After writing the poem, the group and I started on creating the video, one of my tasks being creating some illustrations that illustrated the poem and that would be included in the video in forms of GIFs for example. Here are a few.

 

The land has crumbled                                                                                                                                     Beneath my thin feet’s skin

 

Skinny fists/hands like one of the cover albums of Godspeed You! Black Emperor.                   Hands rising towards the sun.

 

At the ever-silent extremity of the world                                                                                                                                   Orange haze has spread

Under the orange gaze of the melting sun

Standing stranded (faceless being)   – Where are we going? – Me…? – Atmosphere…? – Who are we, to be, to become

The face of the planet has melted                                                                                                                        Have I ever had face?                                                                                                                                               Standing stranded                                                                                                                                             Wandering sphere

A graveyard with no name

Is that what we’ve become

Wait…

What we’ve always been?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’re on so many drugs

 

The satellites crashed. We’re dropping. (like flies)

 

That’s all folks!

My first answer when listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s album were a few illustrations, but mainly a poem. I deeply enjoy writing, it is one of my most private and personal forms of expressing myself, and I feel it is when I am most sincere. I find it’s an intelligent way of working through your thoughts and expressing them, specially if you are writing with the aim of making something out of it, and not simply just throwing words on a piece of paper as you would do with ‘doodling’, although these can also be very expressive and significant.

The poem is, as i’ve mentioned before, a response to this band’s music. Therefore it reflects it’s apocalyptic and dystopian atmosphere with it’s glimpses of hope and light. A clever balance and infinite circle between dystopia and utopia.

Here is my poem, Universe in Reverse:

 

_Hope you enjoyed!

After listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s album F# A# Infinity, I started watching movies that I thought of as I listened to the music.

Here are the trailers of ‘The Road’ with Vigo Mortensen and ‘The Book of Eli’ with Denzel Washington and Mila Kunis.

Watch them.

A CHANGE OF DIRECTION

Somewhere along the way we realised we weren’t on the right direction with our dystopian project. So we left behind ‘the american dream’ as on of the group members brought to us a record of a Canadian post rock band called Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

Mostly instrumental but also including a voice over of a poem. We were all very pleasantly surprised by this music. Unexpected and quite amazing. I personally was extremely looking forward to finding myself on my own and listening to the whole album, getting to experience it fully and deeply.

I truly enjoyed it and was grateful to have discovered something new. It was perfect for this project. It combined instruments that you might not usually combine, which you wouldn’t think would work together harmoniously, but they did. And they worked in such a way that felt like I was stranded and wandering in this lost space, in this apocalyptic land, like in movies such as ‘The Road’, or ‘The Book of Eli’.

We decided to all go our ways, listen to the music and see how we responded to it, each create something from listening to it.

I highly recommend listening to it.

 

At the start of the Dystopia/Utopia project, my group and I were going for the ‘american dream’ kind of aesthetic for our project; perfect home, perfect housewife, etc.. As a way to make a mockery of our society that is so afraid of the unknown, that it would do almost anything to keep their homes (utopia) safe from something said ‘dangerous’ by others without even knowing what this ‘thing’ is. Sometimes this pushes our society to do horrible things simply out of fear, therefore many times creating a dystopia out of trying to avoid one.

So on this principle I started doing some artist research and started doing some creating myself, such as the photo collages done with photoshop that I have pr
eviously shared. After this something that popped into my head and inspired me were the typical vintage ‘greeting from…’ postcards from the USA. Such as the ones below:

I gave it a try of my own, starting with handmade lettering.

 

Then put it through photoshop and started playing around and experimenting with colour:

 

And then came the final version:

 

 

 

 

What gives art substance?

I believe that one thing that we all have in common and find difficult at some point as illustrators or artists in general is to give purpose, meaning and identity to our work. All of these things are crucial for a successful piece of work. This CTS lesson was about exploring the areas we need to understand in order to produce work with substance. These areas being; Identity, Subculture, Representation, Narrative.

The definition for identity is that ‘in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, identity is the conception, qualities, beliefs, and expressions that make a person (self-identity) or group (such as national identity and cultural identity) different from others.’ The first appearance of the concept of identity (with respect to the individual) was in the C17, called  ‘Enlightenment Subject’ by Stuart Halls.

”The conception of the human person as a fully centered, unified individual, endowed with the capacities of reason, consciousness and action… The essential centre of the self was a person’s identity .” – (S.Hall, 1992b:275)

The definition of identity talks about it as identity being things such as difference, differences you have from others. I think this is a really important characteristic to take in consideration and to put forward in an artistic environment, as your work is an expression of who you are, what you believe in and your opinions on things. And there are many creative people out there doing just that, and you might share the same views and opinions with many of them. So how do you stand out? Where does the difference in your identity lie between you and these others?

Possibly in how you express yourself, which context you choose, which culture you know best, is more personal to you, which medium is your signature… This is where other elements such as subculture, representation, narrative and media come in and take part in your unique identity as a creative being.