No two artistic mediums are exactly the same. While I do have a plain “trans/script” of the tidal flats, I also wanted to play around with the idea of “sensory translation”—i.e., translating the tidal flats’s pilot from its audio medium into a visual medium, but preserving the overall mood of the piece.

I got an opportunity to do so when I and six other Asian American women and femmes created a zine for Dr. Sayantani DasGupta’s Narrative Medicine course, “Embodied Borderlands: Narrative Medicine and Diasporic Fiction.” Our zine, available here, is titled “Rage Against the Monolith” and excavates ways in which Asian culture and people are seen as overly docile and homogenous. I took the first half-ish of my pilot script and imagined how to enrich it with visuals in lieu of music, ambiance, and the other aural features of my audio documentary-collage. This process involved going back to photos that I took during the most difficult point in the creative process; it was rewarding to see how important that low point was to the end vision/result of “finding the tidal flats.”

If I was preparing this for legit publication, I would change a few things (tone down the theory that was connected to our coursework, for example!) and would love to collaborate with a visual artist to stimulate deeper creativity. But, I wanted to share this hard work as it currently stands. I hope you enjoy~

~lmz