Itâs true everything is a âstoryâ now and everyone wants to be a âstoryteller.â Fashion spreads are âfashion stories.â Food photography tells a âfood story,â but if storytellers want to jump straight to the âfeelsâ (god help me for using that term) they could just skip story and write little descriptive vignettes. So why donât they? You can get to âfeelsâ before you fully assemble a story, if thatâs really your goal.
I donât know. Thereâs a reason why âThe Wallâ and âTommyâ are such classic albums, and a large part of it is that they arenât just a collection of songs but they tell a story.
And âThe Walking Deadâ adventure games arenât really that great as adventure games per se (there arenât a lot of puzzles) but they are almost universally acclaimed for the story of Lee and Clementine that they tell.
Iâm puzzled by this article. I agree with the part quoted here that story telling is not necessary to evoke emotions in many mediums. But the article goes on to talk about Disney rides, which rely on characters and well known symbols (graves and spider webs are scary). A really good artist doesnât need to use other established symbols to evoke emotions (or create âthe feelsâ) any more than they need to rely on story telling. They can do the job with color and texture and scale and so on. So I guess I feel like the article starts along a path toward something interesting and then doesnât get very far.
I get most frustrated with obviously talented makers who rely on other peopleâs stories and characters. So many Tardises (forgive my pluralization errors) and Aliens and Storm Troopers out there could be something more interesting if the artist could only get past the ease of the established symbol and begin creating their own.
Assigning a narrative to the haunted mansion is as tempting and as treacherous as putting a story to Lego⧠blocks before theyâve landed into the hands of children. But Disney Corp and The Lego Group both have got to make money, so theyâll sell us what weâll buy.
There is the other side of the coin: at least in the case of Lego the children will learn that the official narratives arenât the only ones that can be made from the pieces on hand.
I think all art forms look like magic from the outside but like a âfuggly hackâ from the inside. Hiding the âtechniqueâ is what I think sets good art aside⌠including storytelling.
As an instrumental/electronic musician, what I go for in my more ambient music is a sense of setting. A place and time that might be very story-ish, but there is no plot. The inside of a giant clockwork machine or a tiny electromechanical one; someplace wet and subterranean; an unknown forest at night; a distant train.
In my less ambient music Iâm mostly doing mathematical stuff with rhythm, or just cool noises⌠but basically suggesting action and motion and change, without describing what they are. Forward, either steadily or with drunken lurches and stumbles.
And I like to go from one mode to the other, so there is motion into a space and then drifting to a stop, or starting in a space and then pushing/pulling out of it to somewhere else. Itâs almost getting to be a cliche with me; sometimes I worry about it, but I usually donât resist it.
Finally, an article that justifies my utter lack of artistic narrative!
Sounds like a lot of technologies, too.
I havenât seen Lego in years. My last glimpse led me to believe that by now, thereâd be no more modular parts left in the kits, just ready-made faces, animals, vehicles and whatnot. I guess you can still make up a story different from the official one.
I havenât been following it very closely, but my impression is that it got a bit better recently.
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