Fireside Chat

Belief is sometimes hard to put into words. It is also hard to choose one belief to talk about, given the opportunity to do so. So it was great to have one night where we could hear so many different beliefs shared, in many different ways.

I prepared my piece before doing the readings. The mother's story was similar to slam poetry in that it didn't hold to a tight structure or timeline, it followed stream of consciousness and that allowed us to experience a fuller understanding of a girl and of the mother's experience raising her. That is what I have enjoyed since first learning of it. The lack of structure allows for really good expression, but it also allows for heightened language and rhythm that better expresses thoughts and emotions. I hoped that I could accomplish some of that with my piece.

Again, though, the strong structure of the story of being 1/2 black, 1/2 white worked well in that setting to describe a struggle or life. Many of my classmates chose that route and were very effective. I think that much of this assignment, as it is about belief, is very personal. And personal expression should come in as many varieties as there are personalities. And some statements work better with some mediums than others.

Things I'll take away from this class:
1) There are thousands of mediums. Find the one that works for you and your statement.
2) Use your beliefs to fuel your work.
3) Experiment always with the expectation that it will work out well.
4) Don't be afraid or ashamed of your own beliefs. And don't ask others do so.

Concerned Citizen

https://soundcloud.com/rissa6/cami-hansen-1-2

For our concerned citizen project we interviewed a young woman who co-founded an organization with her friend to help out people who suffer from mental illness. Cami, the woman we interviewed, is very aware of the inadequate structures or lack thereof needed to help those who are struggling. Her organization is created purely out of the goodness of her heart because she knows personally what it is like to be improperly treated as someone with a mental illness. She seeks through her work to encourage and support those who need it through advocacy. She wants society to be aware that people are still human beings, even when they are suffering internally with a mental issue. Her organization is about bringing about awareness to the truth of what mental illness is and in turn inspire those around her to be more patient, kind, and considerate towards those who are struggling. Cami is aware of the social and political injustices that occur in the lives of mentally suffering individuals. She states clearly that people have physical problems are allowed far more treatment and care than people with mental problems, when in fact the mental issues are more damaging and take longer to heal than the physical ones. That is why she wants to freely help those who cannot help themselves. Her work reminds me of summer camps that kids go to for medical reasons to learn that despite whatever disability or seeming disadvantage, they learn through activities, encouragement and help that they can be whole and do whatever they want to if the set their minds to it. If they believe in themselves and have others believe in them they can be truly successful and whole. As Arlene Goldbard said, “Rights are mere abstractions without the means to implement them.” This is something that Cami is very aware of and that is why she is so altruistic and helps those that she can. She has made herself the means by which people can rightly get treatment for their problems.

I can say that I am not as proud of this week's project as I have been of others....
I believe much of it is because I still lack tact and subtly.  When I want to raise awareness or discuss an issue, I usually find my best medium is actually talking about it, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk. I find the spoken word to be the best way to get to the heart of the subject I want to discuss-- I think that is what Adichie achieved. I have been trying to stretch myself but I can see I'm still not there yet. I'm sure that if I revamped things enough times I could get somewhere closer.

I chose to create a poster about the representation of women in media. In history, women have been portrayed as a tool to be used for a purpose, a commodity to be won, traded, or bet with, creatures that need to be protected and taught by men, etc. Even the kinder representations still make us look shallow, timid, and naive about the world. In recent decades, the representations have become more and more sexualized-- including the ones that are supposed to be supporting a "better" representation of women.

Women who are super heroes or tv stars are still dressed in the tightest/most revealing costumes and comments are still always made about their sexuality. Female characters who are not supposed to be sexual are often dressed in a more "masculine" way, unfitting suits etc. in order to give them a air of being more serious. The dialogue of all these women (sexual or not) also often follow a pattern more similar to male dialogue than female dialogue [defined by studies, not defined by stereotyped speech or subject matters]. This likely happens because we still as a society believe, consciously or subconsciously, that men are more powerful and can be taken more seriously and that a woman gains power through flirting and manipulation.

