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.