World Building

This week’s world building assignment brought up a lot of questions. So many, in fact, it took a while to narrow our group’s focus to a centralized tone and idea for our new world. Our what-if question, the thing that started all our speculation, was this: “What if there was only one world continent?” This is a pretty specific concept, but it was surprising how many possibilities stemmed from such a simple question. We had to consider how such a world might come into being, whether what we built would take place in the past or the future, and we decided on a future idea, inspired by scientists’ predictions of continental drift. We found a really great source for this at http://opengecko.com/geography/visions-of-continental-drift-on-fast-forward/. That provided all the geographical inspiration for Caitlin’s map. From there, we veered in a kind of dystopian direction influenced in some part by the tone of “Panem” in the Hunger Games. This thought, where we focused on the future and a kind of science fiction style of world, was further supported by the ideas from our reading of “Design Fiction” this week, which talked about where design fiction appeared most and was the most successful, particularly in the conclusion. It also discussed how design is the expression of an idea. We were able to integrate that into the world that we created. The idea is in the question, what if the modern world became one land mass?     World building is integral to science fiction, and therefore it was a great medium to take inspiration from. We felt that the world becoming smaller and closer together would have an opposite effect culturally--nations would feel more threatened by each other and would draw away, possibly scared of losing their own identity. That fear would encourage less cooperation and more paranoia. This was the tone and feeling behind our ideas about border control, found in Chad’s newspaper, which would be a huge concern in a world where all borders touched. It also contributed to Julia’s black propaganda posters demeaning mixed-race people. When cultures are colliding and mixing, as demonstrated in the map and in some the country changes therein, they would tend to feel fearful about losing that culture. Such concerns would not only be cultural, but also practical. Diseases and weapons would be much more serious, and much more difficult to escape. Hailey showed this in a really interestingly commercial way with her advertisement for fashionable medical masks, a wise idea in a society with no water separating outbreaks, an era with no buffers.

What would happen if the modern world became one land mass? Life would be very complicated and conflict would explode. Nothing good would come from this scenario because of the pride and lack of understanding that is in the world today.

Textual Poaching

Living in Utah after a 15 year departure from the culture was a bit of a shock for me. I had moved to Texas when I was 5 from my birth place of Salt Lake City. When I decided to come to BYU, I wasn't completely prepared for the new values and cultural expectations that would greet me here along with the regular struggles of going to college.
I had been single all through high school which had allowed me to develop my personality separate from someone else. I noticed that a lot of my friends, when in a relationship, would take on a bit of the personality of whoever their significant other was at the time, while I would continue in my own way for better or worse. Previous to coming to Provo, I had heard about the almost predatory dating scene and in my narcissism was prepared to ward off all sorts of creepers everyone told me would soon present themselves. My actual experience couldn't have been more different.
I struggled to find a niche in Provo. I found my strong personality turned a lot of guys off here. Many were shocked that I said what I meant and didn't dance around behind codes or hidden meanings. More than once my freshman year I was told I needed to be more reserved in my opinions if I wanted to make things work with a guy. I needed to learn to hold my tongue.
However, because of these freakish experiences, I had to decide who I wanted to be. It wouldn't have been difficult for me to conform to some of those ideals. I could have easily put my head down and accepted the things and people in front of me. But I didn't. So when we were assigned to take a piece of media and make it our own, I decided to focus on this experience that I feel helped solidify who I am today.
We read in class a chapter about "how texts become real" which is usually when some aspect of that text becomes something we not only love, but accept and use in our lives. In 2008, Beyoncé released Single Ladies and took over the airwaves everywhere. Her dance moves started millions of fan videos and every radio station played it at least every other song. I began listening to it facetiously because my brother hated it, but soon it became something of an anthem for my friends and I. Similarly, my high school was also swept up by The Creep and between the two, we had my dating history summed up. Because of my experiences, these two texts felt very relatable and thus amplified my affection for them. So combining these, I decided to take the assumption I had about Provo culture, or the creepers, and match it with what I had to decide to be, which was more of the "single mentality." Together, they create a piece that is more personal and specific to me than they would alone.

