Process Piece

Artists' Statement:  

Our process piece covers rehearsals for a play over the course of two days.  We were striving to capture the essence of all the the work and focus that goes into each rehearsal. There is so much that goes on in a rehearsal and it was hard to know what to include. It was tempting to weave together the sounds of performers who simply warm up and instantly pour brilliance from their lungs. However, that is not what rehearsal is really like. Life is not like “Glee” where all we need to do is believe in ourselves and reconcile our differences with our ex-boyfriend in order to hit the perfect harmony. There is a lot of preparation that goes into the perfect final product. Which basically means, rehearsals are full of struggles and mistakes most of the time and it is only toward the very end when things start to come together.

We decided to have our piece include these mistakes and struggles in order to demonstrate the truth of rehearsal, rather than the illusion of performance. Ours contrasts with the video from the film Once, in that the musicians in our process piece do not catch on to the songs quite as quickly. We get to hear their struggle to find notes and blend together, as well as some of the preparation and warm up. This brought us closer to the goal of learning to appreciate the process just as much as the product. The struggle that the actors had to find the right notes is the real tension and conflict in the story, and it can be just as interesting as a more polished presentation.

As we found clips that captured those conflicts in the story, it was cool to see how the different segments of the audio matched up with each other even when they took place at completely different times covering different songs. The story had a beginning, middle, and an end, even though it wasn’t completely traditional. It was cool to see that you could find story in the process itself, not just a final cut. We are so used to the finished product’s progression that we don’t ever get to see the stories behind it.

We also got to show the personalities of the people involved with the play. Just like we got to see Jack White’s eccentric personality as he built a guitar in his backyard, we got to experience the sense of humor and work ethic of the characters in our story. By taking time to really experience this one part of a bigger whole, we are able to really appreciate the details of that moment.

Pokemon by Neil Cicierega

Here's the song I talked about in class. Enjoy.

Round Robin (Yum)

Day 1

Day 2

"One day when Jack was playing “Stairway to Heaven,”

one of his freckles yelled and said he was sick of that song.

Jack said “Ok” and started playing something else instead."

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Personal Artist's Statement:

            Considering that this project promised hilarity and wackiness, I’m surprised that my story still ended up taking a completely different turn than I expected. I knew that it would end up being funny, but I learned that the simple act of observing art and adding upon our interpretation fuels creativity in a magical way. I was interested to see that at first, my story had a normal response about the protagonist playing guitar, but quickly afterward, each story that followed had a distinct personality including a story about violin-playing moles, Confederate violin makers, and punny narrators. Paradoxically, as we accept the fact that we are building off one another’s stories, we can still create truly original art that might not have ever seen the light of day without being set up like this.

This emphasizes that there is no shame in, and in fact it might be essential, to listen to and appreciate different forms of art while we’re striving to create something new. Because we each have different life experiences, we’ll interpret things differently. The reading by DJ Spooky made this argument by explaining that creativity lies in our understanding of the information we observe. One particular example that stood out in his argument was that the concept of multiple lives in video games has its roots in Indian reincarnation theology.

This idea places great responsibility upon us as consumers of art to make sure that we are constantly filling our minds with the best books, movies, music and other materials. This way we can appreciate everything with a fresh eye and with new context. Our life experiences can also help us to appreciate art in new ways. One humorous example is in the film 500 Days of Summer, in which we see that the protagonist’s unrealistic expectations for love were, in part, formed by a completely misguided interpretation of the film The Graduate.  After a rough relationship, this character comes to see the ending of that movie very differently, most likely in the way that was originally intended.

            I felt that my story worked because it gave just the right amount of a frame of reference that challenged the others to conform to a basic structure, yet gives freedom to create an infinite number of scenarios within those parameters. It also shows just how important context is in the telling of a story. If there was no context or frames of reference in this round robin storytelling, the stories may be somewhat interesting individually, but we really don’t appreciate it until we see how each of the stories interact with each other. I especially enjoyed the stark differences in tone in days three through five. The stories were pretty different on their own, but were linked through talking about violins and allowed the reader’s mind to fill the gaps. Thus the small links that the different stories have to each other turned each one of them into something much greater. As they say, small and simple things bring great things to pass!


Group Artist's Statement: 

We believe, as a round robin group, and adhere to the absurd thought, that we are small little cheeses.

Sometimes we smell bad.

Sometimes we’re delightful.

Sometimes we get dropped on the floor and swept under the rug.

But we get better with age.

Luis Bunuel can back us up on this: “Age is something that doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese.”

Unless you are a cheese! We must be cheeses! Pair us with fruit, crackers, meat, bread, wine etc. and we make delightful tastes and new experiences.  Who would think that a fine brie when paired with a pear (so it’s peared) would make such a wonderfully enigmatic flavor explosion?

