Project Statement

Sense of place. This assignment was designed for me to find my sense of place in the world and portray it via visual means. To start of this assignment I needed to find an idea of where this place could be. After much thought and deliberation I knew that music was my passion, but I then felt it difficult to incorporate the subject into my work. I started to assemble my life long experience with music to see what ideas could be drawn from it, coming to the realization that live music has played a huge part to my childhood. I went on to look at photos of old gigs and listen to music that reminded me of the good experiences i have had to give me inspiration. Music has been inspiration to me for many years so I was able to pull up many resources about it. I felt that being inside a crowd of people that all appreciate the same thing to really be my sense of place, yet I also believe that everyone inside that crowd will have their individual experiences alongside my own. After my research into my own history with music, it became clear that over the years my appreciation for music stayed constant but everything else in my life was changing. It became clear to see that there was a real relationship between my musical taste and my friendship groups over the years. Progressing through genres of music I could see myself fitting the social stereotypes to match them - starting with Metal music where I was only wearing black clothing and had abnormally long hair; then Rock music where I obtained my love of skateboarding, finally onto dance music where I found myself to be spending all my money trying to see every DJ i could. Through my change in taste of music I would say my sense of place changed alongside it, music being the one subject staying the same but everything else seemed to be transforming in front of me. After these thoughts I turned my attention to assembling the images I would use in my scrapbook. I tried to find images that define me at key moments in my life as my tastes were changing. I felt an emotional connection with these pictures reminding me of why I picked up music as a hobby. I went on to use googles picasa programme to edit the images before printing to put in my scrapbook. At this point I felt a strong connection with my sense of place, and how music has been the embodiment of it throughout my life. I began thinking of ideas for a final piece, which aims to use my 4 most important musical items to portray an image of how much music means to me. In my piece Iused cables to spell the word music as I believe music is the connector to my sense of place, I also used a switched on lamp for the letter I in music to put across an impression that music is my inspiration, my light in the dark as it were. Using Picasa again I was able to edit my final image, cropping it and using an effect to make the picture look old fashioned. To conclude, this project has allowed me to be creative in relevance to a subject that means more to me than any other. It has deepened my self understanding in how I have progressed through the years, whilst allowing me to see my true sense of place. Hopefully my scrapbook shows the intimate journey music has taken me on, and why I came to chose my final piece. I researched images of myself and others to try and inspire my own work. However if I could do this project again and if I could afford music production software, I would have made a track to accompany my final piece - which would have given it a more personal feel. I felt limitations to the amount of ICT i could have used to portray an image which shows my musical interest - but googles picasa programme helped me to edit my images nicely. Overall I felt this project was averagely successful - my letdown was inside ICT>