As our last rotation, it was all about sketching and drawing a short story complied of 3 scenes (beginning, middle, end) however, the middle scene must be based on a location. To help us discover ideas to utilise for our task, we took the tube down to London Bridge station, where we would walk up to Tate Modern.
From there, we were encouraged to doodle 10 different locations around the museum. These doodles don’t have to be a detail, they only need to provide a minimalistic tone to what the location and atmosphere looks like.
After the exercise was done, we had to decide which doodle we would like to use for our story. For mine, I’ve picked my doodle of Babel, a tower of radios based on the myth of the same name. In similarity to the myth, it has radios playing sounds and recordings of news broadcast and discussions, symbolising the knowledge that is speaking to us. Every time I visit Tate Modern, this is one of the monuments that I’m always looking forward to seeing due to its size and symbolic nature surrounding it. Meaning that creating a story based on this would be fun to explore this piece in my own narrative telling.
Before I got to work on this short story of mine, we had to go through some exercises of sketching and toning.
Moving on to the creation of my story and using the location of Babel as my mid point, I wanted to make this story about someone who has just discovered the tower, hidden away from prying eyes who wishes to steal the knowledge for themselves. The tower is kept in an abandon building that blends in with the rest, inside are lots of cables and plugs to kept the radios of sound working to provide its knowledge with soundproofing foam covering the room, preventing any outside noise from purging his volume. The character walks inside and up close to the tower. A few feet away from him, stands a robed figure, speaking about the knowledge that the tower provides and why it has to be self contain from publicity.
I’m really happy with how this short story turned out. It was a fun concept to develop around the monument. If I was given the choice to further explore this story on its premise and background, I would like to take up on that as based on this concept alone, there is a lot that I can do to turn this short story into its own narrative.