Week 1

After a number of discussions with friends, family and coursemates, I decided over the summer that I wanted to take my own personal aspirations for what I want to get out of this course, and challenge the boundaries. I came to UWE with the intention of aiding my aspirations to become a music journalist, so this year I have been trying to gear my work in that direction. 


Tom told me about an interesting art installation he had seen in which wine critics tried to make a visual representation of the blurbs on the back of bottles of wine, or something similar. The details escape me. But from that, I thought it would be interesting to look at music reviews and really dissect them, highlight what they actually are, what they hope to achieve, and then mess with the conventions to expose them. 


Does the language in music reviews really help us to imagine what music sounds like? Or does it simply paint a picture or a storyboard for how an accompanying music video may look? I'm not sure that flowery poetry about how a guitar 'soars' really helps the audience to understand what to expect. Anyway, I wrote a vague proposal to try and summarise what it is I'm looking to do;


For this year's project, I intend to examine magazine style reviews, and explore whether or not the language they use is successful in really describing what to expect of whatever product or event it is they are featuring. Due to my personal interests and intentions as a journalist and academic analyst, I am more interested in music reviews in particular. Obviously what music reviews are trying to achieve is to not really paint a visual picture, but to paint an audio prediction. Through this, though, they often use colourful imagery and whether they intend to or not, inadvertently achieve a much more visually rich description. Does the audience actually know what to expect musically?

I aim to take a number of existing reviews, or possibly use some reviews I have written myself for Guide2Bristol.com and try to convert them into visual translations. I aim to take any of the more particularly rich imagery and make collages depicting what it is the review is really trying to say. To make the whole experience more coherent, I will include the original text in which the image is based on, and perhaps use AP Divs to highlight particular phrases when certain parts of the images are rolled over. I will present my work on a reviews website I have created myself, loosely based on the sort of design that features on websites such as NME.com.


To put this into context, I was thinking of creating a reviews website, not too aesthetically dissimilar to websites such as the NME's, and just having links to each including the original text and then the image displayed with it. The user will engage by trying to dissect which part of the image corresponds with each key concept, idea or imagery touched upon in the reviews. I need to start working out a basic website structure, but I think initially it won't be too fancy. The images will do the talking; I just need the bare bones to work.


Also this week, myself and Amy teamed up with Tom (the usual sort of grouping) in the tutorial workshops for the mini practical projects we've been assigned with. Myself and Amy are doing a couple of Web-based pieces - the User Unfriendly website being an obvious choice so far, and Tom is working on a couple of bits of video. Screenshots etc. coming up.