What is amazing to us is that hundreds of cheeses have existed for hundreds of years and we didn’t invent them (actually, was cheese invented or was it discovered?), yet we are always finding new ways to present said waxy, creamy, buttery, nutty, edible mold.

We cheeses likewise adhere to this principle as we create art. There are so many preexisting ideas, that the notion of originality is ridiculous. With billions of thinking minds on the planet, there must be at least one or two overlaps in “creative” thinking. Is there not?

We agree that the creation of art is a Frankenstein and a smattering of random thoughts pieced together in new and exciting ways. We cannot create, only recombine and innovate. This was perfectly evident in our Round Robin experiment. Random ideas could be combined in new and exciting ways, which in turn yielded fascinating results. The beauty of the finished product lies not necessarily in it's cohesiveness but in it's concept.

DJ Spooky spoke of this in his article entitled The Exquisite Corpse:

“. . .the basic idea is that the idea of living multiple lives, games theory, and the moral relationship between individuals and society was linked to rules - it seemed like a good place to reflect on how games get "sampled" and remixed, depending on which culture they're in. Cut and paste the result, and the basic idea is that this is all about information, and how we play with it. It could easily be PacMan, Quake, or Halo2 it depends on your frame of reference. It's a thread that easily connect artists as diverse as Luis Buñuel, John Cage, Virgil Thomson, and Grand Master Flash. Yes, Grand Master Flash! The whole idea is to look at links - at connections that are unacknowledged but also undeniable: chance processes, and randomness do that - they scramble subjectivity in a way that lets the unconscious methods we've used to sort information in our minds become a filter for the way we engage the external world.”

Yeah, long quote. But it’s spot on.

“Creativity” is the recombining of literally ancient ideas.

On the other hand, if cheese gets too old, it can go bad, grow mold. . . etc. We are required, subsequently, to keep refreshing our cheese supply.

We have to stay relevant and informed.

This is what we learned. That we are merely cheeses, likely to mold and rot if we do not keep refreshing ourselves with new ideas and combining them together to innovate.

“Age only matters once you shrivel up and rot, so you better stay fresh.” -Not Luis Bunuel

Music Mosaic

"Blue in Green" by Miles Davis

 The piece of music that I chose for this assignment was Blue in Green by Miles Davis. I’ve always thought that this piece had a melancholy feel to it, so I decided to choose colors that would reflect that mood. I started off by making the pictures more black and white, with a lack of color. I feel as if this gives the images such as the street lamp and the contemplative face more somber. However, as the song progresses, the color becomes more saturated and the images become more blue. This adds a cautious but hopeful attitude. However, the images are still not completely in color, keeping a sense of ambiguity.

Another element that I used to continue to change the perspective from the melancholy to the hopeful was by using different levels of light in the pictures. I started out with pictures that were darker and showed small sources of light, such as the neon sign surrounded by darkness or the street lamp at night. Then as you go down the pictures, they become more flooded with light and sources of light such as the shiny and reflective saxophone and of course the sky lights which are the last two pictures.

I also used the subjects of the pictures themselves to emulate the experience of listening to the music. As a saxophone player, I tried to capture the texture of the instrument in the picture, showing the different keys and tubes that are part of the complex structure of the instrument. The complex lines and shapes on the instrument reflect the complexity of the improvisation on this song. As a saxophone player, the literal texture of the instrument is just as beautiful as the sound, and I wanted to capture that in the image. I also took a picture of a record and tried to show the textures there and also emulate the experience of listening to jazz in the image.

I also chose urban landscapes as subjects because of its cultural connectedness to jazz music. The occasional quick tempo of the solos in this song juxtaposed against the slow overall tempo of the song reflects the need to quickly go about our business in the city, while still feeling that our individual lives go on slowly or can pause for a moment. It is in these moments that we can find beauty in our surroundings. This is in contrast to the Dillard reading, in which she seemed to find more beauty in nature. I was interested to read about how she continued to speak of all the things that she just barely missed as she tried to observe them in nature. However, I was quite impressed at all she was able to see and I think that she has a much more trained eye than she seems to be giving herself credit for.

The reading reminded me of some lyrics from Stephen Sondheim’s musical, Into the Woods.

“Just a moment,
One peculiar passing moment...
Must it all be either less or more,
Either plain or grand?
Is it always "or"?
Is it never "and"?
That's what woods are for:
For those moments in the woods...

Oh. if life were made of moments,
Even now and then a bad one-!
But if life were only moments,
Then you'd never know you had one.”

(source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/i/intothewoodslyrics/momentsinthewoodslyrics.html)

Thinking and Writing

Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood has been one of the most positively reviewed films of 2014. The film chronicles the life of a boy named Mason from age six until the beginning of his freshman year of college. Although it may not have had the marketing that major blockbusters had to make them financially successful, Boyhood still managed to captivate the audiences who saw it. What marketing the film did have reflected the nostalgia of the years represented. Herein lies an important factor, which made the film so relatable to audiences: Boyhood’s success reflects our generation’s already existing obsession with nostalgia and the pop culture of our childhood. This obsession leads millennials and even those born in previous decades to fall in love with a film like Boyhood, which makes a point of bringing to remembrance images from the past.

