Too many screens.
One of the biggest difficulties I had with this project was creating the cover art for Screen Glare. I know this might sound a bit off since the whole project revolves around light. Still, the specific difficulty in designing a cover art around this project was trying to convey the underlying ideas around Screen Glare without addressing light specifically. At the start of this process of creating instruments and sound inspired by light, I wanted to make it clear that I was not creating an audiovisual project where light and sound interact with each other side by side. Instead, my goal from the start has been to take the aesthetics and social attributes associated with light and transpose them onto sound.
Because of this tension between me addressing light conceptually but not visually, I decided to create a sort of digital sculpture inspired by the ideas discussed in Screen Glare. I familiarized myself with the 3D workflow by designing the cover art for my previous EP (New Old Stock) and have, in the meantime, also started working with some rudimentary Real-time 3D rendering techniques. The primary advantage for me when using 3D software is that I can create visually impressive work without relying on my lacklustre illustration skills. And the ability to use the 3D camera in creative ways allows me to create bountiful Promotional Material from a Single scene by changing camera angles, going in for extreme close-ups or distorting the perspective of the piece.
The primary theme I used as inspiration for the cover art was the public/private space dichotomy that I explored within the LP. Another fundamental piece of visual inspiration came from the track "Screen Scape", where I studied how we use our small private screens (smartphones) to escape the hundreds of public screens that are thrown into our field of view every day.
The final cover art depicts two screens that face each other. The screen on the left symbolizes public space, whilst the screen on the right is representative of private spaces. The left screen is highly reflective and has a rougher aesthetic, whilst the private screen appears more matte and generally displays a softer image. This follows my general observations on how lighting is used in these two categories of space. Still, beyond that, I hope that it inspires an internal dialogue within the listener around ideas of what it means for a space to be public or private, and what happens when the line between those two starts to blur.
I've included a couple of Close-ups of the artwork to spike your interest as we get closer to the release date.
