Fireside Chat

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I was a little apprehensive about the Fireside chat at first. I thought it would go super long and I would be super tired and not want to be there. I had an absolute blast. It was such an enriching experience to get to see all of my classmates perform and get to see what they had created and what they came up with. It was fun and entertaining and I was completely wrong about what I though the experience was going to be.

When deciding what I wanted to do for the fireside chat the only things I was sure of for a long time is that I wanted to play a vinyl. Vinyl records mean so much to me and a lot of the ones I own are sentimental in multiple ways. I love vinyls because they are all about connection and tangibility and then have scratches and static but you forgive them for those small imperfections because you love them. This was the fundamental belief that I wanted to communicate; the belief that you have to be able to give and receive love past imperfections and mistakes. That is when I knew that I had to tell the story of my brother , my family, and I. I wasn’t trying to be like “oh look how righteous I am”, it wasn’t about that at all. It was just the biggest moment in my life where I can look back and see where that belief formulated and the gratitude I have for that belief now.  I decided to play the Jackson 5 record with the song I’ll be there because that best demonstrated the love that my brother did/does have for me and how he just made one little mistake. I wore the overalls and the hat because that is how I dressed when I was 12 and wanted people to be able to look at me as a little kid and be able to tell that I was relating a story that was from my own past and better be able to empathize and see what occurred through the eyes of a child.

I was super nervous at sharing something so personal for fear of judgment, but that was the best part about eh fireside chat was that we all just have this love and understanding for one another and really open up.  Like I said before, it was great to get to watch everyone and I feel a lot closer to the class (yeah yeah that’s pretty corny) because people were being so open and just going for it I think that allowed those that followed to be more comfortable and to express the real them a little more in their performance. 

Concerned Citizen

http://youtu.be/7mO4HqMwK6o

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Our concerned citizen started out as a single individual and by the time the project was done, we felt it was unfair to focus on the individual when we both felt that it was a community effort in this BYU/Provo City Easter Egg Hunt. There were so many collaborators, staff members and volunteers that showed up to this event and set up for hours. They knew the hunt would maybe last 10 minutes. The concerned citizen is the community as a whole. Who says it has to be one? Who says that any one person should be spotlighted for this group effort?

We pieced the interviews together to make the basis of sound. Though the editing process we discovered that we wanted there to be multiple interviews form several workers and that for out “concerned citizen” the project manager just wouldn’t do anymore.  We decided to do a very noticeable and very deliberate increase of saturation with each clip to visually demonstrate the importance and the selflessness and understanding that grows within each interview.  Each realization, each citizen understands the purpose behind the egg hunt, the ideal of community and the ultimate purpose of children and the home was represented within the saturation increase.

We were also inspired from a certain quote form the text. The reading stated, “chose to have a soft approach to change, a smooth, non-violent, gradual pace: no wars, no conflicts, no denial of rights; dialogue, understanding and empowerment of rights instead.” We implemented that in both the editing with the color gradient and the focus of the subject matter. How important the next generation is. There can be no better use of service and community welfare than on the youth.  The particular part of the quote that really stuck us was “a soft, smooth, non-violent, gradual pace.” The way to improve out communities and our future is small and simple things to do within the family and to do with your children. How simple and easy an egg hunt is to go to and how many memories and feelings of love there are that are communicated within that 2 hours. Hundreds of people work for months to give that. They give way more work than children give back, obviously as it isn’t in a child’s nature, and they do it knowing that it’s for the good of the family.

The technicality to the piece was inspired by Moulin Rouge!. The coloring within the film directs your thoughts and emotions behind each scene. The playing off of red and blue as heaven and hell. They communicate so much through color and though it is obviously not utilized in such a perfect way such as in Moulin Rouge! But the basic concept was inspired from that film. The power of coloring even if seems more abstract and theatrically it can have a very realistic effect on people.  

