Round Robin - The boy who left his pizza

The boy gazes at the pizza laying on the table. The aroma is delightful. A pretty girl walks by and winks. He leaves the pizza and chases the girl.

In the early 1920’s, a new surge of art overcame the aesthetic world. In a hodgepodge of dreamlike, nonsensical images, surrealism was born. The point of surrealist art was to challenge convention-- it represented an uncomfortable deviance from reality. As this art form developed, a parlor game developed along with it. Sitting in their vintage suits, surrealist artists drew a bit of a picture, hid all but the very bottom, and passed it on to another artist to continue. The result was usually grotesque, and always fascinating. An Exquisite Corpse-- a mixture of different artists’ ideas and images that couldn’t quite fit together in a homogeneous form. In an attempt to recreate our own form of this surrealist experiment, we passed snapshots of stories through our round robin of creativity. The resulting stories were just as fascinating as the results of the 1920’s parlor game.

Very early on in the process, we had to surrender our stories. We watched our initial snapshot twist into a jumbled mess of other people’s creative flows. After we got over the initial shock of losing control, however, the process became something beautiful. We “...enjoyed the mesmerising flow of fragments” (Paul D. Miller, “Totems Without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse”). The beauty of our combined creative flows helped us create our hodgepodge of nonsense. That hodgepodge, however, was the point of this whole exercise. When our stories made the least amount of sense, doors of creativity opened in our minds. Suddenly making sense didn’t matter. Fitting a mold didn’t matter. Our “flow of fragments” turned into a pure example of our own freed thought processes and creativity.

Our project process represents something beyond stories-- it represents the world’s creative process on a microscopic scale. Everybody works so differently, sees so differently, processes so differently, that every bit of art is subject to billions of unique perspectives. We may never create anything completely original, but we create things that are uniquely our own. Nobody will be able to copy the intrinsic meaning we assign to our own art, just as we will never understand exactly what somebody else’s art means. All of the art in this world comes from this individual synthesis of our surroundings. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí worked together on the 1929 film “Un Chien Adalou”, resulting in a nonsensical representation of their dreams in art form. They didn’t come up with anything new, they just came up with their own interpretation of the information they had.

The tenuous strings of narratives we created illustrate the simple, beautiful fact of our diversity. We work so differently, see so differently, process so differently… Isn’t it amazing how individual our worlds are? How we are able to come up with such a unique synthesis of our surroundings? Our stories are barely interconnected, overflowing with our ideas and interpretations and information. We may not have made sense in our exquisite corpse storyboards, but we did make something-- and that, ultimately, is what matters.

Music Mosaic

Audiomachine - An Unfinished Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju8Bk2Dhi-c

Listening to the song “An Unfinished Life” by Audiomachine emphasizes particular feelings from inside of me. A feeling of anticipation, dread, uneasiness, but also a feeling of hope. The photographs that I took really capitalized on these feelings and made them real for me. Just about all of the photos are underexposed giving them a darker feeling, but some of them have lighter values that show that hopeful emotion. It is similar to the painting “Fisherman at Sea” by Joseph Turner. There is a very dark undertone to the painting, with a little bit of light illuminating the fishers. Some of the photos that I captured have a similar feeling to them, such as the picture with the tools and the picture with the lone tree.

Another element is implemented in a few of the photographs by the contrast of a single object against the background. There are two specific examples of this, one is of the man, and the other is of the tree. They both represent loneliness and expectation within a gray world. These were conscious decisions that were made when I was taking the pictures.

The day that I took these photographs was very rainy and cold. This miserable environment added to the context of the pictures. It made the feelings in the song feel more real as I was thinking of the song in my head while framing and taking the pictures. However, the fact that I was with friends while taking the pictures gave the photography adventure a more positive light, which is emphasized in the pictures.

