For Hunting

            On Netflix you can find the powerful stories of many women who speak out against their oppressors in the film The Hunting Ground.  The film is about the problem of sexual assault on college campuses and how it suppressed by universities, because they are afraid of the bad press that could hurt them if word gets out that these scandals are going on.  Kirby Dick, the director, presents the stories of several women about their stories of rape and sexual assault, how people reacted to their stories—especially those who were part of the leadership of the university—and how they felt personally afterwards and sometimes months or years later now telling the story. 

The stories of the women to me were very powerful.  There were some interviews that were accompanied by cutaways that showed scenes similar to what they were describing, while some just stayed on the visual of the girl telling the story.  Whether or not there were visuals, I was pulled in.  I felt the pain and the fear and the sadness of the terrible treatment of these women through the plainness of their words.  In the interviews, there were also men that were violated that were featured, as well as one man who had his face blurred out, because he confessed that he had been a sexual assailant to show a little of the other faucets of this story.

Now, I thought it was very positive that they also had a storyline of hope among the grimness of the situation.  Though the stories left me touched, it also left me feeling helpless.  However, the storyline of the two women learning about how to submit a Title IX complaint to the government, then going across the country to teach other girls about it was truly inspiring.  I have seen the raised awareness in my own community, at BYU, and to know that it was started by those two women, makes me feel that a difference can be made in this world and that it doesn’t always come from the “big guys.”   They were just like me, right in the middle of a college degree, so what’s stopping me from making a difference?

For Miss Representation

The documentary Miss Representation explores how women are represented in media and how this affects women in our society today to feel that need to have the perfect figure to be a exactly what a man wants and that they don’t have worth besides how they are seen on the outside.  Jennifer Newson, the narrator and creator of this film, reflects on her own experiences and what she will do to educate her daughter, which is soon to be born.

In the telling of her story, she uses the combination of her personal story, the stories of others, both men and women, through interviews and verité footage, startling and revealing images, dramatic statistics.  Personally, I thought the combination was powerful and I especially enjoyed the interviews.  It made me feel that people were on my side, as a woman, and that there were many people who saw this as an issue and it had affected them personally. 

The graphic images of women in media was a little manipulating.  It was if they were looking through all of the media of this past decade and finding the worst to feature.  However, in my personal experience, I have seen women portrayed in a very similar light.  I was able to understand what she was trying to accomplish by backing up the words of people in interviews with very powerful evidence, with themes that are still present in media today. 

Some of the more effective scenes that I saw were of the interviews of the younger girls and boys.  It made me think of not only myself at that age, but of the future girls that I’ll have in my own family.  I recognized the same struggles that I had as a teenager and I wondered, just like Newson, about what I would do to educate and encourage my future girls.  Along with that, it was powerful of her to share her own story and her worries about the baby girl that she was pregnant with and would bring into a world in which her gender was represented in such a negative way.   It gave the film a personal angle for her and also for me.  

For Sock Bombs in the Living Room

I believe in the power of true stories that come from ordinary life.

            Amy Krouse Rosenthal introduces her book Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life with the following: 

“I am not a drug addict, sex addict, food addict, or recovered anything.  If I indeed had a past life, I have no recollection of who I was. 

“I have not survived against all odds.

“I have not lived to tell.

“I have not witnessed the extraordinary. 

“This is my story.”

            Through Amy Rosenthal’s quirky observations about life, I felt a real connection to her, more than I’ve ever felt with another author.  In fact, it was through this book that I gained a better understanding of what creative non-fiction is and compelled me to create the same kind of content for others. 

            I believe that the power of a true story about ordinary life is not only in its relatability, but also in its ability to create trust between people.  Every day we share our experiences with those around us, from what it was like to get caught in the rain, to how it feels to be late to work, to what we had for breakfast.  Then when we feel that someone has listened with real intent to what we have been saying, our stories about experiences become more personal, because we have gotten to a point where we are comfortable with sharing these things with that other person.  Creating relationships like these, encourages understanding and empathy for other people.

            To convey this feeling in my presentation, I wanted to represent various settings of life that are the most familiar to me and my audience, so I chose the living room/kitchen area, a car, and a park.  Then I wanted to infuse these settings with real stories—those of my own and those of others. 

