30 March 2015

Concerned Citizen: Artsy




While making this assignment, we decided to show a lot of Greg’s actual art in the two restaurants. This was able to show the ambiance that his art created in the restaurants. We also wanted to show exactly what kinds of things Greg was doing, instead of just having him sit and tell us. Instead of taking his word for it, we could see for ourselves the effect that he was having on the community. We were luckily able to get easy access to the restaurants that he worked with.   

This assignment brought Lizzie Velàsquez to mind. Lizzie is a motivational speaker and author that was labeled the ugliest woman in 2012. Lizzie suffers from a horrible disorder that prevents her from gaining body fat. She is blind in one eye and has a very weak immune system. She is also only 26 years old. After having two very offensive YouTube videos released about her, she became a motivational speaker against bullying. Lizzie now has a large following of supporters that have her back. This is so inspirational because Lizzie reaches beyond her community to help other people. She performs an exemplary service by being a role model for youth and an advocate against bullying. What Greg does is very inspiring because he tries to encourage goodness through his art. If we had more people like Greg and Lizzie that serve the people around them, this world would be awesome.

In, From Datastan to Storyland, Arlene Goldberg explains the ways that providing a personal, human story helps people connect to issues and causes in ways that mere data and planning cannot. For instance, she points out that, although President Obama and his administration have tried to address various social problems, Goldberg points out that although politicians often create programs to do so, they are often unable to get the support and acknowledgement they need to bring about significant change. However, this type of change is more likely to come about when we learn about these problems and their solutions when they are rooted in personal stories that connect people to culture. Greg and his colleagues’ work addresses problems of lack of culture and exposure in the Provo/Orem area. By presenting his story as an extension of himself, our documentary may help others to see the change, excitement, and bonding that can come about when we bring playful art into our community.

Greg explained that he chose to help with this work because he grew up in Provo, and he feels like the community he grew up in influences his current work. He chose to give back to that community by sharing his work in a permanent way with a variety of members of the community. His work reflects the simple, suburban life that was central to his childhood, and by choosing to work on these projects, he gave some of himself back to that community.
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24 March 2015

Game for Change: Calm - An Autism Spectrum Story

Play the game: http://twinery.org/2/#stories/07162a92-38af-40e8-6348-6acb808a14ad/play
Recently, I watched Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. I have a family member with Asperger’s Syndrome, and this film made me think about mediated representations of social neurodevelopmental disorders more critically. Jake Gyllenhaal’s character in the film reminded me a lot (like, disturbingly well) of my family member with Asperger’s, so at first I was excited to see the representation. I hoped it would help people be sympathetic towards people who do not understand social norms in the same ways that they do. However, by the end of the film, the character seemed to be written off as just a psychopath, which seemed completely unhealthy to me. He is often treated poorly in the film—just like people in real life with high-functioning autism—but I didn’t feel like the film did anything to make that conversation healthier. As such, I wanted to focus my game on this topic.

In my research, I skimmed a few scholarly articles about these types of disorders. They pointed out key aspects of people with these disorders to me, such as the ability to empathize just as well as neurotypical people, as long as the need for empathy is clearly stated (Hirvelä and Hirkama, “Empathy, morality, values, and Asperger’s Syndrome). I also read a lot about the diagnosis of from the Mayo clinic’s website. These sources revealed scientific aspects of the disorder to me, which are helpful. However, I gained the most valuable information from Tony Attwood’s The Complete Guide to Asperger’s. This book goes over real examples of how people with Asperger’s function. It revealed a lot of concrete ways that these types of disorders work, and which I was able to understand from interacting with people in my own life.

I tried to incorporate as much of this information as possible into my game, which I think turned out to be a bad idea. Although there are similarities among people with Asperger’s and other forms of high-functioning autism, no two people experience it in the same way. My game tried to tell multiple stories, which really didn’t accomplish much. I think it would have been stronger if I had only focused on one or two aspects of the disorder (such as an inability to perceive nonverbal cues or obsessive hobbies), rather than trying to incorporate all the elements I am aware of. Additionally, I found myself including personal, emotional nuances that are true of myself but probably not true of people with high-functioning autism. As such, I am quite confident my game is a poor representation of the disorder. But at least it tries to be sympathetic.


