Experiment with randomisation

This is a quick test I did yesterday just to see how a random video, a random story and a random piece of music would look together, and whether I would try to find some sense in them once I see them together. The story was found randomly on youtube when I typed 'man telling a story' the footage is from an old project I had done, and the music was picked randomly from my computer (from album folders that I had  never listened to). I feel the result is quite boring mostly because of the videos & the formal style of the story. I think the storytelling needs to be more raw & the videos much more interesting visually & conceptually.

I have come up with various points I need to think about:

1. The length of the story
2. The length of the video
3. The genre of the music
4. Most of the stories will be in Maltese (subtitles will have to be included) is this acceptable?
5. How to include extra visualisations (if at all - will have to try this to see if it adds anything to the project) and will this be a separate layer?
6. The quality of the sound (stories)
7. Contextualising shots rather than literal 
8. Edited or raw footage
9. Is it possible to have an instance where there is a video and a story but no sound, a video with sound but no story, sound and a story but no video - so they don't necessarily have to be there at all times.
10. Interaction - I still want to have some interaction from the viewer, whether it is simply clicking or tapping on a screen and getting a new random story, or something more elaborate. I think this engages them much more.
11. Response from the viewer & what to do with it: I want to see if the viewers will try and make some sense and link the randomised media. What do I do with this information? How do I record it and will it be a part of the project?

I have already contacted some individuals who have agreed to be interviewed for their stories; I will start the collection of stories during the Easter Holidays and will start seeing which ones I can keep as recordings, and which ones can become conceptual videos.

It is now quite clear that my proposal has changed substantially, but I'm happy to say that I have kept the elements that I was enjoying - randomisation - my initial concept of the Cosmic Kitchen of mixing different medias together, the best way to achieve something unexpected & unintentional is of course to randomise it & having no control over it, having a project about the viewers rather than myself, surreal elements in the videos & visuals.

I got rid of other elements that I felt where bringing the project down: the idea of trying to get the viewers to 'experience' something; this was clashing with the idea of the 'coexisting artist' as explained by Shultis in 'Silencing the Sounded Self'. I also got rid of the idea of having a linear structure for the project; this was restricting my experiments and as such, wasn't really needed in the end.

Overall I'm quite happy with how the project has been evolving & my next steps are to start gathering material; both media as well as new books and links to formulate a new, more appropriate title.