Compounds: How I solved Béla Bartók issues with cataloging work scale
Today, the practice of cataloging your art is not as common as it was before. I came at this field with the idea that entry barrier for art is way too low and therefore waterfalls of art will be made, it’s just too easy and it doesn't relate to the question whether it's good or not. With big bodies of work comes the issue of understanding them and what time period they were made. What was your original thoughts on it? Was it commissioned or not? Were you in high-school? If you have many works you might as well start forgetting about a couple dozens of them and even lose the opportunity to re-work them or re-interpret them.
I think in general more people should practice it as your own responsibility to the body of art you created, but if you don’t do it, maybe someone alive will do anyway. I find a little bit bizarre that I started the practice wholeheartedly and even I don’t know a lot about my catalog, since there’s works that I don’t know much about. If the creator doesn’t know, who will exactly? This was a call-to-action for 2022 me, which spent way too much time organizing work chronologically up to now, falling into different solutions as expected with someone with no degree in information science.
I got mostly inspired on the way Opus number were assigned back then, using a symbol. One thing that struck me is how I eventually end up with the same problem as Bartók’s. It becomes tricky to differentiate between scale of works, it’s not obvious when you spent way more time in a single work than other ones. It does matter when you're traverssing an ocean of works, most of it is water, you want some land. I got to work on a solution, but first let’s define what I mean by “work scale”.
Bartók maybe understood the difference between minor and major works as difference between complexity, or maybe just the overall size of composition. I think those are weird ways to measure the size of a work, because both properties are dynamic and interpretative. It’s like measuring a bouncing ball where it scale changes depending on how squashed it is. If I spam piano notes for 20 minutes, is it big complex work? Kind of. Is it big? Yes it is. Okay? Maybe we should define it as a major work? No, not really? Of course, academia or public admiration is not a useful way to measure work size, as is eventually related between artists that they can spend months to years on a project and oftenly what will viralize is the smaller-scale frozen-food work they done as a meme.
To know how to find this solution is to know how to define the work size first using sturdy facts rather than flexible interpretation of the work. And the even bigger issue with interpretation is the fact that it shifts during long periods of time. What you think about a work you did now is totally different from what you will think about it in 10 years; we, kind of… change, very very slowly, and so does our thoughts and interpretations.
Well, unfortunately this is kind of a hot topic, there’s nothing out there that will define the scale of a work unless you use your own idea of what is a big work and what is a small work. In composition, people generally gravitates toward music theory as a way to measure complexity, number of measures and b-sides or c-sides it contains, structure composition and motifs, how much time they spent putting notes together. How exactly? I’m not sure. I approached in a different way.
I decided to define the scale of work based on how many cross-medium relations there is, which is still interpretive, yes, however it is a fact that does not change with time. I call it compounds, represented by the C symbol in my catalog. I mentioned it in the previous blog but I haven’t delved into it.
The way I did it, was to separate my works into 7 different collections of similar mediums, where each one of them contains art that is single-medium. Music is single-medium, painting is single-medium, drawing is single-medium, a video without audio is single-medium, programming is a single-medium, animation is a single-medium. I decided to just be detailed enough, but it can go a lot further. By breaking down works into single-medium collections, I now have open the opportunity to put them together. That is when works are combined together to form a single composite of art, by combining the elements together into one.
Essentially, the greater the amount of cross-mediums, the greater the scale of the work. A game is absolutely way more likely to have more cross-mediums (involves programming, 2d art, sound effects, sometimes 3d work, texturing, UI design) than an album (a 2d picture and music), in which I agree with this. The complexity is also measured here because involving many mediums for a single work is like playing chess with your art. It’s very challenging for me, but I can see some people having a blast doing it and having an easier time. Still, the amount of different parts of your brain that you have to use together in order to output a videogame by yourself is big and I agree with this interpretation.
Of course, putting this together is also part of the challenge. I often have to navigate between different catalogs in order to find what’s what, and works aren’t together nicely as they should, which I plan to fix by introducing call numbers as a front-end to the actual static numbers. It’s still a work in progress. Right now I’ve got most of my scattered work around 3 hard drives into just one place and I’m putting them in chronological order as well as adding minor metadata like title, subtitle, software used, commissioner and some notes.