Protest Poster

ARTIST STATEMENT:

The protest poster I designed was focused on the digital world that we live in and the lack of connections we make because of that world and the distractions. How often is it that we get bored and pull out our phone to entertain us. Do we ever just sit down and look around, watch the people around, us the sky, the Earth and just take it all in. We have to be constantly engaged and many people talk of the amazing progress in social connect ability that this creates. I think it inhibits the natural social process however. With websites and apps such a as tinder, I feel like the youth of today is all too much consumed in social media and digital connections that they don’t take the time to look up and watch the people around them getting to make friends through live verbal communication. We are propelling towards progress and email and social media has allowed people to connect to others across the world and keep in contact to those form the past that they otherwise would not be able to, but I do feel that we are getting rid of past communication all too quickly.

I created my posters to be kind of hard to look at at first, signifying the communication barriers that youth are now facing in today’s face to face world. I used two quotes from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, because I feel like this is a film that the generation that I’m reaching out to has seen and will understand. Also in this film Ferris and his friends go out into the city and make connections and formulations and memories and don’t have this urge to document is digitally and are not distracted by constant facebook updates. They live completely in the moment not inhibited by the distractions of vibrations coming form their pockets. I used pictures of kids on their phones at sporting events and at a museum because there are places that are visited by characters in the movie and that the characters have meaningful experiences with because of their dedicated attention to the subject before them instead of being torn between theses two worlds constantly having to multitask and keep up with the social world that is naturally occurring around them in those moments.

When I posted this to my facebook, twitter and Instagram I got quite a bit of feedback. Mainly people where pointing out how hypocritical it was of me to post something like that on a social media site, and that is completely true.  I also got called out on the fact that I run a social media department for BYU Athletics, which makes me feel a little bit hypocritical but manly more informed/passionate about his issue. Nothing bugs me more than people out together as friends/lovers/family that re on their phones completely ignoring one anther, and I have done this/experienced this first hand because of my job and I don’t like it. Social Media is my job but it shouldn’t be my life. It shouldn’t be anyone’s because then you are living through a screen and through actual memories and experiences. The video we watched for the weeks viewing, she talked about the importance of not having just one story about going out and partaking and getting an appetite of multiple narratives. By partaking in social media you get to see a lot of autobiographical narratives and stories form around the world, which by all means is important, however I think its more important to not limit your self to one story; to not let yourself only have partake of a narrative because you are so distracted by a little screen in the bug expanse that is the actual live and socially thriving world.

This is what inspired me. I encourage EVERYONE to check it out. I firmly believe in what this video has to say.

http://vimeo.com/49425975

Webspinna

https://soundcloud.com/april-joyner/aj-webspinna

(You might have to turn it up, it got really quiet on Sound cloud!)


ARTIST STATEMENT

When I first approached the assignment, I wanted to look for sounds that would sound great together, make a beautiful song, and be really impressive. Then I really wanted to represent a theme or s storyline instead of having something that is just seamless and audibly much more coherent.  We talk about inspiration and the environment that surrounds us when we are inspired. I currently have 4 girls sleeping in my living room and they were watching a chick flick late one night and talking about the process of relationships and how there really are these steps and these concrete progressions. Also based on current personal circumstances in my life I decided that I want to tell the most basic progression of a relationship trough my webspinna.

The first song is like someone seeing someone across the room that steals their attention and then the heartbeat of asking them out or having conversations with them.  The Andy Griffith theme song then comes into play. This isn’t as seamless a transition that I wouldn’t have liked, however the point it that ideal since of security and happiness when you date someone. Then the quotes of expressing love. The bells represent wedding bells. The beat that comes into repeat is supposed to show the routine like nature of the relationship at that point. The children laughing obviously represent children coming into the relationship. The Elvis song was used to emphasis the still very much “in love” aspect of a relationship, however I wanted to play under the scene from Gone with the Wind of the break up, because a lot of tines in most relationships there is still love and admiration just it just comes down to the pain that one person has cause the other and that fact that one person may still be in love but the other, “Doesn’t give a damn”. The thunder is to symbolize the storm of the break up and then the last song has this sadder basic beat that seems also very routine like to represent the routine that many individuals have to reformulate after a break up because their normality has been shattered.  

