Technostalgia (Cont)

I've started creating videos for some of my albums. Last night I created a playlist of all the songs on the Thorne Rooms album. It's an interesting variation of looking at the album graphics as you're listening. It works well in this case because you can look at the rooms while listening to the music, which is optimal for this particular concept. The idea was that the rooms are period film sets and the music is a "score", but they aren't music videos per se. The visuals don't "confabulate" the music as music videos typically do.

But I would have never thought in my teens and 20s that we would listen to an album on a TV. It's taking one medium and overlaying it on another--not unlike the synesthetic experience of hearing colors. Obviously, we've had cable radio for decades, but the graphics might consist of a small thumbnail of the album cover, which may or may not show if the images aren't loading for some reason.

It would be interesting to release a vinyl album but it wouldn't have a vinyl record in it (or would be optional), similar to creating a book box (or using existing book boxes) to display on your shelf for e-books. It would just be an album jacket with all the graphics, booklets, and so on, but you would listen to the album on your large 85-inch LED TV with 4 or 8k graphics, and just as good as good as looking at something in print, although the color gamut is different. TVs as large objects become a container for physical media, which we may or may not want. I stopped making physical art years ago because I didn't want to keep making objects and digital art seems to be the solution. I'm not completely convinced that screen art will obviate physical art in the future. I think it will be a balance of the two experiences. I will never be the one to say a digital painting is just as good. If you've ever watched Waldemar Januszczak’s documentaries you should never get that idea. Physical art is sacred, as I think vinyl is.

On Aspect Ratios

Aspect ratios are interesting in that they are a "technostalgia" that brings with it elements from the era in which it emerged and can feed the narrative. For example, portrait video nested within the full horizontal frame can suggest something confined or compressed or "shortened"--using a recent metaphor concerning aspect ratios. In 20 years (the typical time for a new nostalgia to be re-used), the Short from the 2020s will have other meanings, and so on.

The Thorne Rooms, now perhaps an idea for a TV series.

Previous Technostalgia Posts 

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Not to say I am a sage of some kind, but this is a diary entry from 2004 where I was thinking film should use the aspect ratio of a piece of paper. In some sense, portrait video is based on this idea. Of course, we use landscape orientation in the paper world but I think our natural instinct is to use portrait mode as a preference. Humans exist in a landscape, not vice-versa, but that's an interesting metaphor that you could play with as a concept.