Conceptual Mapping

10 Final Work

My family and upbringing has frowned greatly upon tattoo’s as it would “ruin my potential” as a respectable individual and employable person and the image that was created for me, specifically by my British father.

After consideration of Suprematism and its contextual genesis in the mental frames of communist revolutionaries I have come to loathe the idea of potential and Suprematism. As a reflection of the Communist revolution of Lenin and Trotsky this form of art suggested that unlimited potential could be accessed through eschewing traditional visual structure in favour of geometric shapes that echoes emotions of the artists and audience. However attemptedly noble this idea is, it grew from the Communist revolution which promised the general populace unlimited potential, happiness and possibility but in the end it was just another societal construct that ground up its constituents into cogs as part of the economic and political machine.

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"Suprematism" - Kazmir Malevich

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The first week I was at class we dealt with the idea of improvisation and being spontaneously creative. The idea of improvisation really resonates with me as a person on a few levels, the first being that all of the fun I have playing music is usually due to improvising something on the spot and making it fun.

The idea of conceptual mapping is interesting in the way it takes the recognisable structure of a map and completely revolutionises the way in which one can interact with creativity and structure. More common forms of conceptual mapping include mind maps and storyboards but a map can be multiple types of representation. However, most maps do share similar characteristics; they do not represent a final product, they represent a myriad of information and they often have focal points within the mind map.

This idea of mapping can be represented in the video I have uploaded earlier to my Tumblr where two musicians (Marcus Miller and Lalah Hathaway) improvise to map out ideas of a song. It was this interaction that really caught my attention as I realised that this was mapping more than just their direction for a song but it was mapping out themselves as musicians. Every note choice and every point of inflection is a piece of information that builds an incomplete picture of the artist, which follows the rule stated earlier that maps often do not represent a final product.

This made me want to try this out and see what would happen and what sort of influences I would be able to see in my own playing when I collaborate and improvise with another person and if those things would change at all through improvisation.  

Another avenue I explored was attempting to textually map out an audio project and I did something similar to a work showed to us in class whereby two artists collaborated and created a text map that was a essentially a word association piece that created a window into the influences and styles that the artists were shaped around. My friend and I did this before we jammed and we used this map as a sort of chord chart for the jam. I found that while separately the jam and the word association were interesting on their own I do not think they had a very dynamic and interesting interaction in that it limited a true form of spontaneous improvisation that would really show our personal influences.