Medium Specificity

This week in class we've been working on medium specificity. This concept in creation and art is frequently used in relation to modern art, but isn't exclusive to it. In my understanding, this idea is challenging the boundaries of any specific medium, like that of John Cage and music, or Andy Warhol and prints. We used many different examples in class, showing some modern art pieces, and cartoons breaking the fourth wall, but I admit I still found myself frustrated to break the boundaries of any mediums that at best I was adequate at within it's normal constraints. 

So as I began thinking of this, I decided it would be interesting to break down something that is already considered conventional and beautiful, well beloved by many and widely acknowledged as art. After thinking of many different things, and partaking in many interesting class discussions throughout the week, I began to think about letters and words, and how one lends itself to another, but apart they aren't necessarily valuable. Composition is what gives power to letters and then words, though each word has its own connotation and definition and each letter has its own value. But it is the way in which we arrange these that gives them power.

In order to portray this, I picked a poem I felt almost everyone knew- Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." From there, I began distorting the poem by giving it certain limitations, starting with removing all repeated words. Though I probably should not have been, I was surprised by how few words really needed to be removed, and how the poem's message was still largely recognizable without some of those key repeated areas. However, much of the compositional beauty so intrinsic to poetry was lost through this method. Each word by itself didn't necessarily change the poems basic meaning, but it did add to the overall rhythm and cadence.

Next, I decided only allow each letter to appear once in the poem. As soon as it came up, I deleted the rest of that letter. I was actually surprised how quickly each letter was eliminated so early in the poem, and that only x and z remained by the time the poem was complete. These letters cumulated to create this fantastic poem that so many have memorized and loved, but without being put carefully into the words they can create, these letters mean nothing. The poem is completely worthless. The whole is completely dependent on the parts, while the parts are worthless if not composed into the whole.

I also decided to delete everything but the punctuation in it's place within the poem. As I completed the steps to these other processes, I found myself really liking the way these remaining letters and punctuations appeared by themselves. Though they don't mean anything, they hold their own sort of beauty and artfulness in the way they remain on the page. These random markings are the remainders of a great work of art and are often overlooked, but alone they create their own sort of art form.

Finally, I decided to just look at single words from the poem. One of my mother's most endearing and yet usually frustrating traits is her inability to spell words, largely due to her own doubt. She writes out a word correctly, and then stares at it, and slowly starts to think the word can't be spelled right because it looks so wrong. When you take one word and repeat it over and over in your head, and read it on a page, it starts to feel so warped from what you originally thought of. Similarly, when you look at many modern paintings, like that of Jackson Pollock, originally you may just see random splatterings and think nothing more of it. But as you look deeper and feel more, you start to recognize something in it that wasn't there before. Though letters and words have been formed culturally to represent some thing or meaning, in their most basic form they're nothing more than scribbles that are useless unless composed properly.

Medium Unspecificity.

Historical Piece

Note: various degrees of paper whiteness due to strange pdf converter website. The internet is sure a character.

This week we were assigned to write a script that dove into the story of someone in history that isn't necessarily famous. So, for example, instead of writing about Honest Abe for the billionth time and how he was such a jolly good fellow or hunted vampires or what have you, you would write about the woman who sorted and folded his socks. Granted, there may not have been a woman who pressed Lincoln's socks, but how are we to know? 

We talked a lot in class about how history is subjective, and what we define as fact is what a bunch of scholars somewhere took a vote and decided, yes, that is what most accurately happened in the most factual format. However, every person has a different story. I'd love to hear about the little boy who started the snowball fight that began the Boston Massacre. I'd love to hear more about the blue-toed men that followed after Washington for months without pay in the hopes of forming an independent nation. We watched a video in class about the woman who pressed the shirts of the Norwegian King and had also taken down the Nazi's in their invasion. Who knows if this is true? Maybe it's completely made up by an old woman nearing dementia. But it may also be completely accurate.

We also did a few readings in class on the same topic, and one that I felt was most illustrative of this idea was Vivian, Fort Barnwell by Ethan Canin. In it, the author relates about this specific memory he has about his mother because of this one picture he has of her, only to realize the picture wasn't even of the action he believed, or even of his mother. What he thought were sheets in the photo was actually tropical leaves and his mother was actually his grandmother. So did the memory exist, or was it fabricated upon seeing the picture and misinterpreting it? History is what people make of it.

