Fireside Chat Artist Statement

Wow, this was an incredible assignment! I’ll talk a little bit about how I used media to illustrate my belief and then just kind of discuss the night as a whole.

           So I believe in the power of looking up. That phrase that Grandma wrote on the back of the photo of us, “Always remember to look up,” has meant more than one thing over the course of this year, but since I’ve spent so much time discussing the relationship between art and the artist lately, it makes sense that this time, I thought of art. I believe that sometimes we just need to start recording life as it happens and that we shouldn’t wait until the perfect time and the perfect equipment or the perfection of our craft. The informal documentaries of our lives that we create in the moment on our phones might even be the most important films we’ll ever make because of how special they are to the people we care about most. They’re real. They are what happens when we “look” up from our formal artistic work every once in a while and just hit record.

           I used a lot of photos from the London film trip last spring because I had a lot of special experiences on that trip personally, but I also consciously worked to improve my skill as a photographer. So I’ve got photos of both kinds, pictures that I’m proud of artistically, and stuff that frankly looks like crap but is still meaningful to me personally.

         For example, I shared this photo, which happens to be one frame of a goofy video taken on a train on the way back from Eltham Palace. Michael had been speaking in a weird accent the whole day and now he’d re-opened a cut on his finger and was bleeding all over the place, so I pulled out my phone and asked him to describe what happened in his “voice,” and the result was pretty hilarious.The video is shaky because we’re on a train and I was laughing while holding the camera, and you can hear someone blowing their nose in the background and the lighting isn’t great. So it’s not exactly an outstanding piece from a visual/audio standpoint, but I’m so glad I recorded it. Months later, it still makes us laugh, it reminds me of the friendship we developed and triggers memories of what I saw and learned at Eltham palace, and it also perfectly captures the personalities of Michael and Mariah. 

I also shared this photo, taken at Orrest Head in the English Lake District. This one I’m actually proud of. I took the time to frame it so that it captures not only the contemplative gaze of the person on the bench, but also the gorgeous green rolling landscape he was looking out at. To say it’s not meaningful to me would be a lie, because it actually captures the thoughtful side of a friend I made really well (this is actually another picture of Michael), and from that one photo I’ll always remember how beautiful that countryside was. But I’m glad I have the goofy video as well as the pretty photo, because if I’d only taken a snapshot when I felt it would look great, I would have missed an entire aspect of the trip that was just as important to me as the stuff I managed to capture well. 

Proud of this one!

On the last day of the London trip, a few of us decided to say goodbye to the city from the top of the London Eye. I managed to get a great snapshot of the cart at the very peak of the ride, and I was pretty excited. I only had a few moments to get it right before the cart descended, and I did! But we also took videos of each other recording each other and selfies while we were just hanging out. I’m glad I didn’t spend the whole ride trying to get the perfect snapshot. That would have been silly. So here’s an example of one photo that I’m proud of and another photo that I love just because of the people in it, and I got both on the same ferris wheel ride. That’s the important thing to remember. We can and should work to create artistically outstanding work. And we should also take selfies. There’s room for both. Together, they captured that one little part of our lives where we were living near friends in a city we’d come to love where we’d learned so much. I’m glad I focused long enough to take a nice photo. I’m also thoroughly glad that I remembered to look up and experience life first and record it second. 

 I just love this one because of the people in it.

At the end, I cut together some of those "informal documentaries” that I’d talked about, and used the song “The One Moment” by Ok Go. The chorus goes like this:

"And this will be
The one moment that matters
And this will be
The one thing we remember
And this will be
The reason to have been here
And this will be
The one moment that matters at all.”

            So hopefully that song helped to supplement the idea that these moments of us looking up from our professional work and living life while we’re recording it are really important. The whole song is symbolic of an artist’s life to me. It talks about building temples and monuments that we’ll just burn down in the end and how profound this one moment in time is when we’re together. I used a quote from Our Town, one of my favorite plays, at the end of the video. Not sure if anybody caught it, but I used the starry background intentionally, because stars are an important motif in that play that basically sends the message of how important and profound those tiny little moments of our lives can be upon looking back at them. Those are the moments we record when we "look up."

