'Murica

As I awake that morning every year, a sense of anticipation overtakes me.  I put on all the garb I picked out the day before, prepare for the food I’ll be consuming, the sun that is going to turn my skin into a shade like unto an apple for I’ll forget to reapply the sunscreen.  I know I must savor every moment of this day for it is one I enjoy more than Christmas, more than my own birthday.  The 4^th of July.  The time that my patriotism shines through most, when I recall the ideals that made this country great, remembering our founding fathers as well as all the soldiers who sacrificed their lives for us.  My country.  America.  My home.  

I marvel at the circumstances that surrounded the establishment of this country.  The founding fathers created a government that really worked, that was divined by God.  A country that would be full of freedoms, liberty, and justice.  Equality, a melting pot of all the cultures that I’ve come to fall in love with.  It is meant to be a country for all people.  It’s supposed to unite the countries of the world, giving people a place of refuge, a place where they can be who they are and share their culture with us all.  It was created by immigrants and should allow all to partake.

Though I love my country very much because of the foundation on which it stands the principles of freedom, equality, and justice, I know it doesn’t have the same rapport it used to or the same ideals.  Americans, to quote my grandfather,” are too fat, dumb, and happy.”  The American image is one of obese white males who only care about guns and McDonalds, naïve to the issues facing the country and the world.  People on the outside looking at America see these people who are entitled and over proud of a country that has veered so far away from the principles it was founded on that it just makes us look like bigots. 

I wanted to extrapolate the difference between my pride for my country and how differently I see it from how the world sees it.  I took the iconic picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware River because it was a pivotal point in our success in the Revolutionary war and envelops a man that had the right vision for our country.  I was hoping the images I superimposed on the image would be more offensive, but it sort of turned more humorous like the “Untold adventures of George Washington” imgur account.  Yet, it still works to bring the message across with the use of humor.  It was interesting the correlation with my topic and the reading talking about creating an idea into a cult.  Essentially the idea of America could be the greatest cult there is, people dress up in the garb, everyone knows the quotes of the America characters, and they pick apart the original story.

The Hand in the Salt

Sculpting is a unique art form in that it can take the thoughts of the artist, the vision that an artist has and put it into a tangible 3D object.  These objects can simply represent something else like emotions or an idea.  My inspiration of creating this hand came from my constants thoughts throughout the past weeks on hands themselves.  The design of hands, the functions of them, what they can represent in and of themselves has taken ahold of my fascination as of late.  From these thoughts I was able to form a hand I pictured in my mind, all the little lines, the bevels of the veins on the hand, the intricate details were represented through the sculpting of the material in my hands. 

Though one of the greatest aspects of this medium is being able to actually take the medium into your hands and shape it into an object that others can touch and feel all the details, it does have limitations.  The object itself can’t have the depth of focus like a painting nor can it move like a movie.  These objects created through sculpting can represent great ideas or thoughts however.  For me, I thought it was interesting to take this inanimate material and animate it in a sense into something that is so familiar to most people.  Along with this, like in this picture where I’m essentially having a handshake with my creation, it represents the camaraderie with the human race.  Hands are our way of contact with others, where we can give a pat on the shoulder in reassurance or hold hands with our sweethearts.  It represents the basic needs of human nature. 

Reading over Scott McCloud’s little comic strip on comics, reminded me of how old sculpting is as an art form.  Just like he talked about, comics in our day are similar to the “comics” of ancient Egypt, my sculpture resonates with those of ancient Greece.  The times of Michelangelo’s David and others can be seen through not only my little sculpture, but other artist’s works for the fathers of this art form will subsequently be shown throughout the generations since them. 

A quote from Philip Guston expressing his thoughts on this art form, I feel fits well to what I was explaining with this work,” painting and sculpture are very archaic forms.  It’s the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.”  Though it wasn’t necessarily imaginative to create a hand, the thoughts behind creating it, produced a unique perspective into the hand itself.  Ultimately it created an ironic aspect for it was hands working that modeled this hand representing the work and glory that hands can do. 

