Open World
There’s a piece of music called Rocket by Alex Giannoscoli that was released around a year ago now. At the beginning of the song one can hear the sounds of restless dogs, collars jangling and claws skitting and tapping the floor feverishly. Paired with the music, it creates this weird sense of nostalgia for an existence that I haven’t quite lived, conjuring imagery of the fields that I’ve experienced but in a context seemingly more meaningful in a way that I can’t describe. It makes me remember things differently which is a strange feeling. This is what I think I’d like to be able to do with my paintings. When I was younger I used to be really into open world gaming like Skyrim, but was really bad at combat control and so instead often opted to spend hours walking or swimming around the virtual worlds mapped out to explore. It was always so exciting to stumble across a randomly generated event or encounter in the middle of a deserted valley or cave, a series of code not waiting to be triggered by your proximity as a “conscious” character but one that would’ve run whether you were there or not.
The other feeling generated by those games that I never quite managed to experience when out by myself in reality was that of being totally alone in these landscapes, being able to enjoy them without risk of surveillance. I grew up in a small rural village where everyone knows everyone and I worried that if someone had seen me out walking by myself it would look weird and awkward, something that as a younger teenager I was overly self conscious about. Again, this feeling that maybe what you see could only be experienced by chance, the end of it being caught whilst wondering alone, is something I want to achieve within my work.