Fortunately, as part of my research, I also came across some much better mediated depictions of these types of disorders than Nightcrawler. Namely, this episode of the children’s TV show Arthur—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsmjwHW40ps—(seriously, watch it, it’s really good). Other good representations come from people who have Asperger’s or high-functioning autism themselves. These discussions can be found all over YouTube, and they're really great and eye-opening.
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17 March 2015

Worldbuilding: Pop Fiction Reality


For our world building concept, we choose a world in which the most popular fictitious books became reality.  This concept opened up a lot of hypotheticals and allowed us to examine the ethical, governmental, and societal repercussions.  We took a timeline approach to examining this world, beginning with a “Eureka” moment of discovery focused Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None which is one of the best-selling books in history, and then we went on to examine how government agencies would control and experiment with the power, and how pop culture would react when the power when it became known.

Bleecker’s concept of Design Fiction thematically focuses on the implications of creating an imaginary world and considering its implications through narrative. From there, these narratives can be used to think about the way objects and ideas work in the real world. Interestingly, our world focused on the ability to imagine a new aspect of the world and to have it eventually literally come to life.

As a design fiction, our world brings into focus several topics, such as the significance of popularity in bringing about change, free will versus destiny, going to extreme measures to stop others from going to extreme measures, the power of collaborative efforts, the effects of prescriptive rules versus scientific approaches to learning about the world, and several others. Our world was probably a little too complex to dig very deeply into any of these topics, but it at least called all of them into question.

World building is a requirement in most television shows, films, and videogames today. Viewers seek to be fully immersed in the universe of the story. The Legend of Zelda video game series is strongly developed playable world. The series has 3 major components reincarnation and worship, land of Hyrule, and diversity in mystical races. The more generalized categories for these the components are beliefs, setting, and characters. World building is founded on similar principles as the structuring of plot. The world of Hyrule shares the effect of the endless battle between good and evil.

The world we created was a clever and expansive world. We gave humanity the power to create anything through words. The one rule that restricts this god-like power is the quantity of readership. But even with this requirement, the world had incredibly difficult possibilities to present. The major issue that would rear its head in society was the politics of readership and authorship. This allowed for a timeline of events that channeled the possible political struggle. On the other hand, what the people would wear, eat, or even use in everyday was difficult to specify.


It’s a frightening concept that popularity can alter history, but it’s also a real concept.  Our unique slant allows us to examine the repercussions of an extreme example, and re-examine how our world functions today as a result.  We are all so intriguing that we are eager to continue exploring this alternate reality and and sharing it with the world.

Discovery Journal Entries

Governmental Experiment



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10 March 2015

Webspinna Battle: Late 80s vs. Now

The assignment:

 "Students will work in pairs to perform a 4-5 minute battle of audio collected from the Internet. Think of it as Girl Talk meets Street Fighter II, but with streaming songs/sounds as fireballs (“HADOUKEN!!!”). Students are to create individual personas, with corresponding sonic styles (and maybe even special moves). They are to rehearse this battle to become comfortable with their performance and work out any potential technical problems. Students will meet at an undetermined location at an undetermined (probably night-) time and perform the Webspinna battle. Students will be asked to bring food, friends and family to enjoy the evening. Prizes for the best character design, cosplay, battle, etc. will be awarded."

Here are the links to our audio clips for performance (those in magenta represent the late 80s; those in cyan represent the present):
The Way You Make Me Feel http://youtu.be/4ru6XlZKZDg?t=17s
Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That http://youtu.be/zGxwbhkDjZM?t=25s
That’s What She Said http://youtu.be/aIWrFNDKQ6o?t=17s
Everything Is Awesome http://youtu.be/StTqXEQ2l-Y?t=4s


The process of creating our performance was really interesting, and surprisingly difficult. We decided to focus on making the piece have a clear conversation--or at least we tried to--because we found it more engaging and coherent than trying to make it just a fight between two sides. As such, although we started out looking for soundbytes that clearly completed/contrasted with each other (and we did use some of these, such as the dialup sound and the sound of volume increasing on a Mac), we ended up focusing more on having a coherent flow of ideas, such as interrupting the sounds from the the 80s with Kanye saying he’d let Taylor finish.