Though I found the other reading on eclecticism very interesting 9and very much like I was reading something Dean Duncan would say in lecture) the form of the DJ spooky reading really got to me. I like how it was all cyclical yet new at the same time. I liked that every time you touch on a word it was different and kind of never ending. I felt like relationships are very similar. They are cyclical but there is always something new and you don’t know what to expect and it may match what was before and it may not. I used this in my webspinna by not being afraid to use different genres of music and stray for one singular set sound or style.

BomBom by Macklemore kept we thinking of the webspinna. It’s a instrumental song he does and it combines various sounds and styles of music and goes through this spectrum of emotions. It doesn’t really stick to one set type of song. Though as I listen to BomBom I wish that my webspinna was more seamless and more musically flowing that I had made it.  Also Macklemore can be pretty cynical and I definitely ended my webspinna with a cynical tone about love. 

Webspinna Test links

https://soundcloud.com/interkydd/drum-line

http://www.soundjay.com/heartbeat-sound-effect.html

http://www.buttonbeats.com/

http://fozzy42.com/SoundClips/Themes/TV/AndyGriffifth.wav

http://www.soundboard.com/sb/Jerry_Maguire_sounds

http://www.pond5.com/sound-effect/10700417/wedding-bells-street-hubbub-outside-church.html

http://www.incredibox.com/en/#/application

http://www.audiosparx.com/sa/display/sounds.cfm/sound_group_iid.469

http://soundbible.com/tags-thunder.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5V430M59Yn8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2RxWs60dRM&feature=related

http://soundbible.com/tags-thunder.html

https://soundcloud.com/leprechauntunes/sad-instrumental

http://5secondfilms.com/watch/the_best_breakup_line_ever

Media Specificity

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I wanted to focus on Literature and specifically within literature I wanted to focus on the aspect of the medium that deals with sentence structure and words. No other medium uses the written language with such a force as literature. No other medium is so dependent upon the formulations and organization of words as literature is.

My idea was to take a couple pages of an already established piece of literature and rewrite a new story within the book by rearranging the words and crossing out some of the text. I often find that when I am reading, sometimes I miss a word a two or even a whole page and the story changes dramatically and what I then take away from that medium is altered. By doing so, I wanted to point out how within literature sentence structure and words are up for interpretation and rearrangement by the reader. The author does not have complete control; it is up to the reader to interpret the text in a way that works for them and in a way that the words formulate for them.  So to represent this I took a story already told and told a new one by using on the selected words that I, the reader wanted to see.

When reading the articles about the modern art paint exhibits and the editor not understanding them, I began to think about how this is also a common practice within literature, but the viewers have more power to alter their and the actual perception of the book. It’s easy to read something and not understand it but unlike paintings, there is such a long process to engulfing yourself in the art that your brain could easily rearrange words and meanings within sentence structures to formulate a new meaning that flows better with your interior thought process.

This may not necessarily be considered another form of media, but this project led me to think about the magnetic poetry that people have on their fridges and how  it’s just a group of words that people can come up and arrange however they want and then they have a story and others can come up and change one word and it’s a completely different story. The concepts are very similar between my project and this interior-decorating item.

Textual Poaching

Beat. Beat.

Drum. Guitar.

You are proud to listen to yours

While I can only glorify mine if its behind closed doors

Tell me of its bad influence and scare

But listen close and tell me which one is more bare

Condemn me for the way it sounds

But don’t you listen a single bound

Yours sounds like honeying sweet

But see, the lyrical dirt doesn’t miss a beat

Assume it’s loud and reckless too

Though your talks more of who to do

Judge me not I guess does not apply

Your not even smart enough to see the why

You go one listening to more and more

While I must be a little whore

Artist Statement:

My name is April, and I am a metalhead. I love screamo music, emo music, and punk music. People often look at me and say that that’s not possible. They look at the way I live my life and say that if I listened to the kind of music that I claim I do I would have piercing and tattoos and use profanity as my only way of communication. People seem to think that if a song screams then it must be negative message. If a song is happy, poppy, and from a well known artist with a mainstream, then it MUST be good and MUST contain a better message than from a band that has boys with long black hair. 

The piece I made is a compilation of several pictures. The main picture in the background is a group of Beatles fans standing outside one of their concerts. I wanted to take the fans and replace their love for the Beatles and change it into bands that are typically considered to be loved only by drug addicts and hippies. I wanted to point out that these clean cut individuals could appreciate the music that comes from bands such as the Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Blink 182, if they would just take the time to look around the stereotype and listen to the lyrics of the music produced.

