Potential ideas to explore

This change of direction for this final major project has meant that I've not had the luxury of time to allow a lengthy experimental stage. With previous projects, I've tended to see what comes out of various processes to inform some kind of deliverable. With just over a month to complete this, I need to be at a stage where I'm ready to move into a more considered approach to the output to maintain a certain amount of freedom to fully explore the potential aesthetic solutions.

So right now I'm considering a number of different directions. All of which are the result of the rationale I've been refining.

One is to argue the relevance of format to music in the digital age with a series of 'unplayable' music forms. As with the Matthew Dear 'Totem', the format itself is simply a collectable visual object with the audio content via streaming or download. The use of unplayable media is, for me, a logical conclusion for where music retail is going and is seemingly a more potent yet actually quite abstract piece of ephemera that might question the current music buying habits within this particular era. I can already see a number of interesting routes for this and have a selection of associated visual references that I'll post as soon as I have chance.

A second option is a series of print-based items that exalts digital media by exposing how traditional music formats have been wrongly defined as the actual music. I knocked up the quick image below as a marker for this approach although I'd suggest a broader interpretation of the concept. I also need to check on the availability of various print facilities before going too far down a particular route.

The third was an idea that looks to exploit the fetishism for music formats in a visually communicative way. To highlight how vinyl hunger in particular verges on the pornographic. This is the one that I'm less sure about although I was thinking it could be a fairly tongue-in-cheek series that looks to play on that desire.

There's a fourth option which would be to use all of these in some way and build something approaching a campaign that uses the various elements to contribute to a dialogue about the concepts of music, formats and meaning.