A World Within a Phrase
An art and music challenge.
Hey friends,
I want to invite you to participate in a personal challenge with me.
I’ve started working on a music series that incorporates influences from phrases found in various media. While working on this, I had the thought that it would be cool to see how my fellow artists and composers interpret one of the lines of text that I’m currently thinking about.
When I say ‘challenge’, I really just mean a creative ‘prompt’, but that word often implies AI, so I didn’t want any misunderstanding since this is meant for all mediums of visual art (including AI).
A Love for the Abstract
If you read this Artletter, you know that I’m interested in all things abstract. I’m endlessly fascinated by the strange phenomenon that allows artists to conjure form and meaning out of the raw materials of their experience. The mere existence of abstract art and music is a testament to the power of the human mind to see beyond the world at face value and extract its essence to reveal deeper layers of perception and understanding.
An attempt to live up to such a statement sounds like a tall order for an artist, but what’s also fascinating is that we don’t necessarily need to try to be profound, or even intentional for that matter. Yes, you can be highly conceptual in your art, but you can also just play with raw materials and forms in a purely intuitive way. No matter where you are on the scale, or combination, of High Concept<———>Pure Intuition, your work has the potential to convey a message or evoke emotions in a way that is uniquely yours, offering perspectives and insights that have never been expressed in exactly the same way before.
It is this viewpoint of each artist that I’m interested in. And what better way to accentuate the uniqueness of our perspectives than by using a central point of influence?
The Challenge
Make an abstract artwork or music piece (or both, if ambitious) using the following line of text as the primary influence:
“They devour that by which they themselves wish to be devoured.”
The text is by philosopher, Peter Sloterdijk, in his book, Bubbles. This is mentioned only to give credit, but no context is necessary because we are only working with the given text, which contains multitudes of information to work with in the abstract (see ‘Interpretation Ideas’ below).
Post it on 𝕏 and/or Warpcast any time up until the deadline.
Use #LWArtChallenge, tag me, or DM me so that I can find your work.
Deadline: Sunday, June 9th (end of day for all timezones)
All works will be featured in this Artletter in a follow-up post.
Feel free to mint your work on any platform, but there is no obligation to mint. I will be participating by writing a piece of music, but will not be minting mine yet because it’s part of a larger personal project that I’ll release in the near future. I will do my best to collect any minted works.
Interpretation Ideas
Here are a few of the infinite ways you can use the line of text to influence your piece.
Literal: Apply a literal interpretation to the imagery invoked by the text.
Emotional: Use the emotional impact the text or individual words have on you.
Aesthetic Sentiment: Interpret the style and attitude you get from the text.
Structural: Look at the grammatical structure or any other aspect regarding the shape of the phrase.
Temporal: Consider the rhythmic patterns in the text, whether spoken aloud or purely visual.
Symbolism: Explore the symbolic meanings the phrase might carry.
Contrast: Consider any contrasts, juxtapositions, dissonance and consonances, tension, or other dynamics you find throughout the phrase.
Sensory Associations: Think about the cognitive and sensory associations that are naturally triggered by the phrase. These might be textures, colors, melodies, harmonies, etc.
etc.
The abstract realm is vast and infinite. A single phrase contains a world of information. I’m excited to see how you take influence from the given phrase for this challenge.
See you on the other side and thank you for participating with me.
-LW❤️🔥
I’m into it! Would collage be an acceptable medium or only purely abstract? I make a lot of digital collages intuitively. I’d love to take a swing at this :)