I wanted the image to looked very thrown together. I wanted it to look like things were out of place—because according to society they are. People who are good and upstanding individuals can’t possibly like NOFX and Bad Religion? That’s absurd, correct? I feel like there is such a stigma to metalheads, especially in Provo. This is where the poem comes in. It is something that I wrote just to get my frustrations out about how many people judge me for the music I listen to, without even knowing the lyrics, and glorify this pop music that sounds cheerful but is much more dangerous and threatening to the LDS standards than screamo. It all comes down to preconceived perceptions, stereotypes, and societal standards that have been around for years but have no right or authority to dictate our lives and the interpretations of the events around us.    

Movement Manifesto

Manifesto Statements:

• Good art takes the everyday, the typical, and presents it in a thought inducing and inventive way
• Good art explores new approaches to something ordinary.
• Good art creatively blends conventional with experimental.

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eP3iO6WNhc&feature=youtu.be  

Artist Statement:


In our manifesto we really wanted to conceptualize the significance of finding beauty in typical things or actions and depicting them in an interesting or unique way. We were really inspired by the grandeur found in Revolution (Life Cycle of a Drop of Water) by Chris Turner and Plastic Bag by Ramin Bahrani. As the title of each signifies, they are each about something simple and that we associate with every day. But through the creative eyes of these directors we as viewers are given new insight into the life of each of a simple drop of water and an average plastic bag. We, too, wanted to depict something very typical, but in a way that causes viewers to stop and really appreciate the magnificence something taken for granted. Breathing is definitely something that most of us take for granted; in fact it's so common that most of us can probably go all day doing it and not even think about it. In the exposition we have a girl under water drowning herself; withholding the very thing that grants her life: breath. We juxtapose this several times with underexposed clips of people using breath in various forms. This creates a stark contrast between one and the other: the first no longer wishing to breath, the other finding great joy in their use of breathing. Whether it is blowing out candles, catching your breath, or using a cool breath to cool down a drink, breathing is pretty spectacular and certainly under-appreciated. The last two scenes juxtapose a sigh of relief and choosing to come up for air and live. The multiple shots of types of breaths were to signify how whenever we are without air all we can think about is breathing. The scenes also gradually become shorter in length as the film progresses, in a similar way that breathing increases as stress increases. And then, finally, at the end we slow it down as the the sigh of relief is exhaled and the girl takes a much needed breath. Through this we hope that the viewer will view breath with more appreciation and maybe recognize its significance a little more regularly.

Creative Art Piece

http://vimeo.com/59026775

The everyday/factual/scientific/reality looked at through a colorful lens.

Historical Story

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B3j3VZNPVl2HcTV5N3dfQkpCb00/edit?usp=sharing

Artist Statement:

We told the amazing story of William “Buck” Holloway Joyner. The exact details of the event where not perfectly know. We did know that he cut an infection out of his leg, killed two guards and stole a plane to fly back to the American base.  We really wanted to humanize the opposing side (the Japanese) and fight against this stereotypical way of making them these heartless enemies. That is why we decided to follow Takeo a little bit in his home life and leave the decision of Buck’s reuniting with his family up to him. We really wanted some of the hero characteristics to reside with Takeo and not with Buck. We chose Takeo’s name, which means strong and good husband, to demonstrate that as well. We wanted Buck to be as true to his character as possible, and that character was not perfect.  We didn’t want him to be the stereotypical WWII idealized hero, we wanted him to have flaws (the drunkenness and the murder of two people) but have a true motivation for the escape (family). We didn’t want to take the flat “action film” approach to this story. We rather focus on the difficult and unique relationship that exists between a POW and the sincerely kind captor he has known for the past 8 months and the connection they have through fatherhood.