In the first setting I invited a member of the audience to tell me a story about their childhood in the form of an interview.  Through this form, I invited the audience to actively listen and relate to an “everyday” story.  Then in the second setting, I re-enacted a memory of my siblings and I singing in the car on the way to get ice cream.  For me, this memory is very important to me, because it was one of the last times I got to spend with my sister, Rachel, before she left on a mission.  Lastly, in the final setting of the park, I wanted to portray a current story. So I invited two of my friends to have a normal conversation while playing catch. 

These are the stories I love.  These are the stories that connect us. 

For Project Consent

Several months ago, I was surprised to read what an old high school friend, Aubrey Schuring, had posted about her last four years. She’d been in a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship all that time, and now, out of it and trying to heal, was speaking out against sexual assault, abuse, and rape culture, “an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused” (Marshall University).

Since the first post I read, Schuring has posted and talked tirelessly, trying to stimulate discussion about these issues. She volunteers with the Center for Women and Children in Crisis as a Rape Crisis Team member, answering phone calls from and making hospital visits to rape victims.  A few months ago, she got a volunteer position as Staff Photographer for Project Consent, “a non-profit, volunteer-based campaign that aims to combat and deconstruct rape culture by raising awareness of the harmful way with which it is regarded in society, educating our audience about the disparity of discussion of sexual assault, and promoting positive dialogue about the importance of consent.”

Schuring has created two photography series for the campaign, Face Value and The Very Best We Can. In the first, she documented the emotions of herself and three other volunteers talking about their experiences with consent. In the second, she created an anonymous survey about consent and photographed models acting out the emotions and stories shared. That’s two stories in four months. But ideally, she said, “I would be doing a project every week or two. But it’s been kind of put on the backburner because people are scared to share.” It’s understandable, she clarified. Rape and sexual assault are hard things to talk about. But if we try to talk about assault, abuse, and rape culture without attaching personal stories, people aren’t going to listen.

Even when she does share stories like her own, Schuring says people aren’t always supportive. Opposition has come from all directions, even family, although she attributes a lot of that to “a generational gap”. The conservative culture in which she is based - Schuring’s a Utah native - balks at the uncensored language and stories often used and shared when discussing rape and sexual assault, and she says people “shut down and they don’t want to listen.” So as passionate as she is about how she wants to communicate the few stories people are willing to share, she’s juggling between telling censored, dehumanized stories that people won’t listen to and the more realistic, more painful stories she wants to tell that people won’t listen to, either.

As Goldbard said in Human Rights and Culture: From Datasan to Storyland, “anyone who wishes to make significant headway on a social problem or opportunity must engage with people’s feelings and attitudes about it.” She acknowledges the importance of telling these stories in a way that even - and maybe especially - her conservative peers, family, and community can understand and relate to. “Right now,” she said, “I’m trying to find a balance.”

--Catherine Santos and Tabitha Brower

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpZQFCS6umg 

For A Guatemalan Romance

            Ever since I returned from my mission in Guatemala, I’ve felt a responsibility to share the stories of those that I met while I was there.  When I first arrived in Guatemala, I remember feeling so overwhelmed by the difference of lifestyle I had to adapt to during my time there.  In this twine game, I thought I could replicate part of that experience of enveloping oneself completely in a new world.  This is especially important to me, because I feel that once people can better understand their counterparts all over the world, there would be less blind hate or blanket stereotyping of other cultures.

            To narrow the topic down to a smaller concept that could be communicated in a simple game, I chose the issue of the oppression of women in Guatemala, specifically in the home.  A google search of “women in Guatemala” which reveals them as victims of many sexual crimes, violence without consequences to the offenders, and small charities raising money.  The women of Guatemala are represented as faceless victims without a second side of the story. 

Like Chimamanda Adichie discusses in her TED Talk, it’s not fair to only accept this single story for a whole group of people we don’t know about.  While many people are fed by the stories about the starving children, genocide, violence, and “tribal music” that characterizes the entire continent of Africa, Chimamanda proves that this is only one part of life in Africa, and more specifically in her case, Nigeria.  The same thing is happening here, with the women and people of Guatemala, though that is not to say that all those stories are not true, the other side of the story is not told.

            The documentary “A Dollar a Day,” is another representation of a first time experience in Guatemala, where a bunch of college students live there for about 6 weeks with the goal of gaining a better understanding of what it’s like to live in poverty. Now what one of the big lessons they learn on this exhibition is that in a life of poverty, everything revolves around obtaining food.  While the men are expected to go out to work and bring home money to buy food, the women are responsible for preparing the food for the men. 