            The interests shown in social media by young people reflect these attitudes and longing for the glory days of youth. One of the most popular social media sites to recently emerge is Buzzfeed, which frequently features lists meant to relate to certain niches of Internet culture. Some of the most popular articles are those that relate to the childhood of the readers. These articles feature toys, films, and technology of past decades to evoke sentiment within the reader, probably associated with various memories of childhood. In fact, an entire section of the website, called “Rewind” is dedicated to 90s nostalgia. Titles of articles include “The 11 Most Essential Mid ‘90s Back-To-School Teen Girls Fashions”, “31 Little Victories That Made Every ‘90s Kid Feel Invincible”, and “15 Things from the ‘90s That You’ll Never Experience Again”. Each of these are shared and re-shared and appear across several other social media outlets, including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.  

            Other trends appear on Facebook, which reflect the Internet’s hunger for all things nostalgic. One popular practice is to participate in “Throwback Thursday”, usually featuring a photo taken in the past. These can be as recent as a week before, or as old as a picture taken at birth. At any rate, the desire to want to be brought back to older times seems to be a popular yearning. Pop culture continues to resurface from the 80s and 90s as a steady demand for merchandise from that era is on the rise.

Filmmakers increasingly produce reboots and remakes of old television series and films. Some of the most financially successful films have been adaptations of 80s television shows such as Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Another franchise soon to be rebooted is Power Rangers, which continues to run on television, despite being created two decades ago. These franchises have had previous films in decades past, but producers can rely on these brands to continue to grow and be successful. This is largely in part to the young adult audience, who grew up with the same characters. One of the most popular franchises, continuing to rely upon the success of the original is Star Wars. This is particularly referenced in Boyhood, as the main character finds common ground with his father in the discussion of the films, despite their initially rocky relationship and the normal problems of adolescence.

            Another strategy the film uses is to consciously feature technology of the day, such as the Gameboy Advance, which Mason plays as he ignores an irritating conversation between his grandmother and sister. Mason’s intentional aloofness helps him avoid the painful reality of his sister’s self-absorption and lack of empathy for him. It also provides the audience with something of which they can relate. Mason consistently releases emotion through entertainment throughout the film. During his tween years, Mason’s stepfather’s alcoholism pushes the family to the limit. Locked in a bedroom, the only thing that Mason can do to release the tension is to watch a viral video of the time: Will Ferrell’s The Landlord. The fact that this video is Mason’s coping mechanism only elevates the nostalgic admiration that the audience will feel towards this popular video. However, the film uses the video even further to undercut the comic relief with awful reality. They specifically use the portion of the video in which Will Ferrell calls his landlady an alcoholic, reminding us of the villainous stepfather.  

            While it’s true that much of Boyhood’s success is largely due to the fact that its storytelling is dynamic and the characters are well represented through fantastic acting and realistic dialog, the film was nostalgic by its very nature. In and of itself the film was founded upon the premise that it would follow the course of a boy’s journey to adulthood, with the production taking as long as the plot within the film. The very tool that the film utilized to such stunning beauty was the presentation and reflection of the past, present, and future. The entire film was centered on the perception of time, and experiencing life in the moment. The moments in life build up one’s identity, but the film treats each individual moment as something sacred. The items of nostalgia in these scenes, whether they are a videogame console, TV show, or even iPhone, are the symbols that represent those important moments.

            The current fad of being obsessed with the past may not last forever, but is certainly prevalent in our society. True, reflection of the past has always been part of human nature, but perhaps never before have so many young people started feeling “old” at such an age. Perhaps never before the pervasive culture of the internet have these young people found grounds to feel like they have authority over others who may be just a few years younger than them. But Boyhood is aware of these tendencies and uses them cleverly to help increase appreciation for the story. On the film’s Facebook page, fans are encouraged to recreate childhood photos. One contest on the page featured the giveaway of a Viewmaster autographed by the director. One website for the film removes all doubt of the role nostalgia plays in the film’s success in its very title: boyhoodnostaglia.com. It may be the case that obsession with nostalgia is shallow, but Boyhood was able to use it to bring people to enjoy the film while turning those moments into so much more. The film’s genius lies in it being at once relatable, but deep and touching. The sincerity builds upon the past, and encourages the audience to live to the fullest in the present and future.

BOYHOOD TRAILER

Sources:

           

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rewind

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2014&p=.htm

http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/14/showbiz/movies/mighty-morphin-power-rangers-movie-ew/

http://www.boyhoodnostalgia.com