In "How Texts become Real" the concept of investment giving meaning was addressed. As I read this I was able to relate greatly.

I immediately thought of my time as a young boy in Argentina and the emotion connection that I had the television show Batman the Animated Series. I went to an argentine school and was not only the only foreigner but for the first year or so could not understand any of the conversations happening around me. Each day I would wait patiently to go home and watch Batman. He was also alone, he like I, was surrounded by a strange world in which he did not fit in. To the general public he was a crazy man in a costume and to the costumed villains around him he was their bane. Through all this I began to relate to him and those that fought along side him I pictured myself as Knightwing. He to was alone working separately from Batman but always knowing he had an ally somewhere in the night. This gave me great comfort and helped me as I slowly began to learn the language and make friends.

To this day I have a strong emotional connections to Batman. While I like the films they have much less meaning to me because they do not have that value I gave them as a child. It has less to do with content and more to do with the meaning I have given to it. In fact I much prefer to read Deadpool comics.

         For this assignment I wanted to draw from my experience with the piece. I wanted to create a piece of art much like those that I would make as a child. I made sure to use construction paper glue and children’s scissors. I wanted to have this art that was so familiar to me represent the negative experiences I had as an outsider. I was made fun of often would associated the schoolyard bullies with the villains on the television. I placed them around me as a child dressed as Batman. I then took lines from the villains on the show and put them through several rounds of Google translate before lastly translating them to Spanish. This was the Spanish is how I heard It broken and confusing yet still full of cruelty.

THIS IS NOT A SONG

This is Not a Song is my attempt at making sense of the difference between music and between what one would call “a song”. It is an attempt to address the difference between art thats primary purpose is to be enjoyed and art that’s primary goal is to make a specific point. John Cages 4’33” helped to inspire a lot of my initial thoughts abut this. Silence is a great starting point for this conversation. Silence is an important part of music and is arguably a piece of music itself. That having been said entertainment and enjoyment are not a huge part of the concept of music being silence. Another source that addresses this point of the space in-between music is at the beginning of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. The central unnamed character enters this space in a dream like state in the beginning of the novel. He finds people there preaching and addressing ideas, more specifically topics pertaining to religion and race. This stood out to me as a testament to the importance of there being layered meaning in music as an art form but not necessarily as a form of entertainment. As I began to write the song I spent some time thinking about how straightforward I wanted to be with in expressing these ideas. I thought about McCloud’s Setting the Record Straight. I liked that the he used a very straightforward approach to express his ideas. He choose to speak directly to the audience. I knew I wanted that at some point but not throughout. There is part of the song where the lyrics directly address the confusion. I ask, “ what is the difference between music and a song?” I give certain suppositions but do not try to define. I leave it open, as “art” usually does. I also use more subtle approaches to address this idea both through lyrics and song. At one point I try and bridge the gap between song and painting by implying that describing a painting is the same as painting one. Underneath that a deep bass drum can be head which is actually me beating on one of the canvases of a painting of mine. I use many non-musical items like this to push the idea or theory that everything is music. Among these items are a waterbottle, a bowling pin, a hole puncher, scissors, and even the pages of the book Invisible Man as I read and sing from it. The last portion of the song addresses the opposite of the first. Where as the first is a pensive speculation of the ideas of music art and silence in regards to music the last third of the song address the opposite. Thru yelling and loud noise it tries to make sense of the emotional side of music, it is less subtle in both sounds and lyrics. The piece tries to address the nature of music and hopes to be music while failing o be a song.

Bartime Stories

“It's our history; we can change it if we want to,” says Miss Falewicz in the film, Be Kind, Rewind. In in many ways, she is right. Psychological studies show a lot of evidence for various ways in which we reform the past, occasionally conjuring memory out of whole cloth and sometimes out of nothing at all. Suggestibility, memory misattribution, false recognition—these are all terms that psychologists use to explain such events. We can liken it to Orwell’s 1984 with all its thought police and rewritten histories. You may even think of this example as a microcosm for our own brains. We create our own realities.

To that end, we ought to be skeptical of historical drama as fact. Our perception of history is largely influenced by where we are experiencing it. In our screenplay, we chose to incorporate popular themes in the world today: roles of women, the dubiousness of Thomas Edison’s character, the way ideas are sensationalized and misrepresented in society, etc. These things weren't really on the discussion tables in the 1880s when the story is set, but they allow us to connect to the period in a way that we understand and enjoy.

