Woman with Words (Round Robin)

With the world moving further into the digital age, some have become resistant to the changes saying that the “millennials” are losing their contact with others and their creativity.  Though like DJ Spooky says, with this media comes connection, comes communication with others.  He mentions how we can collaborate with others to be even more creative and allow our ideas be spread more widely and added upon.  I think about Pinterest in this sense, where people come together, present their ideas that then get shaped and modeled by others. This results in even more creativity being shared.  This assignment is supposed to achieve this, sort of a community within the group that creates five different stories with five different viewpoints making up stories.  It reminds me of “Everyone is Art” by Samira Harris, which is a collaborative artwork involving pictures of several people to make up a resemblance of Botticelli’s painting “The Birth of Venus”.  Our group of several people make up individual parts of these stories separately, but as a whole they come together to create art.

Part 1 (Heather Moser)- I was thinking about how  when we hear things, coming back from a class, the words sometimes spill out of us and we basically lose that information.  I thought this would be a great beginning of a story that could go somewhere, hopefully in a way that the words would instead come out of her mouth once she plugged her ears.  I wanted it to be a sort of panic that these words were spilling out of her because that is sort of how I feel when I can’t retain some of the information from classes.

Part 2 (Jake Nelson) - The spilling forth of words made me think that the story was going to deal with the theme of candid expression and our struggle with retaining some of our harmful communication. As a result, I wanted to show that the words could not be contained by such an easy solution, thus the fact that the words only found another exit. I hoped by continuing the playful, yet groutesic theme that the story would reflect a fairytale of sorts where the protagonist comes to and realizes that harmful communication is stopped from within, rather than simple fixes outside.

Part 3 (Amy Peterson)- She looked 'round her room in a panic, grabbing a bucket to catch the words pouring from her mouth. 

Part 4 (Maddy Purves)- Her breathing slowed as she watched the letters in the bucket form words, and gasped when she read what they said.

I’d read that the character “looked around desperately” for a bucket for the words to spill out of her mouth and -- feeling as under the weather as I, myself, was -- took that statement literally. I wanted a bird’s eye view of the bucket into which the character had vomited her thoughts, feelings, etc. in the form of letters. I then thought it would be interesting to see what words these letters would combine into, and decided upon words like “forgiveness”, “happy”, and “love”, for the last person in the chain to interpret.

Part 5 (Juan Rodriguez)-She forgave herself and moved on with her life.

Coming up with a conclusion wasn’t easy. Without knowing her name and what happened before, I only knew that I needed to come up with a conclusion. It could either end well or bad. The last part was about forgiveness. By the way it was written, it felt as if the protagonist came to realize something very important. Whatever it was, this was my starting point for this last part. She finally forgave herself and now everything is going to be alright.

As eloquently stated by DJ Spooky in his preface to the Exquisite Corpse, recent advancement in social connectivity is fueling the fires of collaboration; breathing life and form into the masses of information we consume everyday. Despite the increased flow of information, however; collaboration and the art that derives from it continues to be dictated by the unbreakable, universal rules of chance and individual perception. Each one of our blogs displays a spin off of the Exquisite Corpse and evidence of the mentioned universal rules. As a team, we played a game where one individual begins a story, only to be constrained to writing under 20 words and sending the rest to be filtered through the artistic channel of four others. After coming together and analyzing each individual’s justification for their respective part, we were able to not only discover the following insights into how a disjointed story can work together, but also basic patterns manifested in collaboration itself.
After coming together, we each explained our justifications for the parts that we’d played. As a team, we realized that the game had forced us to think about our stories through a lens of communication -- which communication, in and of itself, fits under the definition of a ‘medium’. As a group, we each had to adapt to what the people before or after us in the process chain would add or take away from what we, ourselves, had imagined. Some players were able to adapt quicker than others, while the others were able to adapt more cohesively. This did not become apparent, though, until the game had finished, because there was such a lack of communication. 
Therefore, without communication, the stories became more about expressing our personalities and worldviews rather than plotline. The game was challenging. It was hard to release some of our precious creative control into the hands of chaos, but chaos was crucial in preserving the crucial element of purity with regards to our reactions and responses. Most importantly, out of this purity came a story that was more creative and unique than we could ever imagine.
Looking deeper, we as a team felt that our game also helped unlock additional insights into the role of collaboration in art itself. As mentioned by DJ Spooky and class discussion, collaboration as an artform may seem disjointed and Frankensteinian in many regards. Each individual carries their own worldview, which is only accentuated in narrative construction as that worldview seeks to adapt to constraints and filters. Above all, however; these constraints are what make the Exquisite Corpse the artform that it is and the strongest glue that binds our story together. Each part of the story is unique in content, yet similar in which is what made. It stands as a microcosm of art itself, where we merely sample and elaborate off the shoulders of artistic giants who came before. Information and creativity may exponentially increase in a globalizing world, but the rules of artistic creation remain the same; forever dictated by the constraints our game portrayed. 