          The whole fireside chat was incredible. I think Erik expressed it best in class the next day: the fact that people were willing to put themselves out there and be vulnerable in front of each other while talking about things we cared about… that’s Zion. It was pretty awesome to use media as a tool to share our beliefs in front of a live audience, in person. 

Link to "The One Moment" Video

Concerned Citizen

Concerned Citizen – Link to Video

Artist Statement

           This week’s project emphasized the importance of being an active and involved citizen in society.  Our society is ever struggling, and we are seeing an increasing amount of hate in the world.  That is why it is important for us as citizens to cultivate love and service.  In her article, Arlene Goldbard emphasizes the relationship between culture and community.  As she stated, we live in a time of rapid cultural change.  In an ideal world, which Goldbard refers to as “Storyland,” people would recognize the sacredness of culture.  Understanding, supporting, and adopting culture elements from those around us will support “resilience, connection, and possibility.”  We see this connection between culture, service, and community through figures like Martin Luther King.  Martin Luther King was an advocate for change. From his autobiography and speeches, we learn that he wanted the black community to receive equal and fair treatment; but never wanted to sacrifice culture.  He wanted to foster a community of togetherness, where different cultures could work together and benefit one another.  His service to his community and his country greatly shaped the world we live in today.

            Inspired by these cultural activists, we chose to highlight Addiction Recovery Sponsor Dave Anderson.  In our interview, Dave explained his previous struggle with a drug and alcohol addiction.  His addictions lead to a life of struggle, pain, and heartache.  Eventually, Dave was able to receive help through a rehabilitation center.  During his journey to recovery, Dave felt drawn to his Native American ancestry and culture. He found solace and peace through traditional Native American practices.  At the end of the process, Dave was a reformed man. He felt relief and wanted to provide other struggling souls this same relief.  Thus he began his job as a Sponsor for rehabilitation centers.  He enjoyed serving others and provided a beacon of hope for many people.  Furthermore, Dave decided to share elements of his Native American culture with others in hopes that they would find the same peace he once experienced. He often invites young people from the rehabilitation centers to Navajo sweat lodges, where he hopes they will experience mental and spiritual healing. 

            In summary, Dave Anderson is a man who feels he has been healed through a culture of spirituality, kindness and hope.  He has since dedicated his life to serving his fellow men, guiding others through the healing process and implementing elements of his culture into that process.  We feel lucky to have interviewed Dave, as we feel he embodies the spirit of servitude demonstrated by Martin Luther King and the open heart of the artists in “Storyland.”

World Building

A World Where Color Is Rare...

by Shawn Hall, Brittany Hanson, and Kyle Woodward

Advertisement #1

Advertisement #2

Movie Poster #1

Movie Poster #2

Artist Statement

Imagine a world where color was in limited supply.  How would people view color?  Could they still find beauty in a colorless world?  Who would control the supply of color?  Would it be an everyday occurrence?  For our world building assignment we explored these questions by creating design fiction. As Bleecker outlined in “Design Fiction”, we used fiction and fact hand in hand by creating our own facts to describe what our colorless society would function like. While the pictures or newspaper article that we used were not entirely real in a sense, we made them real by adding a backstory which added to explaining our futuristic society.

As the newspaper article so aptly describes, we pictured a world burdened by the after effects of nuclear fallout. In this world, color was all but lost and the earth was left only visible in various shades of grey. As technology grew, however, color was soon discovered and re-instigated into society; therefore, we wanted to be able to convey a rather foreign perspective on color. What if we never knew what red or green was? If we could never comprehended such colors, who’s to say the sky would need to be blue? In these various images, particularly the advertisements, we were able to explore a strange smattering of mismatched hues. To these people, color is cool just because it’s color. It wouldn’t necessarily matter to them whether or not it made sense. After all, if they don’t fully understand it, it could never truly make sense to them.