In my poster, I tried to show the wide variety of how women have been represented, so I chose a modern, sexualized and emasculated character-- Black Widow-- as well as a shot from an old John Wayne western. I chose a Western because it shows the history of the representation but is still applicable today-- just a few weeks ago a man in the program told me the reason women don't like Westerns is because they don't understand doing something for the greater good, they just want everything to end happily.

I chose to have a group of real women standing in the middle of the images but in front of an empty screen. There is potential for these women to be represented, but it isn't there yet. (Really, I couldn't think of any examples of a female character who wasn't a caricature or the object of competitive romance.)

I used words from a short essay I read that I thought well concluded why our shift in how women are represented still didn't bring the answer we were hoping for. In looking for strong female characters we created woman who can fight hard core, fix cars, etc. but are still hollow characters without enough substance underneath. We don't need strong women, characters. We need strong, well-rounded characters, that are female.

Webspinna

I had a good time making this webspinna. The hardest part was finding online sound making resources. The workshop we did in class really helped with that. I began the process of compiling my sounds by picking a connecting theme—I wanted my webspinna to feel complete in that way. I ended up stuck on the idea that I wanted the theme to be humor—kind of celebrating laughter. That choice dictated a lot of my sounds, I used laughter, comedians, and online clips that many people recognize and laugh at. I was also able to find some beats that tie it all together, that helped a lot. Altogether I like how it turned out. It was a fun activity to have outside of class and be able to meet people's friends and family--albeit, not many could stay the whole time.

I really liked the discussions we had in class about glitch art, but I didn’t understand how to incorporate it into my webspinna since we were told not to manipulate the sounds we found, just to use them the way we found them. I did try in some ways to create moments of smooth workings and moments of “glitch”: I had the psych theme playing with quotes from psych, but I also had a mash of stand up comedians with a beat behind them.

I think it is interesting that this assignment was given to help us think of the web as not just a place for information and communication but also full of things that can be made into art. It is interesting because more and more I think that our “norm” is to not see it as a place for information. I think that already the most common uses of the internet in younger generations is YouTube, blogging/tumblr, and online gaming. People use youtube to show their creations, they blog with pictures they’ve created or taken to express or represent themselves, and people use online gaming to create identities and sometimes to make videos. So these experimentations are turning into the norm.

Fox flute
Laughter
Psych song
Names
Loops
Regan
Seinfield
Carey
f sharp

Fox
Laughter
Psych song
Names
Loops
Regan :30
Seinfield
Carey 10:32
Fsharp
Laughs

Fin

Gone Missing/The Cleverest Thief review

This was a project I spent 6-7 months on. I was in a class where we workshopped with a member of The Civilians to learn how to create a play from interviews. Then we went out into the community to interview a lot of people. We had to learn their mannerisms, their speech patterns, etc. We talked a lot on how to structure these and how to piece them together to create some through lines.

Lindsay talked to us about how this ties into the gospel, that we are reaching out to people we would never otherwise have reasons to befriend. We get to know these people for a time and then try to represent them fully for other people, to respect their stories and give them importance. 

The other big part of this show was exploring with mixed media. Half the class worked a lot on creating video and media ideas. It was a lot of work for our stage manager to time all that media to the performances every night. It took a lot of people to get all that media created. It reminds me of the "play" we talked about in class. We are playing with what is theatre and what is film. We are also playing with what filming can do, we manipulated an image so it could project image all around but only project certain images on someone's skirt.

It was a good learning experience as an actor as well as a designer. I was the props designer for the show and I had to learn to work with a much more fluid schedule. It was a really great experience and I really was impressed with how much the community loved the Provo half of the show because they connected with it.

Medium Specificity

For this project I chose to do a set design. Like McCloud, I grew up with one idea of what set design was. I was taught that it just looks nice, shows where the story takes place, and has levels and five “areas” where the director can have the actors move to when the scene needs it. However, McCloud uses the buying ice cream comic story to show how many different ways the same story can be told and how artistic choices made by the author/artist can create new emphasis or meanings within the same plot. Likewise, I feel that set design can do much more than look nice behind an actor. 

