Song: Rhapsody in Blue - 8 bit
For my musical mosaic, I decidedly spent time looking for one of the most beautiful classical pieces I could find. After browsing through various compositions, I decided on “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin and then found an 8-bit version of it. The gorgeous intricacies of the complex music sound ridiculous when played and compressed in 8-bit, which is exactly what I was looking for. I then spent time locating several pictures that are either iconic, beautiful, or personally meaningful to me and I edited them to be my own, purposefully pixelating the images until they are only recognizable from a distance. Doing a Google Search for famous or beautiful images was a very intentional decision and one I took some time with. The viewer needs to recognize what the image should be in order to be affected by what it is not. The compression of both music and image is jilting and is meant to be off-putting. While I included the pictures and song, as the assignment calls for, the piece is really most powerful when viewed as a video and is intended to be so. Consequentially, I will also include a link to the work as a video. I decided to call my Musical Mosaic “Dark Glass”.
My intent for the project ties well into the writings of Annie Dillard, as my intent is all about seeing and perspective. The pixelation of famous or beautiful images beyond the point of enjoyment parallels the way in which the western world now experiences or “sees” culture; that is to say, we see what we expect to see, and what is fed to us through our screens. Culture and relationship is not necessarily unalterably ruined by technology, but it is vastly affected. From the music we enjoy to the politics we feel passionately about, nothing we experience goes unaffected by our high-speed cultural lenses, and it is difficult to truly enjoy beautiful things such as a kiss without the cultural weight our perceptions give us.
The title of the mosaic refers to 1 Corinthians 13:12 and how we quite literally “see through a glass, darkly”. Annie Dillard makes the case that it is so difficult to truly and objectively see something other than what we expect, and I think that case is only even stronger in the 21st century. A work of art that explores a similar concept as the one I am attempting to depict is actually located pretty close to home. It is a sculpture on BYU campus of a pixelated elk out in the woods. Of course, we expect to see an elk in the woods, but we also are used to experiencing animals and anything outside of our immediate world on a screen. My guess is that the sculptor’s intent may be similar to mine: while we recognize and even celebrate technology’s place in society, we also hope that we can outgrow it’s iron grip on perspective in our culture.
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