The scarlet_dream sequence is a collection I started when I wanted to do much more palette restricted designs using some of the intuitive composition style I developed with Jesse Cathode and sega_sibyl. When I was around college age, there was a streak of design in the music I like that used red and black and white. The White Stripes are an obvious influence, but also Interpol and The Strokes delved into the palette – and these bands were really shaping my emotional life at the time. Particularly poignant for me was the strange lines from Interpol, all three colors – all very abstract:
White Goddess, red Goddess
Black temptress of the sea, you treat me right
Black Goddess, red Goddess
White temptress of the sea, you treat me right
So as I had this palette in my head, I used to imagine that I could only dream in those colors. I don’t know why exactly, but it became something of an obsession. Some of the doodles from classes that I scanned still exist. I took to calling them triptychs, doing three at a time, choosing random letters and numbers (the 45 was a reference to the random track Brimful of Asha that stuck with me for some reason).
In one of my classes we were meant to learn to use Flash (back when it was Macromedia Flash) and make an animation. I kept the palette and made a strange looping animation with menus called Triptogram. The unnamed character falls through a manhole and falls forever through different patterns set to music until you click the black hole and they fall back out of the sun to the street, walk towards the hole again. Since flash doesn’t really work very well anymore, and this may be my only chance to share this odd project – here’s some stills from it.
So took some of the ink and spatter experiments from that era that I had scanned at 1500 DPI as TIFF files (thank goodness for archival foresight) and used them to make some new designs. It’s meant to be kind of a tribute to my past self, and an exploration of an idea that was very intimate and inter-laced with a still-maturing personality. So far there are two completed cycles.
