Fireside Chat

            Since the beginning of the semester I have been dreading the fireside chat, even after it was expressed in class how awesome it had been in previous semesters. I do not have a performing bone in my body, so I was unenthused in getting up in front of everybody. That being said, while it was still not my favorite thing to perform my slam poem, I absolutely loved the fireside chat. It was so cool to see the variety of different things that people came up with, and especially interesting to see what they chose as their belief to explore.

            It took me a while to buckle down on exactly what I wanted my belief to be, but I knew from the beginning that it would be a slam poem because of a certain slam poem that I am beyond obsessed with right now (link here, please watch), because of the connection I feel to it because of the honesty of the woman’s words. I knew that I wanted to try to capture the same sort of passion, so I eventually decided on Facebook because ever since I deleted my page, I’ve had to defend my reasons for doing so. My belief is that Facebook is a destructive entity. I believe it is encouraging young people to be bully’s and be social in all the wrong ways, as well as being a black hole that sucks you in and wastes your time while distracting you of what’s really important in life. I was also inspired by Susan Sontag’s essay, “Regarding the Pain of Others”, one of the things she talks about is how pictures aim to make things look better than they actually are, and I believe that’s exactly what Facebook does, makes peoples lives appear better than they actually are, which is unhealthy when people start comparing their lives to others because it is unrealistic.

            Performing my poem was nerve wracking, and even though I basically had it memorized, I looked at my notes far too much because I was so nervous. I think it would have been a lot more powerful if I hadn’t have brought them up with me. It was also really interesting to me that basically Seth and I were the only ones who decided to defend a negative belief. I’m glad that basically everyone else was doing positive things because it kept it light hearted and fun throughout the evening. But I’m still glad that I chose the belief that I did because the social media life take over thing is something that is really important to me, and I hope that those who listened to me took it to heart and will take their time on social media websites more seriously.

Concerned Citizen

Raised on Recycling

            When we first started to throw around ideas of whom we might like to get to know better as a concerned citizen, we thought maybe someone that works at an animal shelter, or doctors that were doing innovative things with patients. But then we watched the Fit for the Kingdom video that was centered around the LDS poet, Rusty, where it was in a much more intimate setting where we really got to know what kind of person he was and what his inspirations were. This led us to choosing someone like him that was doing something relatively small in the community, but still making a difference.

            In Goldbard’s article, she references a few instances where policy seemed a bit behind the times, with the Muslim women and their hijabs, and the growing prison population in the US. Knowing we wouldn’t be able to tackle an issue quite as big as either of these, we decided to tackle a smaller issue, but still one in which the citizen was doing something that didn’t quite fall in line with the larger community around him. Josh Palkki is a student at BYU, residing here in Provo, but grew up in Oregon, where he was raised to recycle. We thought it would be interesting to discuss with him why he continued collecting recyclables, even though it is more difficult to recycle here. For our video we took inspiration from something we found on vimeo about an artist in LA (link). In the short, we spend a lot of time listening to what the artist has to say while he’s sitting in a chair, but there are cutaways to some of the work that he’s done and things that help you further understand what he is saying and who he is as an artist. This is why we decided to include a lot of the interview, he had some really interesting things to say and we thought it would be beneficial to include things like his dirty kitchen to sort of contrast how he is an avid recycler but is maybe more lax in other aspects of his life.

            An interesting issue that we ran into while we were trying to find an apartment complex nearby that had recycling set up for students (so we could film some cutaways there), was that there was no such thing. We spent nearly an hour searching for one and came up short, having to go on campus and to the dorms to find any actual recycling bins. This was comical since we had just discussed with Josh how it was much more difficult to find anywhere in Provo to actually recycle. Our hope in spotlighting Josh and recycling is others might be impacted by what he has to say, like we were, and take more steps in helping the community around them.

Protest Poster

            Sharks are hands down my favorite animal of all time. Shark week is on par with the Christmas season for me, and I take the Christmas season very seriously. When I first thought of what I might do for this project though, I immediately thought of dolphins because of the documentary The Cove, but since were trying to deal more with issues that we feel are underrepresented, I had to go with sharks. Out of all marine life that is hunted, I feel like sharks are pretty low on the totem poll because they aren’t represented as very friendly creatures historically, in comparison to whales and dolphins that are also slaughtered but have bigger movements to save them because they are “nicer”.

