‘Attention’, the word which I first got in touch with by a piece of reading, Deep & Hyper Attention at the very first week, then the 20 mins attention test in week 4’s lecture, the 5 mins drawing exercise held during my studio visit, and even the last project of Media 1 is related to ‘Attention’, for me, it seems to be the theme of this year’s media course, am I right?
Luckily, the attention ‘experiment’ this week was just focused on hearing a piece of sound work, one of the media type that I had paid a lot attention on and quite interested in it (I guess the Sound Design elective can tell that), although it was pretty hard to be entirely focused on as its lengthy duration. We had been asked to sit on the ground in our most comfortable way, which some of the classmates had chosen to take a short nap (0r it just the way they get relaxed), my favourite sitting pose, would be sitting at a place close to the wall and lean against it.
Besides the above nonsense (?), what attracted me the most in that 20 mins artifact? The way of using soundtrack to be the beginning and ending, and the technique of mixing interview dialogues with incompatible sound effects. Using instrumental sounds to be the introduction instead of words, and end it in the same way, quite a useful way to grab the audiences’ interest in the very first place, to lead them consider ‘what’s this artwork about?’, with a similar music piece to inform them the artwork is about to finish. As well as, the idea of mixing tracks incompatibly, such as the ‘walking on the grass’ sound arose as the background simultaneously when an interview clip began, which not supposed to be heard at the same time, sounds pretty unusual that intended to create a ‘turning point’ between different ‘scenes’.
To be honest, as I can’t fully understand the interview content, during the interviewing part, besides figuring out why those sound effects had been composed together, what I had done… was to observe the differences between different person’s sitting pose in the classroom, what a curious me?!