            In my game, I represented the relationship between a husband and a wife based on how well a woman does her work in the house and if the food is ready for the husband in the evening when he returns.  It is this cycle that women are usually stuck in that we, as Americans don’t often understand.  A woman does her work to support her family, which is the most important thing to her.  Though she is stuck in a cycle that usually keeps her in poverty, she is not usually thinking about how she should be treated better, or that there’s better life for her over the horizon, she’s thinking about keeping her family alive.

Play here:
http://philome.la/Cathrhine/guatemalan-women

For World Building

            Picture this: You’re at your thirteenth birthday party. It’s a bowling party and as you’re about to impress everyone with your “supa sweet” bowling skills, your feet suddenly morph into fins. You faceplant onto the ground while your crush and the rest of your “friends” laugh at you. In a world where puberty is replaced by becoming your spirit animal, experiencing random morphing is just part of being a teen.

There are of course good and bad aspects of such a society. While some find the spirit animal a liberating, necessary part of themselves, others see it as something to be kept personal, almost hidden. Although a fictitious world, there is nothing new about these views. We as humans have debated for centuries about social expectations and etiquette. Agonizing over what to do and what not to do. In our artifacts, we have represented a society in which morphing into a spirit animal is an integral part of society. Even so, there are mixed opinions and implications concerning whether it is accepted or even acceptable. Such questions ignite a new and unknown conflict, one more question of human rights, like race or gender, political opinions or social standing. In each artifact we chose to explore this question and design pieces of such a conflicted world.

As we created our own new world, we opened our minds to this pressing question, but also to what life would look like with spirit animals involved. Creating snapshots of everyday life through newspaper headlines, political posters and photos of city signs, we designed a fictitious world that came to feel real. With each artifact we seemed to uncover a new story about the people, places and things that this world contained. Like Julian Bleecker says in his article, Design Fiction, “ [Design fiction] objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, imagined or expressed…” There was no way we could explain every portion of the newly discovered spirit animal world, but we could craft our own perception and provide a base for new stories.

We can see this phenomenon of new worlds and stories in our own world today. When the novel, The Hunger Games, was released, the imaginary world of Suzanne Collins began to take form. Following the detailed book, was the professionally designed world of Collin’s imagination in film form. Helping the reader and the viewer to see Katniss’s world as real, the specific choices in design became a trademark of that world. People everywhere began to dress up like people from the Capitol.

District 13 or maybe even like Katniss herself, delving deeper into the newly created world.  Although our world may not spark a phenomenon of people dressing up as spirit animals or making movies about awkward transforming teens, it has made us more aware of how design holds the power to open an avenue of creativity. That each photo we created or political poster we staged contributes to the creation a completely different and magical world.

--Catherine, Hannah, Grace, and Morgan

For a Webspinna Battle

The inspiration for our Webspinna battle was the result of a long chain of ideas, but eventually came down to a desire to explore the different cultural sides of music. Our characters, a Rock Star and a Pop Star, attempted to embody the sorts of stereotypical associations that go with each genre. We explored that for a while (the Rock Star playing the angsty bad girl and the Pop Star milking the crowd while tossing her hair), then went on to represent how each style as affected other genres of music, including each other.

The Pop Star started with strictly pop music, but eventually used electro-pop, and then later represented Korean culture through K-Pop. The Rock Star showed her versatility through heavy metal, hard rock, and symphonic metal. At the very end, we included a rock-pop fusion by Mr. Jackson himself, because both genres, though different, have influenced the other. Earlier in the Webspinna we gave an example of this. When the Rock Star lets out an angry war-like cry, the Pop Star sees an anime influence and takes the idea of Asian culture, makes some adjustments, and then responses with K-Pop.

This brings us back to our discussion in class and how other artist’s work often has a direct influence on our work. Jonathan Lethem, author of The Ecstasy of Influence, said, “Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” As artists, our ideas come from so many places they are hardly our own. Just how “The Grey Video” by Danger Mouse was root of our inspiration for the idea of a battle between two music types in his representation of two music types coming together to create something new.  It was from this root that we were able to explore the different types of sounds associated with rock and pop, as well as the harmony they could create when combined together. 

Truly, the exploration of sounds coming together is in harmony with the idea of taking one work and creating our own interpretation with it to create something greater.  To quote Isaac Newton (in true nature of our ideas being a collaboration of outside sources) we stand on the shoulders of giants, and we sit on centuries of art and work to provide us with creative inspiration. 

