Idea #8 - 2.25.10 - A Few Ideas

For this idea post, I wanted to put down some ideas I've been thinking about.

1. This one might be too crazy and inaccessible because I think it has the problem of utilizing a made-up language, which I guess is like what I was doing before. Another problem is that it brings me away from photography and more into sculpture. Here it is anyway... When I hear music I often find different instruments or melodies to have textures, sizes, or some dimension or quality about them that brings a feeling, when I try to identify these feelings words like silky, tight, or wet are what come to mind, among others. For example, a bassline can be hammocking a chunky guitar with a sticky drum. When I hear this song I dont imagine a hammock filled with peanut butter but when I try to rationalize the words for the feelings that each part gives me, that is what comes to mind. What I love about this idea is the abstractness and absurdness of it. A problem that I am having with using imagery is that I feel a pressure to have actual 'things' in my photos, which feels at odds with instrumental music, and in this case, I feel like the quality of the materials would be important and would be lost in a photo.

2. In an attempt to make it more about photography, I thought to try shooting photos with long shutter speeds while making a sound recording of that same moment. It seems interesting to me but I'm struggling with what meaning it has. What is the implication of the image being still? Make it moving and it is a video. Is it a statement on the nature of photography? Is it about time? A photograph can contain a moment in time, whether a fraction of a second or 30 minutes but no matter how long, it can be experienced instantly. Sound can only be depicted through time, or in a visual representation which is then essentially a photograph which could not be identified by anything other than 'a sound wave' by a viewer. Perhaps in this type of work I would be dealing with ideas about how accurately a photograph can portray life. I'm not sure, I dont know if this is a good idea either.

3. I imagined something more interactive that deals with the same stuff I've been working with. I thought about fashioning a keyboard that lights up and is basically a manifestation of the color/music theory I've developed. The viewer immediately sees how the colors of the rainbow are related to the keyboard, so if they were to play a set of complimentary colors they hear it as harmonious. In theory, someone who is really in touch with color relationships might be able to play the piano beatifly without knowing anything about music, but by simply choosing key combinations based on their colors.
I like this idea the most, however, I imagine a slew of technical aspects that might make it impossible. It also isn't photography. For some reason I can't seem to develop ideas that stay exclusively in the realm of photography. All of these still are incorporating music or sound in some way but for a lot of reasons I feel like should try to not even use sound or music at all. But how can I express the ideas I'm working with, without the element of sound? Can I make photography that truely has the experience of music? I don't know, I've gotten myself pretty confused at this point.