We took a great deal of creative liberty in developing the story—so much so that we suggest Edison may have been a woman. It’s left a bit vague, so it is up to the viewer to decide if this is Martin’s biggest lie yet, or if there's really some truth in it. The woman is, after all, a lead figure in Edison Machine Works, which is atypical of the 19th century American workplace. That aside, it turns out there were actually women inventors at the time. Prominent among them is Margaret Knight, known by journalists as the “Lady Edison.” The story is funny and silly, but there are some legitimate “currents” running through it.

A major inspiration as the story was written was the humor in everyday life. The original idea came as Kyler read a story about an argument between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Edison had promised Tesla 5,000 dollars if he completed a design. When Tesla completed the task and asked for his reward Edison said that he never intended on paying him and that Tesla simply didn't understand American humor. This prompted Tesla to leave Edison's employment. Tesla and Edison became rivals and had what one article refers to as a “war of currents”. The fact that such a silly thing took place between such great minds was a driving force behind writing a comedic script about this place in time. We liked the idea of creating a character that wants to be a part of history, as most people do. Through Martin we tried to show the ridiculousness and sometimes futility of this pursuit. Yet here we are in the very same business, attempting to elicit a snicker rather than “ooh, lightbulb” out of the name of Edison. Did we succeed? You can be the judge.

http://www.livescience.com/46739-tesla-vs-edison-comparison.html

http://www.biography.com/news/famous-women-inventors-biography

Bartime Stories

Future Library

The beauty of a process piece is the focus on creation, and at our core that is what sets humans apart from other living creatures on earth. What’s so wonderful about documenting a creation process, whether it is through the medium of film or through sound alone, is a compound effect. One creative piece inspires another and the potency of that creative process is given room to grow, much like a tree in the forest. This idea is evident in the short documentary, “The Smokehouse”. With each appropriately composed shot of the wood as he carved, we were watching a communication between two artistic works. The first being that of the woodwork and the second being the medium of film. This collaboration of artistic mediums illustrates a macro-process, similar to our audio documentation of “Future Library,” in which two processes compound and communicate. As art begins to communicate with art, it has a better chance to influence the people who come in contact with it and in doing so it has a better chance to stand the test of time. This idea of artistic communication and time is something that we wanted to portray as we started on this work.

The idea of Future Library is timeless, growing like tree roots into the past, rooted in the future, and growing upwards towards the future. The link between a tree and a book and man is as old as the written word itself, leading up to the moment where we are always faithfully writing books for a near-future audience, but now we are looking further into the future. Future Library will contain books that will not be read for a century, and authors such as Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell who are contributing to the project must faithfully write for an audience that may not even exist.

Rachel first stumbled upon the idea of “Future Library” as she was scouring a artistic journal publication for ideas. The idea stood out to her because it seemed like a simple time capsule, but it was actually complex: filled with questions and implications about the future of humanity, libraries, forests, and books. The artist, Katie Paterson, believes that these things are interconnected. She got the idea for Future Library when she thoughtfully compared tree rings to chapters of a book. We particularly liked the idea of trees growing as a book was growing, since their fate is interconnected. We wanted to reflect that in our process piece by juxtaposing the forest sounds with typewriting. We also decided that since the idea behind this process holds equal weight to the process itself, we wanted to avoid following a strictly linear path. We introduce the process piece with a quote from Fahrenheit 451, a book all too appropriate for this project. This introduces our theme, then we introduce our forest, a steady presence throughout the piece. The forest is the only component of this process that will be present in an interactable way in our lifetime, so we kept it throughout. We also thought forests and libraries to be very similar, so we juxtaposed them in the beginning with the audio of turning pages and stacking books.

Finally, we wanted to end the project with the theme of the unknown future. We included a clip of a news reel with no real news to introduce the idea of a century where anything could happen. Then, we end with a quote from T.S. Eliot: “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”

It is fascinating that such deep stories can be told in a picture and 20 words. I feel like the round robin gives us an opportunity to have these collective, small bursts of creativity, that can turn out to be quite beautiful. It was interesting to see how the stories progressed as they went through each set of hands. I didn’t imagine where the story would end up, when the idea originated. The first idea seemed the most difficult, and the later rounds became easier to write. It was as if the first Idea was a little spark and once it caught, it was easy to put wood on the fire. The beauty of collaboration is that you have to give up control. Most of the best art is produced when it is created with restrictions because it causes the artist to think outside of the box. When several artists work together that's that much more box to think outside of.