--Catherine Santos and Emily McNey

Cue List

Pop Star Chilling with headphones—Sugar Music Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vw84EkHOlY

0:1-0:06s

Rock star opening—Fall Out Boy, Where did the party go?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20KcK0OhOGo

0:03-0:10s

Pop Star Reacts—Karmin, Crash Your Party

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOorxvAVqb4

0:00-0:09

Rock Star response—Revving

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnNnWctXhf8

1:07-1:10

http://soundbible.com/tags-engine-revving.html

(engine rev inside car)

Pop Star response—crowd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3i9ilHpPko

0:00—whenever

Rock Star response—Explosion

http://soundbible.com/tags-explosion.html (have two tabs of this open)

(big bomb & granade explosion)

Rock star takes the stage—Twisted Sister

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hppzuyYA43I

0:06—whenever you’re interrupted

Pop star—Madeon

Madeon

https://vimeo.com/28501488

0:13-whenever

Rock star—love song, Rolling Stones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQSGw0hMd_I

0:15--whenever

Pop star—moves like Jagger

Moves like Jagger

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vz5HBbRH4M

0:41—Whenever

Rock star—international with some layer

Top 10 Best Anime Fights

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGWiZWBXbD4

2:23--2:33

Pop star— kpop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3dezFzsNss

0:00--whenever

Rock Star—fast, Afterlife - Avenged Sevenfold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNpy2K27PKU

4:14-4:34

Pop Star—Michael Jackson

“HEY!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzZ_urpj4As

0:17--0:22

Rock Star--conclusion

Black or White

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FbkTX2bnis

0:04--0:50

For Mixing Cultures

            Because my father is a first generation immigrant from the Philippines and my mother is the product of a genealogy of pioneers from Europe, as I child I struggled to understand under what race I would be categorized.  When my little friends would meet my mom for the first time, they would see her blonde hair and blue eyes, and would be unable to make the connection of mother and daughter between us.  With my dad, I felt more comfortable with introductions; our connections were more obvious.  Now I’ve realized that I don’t specifically identify my appearance to either one entirely.  I believe I’m a complete mix.  Though the brown of my eyes are easily seen as a reflection of my father’s, the lids that house them are in the form of my mother’s.

            It is in my genealogical roots that I wished to find the answers of who I was.  I would daydream of what life was like in the Philippines, with only idealistic photos from travel books and my own imagination to guide me.  In this piece, I wished to represent what that sort of looked like in my mind.  When looking through a bunch of paintings, I found the work of Vicente Manansala, who is a cubist from the mid 1900s.  The bright colors and basic forms he uses to create a pieced together world are similar to the visions I often try to form in my head.  I specifically chose the piece “Prayer before Meal”, because there are only a few details that my father would share with me, including the fact that his mother was very strict about prayers as a family and the Sabbath day observance. 

            For me this piece became the physical representation of the imaginations I’ve had since I was a child.  Like Jenkins says in his article “How Texts Become Real,” I formed an immediate fondness to Manansala’s type of painting, because it replicates the feelings I have created for myself in my own mind.  To me, because of this connection, the original intent of the painter may be lost on me now that I have my own purpose of viewing his work.

            To combine this idea with my feelings about my mother’s heritage, I found a more realistic painting of farmland landscape on which she grew up on and that her ancestors had been accustomed to.  This image is more realistic to me, because I’ve visited the birthplace of my mother and seen the landscapes she had seen when she grew up.  Overlaying this image with the painting by Manansala, emulates the feeling that I am not defined by one culture or the other, but rather an exploration of what the two become blended together.

For A Life Check

            While considering each form or design that a language would use to record sounds or thoughts, I was interested in what is actually considered writing.  For example, hieroglyphics are collections of picturesque symbols that are meant collected together to make meaning, which isn’t unlike the system of writing that the Japanese use in their characters. Like McCloud’s book “Understanding Comics,” I would like to explore the medium of writing that exists beyond the surface stereotypes that are established through the record of language.        

            Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines writing as “something written as letters or characters that serve as visible signs of ideas, words or symbols.” When considering hieroglyphics as a type of writing opened my mind up to the fact that writing could made up any type of form that could be represented as characters. Characters could be dashes, pictures, circles, etc. as long as together they could be interpreted as an idea.  I then researched more about the forms of writing in different languages, including Sanskrit, Laos, Arabic and cursive English to consider further how each used different symbols to create meaning.  Looking over these types of writing, I noticed that each had a certain rhythm to them, which reminded me a heartbeat monitor.

