As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the session of presentations was crucial for me in refining my approach for my media project. The media format I chose is a podcast, and I think my project is the only one that is not video-related. Again, I wanted to challenge myself with a whole new platform to work with, and I am more excited than confused at this stage of the project.

As I was preparing for the pitch, my idea for the media artifact led me to two potential approaches: one is more factual and one is more artistic. In both means, I want to be able to bring in some form of narratives for the work, making it more of a story with an emphasis on the experience of being directly affected by the plastic crisis. I acknowledged that plastic is easier to recreate visually, but the guests made very useful suggestions for me in finding sounds that could represent plastic. One such is the sound of ocean, which is another emphasis that the ocean (itself and the life underneath it) is being heavily affected by plastic. Before the session, I had imagined of producing sounds of wildlife like whales and birds – some typical ocean creatures and put out a statement: “with the way the plastic crisis is going, not just through South East Asia but the whole world. The day we no longer hear the sound of these creatures is closer than ever.” Of course, using human voices are crucial. I got another great suggestion to use voices of people of different language in highlighting that this issue should be a global one. Bringing in a global perspective on this would broaden the scale and impact of the artifact in my opinion.

I also put myself under three constraints: no use of news footage or media, no use of commercialised content and no use footage of humans or animals. As my project is audio-based, the latter ones are rather obvious while the first one will be my main struggle. I will have to be ultra selective in choosing the right content without showing the news when addressing the issue in South East Asia. Even though I am not totally sure how the final product would sound at the moment, I am excited to attempt putting these ideas into practice.