DYCP Application Thoughts

I’m planning on applying for Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice fund. Recommended to me by my mentor, this funding would act as a support for this “Wasted Time” research I’m doing as well as help accelerate it. And it would accelerate me as an artist, as well.

I have struggled to see where I fit in in the world of art. I make pop music. I write poetry. I want to make audio programmes. I love academia and researching. I want to help educate. I want to tackle big ideas. I want to make something rich and mysterious and layered. But I also want to make things which are catchy, easy, joyful. How can I do all of that?

The Tiny Songs Project has helped me re-brand myself as an artist almost. I went from gloomy, self-centred songwriter to happy, weird, music-maker and image creator. It’s also changed the way I dress myself, too. I wear a lot more colour now, or am drawn to it at least (don’t really have the budget for a wardrobe overhaul at the moment). See the above photos for the difference.

The DYCP application requires me to plan out what I would do with the fund, who I would get in touch with, what milestones I would aim to reach and how I would measure my progress. I’m not sure at the moment what any of that would exactly entail, but I have some ideas. Here they are in note form:

MY MAIN QUESTIONS

• How can we make the idea of "lost time" less negative?

• How can our planet help our perspective of time?

• Can pop music & the culture surrounding it be a vehicle for solutions to these questions?

AREAS OF INTEREST

I would like to network with people, organisations and places in these areas

• the arctic

• the ocean

• geology

• astrophysics

• indie pop and punk music

• audio-making (like Transom for example)

• Norse/Celtic myth and folklore

MEDIUMS TO WORK WITH

• music — writing an album or an EP

• podcasting/audio

• written blog

• visual diary/sketchbook

• diagrams or maps

• performance

• workshops/teaching

• animation

ACTIVITIES TO DO

• geological exploration of a place

• stay somewhere remote up North

• collect oral histories around nature and myth of a place

• create a series of deep time event reconstructions

• create a podcast from the information I research or an enriched audio piece by including the songs I write

• pop album pop concert zine for geological events, merch for geological events or areas so we can care about them like we care about our favourite band

Out Of Bounds

A couple years ago I played through Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2. The soundtrack is something I still listen to when I want something cosy on in the background — it has a mix of magic and nostalgia and weirdness to it that I really love.

Something I’ve been thinking about is the videos on Youtube that show you how you can break out of the boundaries set by the Kingdom Hearts games to explore parts of the maps which aren’t meant to be explored. I really love the settings of these games, especially Hollow Bastion with this sublime (in the terrifying, eerie yet beautiful sense) castle which haunts the horizon. You can’t ever reach that castle, you can only progress through to another part of the game where you’re in the castle. If you walked right up to that castle as you see it, then you would find a warped, lo-resolution version of it with nothing inside.

Here’s a video where the player does just that:

The weirdness and beauty of being somewhere you’re not supposed to be… that doesn’t even truly exist, or so you told yourself… Diving headfirst into an illusion so much that you run right up to it and peek beneath the surface. I like that. It’s a kind of trespassing, isn’t it? But how can it be trespassing if nobody exists on that plain to police you?

How does this relate to Lost Time? I think it brings in ideas of the Sparkling Dark, for sure. The gorgeousness of being lost, outwith your loop. The isolation of it, too. The videogame wants you to follow a certain path and has boundaries and limits. It’s designed to lead you in a certain direction. Sometimes you have to absolutely glitch out and jump into thin air to reach a place where you’re inside yet outside the game. Do you want to be there? Maybe not… but the view is beautiful, and the chance to explore is so inviting.

How could art create that feeling? How could a performance do that? Could you show the bones of a song being made and performed and allow the audience to veer it away from the intended conclusion? Could you let people get up and walk around, on to the stage, as you are performing? Could you do a live poetry-writing session where people add directly to your words and contribute as you write, changing the intended outcome?

And animism. That castle is talking to me. It being there is saying something. Always when I played the Kingdom Hearts 2, there’s a place you can walk to, to see this burnt-down castle on the horizon that can’t be reached. When I would take my avatar there to look at it, it would feel so significant. An image that spoke very clearly. What it was saying, I’m not entirely sure. But it was being said.