Regardless, we decided that color would ultimately be a luxury and something only the rich could afford to produce. It’s similar to the ideas proposed in the 2011 film, “In Time” where time acts more as a currency than a force of nature. In the film, the rich hoard all the time in the world and are able to live as long as they so desire. Though our idea is much different in nature, those with access to color must needs be of high status.

In the advertisements, COLOR is a brand with a restricted trademark, so the word “color” is literally owned by a company, and color itself is only understood artificially, as a product. To people who can only see manufactured or archeologically preserved color, places we recognize as beautiful, such as the wildflower fields in Oregon, the white cliffs of Dover, or Mt. Rainer might not compare in their eyes to a colored toothbrush or tube of toothpaste. In the second advertisement, while all the other photos depicting different aspects of life and nature are black-and-white and faded, the artificially colored tube of toothpaste and toothbrush are the bright focus of the advertisement, suggesting a rather tragic irony: That incredible Greek artwork, British castles, snuggling with a kitty, or stopping to smell the flowers, things that make life “colorful” in the sense that they enrich and enliven our experience, might pale in comparison to the sensation of adding actual color to a rather mundane product.

Webspinna Battle

Mac Vs. PC

For our Webspinna Battle, we decided to focus on a debate that seems to be pretty prevalent between college students: Mac vs. PC. Just like our reading in The Ecstasy of Influence, A Plagiarism, we not only didn’t avoid drawing upon those that have gone before us but in fact specifically sought out how other people have approached this topic. While some may see this as plagiarism, we wanted to have our characters and artistic choices recognizable so as to be able to build upon pre-established expectations.

The main source of inspiration for our battle was the series of Mac vs. PC commercials that Apple released several years ago. In these, a chubbier man in a white shirt and tie represented PC while a simple, casual dressed man was Mac. These commercials made PC seem like a hopeless cross between businessman and nerd, just trying to win customers while Mac was chill and approachable. Drawing from this, we wanted to do something similar but something that would give a more balanced view of the two. So, we decided to emphasize how PC seems to be more popular with businesses and is often seen as more “traditional” while Mac is much more trendy and popular with students. We demonstrated this in both dress and audio.

While we wanted the main source of the “arguments" to come from the audio, we realized it would be important to quickly and clearly establish what our personas were. So to begin we used the start-up sounds for both the Mac (Brittany) and PC (Brendan). Brendan wore a suit to emphasize the classic-but-old-fashioned idea and Brittany dressed up in a slightly preppy but more modern nice-casual outfit. When Brendan turned around during the PC’s start-up sound, he revealed a Windows logo on his back, solidifying his persona visually and through audio simultaneously. During the PC’s next audio clip, “And loading,” the Mac booted up and immediately started playing “Better Faster Stronger” by Daft Punk, alluding to the Mac’s faster start-up speed. During that time, Brittany started dancing, turning around to reveal the Apple logo on her back.  PC finally got his music going, playing the song “Classic”, when Mac interrupted with the song “Fancy”, arguing that while the PC is timeless, the Mac is “in the fast lane” (and perhaps a bit of a fad, as Brittany hopefully alluded to by taking a selfie). Next, the PC began a clip from Legally Blonde the Musical called “Serious”, in which he suggested that while a PC is the choice of computer for a professional, a Mac is just flashy; a bit of a Marilyn Monroe. PC also took a bite of Mac’s apple out of spite. The Mac responded with “Livin’ in the 21st Century” by Kanye West, emphasizing the Mac’s popularity and modernity. She then took her apple back and compared it to the logo on her screen, suggesting that whatever the PC does, the Mac will always find a way to compete. PC responded with “Better Than Me”  and stole Kate (Brendan’s fiancée and Brittany’s roommate) from the audience to do the cha-cha to emphasize just how awesome traditional can be, even if the Mac thinks it’s better. Her fall was an accident, but one could argue it actually highlights the nature of computer error. As the PC grabbed a Windows hourglass-shaped battle ax, the Mac started playing a remix of Windows error noises (found on Youtube). The Mac, wielding a rainbow pinwheel of death error icon, was about to triumph when the PC started playing the Mac funk noise, and both of us started moving in jerky slow-motion as we  “froze”, finishing off with a power-down noise. So who ultimately won? We both channeled some of the typical pros and cons of each computer through audio and visual resources, but we’ll let you decide.

