Sharing Dreams/Compartiendo Sueños 2008:
Design in Music/Diseño en la Música

Patrick Schreiber

Design, as with music, is based on rhythms and proportions and is governed by cultural precepts often liked or disliked based on a viewer’s/listener’s inherent intuition. Both genre, while multifaceted in their presentations, can be subjectively deconstructed based on the multitude of cannons that were developed over the course of previous centuries. And as often is the norm, we find comfort in the familiar while shunning the unknown with an occasional willingness to venture beyond our region of comfort allowing ourselves to experience the unaccustomed while temporarily withholding judgment or criticism. Yet in the end, we always seem to find ourselves holding on to the inclinations that originally formed our preconceived opinions if only to ease our discomforts.

The Sharing Dreams collaboration has given me the opportunity to examine the context in which I question my preconceived notions of culture based in the pretext of design and music. Most intriguing to me was the notion of representing an art that is primarily auditory in a two-dimensional visual framework. I was challenged with using a score of color, form and spatial relationships to competently convey a substantive context of music—more substantively with a distinctive notion of a guitar. Adding to the myriad of parameters was that this collaboration is based in a multilingual context.

As I embarked on my investigation, I found myself constantly referring to the project title ‘Sharing Dreams’ as my muse. I wanted to create an ethereal visual representation with a pervading impression of excitement in a dynamic visual context. Using a matrix of overlapping gradations comprised of different sized raster’s while adjusting their opacity, my intention was to create a multidimensional visual dreamscape that allowed the viewer to move in and out of the real – to the ethereal landscape.