            I was especially inspired by the writing on the Declaration of Independence, seeing the highs and lows of the letters separate in each line to express not only the work of 56 delegates, but also the vision they all had in their hearts for the future of the United States of America.  Their writing was representative of the lines generated by a heartbeat monitor, not only in their form but also in the content.  Applying this to myself I thought I would create a record of my own heartbeat almost as a journal entry of my heart “thoughts.”  What this writing would communicate is my activities throughout the day, if I was nervous, resting, running, excited, and so on, depending on the rate of my heart.  Now what is special about this type of writing is that it transcends all languages, because all of humanity knows what the rhythm of heart means to them.

For a Revolution

Francisca Zorrosa Diaz was born in Oaxaca in 1911 and moved to Mexico City after the revolution. She is Pepe’s grandmother and “Las Soldaderas” was inspired by her. However the story is completely fictional and draws inspiration from many stories of the strong women called Soldaderas.

During the Mexican Revolution many women were involved in the action, whether it was through force, or by free will. Fighters such as Petra (Pedro) Herrera, Maria Quinteras de Meras and Angela (Angel) Jimenez were some of the most notable women who fought in the war and were actually part of Pancho Villa’s army. Inspired by both the true stories of these women who fought in the revolution and the story of Pepe’s great-grandmother, we put them together to highlight roles of women in the war. Francisca, the main character, represents not only the women that became soldiers, but also how she was forced into it through the need of protection, which also applied to the women who left with the rest of her male family members to avoid being left behind alone and vulnerable to attacks. With Carmen’s character, we wanted to portray how women also played a part in the war through their medical support. This was especially important for the revolutionaries, because during the war, the Red Cross refused to help the revolutionary soldiers.

There are many stories about the Mexican revolution, the book Los de Abajo (The under Dogs) gives the revolution a less heroic treatment and portrays soldiers raping women and braking into civilian houses. This book was one of the first sources of inspiration, and after some research we found an article that quotes the work of Gabriela Cano called Soldaderas y coronelas this was one of the major sources of inspiration, learning about this brave woman gave the main character more realism and a purpose and also helped us set the environment in which the story takes place.

Creating the dialogue was the most challenging part, we wanted to keep it simple and authentic. We decided to use some Spanish words and phrases that helped us give a foreign feel to the story. We wanted to be as accurate as possible in regards dates and places. We wanted to use real battles and that’s why we wrote about La toma de Zacatecas, one of the fiercest battles of the revolution, but also one of the most important. According to the chronology published by the Mexican Senate in 2010. After the victory over Zacatecas, Villa went to Mexico City in December of 1914.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz_OCzssdDida2NFWmJvbDhwWkk/view?usp=sharing

For Party Anxiety

For our project, we decided to use the form of an autobiographical documentary to express a complex process. The process of our project was that of social anxiety. It was inspired by thoughts or actions that we, or more specifically, Jase, has experienced in his life. We wanted to capture a real life situation and translate it into an audio form. Because of the nature of this process, it being almost entirely in the thoughts of another person, we had to recreate the situation with a simulated performance. There aren’t many ways to document human thought other than voice over; so we staged the vocalized thoughts of the subject by recording them in a controlled setting. In this manner, performance further developed our project into something more than a simple autobiography.  We felt that the he personal content of the process and the complexity of the idea could be conveyed most simply through a staged yet genuine reenactment of actual anxious thoughts.

A major focus of our project was the genuine intimation of anxious feelings. The film Inception proved to be a great source of inspiration concerning the reflection of character anxiety in sound. In a critical scene in the film, Cobb tries to persuade Robert Fisher to trust him.  While the two are talking at the hotel bar, the background noise is faint and slowly gets louder throughout the scene.  During the conversation, when the people talking in the background are the loudest, a champagne glass shatters and distracts Cobb with memories of his past.  This is the moment when the conversations in the background are completely silenced, causing a heightened sense of anxiety.  It is this stark contrast that creates an emotional reaction in the audience.  In our audio process, we recreated this technique with a crescendo of sound by increasing the layers of voice audio, amplifying the amount of anxiety felt.  When the noise silences and the tension is released the listener is jolted by the by the abrupt change. As our anxious subject finds renewed peace in his isolation, the audience is treated to the comfortable quiet of his liberated mind.

