4 minute read
Preliminary Steps
For three and a half years, I wanted to make a thesis based on a brand identity. It wasn’t until a quick exercise that I found myself steering away from that. For a long time, identities were what made me passionate about design as well as hand lettering and custom typography. My early thesis ideas revolved around some of those things. Aside from design, I had always been intrigued by human perception. Here’s a screenshot of what my ongoing thesis idea list looked right before we began. (Right) Lots of these were random thoughts that crossed my mind in a fever dream sort of fashion. Some I find to be interesting to think about, but some I find to be just silly. My personal favorite is, “eternal sunshine idea?” Which I have no idea what it refers to. I wasn’t necessarily brainstorming heavily when it came to these, they were passing thoughts that I figured would be of use for me in the near future. At the end of the fall semester 2019, all the seniors gathered to workshop some thesis ideas. At first, we were instructed to write down a list of 50 things we may have been thinking about, were curious about, or just anything in general that might pique our interest. I told myself specifically that I would not include brand identities in that list. I would force myself to see what other possibilities there are. My ideas ranged from something as basic as exploring packaging to more complex ideas like thorough examinations of trends within design and what that might mean for the future. What had stuck out most to me in this list though was synesthesia. As I was scrambling to come up with ideas, I remembered recently thinking about a high school friend that had synesthesia. I was in the band with her. She played clarinet, and I played trumpet. One time we were having a conversation and when I pointed out the F note she had told me she loved that part of the song because
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green was her favorite color. This was the first time that she or I had ever realized that she reads music by color and I read it as black and white notes.
As I ruminated on the thought of doing a thesis that follows synesthesia, it felt as though this topic was meant to fall in my lap. Synesthesia is directly related to our perceptions of the world around us, and our ability to retain information
and associate it to other events in our lives. Psychology, emotion, and philosophy are a few of the things that have been dear to me for as long as I can remember. Growing up I had frustrations of why people behaved in certain ways, or why people would make decisions that resulted in horrible outcomes. Alongside this, I had also grown up a musician. I knew how to play trumpet, guitar, saxophone, french horn, oboe, piano, you name it, I was probably trying to learn it. Synesthesia, although I don’t experience it, is something that fascinates me in the operation between melody and perception.
Chromesthesia explained simply is the ability to see colors when you heard sounds. Now, you could probably close your eyes and imagine the color blue when you hear a G note on a keyboard. But natural chromesthesiacs see these colors in their minds eye involuntarily and repetitively.
I’m a highly visual person and immediately had so many visual ideas for this project. One of the first things I did after so groundwork research was look into synesthetic art and see how others have recreated the experience themselves. One that stuck out to me was done by Onformative, a studio for digital art and design in Berlin. Their project Collide (Left) is a synesthetic art installation that is primarily video and sound. A large room featured narrow video clips that were and abstract representation of chromesthesia using man made colors and textures.
By mixing, reversing and eliminating restrictions of time and space, a new vision of the human body and mind is discovered. The work is a multi-sensory experience exploring the subjects from an emotional perspective, examining the feeling of being immersed in the creative process and attentive to the present moment as the senses combine and become one.
Above: Synesthetic Art Artist Unknown
Above: Sam Chirnside STIMULI x VITARKA Below: Album Art Artist Unknown