Music Mosaic

These pictures I’ve created share common colors and shadows.  The whole scheme is warm tones, soft.  I would say it’s a rustic pattern with dark shadows.  These colors of the pictures are what I imagined whilst listening to this song, country like and basic.   The beginning rhythm made me feel hurried, busy.  The city picture represents this riff for a city is full of rushing people.  The watch also shows this riff by demonstrating how time is ticking away quickly and there is no sign of it slowing down.  The blurred dots are my interpretation of when this fast-paced riff would be hit by these chords that felt like a mushing of the notes, blurring this image of a fast moving city in my mind.  The chords put this spurt of colors into the riff, much like the bright orange picture that blends several colors, moves them out in a burst showing how the chords take one color and explodes it.  In the song, a downward beat is created by hitting the guitar making this ‘tack’ sound.  I pictured the image of the hammer hitting the nail when listening to it; the downward motions of the hits and the sharp yet short sound that is made when contact occurs, driving the nail further as well as the song.  The fast rhythm turns into this slower riff with a very different tone to it, but still has this fly-by feeling like the mountain range passed by on the road.  This new riff contains these rolls like the mountains, ups and downs and has this softer tone of blues to it rather than the oranges, yet is still quickly.  This riff brought out thoughts of nostalgia for me, thinking of quiet moments I’ve had because this quieter section feels serene.  It brought thoughts of rainy days spent in the quiet indoors, away from the wet of outside, but still admiring the tranquility and scene from a protective window.  The water droplet picture explains this feeling.  The curtains are what I think the overall color and picture of the song is because it blends the warm rusty colors of the fast, but also the brighter, lighter color of the slow.  When taking these pictures, Dillard’s point on seeing being a verbalization, kept coming to mind.  That unless we call attention to something then it will pass by our eyes.  I never noticed what could so easily bypass my vision until I started looking for things to represent this song, then I recognized objects I’ve never offered much thought to or I began to see in a different way.  Christoph Hessel’s Public Privacy reminds me of the droplets picture I took for both represent feelings one has in a certain situation.  Mine is about a quiet moment and nostalgia, his is likewise a quiet moment, but also one of being uncomfortable when so close to other persons in public. 

Song Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmE3QaGetn4

Thinking & Writing

            If I were to tell everyone that I day dream in visual detail about being a superhero who saves everyone from a nuclear blast or of my future life in a house married to a man I saw in my class, no one would bat an eye.  But if I told them that I can see my deceased grandmother who talks and interacts with me then everyone loses their minds, particularly me in this case.  The common mentality of people is to ignore others with mental conditions or to shrug them off.  There is not much help for people with mental illnesses especially when facilities that are supposed to help them can’t because of a lack of funding from the very people who keep this mindset.  This is what is predominantly shown in the movie Dream House. 

            A man who is suffering from a severe mental illness, is plagued by the relentless hallucinations of his deceased family.  Yet, after spending five years in a mental facility, there is no relief for his suffering.  He is let free where people pretend there is nothing wrong with him, ignoring the fact that he seriously needs some sort of help with this problem. 

            This film came out in 2011, a time when there wasn’t much talk about mental illness.  It was starting to become more common to talk about such things as depression or schizophrenia, but the old fashion thinking that it is taboo to talk about such things was still prominent.  Only now has it become way more open to talk about these sort of problems. 

The movie was released when Casey Anthony was on trial for killing her daughter, a major news story in 2011 that many people were following closely.    Any time a child is brought into a seriously disturbing matter, it catches peoples attention.  There were many questions as to the competency of Anthony’s mental condition, whether she indeed was mentally sound or not.  The correlation between this prominent case and Dream House are uncanny.  Both parents were put on trial for the murder of their family, both had their mental health in question, both were acquitted from their case.  So many people during the Anthony case were so sure of her guiltiness and were surprised of the verdict given by the judge.  It could be possible that Jim Sheridan, the director of Dream House, saw an opportunity to bring to light the pains and horrors of not being mentally of the right mind, regardless if they did in fact murder their family or not.  Also the fact that we just don’t know the truth, perhaps they did not actually commit the terrible deed, which was ultimately shown in the film.  

Daniel Craig, one of the stars in the film, in an interview about Dream House stated,” the mind is a wonderful thing.  And a dangerous thing as well.”  Doesn’t that statement just capture the very essence of the film and of human kind as well?  This seems to be the very reason that mental illnesses get such bad raps, because people think that they are dangerous.  And well certainly there are those few cases where a mentally disturbed person is a danger to themselves or others, that does not hinder the fact that there is a great need for more awareness and aid to mental health conditions.  This very fact should be the actual reason for action of greater aid, greater facilities to help people plagued by a mental illness.

It is known that this film did not receive very many accolades; a lot of people did not like it.  It’s possible that they were simply disappointed that it is more of a thriller rather than a horror film or thought it was frankly boring.  Perhaps though that taboo societal mindedness of not allowing such personal problems like mental illness be shown caused many to watch it and cringe.  Topics like this can be uncomfortable and coupled with the uncertainty of the main characters mental condition and if he did in fact murder his wife and two daughters could put even the strongest man on edge and feel very uncomfortable. 

            For me personally, I connected well with this film and could see the problems it was trying to exploit in society.  I have known several people with severe mental conditions, mostly bipolar manic-depressives.  For them, day-to-day life is frightening because they don’t know when they might crack again and there is not much sympathy for them because so many people believe in the ideal that you should keep such things locked up.  Yet don’t we all have these ‘dream houses’ where we try to keep our problems locked up, our secrets and all it does is end up hurting us?  Too bad that for so many people out there, what they have to keep locked away in their ‘dream house’ is a serious mental illness and they can’t seek any sort of comfort or aid from society because they will be judged for it.