Following this theme, me and my partner decided to write the small story of a little family that moved right in the middle of the Hatfield/McCoy territory. Though no such family to my knowledge existed in that time and place, I've decided to make them the catalyst of the family blood feud.

Historically, the Hatfield's and McCoy's had conflict prior to this pig incident. In 1865, one of the McCoy's ancestors had joined the Union Army instead of the Confederate during the Civil War, and was found killed by some of the Hatfield's after returning home from service with a broken leg. Devil Anse Hatfield, who was an affluent political member and the owner of a huge logging company that many of the McCoy's themselves were employed in, was accused of the murder but had an alibi of being sick in bed that let him off. The conflict was primarily dead from then on until 13 years had passed, and in 1878 a Hatfield and McCoy had a dispute over the ownership of the hog, and a key witness for that trial ended up murdered. 

So using this basic historical plot line, we devised the small Abel family who had to move to a small cabin after the death of the father figure in the war lead to the loss of their original property. This cabin fell right between the feuding families, and when little Addie Abel accidentally lets out the pigs, he starts off the conflict. We chose to leave who's hog pen it was because we wanted to continue the idea that no one really knows who's pig it was. We also wanted to make a statement about the pointlessness of the blood feud and how far little misunderstandings can go, so we had the smallest, least daunting and innocent character be the cause of it all. 

In doing this, we hoped to hit on the theme of a subjective history and how it just might alter the way we feel about any given story. Here, we saw how a violent past could have been caused by it's antithesis: an innocent and curious boy. We hoped it would garner more thought toward history, and what the small contributing factors may change the way we feel about any given event. A woman in Norway could have changed the tide of the war in a little-known business of shirt ironing, and a small third party boy could have instigated one of America's most famous blood feuds. History is what you make of it.

Holla at my partner in crime, Hailey Robertson!

Process Piece

This be our sounds, yo.

This project was initially very challenging. Being so used to working with visual mediums, it seemed hard to get any sort of meaning across with only sound. However, both the viewings and some outside inspiration helped us create something worthwhile, as we noticed the importance of daily sound and realized how important composition and juxtaposition are.

            One of the things that struck us most about the viewings was how fascinating  normal sounds were once we paid close attention to them. Sawing, hammering, chopping, boiling water—all of these things were simply fascinating once we bothered to notice them. Because these daily, normal processes were so interesting, we decided to incorporate a daily process into our audio documentary. Similarly, we were inspired by NPR’s podcasts This American Life and Radio Lab. During the stories of these podcasts, the producers catch a huge amount of ambient noise. They turn on their recording equipment far before they even get to their subject. This noise adds a lot, and carries the listener through the entire process. We tried a similar technique in our short audio by including the beeping noises of the treadmill, etc. Overall, the emphasis on ordinary sounds became a key player in our audio documentary.

            Another inspiration for our piece came from one of the viewings—“The Smokehouse.” We noticed that while the sounds and images of making the smokehouse were interesting, what really set that piece apart was hearing what the philosophy of building the smokehouse was. The smokehouse was really just a smaller piece of a much larger process for Rohan—living a self-sufficient life from the land. This led us to ask questions of our own collected audio for the process of running. What was the bigger process? What would lead someone to do this task every day, when it is so physically demanding and often so unpleasant? We answered those questions through the form of an overlaid narration.

            Taking advice from some of the suggestions sent out to the class, this narration as a conscious choice. While we did decide to make it narrated, we decided not to directly comment on the process at hand. Rather, we depended on the composition and juxtaposition of the sound to get across a meaning. We also decided to juxtapose style. While we made an emphasis on capturing the hard breathing and mundane process of running on a treadmill, the narration was academic, formal, and voiced with little motion.

Our end goal was to have the focus be on what the world spends so much time doing, and to contrast that with the maybe scary implications of why we do it. By hearing the cold definitions of the severe mental obsessions contrasted with the basic humanity of breathing so hard and the inhumanity of the sounds of the machine, we wanted our audience to question why we would run a treadmill to begin with.

**Special consideration for this post**

This is not a royal "we." Merrit Mecham and I collaborated for this assignment!