Imagine free space. Give thoughts in this space. It is a space to give and a space to take. An unusual place. A free place. Just space. This creates space. In this space, you can choose where to go. You go there, whereon you consciously or unconsciously turn your attention.
The result will be sometimes banal, but that’s exactly what makes it fun. The result can be complex because then that is interesting and makes you curious to dive in. Or the result is deep, dark, and heavy and you can get lost, if you don’t reflect this as a decision of directing your attention to these thoughts. Sometimes it can also be bewitched and then arises a break and there exists only space.
In the case of THE BOOK OF ODDITY we try to develop a place in this space. It is an ongoing process whereby we interact and exchange ideas. The special aspect of the project is the approach to assign the results of our ideas to certain characters. These can be traced back to real-life persons like in the case of Fred Austin and TNGX. But the ideas can also become reality through truly fictional persons like Oddward, Aurora, and Anima. These only exist in the above-described space but become part of reality through their acting.
Furthermore, we try to reflect on every decision that we make in the progress of the project consciously. This cannot be totally controlled, because there still needs to be enough space for spontaneous ideas so that it stays interesting for us to continue with the project. The reflections and ideas can concern music production, graphic design decisions, or the content of the story or characters. Additionally, the ideas can also affect the design of the whole project and concern the different narrative levels and how we see the project ourselves. The only decision we have firmly made is to allow limitless ideas as long as they do not hinder the progress of the project.
So what we try is to use the above-mentioned space, where everything that we are in the position to think of is possible. The second step is then to find out, what and how something can be realized. Therefore we decided to use a lot of computer graphics and so on because it was the best way to manifest our ideas. And nowadays we are very happy with this decision that gives THE BOOK OF ODDITY more a computer game-like feeling than that of a classical music group. This also opens up the doors towards new ideas on how we use characters and continue the story and at the same time understand ourselves as a part of the story and as characters like Oddward, Aurora, and Anima.