The product ended up feeling better than I thought we’d be able to piece together. I think we included a few really interesting ideas, such as Britany’s persona (present) trying to Rick Roll my persona (from the 80s) but it failing because that song was current and popular at the time. We ran into a few technical difficulties with the computers, but fortunately Britany was able to improvise and take over on a couple of series of clips after mine stopped cooperating. Other than that, I think at least most of the flow of ideas could be followed.

While doing this project, I thought a lot about one of my favorite youtube videos called Harry Potter VS Star Wars (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N5KyjM5v0c&index=108&list=LLu2SA60FNRY84Fspt9B8X-A) The video info reads "Its Jedi Knight VS Wizard!! Generation VS Generation ... who will win? Magic or the force? Saber or the wand?” In the video, they use sound bits from the films while taking on personas from the universes. It is similar to what we were tasked to do.

It was interesting to see what people chose to represent their topics. During the battles I noticed some of the same clips being used in different battles even though no one’s battle topics were quite the same. For example, “Let it go” was used for Disney, cold and modern pop culture. Like Jonathan Lethem said in The Ecstasy of Influence, "The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended."
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02 March 2015

Textual Poaching: The Homosexuals: 1967-2015


The assignment:

 "Each student will choose an existing, mediated representation of the culture, race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, etc. with which he/she identifies. The representation may be in any medium—film, photograph, visual art, poetry, literature, advertisement, news article, song, music video, etc.—but it should be older than the student. Students will remix the representation so that their new creation demonstrates their negotiation of this aspect of their identity and how it has been historically represented in media. Artist statements should include a discussion of the correlations and contradictions between his/her ‘self ’ (perspectives, practices, etc.) and this historical representation of this aspect of his/her identity."

There were several aspects of my identity I considered exploring for this assignment. Some felt too obvious (e.g., whiteness, maleness) while others probably would have been too obscure to explore in a remixed mediated representation (e.g., nostalgia, aesthetic appreciation). Fortunately, I'm gay, which is an aspect of my identity I can always explore within the largely Mormon culture I'm familiar with.

One aspect of belonging to the queer community that has always been interesting to me is the contrast between what people think it's like to belong to a sexual minority and what it's actually like. Before coming out publicly, I had a lot of fears and anxieties about my sexuality being public knowledge. I expected to be treated poorly or looked down on by people in with specific backgrounds. I myself had fairly negative feelings toward homosexuality earlier in my life, and it took me a while to accept and embrace my own sexuality. As such, I didn't expect other people to be sympathetic to my experience.

When I finally started to come out, my expectations could not have been further from the truth. I was met with nothing but acceptance and sympathy--especially from church members. Later, when I posted about it on Facebook, my parents expressed to me that they had the same concerns that I had had earlier. In my experience up to this point, however, their fears were misplaced, as I have literally received no negative reactions in regards to my sexual orientation. In 2015, it seems, most people within my social circles are simply fine with these kinds of things.

I decided to base my assignment on the contrast between past and modern opinions of homosexuality. I found "The Homosexuals" (1967) while randomly browsing YouTube one day. I thought it was kind of appalling, but I also realized that I haven't experienced those kinds of opinions in my own life. I thought it would be interesting to juxtapose the opinions of people back then with my own experience with peoples' opinions today. I did so by simply filming myself doing something mundane (eating cereal) to show that these outdated opinions simply don't affect me in the way one might expect.

I also wanted to include the final audio clip from Seinfeld as another way of interacting with past views on homosexuality. The recurring gag "Not that there's anything wrong with that," is an iconic element from the show, and it reflects some interesting aspects of the way people feel the need to discuss sexuality. Some people feel the need to be totally politically correct when discussing sexuality with me, and they go out of their way to make sure I'm not uncomfortable (which ironically makes the conversation more uncomfortable). I think the Seinfeld joke is really funny, and it definitely doesn't offend me, but it's a great point to discuss. I interact with this audio in the video, because this is a viewpoint that I have had to interact with in my life--unlike the audio from the 1967 documentary.

Considering my experience with "The Homosexuals," Jenkins' "How Texts Become Real" is very relevant. This program would have been interesting and insightful to me out of the context of my own experiences, but as an artifact from the past that I do not relate with, it gave me lot more insight. I would not have considered my own experiences as I did without the context of the opinions presented in this program.

 Here is the original program from which most of my audio was taken:

And the original ending to the Seinfeld episode from which my other audio was taken:

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