Set design should be a physical rendering of the metaphysical concepts of the director, while also creating a comment on the action, and creating spaces for appropriate action all while being aesthetically pleasing.

My interest in the ability for theatre to explore the abstract to create incredible amounts of subtextual meaning began my freshman/sophomore year when I saw Theatre Mitu perform Death of a Salesman. The show used props and lights as metaphors for the many underlying thoughts and emotions the characters were feeling. The set design catered to that choice by creating levels and open spaces for the actors to navigate some of the larger props, and did what it could to not pull attention to itself so that the actors in costume would pull the most focus.

So with my set design I picked a script and asked my scenic design professor for a director’s concept to work with. The script is Wait Until Dark, a play about a blind woman who must save herself from an elaborate con and then outsmarts a murderer in her apartment by shutting off all the lights. The concept was that it would be pretty realistic, that the audience would feel a part of the action, and that the audience should feel like we are all blind.

To make it realistic, I had to do some script analysis and research. In order to invite the audience in, I wanted to eliminate the fourth wall. To do that I turned the set so the furthest back area is a corner. Now the audience can really only see two walls, making it unlikely that there would be a wall in-between them.

To create feelings that we are all blind, I thought about what feelings this blind lady in the show has: she feels confused, disoriented, and dependent. So I created a set that has a section set but the rest of the scene can rotate around. This is at first confusing, because the set is realistic, but it moved abstractly. It is disorienting because the audience is never quite clear on what the layout of the room is, and in many ways it is where the set is currently turned that dictates to the audience how they see the action and what angles they are able to see, much like if they were blind.

(This is called a white model, it is the preliminary model before the finalized color model. The actual set would not be all white.)

Textual Poaching

Jenkins discusses how the boy’s investment in his toy made the Velveteen Rabbit become real. It came through time. The boy integrated the rabbit into his life. That is where I struggled with this assignment. Although I am happy with what I have, I don’t think it is an accurate representation of something that has been integrated into my life. The ideas behind them play a very big part in my life and identity, but not the media I chose to represent them. The challenge of trying to find a way to use media to relay my thoughts to an audience reminded me of what Chris

Purdie said in class—that art is finding ways to convey metaphysical thoughts in physical ways. My thoughts and opinions have come to be through experiences I’ve had and essays I’ve read—so I don’t first think of media as a way to share these thoughts, but I think that if I am to make rich art and meaningful media in my lifetime, then I need to keep trying with this challenge.

 I changed from my initial idea in order to better fit within the given constraints of the assignment. I chose to focus on my “female-ness.”  There are several frustrations I have with how I have been treated as a woman. Although I thought our society had moved past thinking of women as second-class and less intelligent, I have experienced that this is not completely the case. So to start off with, I found some old media—the poster—and put some of my own experiences with it. Then I found an old movie poster, “The weak and the wicked.” I don’t know what it is about, but I chose to not find out, to just type “strong and smart” into google image search and use what came up. I was surprised to see such a matching find. From there I went to find mediated representations of some frustrations I have and I added my own thoughts. After setting up with the older media, I wanted to use media from modern times, foreign places, and local to show that I see this a current world-wide problem.

Manifesto

Our manifesto grew out of a mutual interest in examining and actively questioning our society. It developed as we discussed as a group our points of interest and perspectives on what is important to social discourse, both aesthetically and as commentary. 

We decided to explore different mediums to create a collection of works that portray the ideas expressed in our manifesto. This mix up of different mediums is reminiscent of the mashup by DJ Food we were assigned to read. That 40 minute piece was built off the exact same thing we were focusing on in our manifesto. It discussed not only the history of a new genre, but many societal problems that came to light as the genre emerged. For example, it started out by reflecting on the technology that helped the genre take root; music files on the internet. With this change came the surge of access to music, but at the cost of the artists. Good and bad accompanied the events, but it was not really picking sides, rather calling attention to the developments in the society surrounding the artist. 

