During the final weeks of the 2013 winter semester as a part
of a media and databases course students were issued an individual final
project as a culminating task/experience. The project took place in the form of
an info-graphic composed out of a dataset of the students’ choosing. The
info-graphic itself was open-ended and its composition and presentation left up
to the interpretation of the particular student. For me personally, my project
focuses more on the process work of translation of information rather than the
aesthetic appeal or readability of the work.
I decided to use my iTunes library as a dataset for the
project. Why, simply because I love and compulsively collect music. It is a
strange thing I’m sure, to think of a person who collects music in the form of
physical CD’s especially when such things are so easily available as
downloadable files on the Internet. However, with my collection I feel that
even if I were to download/torrent something it would not rightfully belong to
the collection unless I physically bought it and added to the ever-overflowing
shelves of my room. In essence I wanted to work with a dataset that I was
familiar with and fond of hopefully being able convey some sort aspect of
myself through the work and through the music I listen to.
The construction and composition of my work may be seen as a
little unorthodox as I have created two separate aspects of the piece through
two separate mediums. I feel that there are two sides to my music collection:
the digital and the physical. The digital being whatever I obtain through the
Internet and the physical being what I purchased.
For the digital aspect, representing the collection my music
that is done online, I created a Photoshop file and exported it as a .png. The
file contains images of the album artwork from the last 289 albums I’ve
downloaded amalgamated into what I call, a super-collage. The images of the
albums are organized by similar colour to create a sort of gradient-like mosaic
effect. I duplicated this image and created one clear version and one blurry
version to represent the anonymity of the torrent culture as well as the grey
areas when discussing the contemporary issue of ownership of online content.
Similarly I made the files available for download here, which
also represents internet culture.
For the physical aspect, representing the collection of my
music that is made by the purchase of merchandise, I decided to display on a
3-pane presentation board, the top 50 most-listened-to albums that I actually
physically own. These are organized meticulously in alphabetical order
(concerning artist’s name) and then further by chronological order (concerning
the albums of that artist). This represents my obsessive compulsiveness to
constantly organize my music libraries ensuring that every possible detail that
I am aware of is added to the library. Within the CD sleeves that the CD’s are
housed in, on the reverse side is a QR code that, once scanned, links to Google
Doc spreadsheet containing information about the particular album. You can find
a copy of all 50 spreadsheets here.
 |
| A photo taken of the physical aspect of the piece contain 50 CD's in protective sleeves. There are individual QR- codes on the reverse side of each CD jacket. |
I feel that there is no better way to illustrate a
collection to some one than to showcase it. I am proud of my collection and so
using in projects is exciting to me. This illustrates the motivation behind the
work.
