Personal - Weirdcore: Research & Experimentation

Following our briefing on our Experimental Media unit assignments, I became excited because this is what I was looking forward to; my personal sort of research projects on this blog have been in anticipation of these tasks. Thus, I'd like to experiment with weirdcore and  internet surrealism as potential themes for the portrait series and/or multi-screen moving image piece.

“I Find it Very Difficult to Understand What is Going on These Days” by David Lynch, 2009.

Here are a couple of edits I've made over the term, inspired by weirdcore, the image above and a Photoshop tutorial by Piximperfect on Youtube for using the brush tool and unchecking "transparency shapes layer" in Layer Style to paint illumination.

(This was a tree)

Whilst scrolling through the r/weirdcore subreddit, I came across a short morph/degrading quality edit someone had done to the beat of 'Solace' by rapper Earl Sweatshirt.

a very short edit. it’s my first from r/weirdcore

This comment particularly made me think about how narrative can be constructed and how visuals can become immersive with this heavily compressed, borderline creepy sort of content. This edit itself seems inspired by the audio choice, so I looked to music as a starting point. I downloaded Machine Girl's instrumental song 'Nwofka Skullboy' and manipulated it slightly using Audition. Having some experience in Audacity meant that I knew what basic effects did to audio tracks, but hadn't been able to non-destructively mess around with them. James Wright's Audition tutorials were very helpful in giving me a secure starting point. I shortened it to 30 seconds, then added reverb, phase, delay, time stretch and some pitch shifting.

After I'd done this, I listened to it a few times to get ideas for a narrative. What came to mind was an entity approaching the door to a house party and entering, followed by a hallucinogenic trip sequence and ending with them waking up to a weed trimmer outside. I thought it would be cool to play with perspective and have the character walk into a wall, having that turn into them waking up faceplanted on the floor and flipping the frame. Here is a VERY basic storyboard for this concept (drawn atop reference images of my house, I used Minecraft crying obsidian blocks for the partygoer's texture) barring the trip sequence, with the edited track:

I've also been watching some fairly obscure content by YouTube creators such as music producer YABUJIN, Professor Janky and Corrupted Memory. In terms of video art, I am reminded of 'witch house' aesthetics, a very visual genre which shares similarities with these channels, such as cryptic messages in storylines/titles, dreamlike sequences with philosophical themes and audio manipulation (e.g. reversal).

Here is a playlist of my favourite selected videos under this umbrella.

YOURLOCALBREADMAN (Immanuel Jacobs) is a creator who not only produces music, but also uses Photoshop and After Effects to edit together gameplay concepts, combining things I'm very interested in such as the RPG interface, Aphex Twin's music, surreal horror, the SCP Foundation (online collaborative fiction) and liminal "weirdcore" aesthetics. Jacobs has mentioned being inspired by OFF, Undertale and Earthbound (RPG video games), as well as animator David Firth who created Salad Fingers. His developing style of VHS tape distortion overlays, dark comedy motifs and interdimensional creatures is clearly defined in his animations and album art. 

Below is an artist study inspired by the image above, in its original looping gif format; I used an previously taken image of my housemate sitting on our conservatory roof, traced the countours on him, attempted cel shading and added a doodle-style walrus-type creature to the side of him. Finally, I used Photomosh.com to create a .GIF as per the original video. I've included the original image and the un-moshed coloured-line version as well for reference.