Grave Matters (Anxiety Metronome)

David Gasi 8 years ago

Anxiety is something from which I suffer. Many people I know do, beyond the normal healthy anxiety we each carry to help us navigate safely through the uncharted world. I wanted to visualise anxiety. Not regarding any particular thing, more a general anxiety which could apply to anyone. Time and pressure came to mind. Quite abstract. The march of time. The sense of time speeding up and slowing down. I thought of a metronome. A device used to speed up and slow down time as an aid in attaining synchronicity. A device of visual binary motion, tick/tock, on/off, one/two. Of course, when used as a musical aid, the tick/tock may well be used beyond a 1,2 count for any desired timing ... but the noise, the incessant click/clack, the sound the visual suggested, that to me elicits a sense of tension.

The speed of a metronome can be adjusted. The tempos are denoted by labels, which signify where to position the weighted slider for the desired setting. The labels presented an opportunity. Of the labels for different tempos ('Largo', 'Adagio', 'Moderato', 'Allegro', 'Presto', etc) one stood out. 'Grave' is a very slow tempo, between 25 and 40 beats per minute. I named the artwork 'Grave Matters', thus incorporating a rather obscure double meaning.

Initially I shied away from changing these tempo labels. It needed to work conceptually, there needed to be a reason. I asserted that slow and steady suggests an air of confidence. An extremely rapid speed, a sense of paralysing anxiety. I thought of having just two labels at either end of the scale, very slow/very fast, to signify this confident/anxious. But then something happened. I couldn't easily choose the best binary pair. What about 'Assured' or 'Bold'? And were there different levels of anxiousness? Yes I decided. And set about compiling a list and creating the new labels. 

I agonised over which two colours to use, deciding on blue and red ... but worried the contrast may just have been too great. So eventually I created a third outer highlight layer. I wanted the colours to vibrate against each other, with a soft middle layer that beckoned the viewer to come closer to the work, in doing so uncovering the subtle detail of the side ridges and face of the object. This was my first print run. 

After this first three colour print, on reflection, I wanted a slightly calmer and simplified version. Perhaps safer or more direct? I'm not sure. But I set about producing a second print run, and this is the pink/red version of the print at the top of this blog post. The colours still jar, but there is a little more harmony and the details are visible from a greater viewing distance. In a way, it makes sense there are be two variations ... I had considered producing another two, but I think I'll stick with it as is.  

So, as mentioned in previous posts, I'm interested in Derrida's Binary Oppositions and how the grey areas between binary pairs can be visualised. Often I'll start with an idea and reduce down to a pair of words, or have a visual in mind and think about the words that best describe the idea. The topic/theme are usually around a political/social/cultural area. In any case, I aim to produce an image that both communicates quite directly, but gives rise to a level of ambiguity in meaning as increased time is spent by the viewer interpreting the work. That may be asking a lot, but I am challenging people to think, and encouraging a kind of critical loop to occur in the viewer; 

  • What is my immediate interpretation? ->
  • How else could this be interpreted? ->
  • How do these additional meanings compare to my initial interpretation? ->
  • On reflection, what do I now think about my initial interpretation?

Something like that anyway. I'm sure that doesn't happen at all, but I like when I get feedback where a viewer says 'this piece could mean A or B, but I think its C because ... '. I hope something like the above is going on. This makes 'Grave Matters' a bit of a key to my work; it literally denotes the grey areas, punctuating the (somewhat subjective) binaries with a scale, a range of possible states. In a way the work deconstructs itself. (If that is even possible!)


Its been an interesting process. Hopefully an interesting read too. Through this, and discussing my prints so far with others, I've realised I'm not pursuing the 'design fiction' idea as I had intended. Indeed, I don't think I've done well to thoroughly explore the term. So a change of scope. I'm sticking to the same themes and critical lens, but allowing myself to work with the broader term of 'visual communication'. I hope to bring more 'word' into examining the relationship between word and image; the titles of each piece are really important to me, but are not evident 'within' the works. That brings me to Derrida's critique of Kant's Ergon/Parergon relationship. But that's for another print and post down the track. :)