            My poster was obviously inspired by the film Jaws, which was a real jumping off point for the medias negative depiction of sharks. This has led to other films where the antagonist is a shark (or sharks) like Shark Night, Red Water, and Deep Blue Sea. These all perpetuate the stereotype that sharks are out to get humans, when in reality there are as few at 50-70 shark attacks each year, with only 5-15 of them being fatal (according to National Geographic). The story of the shark is like what Chimamanda said in her Ted talk, where she urged that people just kept hearing different versions of the same story. I feel that since people have been taught that sharks are after humans, it makes then less inclined to care about their well being.

            The real issue here though, is that millions of sharks are killed every year (anywhere from 63 to 273 million according to livescience.com), mainly to make soup from their fins. They are caught, have their fins sliced off, and tossed back into the ocean to die, or in other cases brought back to land to be tossed in a mass shark graveyard in the middle of the dessert, since finning sharks like this is illegal (sorry, I couldn’t find the actual source for this, I watched it on shark week earlier this year, it took place in Mexico). For the past few years, protective measures have been put into place, but since this takes place in the ocean its harder to police, evidenced by the still declining shark population which has dropped drastically just in the last decade because of the popularity of shark fin soup, causing a 90-99% decline in population of the seven most targeted shark species including hammerhead, bull, and tiger sharks (sharksavers.org).

            By switching the roles of the antagonist and protagonist in the Jaws poster, I was hoping to bring awareness to the fact that we are detrimentally more harmful to sharks than they are to us. I believe that the issue gets somewhat shoved under the rug because of sharks long standing representation as predatory on humans, when in reality shark attacks are few and far between and is mostly confusion on their part. In posting this on my social media site (my mothers actually, I don’t have a Facebook), I found that people indeed really don’t care about sharks. There were only comments like, “I wonder how crazy the ocean would be if that many weren’t killed every year,” and “that guy looks like Mrs. Doubtfire,” so that was kind of disappointing. Hopefully people at least saw it and looked up why it is happening. Save the Sharks!

Webspinna

            We were inspired to choose Television versus Movies because we knew we wanted to show our differences through the sounds we chose. Aralie is more interested in television, while Hailey is more into films. So, because of this we intertwined our favorite television shows and movies to create a continuous battle of sounds. We first started with a very prominent movie and television sound track. We did this because we wanted to engage audience and bring them into our sound sphere. We initially wanted to just go in chronological order, which we still mostly did, but after reading the DJ spooky article were we were encouraged to read things out of order, we thought it would also be interesting if we mixed up the sound track a bit. That is the reason why the beginning and end are out of order. Fresh Prince and Breaking Bad are very recognizable themes and so are The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Dark Knight.

            Aralie took inspiration from “A Day in the Life” a Beatles song that switches up in the middle. It almost seems like two songs, but also still flows together nicely; it creates chaos, but also is pleasing to the ear. It is a hard technique to replicate, but we tried our hardest. Hailey took inspiration from “Look After You vs. Barry Bonds”, a mash up that mixes a The Fray song with the rapper Kanye West’s lyrics to form one song with very opposing sounds that somehow work together. This led to the mash up of The Godfather soundtrack, which is a big beautiful orchestral movement with the harsh sounds of The Jaws soundtrack to come together to make an interesting and somehow pleasing mix of sounds.

            Our performance was exhilarating and nerve wracking, but turned out very well, with only one minor problem of a clip being played out of place. It was exciting to be able to hear the crowd react from the themes and quotes that we decided to play. We knew that certain clips would bring nostalgia, but we were unsuspecting of the laughter that followed. Overall it was a great experience to be able to perform live and have it go as well as it did.