Links to the Audio:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nQ2oiVqKHw - Booting Sound PC

https://youtu.be/lHrK1kw7ZMw?t=7s - AAAnd Loading

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvxOIv7SVPo - Mac startup

https://youtu.be/GDpmVUEjagg?t=1m37s - Harder Better Faster Stronger

https://youtu.be/CW0DUg63lqU?t=18s - Shameless about stealing

https://youtu.be/4Ba_qTPA4Ds?t=40s - Classic
https://youtu.be/0UJpzfWkzUI?t=38s - Fancy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYG6QA9gF0o - Siri Shut Up!

https://youtu.be/FMuIaPpsh0Q?t=2m11s - Serious
https://youtu.be/lVcQr9iAjL0?t=7s - Livin’ In the 21st Century

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx9XYrRpHjo - Better than Me!
https://youtu.be/D3-vBBQKOYU - PC error remix

https://youtu.be/W_6SfMZxoLc?t=50s - Mac errors

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRQINh46bQ0 - Power down

Medium Specificity

Medium: Clay Sculpture

             I was definitely more confident in the idea of this project than in the execution of it, “it” being the first clay creature thing I’ve made since middle school (Conclusion: Sculpting skills have not noticeably improved). Here’s the idea: Sculptures are generally made to look as if they are one uniform entity. Additionally, a clay sculpture of an animal usually doesn’t appear to be aware that it is a clay animal or to have any opinion regarding its state of existence.

            To challenge the first point, I decided to expose a common tactic sculptors utilize to cut down on the amount of clay necessary and to reduce the weight of the finished product. The body of my “clay” dragon mostly isn’t clay at all; it’s a ball of aluminum foil with a thin shell of Sculpey molded around it. Rather than disguising this “cheat,” I left half of the dragon’s body exposed so that the aluminum is visible. Just as Scott McCloud uses a comic to analyze the properties of a comic and the Daffy Duck cartoon draws attention to common elements of its medium by playing with the conventions of color, slapstick comedy, and varying depth of field, the exposed side of the clay dragon draws attention to the medium of sculpture itself and suggests that the finished product isn’t always what it externally seems to be.

I left half of the dragon’s body exposed so that the aluminum is visible. The exposed side of the clay dragon draws attention to the medium of sculpture itself and suggests that the finished product isn’t always what it externally seems to be.

            The Daffy cartoon goes beyond simply exploring its medium. Daffy Duck’s character is aware that he is a cartoon, arguing with the artist and complaining about his salary. I wish I hadn’t spilled so much glitter all over the dragon so quickly, because my favorite part of my idea isn’t as clear as it could be. The dragon is supposed to be licking the glitter off of its back. The space around its tongue is a bit bare and its tongue is covered in its own scales. Maybe the dragon isn’t going to stop at just the glitter. Maybe it already peeled the clay off its left side and wishes it was just a ball of aluminum foil. Human artists aren’t always comfortable in their own skin, so it follows that not all pieces of artwork should be. 

Dragon licking the glitter scales off its own back.

Self-aware art is so interesting. I once saw a drawing of a girl sketching in her own eye, as if she was in the process of creating herself. The possible specific commentaries made by art that draws attention to its own creation are endless. I’d like to think that if a skilled sculptor took up my idea, that the finished product would make the viewer feel sad or thoughtful. I’d like to think that the dragon would be silently saying, “I don’t want to be me.” Or it could be begging the viewer to consider the heart beneath its exterior. There is more than one way you could interpret it.