Historical Story

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_RPsR220rfeM3N5b1JiNFYyU2c/view?usp=sharing

      We began playing around with the thought of a Japanese man in America knowing about the attack on Pearl Harbor and trying to warn everyone.  We had too many problems trying to figure out how to start it, then we thought of the bombing of Hiroshima.  As this idea began brewing between our discussion, we saw a potential script.  We thought it would be interesting playing around with the idea of a Japanese man living in America, working for the military, knowing about the bombing of Hiroshima and have this conflict of which country he would be loyal to.  Would he be loyal to America, his new home, or Japan, his homeland?

       We saw correlation with our script to the "After the Deluge" reading through both showing life as normal at the beginning.   People in both times are going about their business, but word comes to them that something big might be happening.  Some are more skeptical than others, but soon it becomes evident that this normal life they have been living is going to be drastically changed.

       We found an article that would help propel his choice, “After Internment: Seattle’s Debate Over Japanese Americans' Right to Return Home” by Jennifer Speidel.  In this she mentioned some of the hatred for the Japanese in America after the internment camps in which is when our story would take place.  There were so many people who despised these people, would treat them very poorly.  Adding this aspect to our script with the one soldier attacking Tadashi, only heightened his reason to help his home country of Japan, but by so doing betraying his new home.

       Differing from most films about this time which show the perspective of the Americans’ side of the war, our story is from the perspective of the Japanese.  It is similar to Letters from Iwo Jima which is the standpoint of the Japanese during the war.  Showing both of these sides is crucial to humanize these horrid acts these countries inflicted upon each other.  It gives this sense that there was heartache for all, but especially for those citizens who didn’t want to take part in their country’s fight.  Our script shows the struggle for those Japanese citizens living in America who felt the impact of both the Pearl Harbor attack and the Japan bombings.

       When delivering such horrific news as the Hiroshima bombing, there isn’t need for any flourished or prophetic language to deliver it.  We just needed the facts.  “This Day in History” on the History Channel website provided the needed information for August 6, 1945.  It gave us the name of the bomb, which was crucial for our dialogue in providing at first skeptic remarks and then to a clear statement of destruction.  The simple delivery of them meant for a greater impact on our main character.  

The Process of Elimination

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reLr5Z-OVqM

We focused on a process of elimination, exploring the cognitive happenings of people (us) as the decision was made as to where we should go to eat. Even though things like this are widely known as “processes” it is not often pondered as it happens. This sort of casual, friendly and non-spectacular conversation is the sort that anyone would overlook; nothing big happens, we don’t, by the end of the conversation, come out with anything tangible. It is, however, a definite clear process—and one that is really quite elementary. Interactions with other humans tend to all be processes in their own right, this is simply one form they can take.

The process itself seemed, at first, a little worrying to us. We thought that the presence of the phone that was recording, the knowledge that we were having a conversation, would somehow impede our subconscious willingness to be normal in this situation. However, it became very clear very quickly that there was nothing special to this. There was no reason to worry about being insincere; it was very natural. The product, while not immediately tangible, was a decision made mutually through the collaboration of two people in civilized, friendly conversation. It highlights how familiar we all are with processes in a general sense. It is likely a natural thing for an artist to hear “find a process” and assume that it’s a hard thing to do, because we’re all artists and since when is anything easy? But in reality, most everything we do is some sort of process, even if the product is just a decision about pizza places.

Though we didn’t necessarily have in mind the videos that were the preparation for this assignment, the product turned out to be much like Dean’s little video.  Each process wasn’t fantastical in nature, nothing overtly special, but very simple and a phenomenon that occurs often in everyday life for people.  Whether it’s the struggle of having to gather a family together to read the scriptures or the struggle of making the decision of where to eat.  There are always factors involved that can halt the process, one person can derail the whole event by disagreeing, but in so doing it adds to the process, making it a part of life.

        When we had the completed product, we both discovered a mutual appreciation for the webseries Good Mythical Morning.  What the hosts do on this daily Youtube show is have a conversation about a plethora of subjects, improvising the entirety of what they say like unto what we did.  These internetainers opening is always “Let’s talk about that”, leading into this process of a conversation that can have many disagreements, or they’ll even be debating over a final decision like what the world’s ugliest animal is.  In this sense, we saw that our process was of the same fruition as the daily episodes of this show.  

Heather Moser

Grace Taylor

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