    The main point of our manifesto is that true art exposes different aspects of the artist’s society. Our first thought was to use our art pieces to expose the problems we, as the “artists”, see around us. however, we realized that true art should not just complain about society but also celebrate it. Thus, we chose to base our artwork around the idea of exalting the common man in today’s economy. An example of this that comes to mind is the beloved artwork of Norman Rockwell, who did not choose the most beautiful subjects to draw. In fact, common man would be a very fitting word for most of his characters, and yet the pictures are so lively and strike joy in the viewer. This is a very simple yet effective example of "exalting" the common man. Since Norman Rockwell dealt with plenty of poverty in his time, and his artwork reflected that poverty, his work fit very well with the ideals of our manifesto.

This was a group process piece, which was difficult because I joined my group late. They had already summed up their “what is good art” manifesto into four bullet points:

• Exposes and inquires into the respective contemporary society of the artist.
• Transcends age, gender, and generations.
• Is informed by and conscious of the forms and aesthetics of the past.
• Is intended to be easily accessible. 

Sadly, the scanner cropped off part of my image.

My art piece exalts the common man/woman and also exposes and inquires into my contemporary society. I used common facebook pictures of people I have talked to and used their real stories in my art as I comment on the economic struggle we are facing. I am using an aesthetic of the past, decoupage, and it is easily accessible because it is on my blog. I also tried to make if full of texture to make it tactile and real.

Historical Story

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8EOS_BZOzfUQWFuWDJaQmxPTnc/edit?usp=sharing

Ivy and I worked on a story based on the true events of a family friend of her father’s. Her father’s friend in named Tom Wright and he was the photographer for The Who when they first started out. In fact, Tom was best friends with Pete Townshend-- the lead guitarist and creator of the band. As a great source of research, Ivy had her parents send her their copy of Tom Wright’s autobiographical book titled, “Roadwork: Rock and Roll Turned Inside-out.” Within that book we picked one story and then picked out moments of dialogue that were recorded in that book to use in our screenplay. Of course, at other times we used our own creative license.

For a long while, we wanted to tell the full story of Tom and Pete’s friendship, the creating of the band, and the adventures of The Who and their photographer. We figured it could work well if we did it in the style of My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts. After all, that story had a great way of telling a story that had plot structure and that helped you get to know the characters. But in the end, we decided that with this story the audience could gain more access to these interesting characters by making the action live-- instead of past tense-- and using their dialogue-- as opposed to voice overs.

During the making of the screenplay, Ivy and I remarked a lot how interesting it was that Ivy’s father has been friends with Tom almost her whole life, and now she is writing a screenplay about him, yet she has actually not seen him very many times, since he works a lot and is often gone. This definitely affects how we write this script. Had Ivy known Tom personally, we may have written the story the way he tells it, or in a way that Ivy retells it-- much more like My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts-- but instead of basing the story on memories, we based it on the autobiography. However, Ivy’s few interactions with Tom still played a part in the writing. She told me that Tom was the nicest person in the whole world, which is why we kept his dialogue kind, friendly, and free of sarcasm or the like. So in many ways, our story is a fusion work about Tom Wright through they eyes of Ivy Hutchison. 

Genealogical Artifact

Roman mythology states that daisies came to be when Belides, an innocent wood nymph, turned herself into a daisy to avoid the unwanted attraction that Vertumnus had for her. I guess my attraction to daisies began with unrequited love as well.

A few years ago, I was dating a boy named Taylor. He had told me he loved me, but even a month after he had, I couldn’t say it back. I did really care for him a lot, but certain things made me believe that I shouldn’t continue on in the relationship. We were both going to college in Utah and we were going to have a two week break between semesters-- Taylor was going to spend it at his parent’s place in California. As I helped him pack up his things, I told him that I thought his trip was a good chance for us to take a break. He took it with dignity-- but he cried. I felt awful. I knew what this was doing to him, and I wanted so badly for it to not hurt him.  And on that note, we parted.