            But of course, the art isn’t literally self-aware. Daffy’s arguments with the artist are still the creation of the artist, and the sketch of a girl didn’t actually draw itself. So the art is ultimately still a medium through which the artist is able to externalize an observation, an idea, or a piece of herself. With the latter purpose, perhaps self-aware art is the most thinly-veiled, most vulnerable form of self-expression. Maybe the person who drew the girl drawing her own eye is in the process of creating themselves. Maybe the sculptor of the dragon sometimes wishes she could peel away her exterior appearance, mannerisms, race, habits, gender and all of the attached expectations and just allow people to see the core of her personality, the endless aspects of herself that never make it to the surface. Wow, that’s vulnerability. It’s easier to make that point with a dragon, which, being clay and foil, is a tool that doesn’t mind being sculpted into any expression of its maker’s heart.

Historical Story

Nixon's Teddy Bear

Link to the Script

ARTIST STATEMENT

Our historical story centers around the missing 18 ½ minutes of audio from the Watergate tapes that implicated President Richard Nixon. As far as we know, that audio was deleted from the only tapes it was recorded on. But what if a trace of those minutes still existed? What if the FBI would have found them were it not for a secret agent? And what if that agent was, of all people, Nixon’s maid?

The 1970’s was a time of social questioning and exploration for America. Paradigms of government and war, music and fashion trends, and sexual norms and gender roles were all rapidly evolving, but it was only the beginning. Politics were, and largely still are, a man’s world. And for women who for whatever reason ventured into the workforce, there was no homelier or more traditionally feminine job than that of a maid. To a member of the FBI such as Agent Carson, a maid like Julie would already be unremarkable. So the idea that an older, unattractive maid with a naïve, servile attitude might actually be Nixon’s right-hand would sound impossible.

We drew much of our historical source material from two documentaries, Our Nixon and an episode from The Seventies called “The United States vs. Richard Nixon.” The TV broadcaster’s dialogue is taken word-for-word from an actual report given in the 70’s. Haldeman was Nixon’s Chief of Staff. The basic facts of the Watergate case of course informed the character’s actions and our central “What-if”, but the unspoken yet prevalent social structures presented in the documentaries were influential as well. It is difficult to disregard the lack of women playing influential political and legal roles in the films. Of the few women who give their opinion of Nixon, several reply much more demurely or less articulately than their male counterparts. Such observations don’t prove that women in the 70’s were unintelligent or unimportant in politics, but they do reflect gender norms of the time, and as mentioned, we played off of these norms to create Julie’s unassuming façade.

As all women know, sometimes it’s easier to play sexism to one’s advantage rather than attempt to overcome hundreds of years of gender norms. With her collection of weapons and espionage devices, we implied that Julie has been in the secret agent business for years without getting caught, so she must be pretty smart. But she uses her older age and below-average looks, playing the part of a naïve maid to fly under the radar of the FBI. Carson and his fellow agents are openly condescending throughout the script. It’s no surprise: They’re younger, they’re “highly trained” professionals, and they’re men. In other words, the male agents rest comfortably in social sphere far above Julie. Nixon of course buys into the idea that Julie is not what she appears to be when he jokes, “I certainly don’t keep her around for her looks.” But with this comment, even Nixon, who clearly trusts Julie’s intelligence and competence, readily objectifies her although a maid’s physical appearance has nothing to do with her ability to clean. Sexism was complicated in the 70’s and it still is today. Maybe someday people won’t have to (or be able to) hide behind the stereotypes of their gender, race, sexuality, or religion in order to accomplish something remarkable, but until then, this script is our tribute to the “Julies” of the world.

A quick connection to the class reading: The antagonist of our story, Agent Carson, might be a bit black-and-white, but like Persepolis, the depiction of the scenario in our script is partially a commentary on gender issues. While oversimplification can become problematic, whether in the blocking of two opposing groups on opposite sides of a cell in a comic, or in the condescending characterization of an FBI agent in a script, when done effectively, it’s useful shorthand. Hopefully Agent Carson isn’t painfully one-sided. We’re sure he has a nice family back home, and we admit that it probably isn’t easy to remain polite under the stress of his job.