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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