- I'd like to make the background have some depth to it (e.g. clouds) to make it more than unrealistic flat white. I experimented a bit with some background textures as I was working on it but wasn't happy with anything I came up with so I left it blank, but with a bit more work I think I can come up with something more convincing.
- The main pilgrimage structure is still a bit too symmetrical. I'm thinking to correct this I might actually re-shoot some of the objects I used to build the object, maybe keep one vertical half while the other would be from corrected perspectives.
- Lighting and shading still needs a fair bit of work to enhance the three-dimensionality, I didn't have enough time to invest in this step near the end.
One of the strangest bits of feedback I got from the crit was that a few people, including one of the instructors, thought that the precipice that runs across the supporting pillar of the central structure was actually the point where the column touched the water, and everything below that point was the column's reflection. From this point of view the picture must have looked like shite. This is the sort of visual confusion that kind of drives me up the wall. To fix this, I plan to extend the image downward to actually show where the column rises from the water. Hopefully this will clear up one of the things that was bothering me about the image, that being that the image doesn't look grounded enough in terms of perspective, scale and distance.
Another useful bit of feedback I got from the crit is regarding the companion text. Most people agreed that it helped to expand on and define the world of the image better than having a purely visual depiction. However, some felt that the inscrutable and rather impenetrable vibe given off from the text was rather alienating and didn't help open up the image much. I can definitely see where this is coming from. In fiction, (particularly science fiction where the constructed world is vastly different from ours) the viewer/reader often needs a relatable protagonist that responds to strange new things from a suitably ignorant perspective. Think of Luke Skywalker. We can gain a much clearer idea of what it means to be a Jedi by learning it as he does than if we spent 120 minutes watching Yoda building his solitary swamp hovel and reflecting philosophically on the breeding cycle of murky aquatic predators with a habit of mistakenly gulping astromech droids. But hell, I'd watch that. It would be bizarre as hell and most likely confounding, but it would stimulate my imagination better than this...
So it seems there could be a conflict here. On the one hand, people who see what I've created need some kind of gateway perspective to make it less confoundingly impenetrable, but on the other, I like evoking the opaque and unfathomable (just look at the title of my blog). My fix for this is to have it both ways. I'll keep the "Boreal-Liminar array decrypted fragment", but I'll also include a less alienating textual perspective, perhaps from that of the "Indigenous" or another group. Opposing perspectives will hopefully help to make the work conceptually three dimensional, similar to the way I strive to make my work more three-dimensional visually. I plan to have multiple perspectives/narrative fragments to accompany each work, serving the purpose to both unpack the constructed world more and to raise intriguing questions as well, without leaving the whole picture too muddled.