The Media Forge

A Multimodal Transformative Media Practice for Lived Inquiry

The following is a behind-the-scenes exploration of the profoundly transformative creation process I discovered while making my recent song and music video Awake in the Abyss.

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Introduction

In the depths of a Dark Night of the Soul experience, I stumbled upon something unexpected: a new form of transformative practice I'm calling The Media Forge. What began as a simple attempt to capture a profound moment evolved into a multimodal journey through AI-assisted expression that fundamentally changed how I understand the relationship between experience, memory, meaning-making and transformative media expression.

The process unfolded organically:

• A raw voice memo became an AI-transcribed field note

• The essence distilled into an AI-generated song that surprised me with its emotional precision

• The lyrics transformed into moving images through AI video generation

But something remarkable happened along the way. Rather than simply documenting my Dark Night experience, each stage of expression actually deepened and expanded it. The combination of verbal, textual, musical, and visual elements didn't just preserve or abstract the memory—it forged it into what I can only describe as a "visceral memory tool," a multi-dimensional artifact I can return to and re-experience in ways that single-mode expression never allowed.

This is The Media Forge for me:
Using AI as a collaborative partner to forge lived experience
through multiple channels of expression
into a living memory catalyst
for embodying the original experience
in continually newly emergent ways.

Below, I share the complete journey—my original journal entry, the surprising song that emerged, the evocative music video, and a detailed practice protocol for anyone who wants to experiment with this process themselves.