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Selected Works
ṫɨnnɨṫus
Home
Selected Works
Team
Individual Project
Dr. Brian Magerko
Date
2023 Fall
The song "The Murder Mystery" was created in 1963 by the renowned experimental group The Velvet Underground. It embodies the essence of post-modern thinking prevalent at the time, challenging conventional narratives and celebrating pluralism.
The song itself is a unique fusion of poetry, where four poems converge into one. The lyrics are intentionally compressed, often self-referential, and repeated in an incantation-like style. What makes it even more intriguing is the dual vocal arrangement, with one voice playing in the left ear and another in the right ear simultaneously. This deliberate setup creates an auditory puzzle, making it challenging for listeners to grasp all the words. Instead, each listening session offers only a glimpse of the lyrical content, fostering an element of mystery.
This narrative project delves into the experimental journey The Velvet Underground embarked upon, with a focus on visual representation. It seeks to capture the ephemeral quality of the song's verses through a disappearing effect in the handwriting simulation. The conflicts and overlapping voices are portrayed through simultaneous handwriting animations. A spotlight effect allows the interactor to uncover traces of vanished text or follow the ongoing handwriting animation. As one immerses oneself in the song "The Murder Mystery," the meaning of the words gradually fades, leaving the listeners with a pure surplus – voice. This project aims to explore this surplus of text – lines.
Although in this narrative project text symbols are transformed into performances of writing, the traditional literature's single-directional interactivity is still unchallenged. That is, the interaction doesn't alter the artifact in a way that would impact other participants' experiences. To achieve this level of interactivity, further efforts are required.
The Murder Mystery Lyric Excerpt
I created an interactive poster for the self-titled album by the Velvet Underground.
Background:
On the cover of the album, members of the Velvet Underground casually sat on a couch which is located at Andy Warhol's studio space "The Factory". This particular couch is present in various photos and videos. Besides the ones in which the Velvet Underground was in, Warhol took photos of himself relaxing on the couch. Warhol also held many events in this space, and they were documented with guests hanging out around the couch. The couch also appeared in a video of a live record of the Velvet Underground performing the song "Venus in Furs". Through the project, I want the audience to interact with the space that inhabited great talent and great passion.
The scene:
I placed the pictures of the Velvet Underground at the center of the space. As they slowly rotate around the center, you see the members' slightly different facial expressions in those photos. I cut out human figures from a photograph of one of the events and placed around the center as the guests in the space. I placed three members John Cale, Lou Reed, and Sterling Morrison on the outer ring that slowly rotates around the center and give the performance. Finally, I placed Andy Warhol on the couch on top of the space and he dispenses the famous yellow stickers which were on the first album of the Velvet Underground.
Interaction:
The "orbitControl" allows the audience to pan the camera/viewpoint and zoom in/out to explore the space however they want. Through different angles and moments, the audience can create infinite collages of this scene, or alternative possibilities of this space. I also associated music to the members of the Velvet Underground, and also correlated the volume of the each sound with distance from the camera to the images of the members. The audience can adjust the views and experiment with mixing the sounds, as the Velvet Underground explored "noises" in this album.
