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