Mognet Music
a virtual sound installation
Mognet Music is a piece created following a series of several workshops that explored the themes of world building, unreality, and escapism, especially as discussed in Nick Scavo’s essay Against Worldbuilding and Wallace Stevens’ poem To The One Of Fictive Music. The resulting installation collects some of the refined output from these workshops and presents it as a simulation of space exploration, wherein audience members are invited to spend time in the orbit of planets in a system of “built worlds.”
My piece is an exploration of how fan arts such as cosplay and cover music, situate themselves within the real world, reacting to and evolving with a fictional world in a cycle of mutually influential simulacra. Fan art focuses not on building a world from scratch but on rebuilding materials from an existing world to construct one’s identity, using the fandom’s shared understanding of the source as a point of departure.
The 8 channel piece was created using MIDI transcriptions of ‘Cornelia Castle’, a theme by Nobuo Uematsu from the Final Fantasy game. I worked with the harmonic and melodic material as intuitively as possible, leaning into my experience of the game series to produce what is hopefully an honest and reflective example of how materials from any given fictional world are deconstructed and reassembled into unique, personalised accessories that make up a fandom. With 8 independently looping layers placed in orbiting satellites, each experience of the piece is made unique to the viewer, allowing them to contribute to the fandom.
SHOWINGS
2021
The installation went live in April 2021 and continues to run at IKLECTIC gallery online. Below is a live capture of ‘Mogent Music’ from the virtual installation.