Why, hello again! If you read my last blog, you, you saw that I reviewed chapters five, six and seven in the book "Why I Want My MTV." and did my best to locate and identify some common themes and elements within them for an assignment.
Well, I'm doing it all again now with chapters eight, nine and ten! So get ready for more!
Alright, so overall, these three chapters discussed Aesthetics, Aisthesis, Synesthesia, Perception, Logos and Echos and the only common theme that I was able to connect between them was the idea that all of them revolved around the idea of audience perception and the vision that the director and the camera want to portray.
In chapter eight, perception is discussed in looking at the visual aesthetics and the idea of synesthesia that goes into making music videos and how perception of a particular visual relates to the viewer. The director, as his title implies, means that he is in charge of directing all elements of the video in the direction he or she wants it to go in.
That being said, the director gets to incorporate their desired aesthetics in the video, and for me, that comes by listening to the music, and creating an image of my head, which in a sense is turning sound into images, like synesthesia, which is pretty much a person who can hear images. From here, I can creatively imply my own perception and then attempt to relate it to an audience who I hope has similar perceptive tastes.
Chapter nine goes on to discuss the topic of actual perception, which can come from three places. As we probably know by now, the first two are the perceptions of the viewer of the music video and the director, but the third one is that of the camera. Perception is in simple terms, a way of seeing something, but that way changes based on the eyes ears of the individual absorbing or emitting the sensory information.
It is in this exact way that the video camera can take an image, capture it, and then modify it to the desired form, and whatever the camera ends up finalizing becomes a perceived reality, separate from that of real life, or at least how we perceive real life.
Finally, chapter ten deals with the latin words "Logos and Echos" or "Words and Sounds" to be informal. These words mean much more than they sound though as Logos is representative of words as logic, signifiers of common or shared perspective. Echos in a nutshell here is represented as not just sound, but the way Logos is translated into sound or vise-versa. Either way you slice it, these two words sum up the human potential to translate sights and sounds however they see fit. The best part is that there are no wrong was of seeing; Only different ways.
Art in general is all about perception. The artist paints or draws something for the people and does his or her best to provide some kind of idea or thought behind the piece in their own style. From here, it is up to the viewer to draw their own conclusion, and thats exactly the same with music video but with sound and moving picture. But like an artist, the director marries sights and sounds in a single artistic conglomerate to represent a desired vision or idea in an evolved context.