One interesting result of this project was that upon sending off the latest story to the next person, it was rare that the next story would convey what the original author believed to be the important or interesting aspect of the story. Some stories meant to be taken literally were read by the next person as containing a deeper meaning. Other times, the story was meant to be deep, but the next author took the story at its surface. Regardless of the author’s original intent, the next story was often surprising and enjoyable. Each string of stories goes off in a direction the original author most likely did not imagine. These results exemplify the idea that stories are more creative when working as a team.

In the article about the Exquisite Corpse by DJ Spooky, he talks about how fragmented, varied puzzles reflect more accurately the collective memory of our culture and how we as a whole progress. Perhaps this idea could stand a few more test runs from us, but the point is valid. It is simply a silly thing to assume complete control over anything, let alone a creative process, and indeed when a person freely gives up what control they have they not only have an opportunity to be presented with new, interesting points of view, but also insight into other people.

Spooky compared the exquisite corpse and other similar methods of creation with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—as accurate as any comparison could be in two senses. Firstly, in the literal sense, it really is sort of a mismatched and vague representation of a story-isn thing, which is beautiful in its own right. It is also a figurative compilation of numerous consciousnesses, opinions, experiences, and interpretations. A “living” thing,” according to Spooky, as “‘text’ is never inanimate”—an entity of sorts built up from the minds of five independently thinking people.

While writing these blurbs, I felt that I was building up part of a community.  As a collective we have our own personal beliefs and experiences, but then putting it together is like a realization of how we fit together as people.  In a community, when new people come in contact, lives are changed and a person has a choice to take different paths in their life.  This process is similar to when a character beat is formed within story.  Now within this exercise, it as if we are introducing the characters developed in the stories to a new person, who has their own perspective and experience to change the life of this character forever.  Mimicking this natural process allows the story and characters develop more naturally.  Just as we do, the characters have the opportunity to be influenced by the introduction of new ideas.   Then the community grows the with the development of new characters and the introduction to new ideas to each of us as creators.  

"Conroy" by Cake

As I read “Seeing” by Annie Dillard, one little anecdote jumped out at me. It was only one sentence and it described how a photography professor happened to see a bird die midflight one day. The first thing that impacted me about this was how random and unique of a thing that would be to see, but then something else struck me. Why was he looking up? This idea of knowing where and how to look was explained and addressed throughout this whole article, but that moment of looking up was what really inspired me. I loved how Dillard talked about seeing things from fresh eyes and from fresh points of view and I wanted to create a piece that had specific meaning to me and yet could be readily used to tell an equally specific story to someone else.

As I listened to “Conroy” by Cake, I tried to start with a fresh slate. I wanted to have nothing else on my mind as tried to “look up” at this piece. As soon as I started listening to it, it took my mind back to the first time I heard this song. It was a year or so ago and I was sitting angry in traffic. As soon as the song came on my anger evaporated, my mind was filled with ideas and my body with joy. I was so struck by the song that I just listened to it over and over until I was out of traffic. Its odd mixture of sounds forced my mind to make stories. It’s this story telling quality that made me so enthusiastic about wanting to work on this piece.

As I began to paint I thought about Storm Thorgerson who did artwork for bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Each of his pieces have a story telling quality that compliments and at the same time stands alone from the work that it was inspired by.

In my piece I wanted each image to speak for a moment in the song, but I wanted the combination of these images to be what tells the story. I wanted the colors as well as the images to mirror each other and yet be very different in their content. The images needed to be viewed together so that they could highlight how different they are from each other. In the song we hear sounds that are not normally heard together, and that combination is what brings such vivid story lines and images into the mind of the listener. This idea of combining ideas to make new ideas so perfectly embodied the concept of looking at things with fresh eyes and from different points of view. In my painting I tried to tell a story that was specific to me, yet was ambiguous enough for each new pair of eyes to create a different story.