picture of a horse running

The universal truth of my project is that it’s hard to feel a sense of belonging when straddling two worlds or two cultures. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of capturing the dynamics of Cambodian pride and midwestern isolation. The project is primarily based on my experience as an Asian-American living in the midwest, which is almost a completely unique culture in and of itself.

My project was made out of a variety of techniques to create a pseudo-video-collage visual album. I opted for longer clips and images because drawing out the duration of a visual is meditative and compliments the song. The songs themselves started in a large variety of ways and almost every song idea began while working on this project. One song towards the middle of the project comes to mind because I had the original sample over four years ago but it was under a completely different context. This theme of recontextualization pops up over and over again in the project (visually and aurally), an idea I originally got from the experimental artist Slauson Malone who is constantly reworking the same idea. My main influences musically on this project (and generally to a degree) were Slauson Malone, Steve Lacy, Sigur Ros, Beach House and Dean Blunt.

The imagery of a horse has been floating around in my mind for a while. I thought it would be interesting to infuse the racial and ethnic identity references found in this project with a western aesthetic. The (white) horse as a symbol has a deeply contradictory meaning, embodying both purity, freedom, spirituality and death, particularly in the context of war. In many ways, this could be read as a metaphor for the complex nature of identity.

I opted to make a website because I didn't feel like the YouTube video was a finished presentation of the ideas in the project. On the website (felgen.xyz/running), lots of the themes in the project are present in the form of a loose floating collage that slowly gets absorbed into a blackhole along with the video, an idea I had been interested in exploring because of the way it places worldly conflicts and experiences into a physical scale. I could go on about why I chose some of the images. I think the final effect is best viewed on a computer.

The imagery of a horse has been floating around in my mind for a while. I thought it would be interesting to infuse the racial and ethnic identity references found in this project with a western aesthetic. The (white) horse as a symbol has a deeply contradictory meaning, embodying both purity, freedom, spirituality and death, particularly in the context of war. In many ways, this could be read as a metaphor for the complex nature of identity.

While working on the project, I had a whole ensemble of technical issues. The first one that comes to mind is how my macbook kept on running out of memory while editing the final project which had me ax a piece of the project. This caused the project to jump a little tonally but it still worked out in the end.

I’m pretty happy with how the project turned out. I gained a lot of experience by working on it and I learned how to combine photos and videos with music in a meaningful way, something I had rarely explored. This is something I will definitely continue to do down the road. Speaking of down the road, I would obviously love to revise my final project down the road and restructure the flow of it in general. I recorded a bunch of songs for the project I never used and I made it so I could tweak the project well into the future.