Project One Zine - Artist Statement

It was hard to decide which idea I wanted to do for this project, I had quite a few and they all seemed interesting to me. A big factor of why I chose to base it around music is simply the fact that I am always listening to music, especially while I work. Music gives me energy to actually put in the effort, and the motivation I need to work without getting tired or bored. Initially, I wanted to just edit myself into pictures of a bunch of album covers, but I was not sure how to make that into a story or have more meaning than just me having fun with photoshop. So, after a quick discussion with the professor, I decided instead of doing a storyline, I wanted to use this project to create a game. I decided to stick with music, and keep the same general idea of a mixture of songs and their album covers. However, I wanted to make it into a game of Guess the Song. This turned out to be a very good way to engage my audience in my work, because who doesn't love playing games? My work even caught the attention of some of my friends and family members outside of school, who were eager to play along as well. I decided to make the game progressively get harder, so that people would get the idea right at the beginning and get hooked into the game. A big challenge of mine during this project was trying to make it harder to guess. The first couple of songs were super easy and straightforward, but it turned out to be a little difficult to have more vague representations of the songs, without making them too vague. When picking the songs, I tried to focus on well-known songs, so that every audience that is playing along has a shot to get at least a couple songs right, because everyone has a different music taste. The deadline did sneak up on me very fast, but in the end I am proud of how my project turned out in the limited time we were given.