Daisies are the flower of innocence-- that feeling was furthest from my mind.

After he left, I was surprised to find how quickly I missed him-- pleasantly surprised. We’d had so much turbulence of late that I didn’t expect I’d get back with him, but I was finding myself happy to think that my mind might change. Then, one day I was alone in my apartment when I heard a knock at the door. I opened the door and heard words that I thought only happened in movies, “Flowers for Hannah.” The man handed me a beautifully simple bouquet of white daisies in a sunshine yellow vase. I’d never felt so special before. I opened the note that was attached, it read, “Regardless of what ends up happening between us, you deserve these. -Your boy”

He still cared about me. He was fighting to keep us together. He was humble about it. He was respectful of my feelings. He was still in pain. I missed him. I knew I wanted it to work with him. I felt awful for hurting him. All these thoughts and more culminated into a feeling that I still don’t have a word for. I just sat on my couch and absorbed it all-- looking at my daisies. I decided then, that I was going to fight for this relationship, too.

June 25 2011, the day of our wedding reception, there were daisies everywhere. 

So daisies may have all kinds of origins, meanings, or connotations-- but when my husband and I give each other daisies, it tells us a unique story about a friendship and love that withstands adversity, and reminds us how grateful we are to be together.

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At first this was a very difficult assignment for me. I couldn’t think of any object I had that carried sentimental value, because I loose things way too often or they break and-- well I don’t own anything that I still had five years ago. So nothing had a childhood memory attached. Also, other things in my life have made me separate my life into phases and once I moved on from one phase I didn’t look back much. However, I’ve realized that those phases of my life are still very significant to me-- knowing that I will move on in life and move away and likely not keep in touch with many people doesn’t make me value my friendship and experiences with those people any less. I found that the same is true with some objects, like the daisies. By nature, a daisy will die a week or two after you get it. But each daisy still brings meaning and it strengthens our relationship. 

In a poem called The Daisy-- On Finding One in Bloom on Christmas Day, James Montgomery states, “...The Rose has but a summer reign; The Daisy never dies.” In this poem, Montgomery uses daisies as a metaphor for more withstanding relationships. It is interesting that without knowing that, my own daisy story paralleled this same idea. I appreciated that the daisy has a running theme of these good connotations, because this story kind of solidifies it as a symbol of my relationship. I find that hard to accept because life and relationships have so many layers that boiling them down to a handful of objects means that some things have to be left out. So what objects will survive to represent something so big? I had those same questions as I read the section of the reading about the musician. The objects and their short stories gave me a lot of insight to her character, but they all focused on her as the musician. I expect there is a lot more to her life than that, another collage could be made with only one or two objects that relate to music. But that would be too much to try to represent. So just like anytime we tell a story, we have to pick an angle to focus on and sadly leave out much of the rest.

Audio Recording

For this project we were asked to create an audio piece that presented a process. Although many processes have very interesting sounds, my partner and I were drawn to the idea of showing the sounds of a human process. We had seen several documentaries in class that showed processes, but most of them were interesting, not because of the process, but because as we watched the process performed we learned more about the individuals who were involved. This is why I was interested in recording a process that highlighted the subject’s process over the performed process. 

Thinking about human processes, we discussed some ideas such as fights and apologies, but landed on the idea of acceptance. That is, allowing things to happen in our life that are hard at first. In life, you can see that children rarely do this, they are set in what they like and don’t like and what they will do and what they won’t. Yet as adults we choose to cross those lines and put ourselves through things that we aren’t okay with at first; such as eating foods that don’t taste good, going to work even when it’s hard, providing service for others, or visiting people we don’t get along with. This is a process we go through all the time and we all have our own ways of doing it: sometimes we just take a big breath and leap into action or we talk ourselves through it one step at a time. This process we recorded is one person’s experience with working through something they don’t want to do; it is true to life, non-scripted and not exaggerated.

https://soundcloud.com/april-joyner/eating-peas

Tiny Stories: Idioms

Atop a bell tower, Faust was only saved from the masked knifeman when the clock finally struck one. 

