The purpose of the Conceptual Project was to have us attempt to express ourselves in ways we were either unfamiliar with or had never experimented with before. Each of our classes contributed to this in each respective way, with english focusing on poetry, design focusing on creating photos with metaphorical meaning, and digital media focusing mostly on audio and music composition.

In each section you will find an assignment that we completed in each of our classes, most of them building upon each other and transitioning between classes. Artistically I have improved creatively through my newfound understanding of how metaphors can strengthen more than just writing, and can be applied to any other type of art as well in order to increase the depth. I enjoyed the freedom that was present within this Conceptual Project, I feel like we all got to accurately express ourselves in each assignment due to the great amount of freedom we had while creating each one.

My Expository Essay is written on my passion for music and its different parts, like the analytical/composition side of music, as well as the power it has to move the listener and convey great amounts of emotion. The point of the essay was to really show the different parts of music and that however contrasted they may be, the product is amazing and is a form of medium that is unlike any other. I was inspired to write this essay through my previous experience with playing the saxophone and guitar and a band called the “Pat Metheny Group,” which rarely uses words but is still able to consistently move me and communicate purely by the emotion they display through their use of their instruments.

In english we wrote abstract and odd poems that challenged us to get our points across through careful word choice and poem structure, something I was very unfamiliar with, but in the end helped me sharpen skills I do not use to often. Besides the Haiku (which I will talk about later) the poems we made were a free verse poem, a spoken word poem, and an ekphrastic poem. In the free verse poem we were challenged to create a poem that captivated the reader with its careful word choice and use of end stopped lines, this was our first opportunity to use these skills. The next poem we wrote was the spoken word poem, which was similar to the free verse poem except now we had the option to use strategies that would make this poem interesting to be read aloud such as alliteration. Our final poem was the ekphrastic poem, meaning a poem that is a response to a particular painting or sculpture. This poem followed the same structure as the free verse poem, but added the challenge of having it centralized around another piece of art.

I feel like through studying poetry in English I learned more about a medium that I would have otherwise never have delved deeper into on my own time due to my initial lack of interest in poetry. I greatly value what we learned about careful word choice, as a I feel I will focus greatly on word choice as well in other forms of writing as well because of the poetry unit.

In the Haiku assignment we were challenged in creating a Haiku that follows the traditional 5-7-5 formula, while also including elements of traditional Japanese Haiku. Some examples were our inclusion of a seasonal word (Kigo) which establishes a connection with nature through the poem, and a cutting word (Kireji) which is a word that is usually located in the second line and has a great amount of emphasis on it in the poem. We also had to include a picture with metaphorical meaning that was taken ourselves that we would eventually overlay the Haiku text on top of. We enhanced this in digital media by creating a video in Adobe Animate with a recording of ourselves reading the Haiku as well as intro and outro music in order to set the mood, which we created with pre recorded samples that were supplied to us.

Creating the Haiku was difficult as it has strict restrictions you must follow, but overall I feel like these restrictions helped the creative process more than it hurt it, as I was able to be much more specified when creating my poem, as I knew exactly what it needed to be. I enjoyed creating the music for the Haiku the most, as I had no idea we would be doing this when I created the Haiku it was interesting seeing how I could portray the emotions of my Haiku auditorially

Above is a screenshot of my Haiku being made in Adobe Animate. We did everything through this software and then uploaded the video onto youtube in order to put it in the website

I am exploring the feeling of peacefulness through the experience of confusion

In Design we tackled how to get across a certain concept through highly metaphorical photos that we took. This challenged us to think of how to get across what we want to a viewer, without any use of words at all, and rather trying to get our ideas across through presenting a photo that captivates the viewer enough to formulate their own interpretation based off the metaphorical elements in your photo. Its goals were to have us experiment with taking photos that would hold interpretive metaphorical meaning within it.

When producing this photo we used our knowledge of the photoshop pen tool as well as adjustment layers to adjust the color composition in the photo to be what we were looking for.

In my ekphrastic poem I attempted to mirror the confusion and surreal presentation of the painting I was writing about called “Figures with Sunset” by Roy Lichtenstein. The painting balances the vibrant use of color with confusing images in a way that presents a very abstract, surreal, and confusing landscape. I attempted to capture these aspects of the painting through lines like, “like fragile thin ice, a diamond” where I tried to mimic the very delicate and precise nature of the painting . Another way I related my poem to the painting was through odd punctuation and end stops, like in the line “White, reflecting, rubber.” I used this punctuation to mirror the very confusing aspects of the painting, like the weird placement of objects and abstract presentation.

One of the main goals I wanted to achieve when shooting my conceptual photo was that I wanted to clearly convey the photos relation to confusion to the reader. In order to accomplish this I chose to place two Rubix Cubes in water, and by using the refraction of the light on the water to distort my image I was able to give it the “confusing” look I wanted to achieve. I was able to mirror the vibrance in the original painting and the proper diction I used in my poem by dropping food coloring in the water in order to complement the different colors on the Rubix Cube. The fact that the colors floated down in little respective splotches and clouds to further push the idea of being “clouded” by confusion. The last concept i needed to portray was has it relates to peace, and besides the peaceful flow of the colors sinking, I chose a handled vase as the container of the cubes because of its familiarity as well as its positive connotation through its relation to flowers, which helped back the concept of peacefulness in my art

 

In the Experimental Music assignment we were tasked to make a lengthy clip of music through a program called pro tools, and were mostly left on our own and were able to create whatever type of music we wanted. Through my previous years in band, the genre of music I had the information of how to compose was concert music, since I have heard so much to compare it to. I play saxophone so I am usually surrounded and play with many other woodwinds, and am most familiar with their sound but because most woodwind concert music is very complex and consists of many fast runs and notes being played, I found something consisting of a brass choir would be a much to compose. I used a subprogram within pro tools called Xpand in order to use the synths of the instruments. Although it may not have turned out how I wanted it to, I feel like it was still a good attempt.

Above is a screenshot of Pro Tools. We made the song through Pro Tools and sub programs that we could connect to the piano within it like one called Xpand in order to make our tracks. The thing I enjoyed the most about the Experimental Music assignment was its openness and lack of restrictions. We were tasked with creating a piece of music and that was it, because of this and the minimal interruption of the teacher due to us having a lot of quiet work time, I was able to focus very well and get into the zone, which I found very enjoyable and allowed me to be happy with my final work