Since our process had to be fabricated to properly relate the idea of the piece, we had to construct our own version of the beginning, middle, and end to social anxiety. In the case of our process, we chose to document a choice of isolation and detachment. The process begins with the subject’s self-conscious thoughts and develops as he is admitted into a social gathering that further stresses his anxious mind. As he spends more time in the awkward situation; the craze of his worried mind quickly escalates until the subject is overwhelmed. Opting to leave the gathering than suffer more anxiety, the subject completes his trial by alienating himself from others. Like Borup’s My Mom the Taxidermist, not every attempt ends in success. Sometimes the beauty of the piece lies in the process rather than the product.

For Storytelling

Round Robin

1.

2.  Skyward eyes miss what’s below.

Busy with telescopes in the clouds, Johnny was invisible below the treehouse.

“Soon...” he whispered.

3.  “He’s so weird” the kids wisped. “I bet his mind is empty.” But he couldn’t hear them over             all his thoughts. 

It is fascinating that such deep stories can be told in a picture and 20 words. I feel like the round robin gives us an opportunity to have these collective, small bursts of creativity, that can turn out to be quite beautiful. It was interesting to see how the stories progressed as they went through each set of hands. I didn’t imagine where the story would end up, when the idea originated. The first idea seemed the most difficult, and the later rounds became easier to write. It was as if the first Idea was a little spark and once it caught, it was easy to put wood on the fire. The beauty of collaboration is that you have to give up control. Most of the best art is produced when it is created with restrictions because it causes the artist to think outside of the box. When several artists work together that's that much more box to think outside of.

One interesting result of this project was that upon sending off the latest story to the next person, it was rare that the next story would convey what the original author believed to be the important or interesting aspect of the story. Some stories meant to be taken literally were read by the next person as containing a deeper meaning. Other times, the story was meant to be deep, but the next author took the story at its surface. Regardless of the author’s original intent, the next story was often surprising and enjoyable. Each string of stories goes off in a direction the original author most likely did not imagine. These results exemplify the idea that stories are more creative when working as a team.

In the article about the Exquisite Corpse by DJ Spooky, he talks about how fragmented, varied puzzles reflect more accurately the collective memory of our culture and how we as a whole progress. Perhaps this idea could stand a few more test runs from us, but the point is valid. It is simply a silly thing to assume complete control over anything, let alone a creative process, and indeed when a person freely gives up what control they have they not only have an opportunity to be presented with new, interesting points of view, but also insight into other people.

Spooky compared the exquisite corpse and other similar methods of creation with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—as accurate as any comparison could be in two senses. Firstly, in the literal sense, it really is sort of a mismatched and vague representation of a story-isn thing, which is beautiful in its own right. It is also a figurative compilation of numerous consciousnesses, opinions, experiences, and interpretations. A “living” thing,” according to Spooky, as “‘text’ is never inanimate”—an entity of sorts built up from the minds of five independently thinking people.

While writing these blurbs, I felt that I was building up part of a community.  As a collective we have our own personal beliefs and experiences, but then putting it together is like a realization of how we fit together as people.  In a community, when new people come in contact, lives are changed and a person has a choice to take different paths in their life.  This process is similar to when a character beat is formed within story.  Now within this exercise, it as if we are introducing the characters developed in the stories to a new person, who has their own perspective and experience to change the life of this character forever.  Mimicking this natural process allows the story and characters develop more naturally.  Just as we do, the characters have the opportunity to be influenced by the introduction of new ideas.   Then the community grows the with the development of new characters and the introduction to new ideas to each of us as creators.  

For Colombian Music

Music Mosaic

            I’ve based this series of water color paintings on the song, “Los Musicos” by Juan Carlos Quintero, from Colombia.  In these images I wanted to explore the interaction of instruments and their different sounds through line, color and form.  When creating these water colors, I wanted portray a warm feeling, because the sound of the Spanish guitar, drums and rain stick transport me to the beautiful jungles in Colombia.  I also wanted to portray movement, because in Colombian culture, music is closely linked with dancing. 

            In “Los Musicos” there are many layers of instruments that create the sound of the piece and throughout the song different instruments take their turn coming to the front of the music.  Therefore in my paintings I wanted to feature the sound of the rain stick, the guitar, the drums, and the small instruments like the chimes and triangle.  For the representation of the rain stick, I used blue dots.  While with the remaining instruments, I used curved and straight lines to show consistent rhythm it gave off, or the movement of the sound that feels free of a steady composition. 

            For the background of each painting, I wanted to represent either the constant movement of the piece with movement in the paint as well as the layers of sound with the layering of color.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZlwXlFouPM