"Have read little and understood less."
- James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a young man
If Stephen Dedalus would have had access to a blog, I bet he would have had a blast. I imagine him writing endless tirades about oppressions of the mind and the hauntings of history. His search for aesthetic truths would have been.. well, probably a bit annoying to read, but fascinating regardless.
A virtual space like this is at once communal and open (hi!) but also just an infinitesimal little spot in the black hole of the internet (hello?). That's okay though - right now, I'm just looking for an external source to put my thoughts. My MA thesis is going to be my attempt to make sense of the aesthetic aspects of video games: their designs, the concept art, the painterly and draughtsmanship. I'm training as a scholar of literature and visual studies, and I'm an artist with deep roots in illustration as well. That's left me with a great interest in video games as an artistic medium. I'm interested in the pictorial, not so much the simulational. I'm interested in the pretty and the weird of the design, and where they came from. On what shoulders do the aesthetics of video game design (concept art) stand? Why? And what does their appropriation and re-production of those elements mean for the larger discourses and contexts from which they were drawn? How are they innovated? And perhaps most importantly - what kinds of contemporary discourses do they communicate about our cultural moment? I'm interested in the intersections of this new artistic expression found in concept art with discourses of drawing and craftsmanship on the one hand, and critical fields of gender, race and sexuality on the other. What can the big philosophical aesthetic frameworks tell us about concept art, moreover?
That's a lot of questions, right? In Ulysses, Stephen is driven half-mad by his questions and runs into the streets, screaming: "The intellectual imagination! With me all or not all. Non serviam!" Okay - I'm probably not that bad. Yet. But I might one day, if I don't put all my thoughts out there somewhere. So here we are, in the blog-o-sphere. Here I will be collecting pictures, thought experiments and notes over the coming months. For whoever finds this one day - I hope my resources will be helpful to you too!
I'm putting in my favourite concept art picture to kick this off. Here we go!
I'm putting in my favourite concept art picture to kick this off. Here we go!
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| Concept Art for Life Is Strange (Dontnod, 2015) by Edouard Caplain |