Reading Neufeld’s, “After the Deluge” it makes you realize the importance of stories and the power they hold in preserving the past so that it can be told to those in the future. The individual stories shared in the comic are stories that would have been shared to few people or left untold if they had not been adapted into some type of media and shared on the internet. As film makers we are foremost storytellers and sharing the past is a duty we have to our ancestors and to humanity in general. In our script we combine these two duties we have by sharing a story about April’s grandfather and like the stories in Neufeld’s comics we are preserving and sharing an isolated incident within a great event in our world’s history (or nation’s history). We also can better connect with April’s grandfather as well as the people in Louisiana allowing us to be more sympathetic to those times or that event which helps us learn from or be further moved by the actions that take place. Storytelling is history and as film makers we are in a great position to contribute to that.

  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHfr8nydUxE

This video is a video that was randomly found on youtube by the Joyner clan, and it features Buck Joyner. You first can see him at 1:26 on the left hand side. He is the shorter gentleman.  At 2:36 he is giving a speech and at 2:45 he looks right at the camera. Buck passed away in May of 2012 and was just recently buried in Arlington National Cemetery on February 3, 2013. Watching this was inspiration. It’s a living memory and portrayal of immortality for Buck.  Being able to picture him in your mind, his movements and the way he looks, really helps you along with character development. 

Genealogical Artifact

I’ve lived in the same house all my life. My parents moved there a couple months before I was born, and I slept in the same bedroom every single night until I left for college. There is a lot of good and a lot of bad accompanied with that house, as there is with life in general. A decorative negative was the god-awful, moldy, 80’s shag carpet that inhibited our floors when my family first moved into the house. It was the color of dirty beige and had shag so deep it covered your ankles. Okay, so that’s a lie but it was stained all over from the wear and tare of children. When I was about 10 years old, my parents decided it was time to change the carpet out. I was surprisingly devastated. I had cried on that crappy shag carpet. I had fought and laughed and bled my guts out so much that a rug was stapled into the floor in hopes that no one would accidently see the stain. This carpet was my childhood and my parents were willing to chuck it out without even noticing that my brother and I had taken hours to permanently ingrain hot wheel tracks within it. Much to my joy, however, they replaced the carpet everywhere in the house BUT the playroom where I spent much of my time. The new carpet was nice. It was soft and lovely to look at. Pretty soon hard times hit my family and our new carpet became stained and worn mainly from the secrets it was holding about the abuse. I grew up, left for college and came home for summer. My mother was replacing the carpet yet again. I threw a fit. This new carpet was not MY carpet, as MY carpet was not MY carpet when it was first installed. I quickly ran to the playroom so that I could lie on the floor and feel the familiar bumps and stains of the carpet original to the house. It was gone. Mother had even replaced that room too. My childhood was over. I was never again to be 6 years old crying silent tears because I split apple juice on the carpet, the carpet and the apple juice stain that no longer had a place in the only house I called home. My mother sensed my sentimentality and presented me with a shadow box with three stripes of carpet in it; the 1^st strip the original carpet, the 2^nd from when I was 10, and the 3^rd a piece of the new carpet just installed. My mother rolled her eyes remarking my strange love for the “damn carpet” but it wasn’t the “damn carpet” I cared so much for. That night I tried sleeping in the brand new double bed that had replaced the twin I was used to, but couldn’t. I went to lie down on MY carpet, but it was gone. I stared long and hard at the shadow box and began to sob. I would never go back to the life I knew with those past carpets. It was over. No more hot wheels with my brother, no more wrestling matches, no more late night snacks spilt on the floor, no more yelling, and crying and beatings. I realized that I didn’t care about the carpet; I cared about the phases of my family that had stained those pieces of floor covering. The original carpet of my childhood, aged and worn with cheerio crumbs representing when my family was oh so young and developing. The carpet from my adolescent and teen years riddled with tears and blood and true trials of a family. Then the brand new carpet— beautiful, fresh, and unstained; an opportunity for my family’s future. So there I was lying on my floor staring at the shadow box full of carpet making tear stains on the freshly installed soft flooring. Damn new carpet. Mother will kill me if she sees I’ve already ruined you. 