Working on this assignment has helped me connect more with Annie Dillard when she was talking about seeing life on a smaller, more detailed scale. A lot of my photographs were wide angled shots of landscape, but I did experiment more with taking close up pictures of rocks and other geological features. It helped to look at something in nature, and figure out the best way to manipulate it in such a way to make a beautiful picture with meaning, even if the object in real life was just a rock. An example is with the photograph of the snow on the rock. There is character there; a rock with lots of grooves and imperfections is covered with a layer of snow. The snow covers up the imperfections, but leaves the rock with little individuality. I would have never seen that in the rock if I didn’t put forth the effort to focus on it and give it character through the photograph.

“An Unfinished Life” is a beautiful song that encapsulates the feelings of hope amidst much despair and loneliness. I feel that the content and the context of the photos provided emphasizes these emotions and makes the song feel more real and personal to me.

Thinking and Writing - Too Many Cooks, Short Film

Television shows have been gaining popularity more and more through the decades. Several shows have especially become popular like Full House, The Office, The Walking Dead and many others. Adult Swim is a television station that is known for showing animated shows that have more adult material. It also shows late night television spots and infomercials. One such television spot, Too Many Cooks, has recently caught the attention of many people when it was aired in the early morning. It is a short film that at first appears to be a new show, but slowly evolves more and more until the audience realizes that it is not a show and in fact a parody of classic television shows, mainly from the 80’s and 90’s. Too Many Cooks is a parody focused on explaining how culture and society has become more and more obsessed with television shows.

This argument will be explored via two aspects. The first based on the in video content, and the second being the context. There are many elements within the content of the video where the television media is being parodied. At first everything seems normal, the introduction is very similar to family sitcoms from the 80’s and 90’s. When you feel like the introduction sequence should have ended, it keeps going, as if to say that amount of new shows being made every year keeps rising. The video continues to go through many different film genres such as comedy, detective, cartoon, soap opera, cooking shows, sci-fi, doctor shows, and even the old Brady Bunch style for a little bit. Showing each genre as it did emphasizes that those television genres are all under the same curse as each other. This curse being that television shows are being obsessed too much over by society.

Another element in the video is a specific character that is emphasized as a motif. This character shows up near the beginning as a creepy killer man. His appearances aggressively become worse and worse. These appearance represent the consumers of television because of their desire to become more and more apart of the show itself. People in today’s culture feel the desire to learn everything they can about a show and keep up to date on them religiously. The man’s grotesque visual in the video can be related to that of the consumers who demand television constantly and as a result it takes over their life and they metaphorically “feed” on it like the creepy guy did in the video.

Toward the end of the video, there is a segment that is dedicated to what a television show should do, which is to actually play the show. The short length of what is played represents how little there is in many shows today content wise. Most of the emphasis in today’s shows are on the people who made the show, which is also implied by the entirety of the cast present in the short seconds of the ending to Too Many Cooks.

Speaking contextually, there are a few items that should be highlighted that make this short film different than popular television. The first being the time that it was aired. It was played early in the mornings during the week, which happens to be a time when hardly anybody is awake. This is truly a humble act of the creator and the studio for airing it at such an odd time, where hardly anybody would stumble upon it, avoiding any kind of hypocrisy that could arise if it was aired during a popular time on a more popular station. Of course the counterargument here being that that time was the only time the creator could afford, especially since it was so low budget that Casper Kelley, the creator, had to put in his own personal hours in order to finish it.

Of course the director did not intentionally have this theme in mind when he created the film. He said that he wanted it to be more like an 80’s sitcom. And since it was filmed on a comedy station, its intentions could have been more to entertain by poking fun at television shows, rather than informing people of the effect that it is having on the culture. There are many other parodied short films that are aired on the same station and at the same time slots as Too Many Cooks. It is possible that this short video is just another film made to catch the attention of the few who remain awake.

That being said, Too Many Cooks still provides strong ideas about today’s culture having too much of an obsession with television. This is exemplified by the content and context which creates a parody that makes fun of the many popular shows that are out today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8