the good the bad the ugly

wizard of oz

pink panther

the godfather
make him an offer

jaws
bigger boat

star wars
chewy                    WAIT
i am your father     WAIT

indiana jones
snakes

ghostbusters
return to your place

jurassic park
welcome

titanic
i love you jack    WAIT

pirates
capn jack

dark knight
die a hero  21

World Building

This week’s world building assignment brought up a lot of questions. So many, in fact, it took a while to narrow our group’s focus to a centralized tone and idea for our new world. Our what-if question, the thing that started all our speculation, was this: “What if there was only one world continent?” This is a pretty specific concept, but it was surprising how many possibilities stemmed from such a simple question. We had to consider how such a world might come into being, whether what we built would take place in the past or the future, and we decided on a future idea, inspired by scientists’ predictions of continental drift. We found a really great source for this at http://opengecko.com/geography/visions-of-continental-drift-on-fast-forward/. That provided all the geographical inspiration for Caitlin’s map. From there, we veered in a kind of dystopian direction influenced in some part by the tone of “Panem” in the Hunger Games. This thought, where we focused on the future and a kind of science fiction style of world, was further supported by the ideas from our reading of “Design Fiction” this week, which talked about where design fiction appeared most and was the most successful, particularly in the conclusion. It also discussed how design is the expression of an idea. We were able to integrate that into the world that we created. The idea is in the question, what if the modern world became one land mass?     World building is integral to science fiction, and therefore it was a great medium to take inspiration from. We felt that the world becoming smaller and closer together would have an opposite effect culturally--nations would feel more threatened by each other and would draw away, possibly scared of losing their own identity. That fear would encourage less cooperation and more paranoia. This was the tone and feeling behind our ideas about border control, found in Chad’s newspaper, which would be a huge concern in a world where all borders touched. It also contributed to Julia’s black propaganda posters demeaning mixed-race people. When cultures are colliding and mixing, as demonstrated in the map and in some the country changes therein, they would tend to feel fearful about losing that culture. Such concerns would not only be cultural, but also practical. Diseases and weapons would be much more serious, and much more difficult to escape. Hailey showed this in a really interestingly commercial way with her advertisement for fashionable medical masks, a wise idea in a society with no water separating outbreaks, an era with no buffers.

What would happen if the modern world became one land mass? Life would be very complicated and conflict would explode. Nothing good would come from this scenario because of the pride and lack of understanding that is in the world today.

Textual Poaching

            For as long as I’ve been living, I have identified with being American. With grandparents on both sides of my family having been war veterans, I was raised to love America and respect it; after all it’s the best country, right? It was clear to me weeks ago that American would be the identification of choice for this project because of my deep love for this country and what it means, or at least used to mean, and I knew there would be great material with great remix possibilities.

            Not long ago, I was introduced to a clip from the show, The Newsroom, staring Jeff Daniels who is a news anchor. Please watch the clip HERE (some offensive language). In the clip Daniels character is asked why America is the greatest country ever, to which he answers in a dramatic way that it is no longer the greatest country in the world. One of my favorite things he says is, “with a straight face you’re going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom?” he then lists other countries that have freedom and informs the room full of students that out of 207 sovereign states 180 of them have freedom. But after he convinces you that America is no longer the greatest, he talks about how it used to be, and infers that it could be if we went back to what this country was founded on. This was my inspiration both for using some of the most famous quotes in history (and one that is recent because it was too perfect) and wanting to pair something with the quote that was contradictory to it because that’s one of the things I took from Daniels monologue, that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans out there that believe that America is the greatest country there is, when in fact we trail many, many other countries in things like literacy, health, and labor force. So to get this point across I paired the quotes with something in the present day that directly went against what was being said, for example FDR saying that we don’t need to fear anything but fear and juxtaposing that with a picture of young Muslim girls because a fair amount of Americans fear Muslim Americans for no other reason than 9/11 despite the fact that there have been way more white American men terrorists than any other group in America.

            I was further more inspired by one of the readings we did that were the different depictions of the famous painting “American Gothic”. The one that stood out the most to me was of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie reenacting it because they were so opposite of the farmer husband and wife that grace the real painting. It was comical because it is such an unnatural thing for them, that they were almost making a mockery of it; this translates well to my current feelings of America. Historically all these speeches have been revered and taught to us as young children and all through grade school, so they aren’t anything that any American would be unfamiliar with. Yet throughout the country we are going against what they have taught us to do. I feel like these sort of ‘America is the greatest’ and ‘look at how awesome our founding fathers were’ is so engrained in our heads while were young but then we grow up and forget that they aren’t here anymore and that it’s our time to be the role models.

            At the end of the day, I still love America and being American. I still wear my American Flag sweater and celebrate Independence Day with revere. But I have taken off the blinders and recognize the shortcomings of this country, and that’s why it was important to me to remix words this country cherishes with what it actually does.