reason why I can’t hold myself to committing to something like The Witcher 3. I don’t have the damn time!! I can’t bring myself to invest in the fantasy of its world – there’s a thousand films I could be watching instead (I’ll never see them all, sure). There’s so much to consume, always on offer (especially given the proliferation of subscription-based services like Netflix and Spotify that posses boundless ends of “””””””content””””””). I find it hard to invest myself within the game’s world while the thousands of quests available in game float around me, uncompleted. This is why I’m always in a rush, always finding something to fill my time. In relation to Korsakow, I think it’s my unfamiliarity with the platform that gives it this uncertainty. If I commit a whole lot of my time to one project, eg. Ellis Island, do I trust it to reward me with something in the end – will I be full of insight, enlightened?; will I come out the other side dazed and confused?; somewhere in the middle?

In applying these ideas to our project, I can see how creating something that is initially simple in form could be attractive. Giving users a clear layout of the potential possibilities that are drawn within the project is good way of battling this rabbit-hole weary fatigue – though I don’t think there necessarily has to be this binary. Soar’s own Ceci N’est Pas Embres presents an enticing, multi-faceted Korsakow project (and of a scale that I would like to work towards in the future).

For our consultation in week 7, we presented a(n even more) more refined idea of our project. We looked back at the ways that modularity and variability could function within our project – how we can use these ideas within Korsakow to create a work that would function as an engaging piece of new media. We worked on constraints and settled on ‘line’ as a defining aesthetic descriptor and worked towards finding ways of capturing this within the city in a way that built a rhythm (that could then be complemented by the music).