 The Scarecrow King was never one to show any mercy; still, his second in command was aghast as he forwarded the command to leave no prisoners alive.

The wise farmer would never sell his milk cow to the butcher, no matter the offer. No one-time fee could compensate the income the cow brought him daily. 

As the sugar cookies auditioned for the play, it was apparent that Penelope was not cut out for the role of Annie.

 Ponyo was not a soldier; she let the searing pain overtake her. She barely noticed becoming engulfed in the lake. As she lost consciousness, her friends caught her and rocked her to sleep.

 For this project, I found inspiration in idioms. We use them every day but for the most part we have lost touch with their origins and we don’t really understand what they mean. If we weren’t used to hearing them every day we would realize how silly some of them sound. To further this statement, each story/picture is based on an idiom, the idiom is applied figuratively (as it would be used as an idiom) as well as literally, to show how the phrases themselves are different than what you think while using them. Some idioms are clear, some take some deducing. Some I discovered while looking through lists of idioms, and I hadn’t ever realized before that they were idioms, even though I’d used them in every day conversation.

I use photoshopped images because my own hand cannot get me anywhere near the images that are created in my mind. I also hoped that it would make a nice blend of the real and less real images, because that is how I'm using the idioms, realistically and figuratively.

I saw strong connections between this idea and what Dillard wrote about seeing. Blind people appreciated the world in their ways, through their other senses, and when they first gained sight many things baffled them and they couldn’t make sense of it. Yet, when they began to really understand their surroundings through sight they gained new understanding, such as the girl who realized that men didn’t look like trees. Likewise, I used idioms to make my speech stronger or to make connections with other people-- then I began to realize what I was saying, and some idioms don’t make much sense literally, and that threw me off. I didn’t understand the speech anymore. Yet, when I looked further to find the origin of the phrase, I was often pleasantly surprised at the interesting stories. 

As I was working on this project, several people referred me to a man on the internet who has a series about idioms. He is from Germany and he does not understand the levels of meanings in idioms, he only gets the literal meaning, which as we said can be confusing and funny. He makes fun of the phrases and he, like my project, points out to us that we haven’t thought much about the phrases we use. However, I think he still misses something from not finding out the origin and appreciating that story. Idioms give a lot of color to our language, but they mean a lot more if you understand where they come from and how to properly use them.

Always with you, Always with me

These images were created or compiled and altered by myself. They were inspired by the song “Always with you, always with me” by Joe Satriani. In class we discussed storytelling as an imperative tool in maintaining our humanity in such a consumer driven society. I found it interesting that when I listened to this song, I did not feel a narrative story being told-- although some others might. I did, however, feel that there were still storytelling elements in the song. I feel most music is telling the story of an emotion, or perhaps the emotion of a story, without giving us concrete details. Therefore, when I was creating my still images that were supposed to represent the song, I found myself creating non-sequitur, non-narrative images; but, each image encompassed the emotion I felt at some point in the song. A common phrase among musicians, that I learned after I created my project, is “the purpose of music is to communicate emotion.” I suppose that I agree with that statement and that the musicians I have listened to have held that goal in mind. The emotions I felt from this song were feelings of love, from the musician to a woman. I felt, though, that the woman was not with him-- it was a love from afar, or she had died. I did feel that the love was requited all the same. I felt the devotion was being adored, or celebrated in the music, even if there is a twinge of sadness at times that they were not together. I felt all this being conveyed through the instruments, as if the only way for the artist to externalize such feelings is through the rigorous training of the guitar and feeding himself through it. My pictures reflect the bond with the instruments, the fun of love, the distance and intrigue of the woman, while trying to incorporate some of the textures I felt throughout the song.

The Song:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4fPv450OYM