Artist Statement:

I focused on the carpet from my home in Texas. As I came to write the story I put on some of my favorite music and just really concentrated. I wanted to get the voice right because it’s just not just an item we need to do justification to, but to ourselves and the meaning behind the object. I sat down and just let the story flow out. I didn’t stop or think I just kept writing and writing wanting to go back and fix any errors or revisions later. I wanted the story to be as natural as possible but still have a certain written artistic style that I know I didn’t present when I told it in front of the class.  We were told to have a certain degree of performance within our text. I struggled with this. By my final draft of the story I feel like I did accomplish this, but it took a while to define what I wanted to go for, which was just straight up natural speak but a fair amount of imagery as well as opening up a little bit about my family and our relationship struggles throughout the years of growing together. 

The poem from our reading (On page 112) really inspired me to choose the carpet. It says the lines, “Not only did they touch me, or my hand touch them: they were so close that they were a part of my being…”. I really contemplated this while choosing my subject and the carpet stuck out clearly as something that was more than just an object from my life it was a part of being that it could have “lived half my life and will die half my death.”

I am a fan of the classics, so we are gonna kick it old school and reference The Scarlet Letter. Just as within the novel, a piece off fabric has so much more symbolism and metaphorical meaning than it presents. In The Scarlet Letter it represents Hester’s pain, suffering and societal judgments on her. She wears her sin, her troubles, and her past. In many ways, the carpet of my family literally holds all the stains from mishaps and wrestling matches and fights that mark us as this imperfect family with things to be judged for. People could look at our carpet and see what we are. That may be exaggerated to an extreme but I know I would happily cut a piece of the old carpet and pin it to my clothing if people desired me to represent the sins of my family in a tangible way. I would wear it proudly to make the point that no one has a right to judge my family, that they are mine and I am grateful for the good and the bad choices we have made that have gotten us to where we are, which is still fundamentally screwed up, but at least still a family.  Maybe this carpet, like Hester’s scarlet letter, is my “passport into regions where other women dared not tread”(Nathaniel Hawthorne).

Process Piece

Listen Here:

https://soundcloud.com/april-joyner/eating-peas

Artist Statement:

For the process piece my partner and I (Hannah) really wanted to focus on the human aspect of the assignment.  We thought about doing the process of a fight, but that felt too scripted so we decided to do someone eating something they don’t like eating (which for the person we recorded was peas) We recorded them going through the entire process and then edited it down and added the heartbeat in the background.  The whole idea behind eating peas was the idea about how human it is to force yourself through something that you don’t want to do because you know that because you are an adult you just have to buckle down and do it. As discovered on the first day of class, people tend to bond over painful experiences or even just things that don’t go as planned. Eating something that you don’t like is a process that everyone can relate to in the smallest realm of  “painful experiences”. Much like the Scripture Study video we watched this week, with eating peas you have to talk yourself through it and remind yourself of the benefits of doing what you are doing. I kept being reminded of Dean and his wife choosing to go through with scripture study because they understand the long-term benefits of what they are doing and as the adults in the family they have to push through and keep up with it for the greater good.  The audio in the Routine videos inspired the addition of the heartbeat. The heartbeat is the constant rhythm throughout the audio piece, drawing an emphasis to the struggle the person recorded goes through while eating these peas by adding in the speeding up of the heartbeat. I really wanted to draw attention to that to make the listener think about how much of an actual process we put ourselves through to even do things that we don’t enjoy.

I thought about Little Miss Sunshine, Frank and Dwayne in particular, while looking back over the process piece and the idea of doing things that you don’t like because you are an adult. In that film, Frank and Dwayne go through a lot of things and do a lot of things because it’s what’s expected of them. Frank ‘s life is literally falling apart around him, yet (besides trying to kill himself) he has to act and perform to this certain protocol because that is what’s asked of him as a functioning adult in society. Dwayne also has to put himself through these situations for family and society that he doesn’t agree with. When he finds out that he is colorblind he throws this huge fit, but ultimately has to get back up, into the van and drive to the pageant—not necessarily because he wants to but because he has to and its expected of him as an older member of a family. Overall that is the wider theme of process of the piece; doing something that you don’t want to do but doing it because you know you have to. 

Tiny Stories

Billy loved to read but others told him it was better to kick a ball, so he gave himself paper cuts to stop and they all got infected.

A classmate told Amy she could never get a date if she didn't drop a few, so she pulled out all of her teeth. What good is it being skinny if you're dead?

