While working so hard on shaping the Augment story, it's important not to lose track of the aesthetic component: what will the pieces look and feel like? What will they be made of?
This week I explored those questions by creating a "mood board" — a collage of existing visual elements that give a sense of the colors and textures that I want the final piece to have.
Checkout the larger size on Flickr.
As I worked on the collage, three clusters of images took shape: color snapshots from the 60s, special effects making-of imagery, especially blue screen work, and white architectural imagery, especially that with a Greek, neo-classical, or minimalist look.
The 60s snapshots (many of which are of actual period Augment activities) have a saturated color palette and a kind of soft focus that is core to how I visually imagine that style. I imagine this look being especially prevalent for the psychedelic and countercultural material in acts 2 and 3.
The blue screen and special effects imagery comes out of my sense of the relationship between the technical form of image making that make up the modern "cinema of attractions" (computer graphics, motion control, compositing) and the early personal computer world of Augment. Behind-the-scenes process shots from that world feel like a contemporary counterpart to equivalent 60s scenes of bearded men in blue jeans playing primitive computer games and building the first robots.
Finally the classical/minimalist white architectural imagery has a relationship to the material that's a little bit harder to define than the other two clusters. Partially it comes out of my sense that what I'm trying to build is a kind of monument. Art historically, monumental sculpture (and, ironically, the ground-based minimalist sculpture that most sought to resist it) has tended to have a strong relationship to architecture via the formats of the plinth and the pedestal. Further, the austere white in which classical architecture and sculpture comes down to us (however distant that is from how it was originally constructed) has developed deep associations with the arts of memorialization and monument building. I envision this portion of the aesthetic spectrum as, at least in part, relating to the framing and presentation of the work.