Welcome back to A Journey into the Virtual World. In the previous post looked at a few more artists and inspirations for the project. If you missed that one, be sure to take a look back through the [VR]Ography section.
With the audio on hold for the time being, I decided to focus my efforts on figuring out exactly how I wanted the footage to appear, and I first began with the idea of incorporating text. I had the titles set already for the pieces, but I felt like I needed something else to point a potential viewer in the right direction. I looked at other interpretations of the Orpheus myth to help with this, first looking at The Storyteller (1990) which focus on Greek myths, with one in particular about Orpheus and Eurydice. When Orpheus travels to the underworld to confront Hades, and his part in their conversation stood out as relevant.
“Fear me. I am the bored audience at the theatre. A knock on the door when you least expect it. I am the one whose name must not be spoken for fear I hear it and sit next to you. I am the pain in your arm at four in the morning, the headache that will not shift, the sour taste in your mouth of everything you ever did.” – Hades
And this quote by Persephone in which she is explaining the manners of death to Orpheus and how it consumes us all felt relevant, especially to passage of time, which was another key aspect of my presentation.
“The earth itself is eaten away by time.” - Persephone
Further research led me to the Tennessee Williams play Orpheus Descending, and its television adaptation. The play is a modernised retelling of the Orpheus myth and deals with the powers of passion, art, and the imagination, and how they can be used to redeem and revitalise life in an elemental fashion. This gives new meaning to the original, and this I found most intriguing, as that was at the heart of my own project - my quest to create something modern, something new. I also found that within the play there was a huge amount of anticipation, and this was utilised in several scenes, which also led back to my original intent of capturing the sense of anticipation that Orpheus might have prior to his eventual descent.
The title of the play was also a key inspiration for my own interpretation and extrapolation. Orpheus’ descent, as the title suggests, led me to the rather literal interpretation I found myself capturing with the lift scene, showing a literal descent of the Orpheus character within the canon of the retelling and I took this use of the word and used it as an introductory key for the start of the footage.
The inclusion of text brought with it a whole raft of other problems such as formatting, sizing, placement, colour etcetera, but also, most importantly, the choice of font. I wanted it to be clean and legible most of all, and for it to lean into the modern take (a cursive font, for example, might have hinted at the antiquity and origins of the myth). I didn’t want it to distract or confuse a viewer, and I also wanted it to be plain enough as not to be a focus in and of itself - it had to deliver the message, rather than be one. I eventually settled on a sans-serif Ryoichi Tsunekawa designed font called Bebas Neue, which is know for being very clean and legible.
With the font chosen, I shifted my focus back to the work itself, and the duration of the video piece. This led me back to a quote by Persephone within the earlier referenced Storyteller show.
“Everything must die, Orpheus, the people we love most have to die, even the rocks, the earth itself is eaten away by time. Everything must die, Orpheus.” - Persephone
This, along with David Cotterrell’s mention of an hour-long flight made me reconsider the duration of the piece I was creating. As with the sound design, I wanted to produce a piece that was heavy with intensity and expectation, conveying a dense of dread as the prospect of what would be the final outcome. This, combined with an aforementioned piece by Andy Warhol led me to believe that the duration of the work was vital to the success of the piece. His 1964 experimental piece ‘Empire’ was in excess of eight hour in length, and beyond the scope of my own project, being too long for the concept I was wanting to portray, however, the idea of pushing the length beyond comfort, even just a little, seemed desirable to me, especially when combined with an ever incredibly unbearable soundtrack.
So a font was chosen, and a title sort of set, but other than that, and the idea of making the thing unbearably long, I was sort of struggling to make any other concrete decisions on the presentation, which you’ll see in the next part, in which I go on on a tangent and almost abandon the idea of a video piece entirely.
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