Her parents told Rachel to remove her lip ring because no one would understand her. She refused; her dad ripped it off taking the rest of her lips with it.

Brandon's roommates called him weird for his music taste so he cut off his ears to please them, except now he can't hear their praises of his docility.

They told Josh his God was fictional. To prove them wrong he pointed a rifle to the sky. His God wasn't fictional but his God is dead.

Artist Statement:

For the 5 stories, I guess you could say I went in a more morbid direction. I initially got my inspiration from people watching. I look around and can see the automatic change in people behavior and means of carrying themselves when they think no one is watching. That began me thinking about how often the people that love us want us to be so much the version of us that they see when they look at us as an individual and how so many of us comply and it eventually kills pieces of us off. These stories represent that in a much more exaggerated way. The hand drawn images are just cartoon like pictures of the scene described in the story and the image at the bottom of each story in the name of the character spelled out in different pieces. I chose to do this because I wanted the name to really represent the identity of the characters, to show that these are indeed individuals. I wanted the names to be spelled out in pieces because I wanted to show that so many small pieces make up our identity, so that the message in the stories stands out more about killing someone by altering just the smallest thing about themselves. The names are also in color and everything else in pencil because I wanted the viewers eye to be drawn to it first, to pay attention to the identities of the characters first. The rest of the story presentation (the fact that it’s on notebook paper and written in cursive) is supposed to give off a very innocent and childlike quality to offset and counter the morbidity of the actual stories themselves. I wanted a diary/school book look to the images (though they may be my lack of drawing skills) to make the stories as intimate as possible.

Throughout the week and within the readings we talked about the origins of stories and where we can find inspiration, and I found myself looking externally for the most part and after reading the book for the second time I really felt impressed to see how looking external affected my metacognition and how I look for inspiration within. With that, these stories are inspired as much externally (form people watching) as they are internally (my own experiences in life).

As I finished the assignment I began to look at the stories with a different perspective, focusing on what the internal conflict would be inside the main characters and reflecting on what they would be saying to themselves giving in to other people’s desires.  Immediately the song Snuff by Slipknot came to mind. The specific lyrics I focused on were—

I only wish you weren’t my friend

Then I could hurt you in the end

I never claimed to be a saint

Ooh, my own was banished long ago

It took the death of hope to let you go

So break yourself against my stones

And spit your pity in my soul

You never needed any help

You sold me out to save yourself

The “I” being the characters talking to themselves. I feel like on the outside they would be hiding their true self away, giving in, because it’s easier, what others want from then, and to pleasing society. They want to get back to whom they truly are but all hope is dead and they have to let that person go. They are angry and yelling at their pretend self stating, “You sold me out to save yourself”. 

Music Mosaic

The song I chose was Greyhound by Swedish House Mafia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBRKSIj2tMc

Artist's Statement:

When listening to Greyhound, I kept hearing a heart-beat, the sound of human life connected to this slow constant building that reaches it’s climax and then breaks itself down to start all over.  The images represent that gradual shift. The colors on each change as the rectangles build bigger and bigger. The dates at the bottom represent times in my life where I felt like something new had started, that I was building upon something, where I had a new beginning. I decided to include the dates, almost outlining my current life story, because of the reading and how it really inspired me to think about how stories affect our lives and how when we look back at our memories, we remember most moments of our timeline in story format. It stated in the reading, “Stories are the secret reservoir of our values: change the stories individuals and nation live by and tell themselves and you change the individuals and nations.” I contemplated that as I completed my assignment. If you removed every single date from my life written on the bottom of the images, I would be a completely different person. My family would be different and the lives of those around us would also be affected.  I live by these events. I identify myself by them. Change them and you change me. Know them and you know me. The reading also stated, “Story has always been the way we explain our relationships and who were are.” This was the main ideal I wanted to represent with my images and including personal special dates and connecting that to the music with each of those dates corresponding to a new beginning in my life as well as a place for build up and climax within the music. I connected these images also to the song People as Places as People by Modest Mouse. To me this song is all about identity and a desire to know oneself and to know those around you. The reading commented several times on not being able to know someone but through their stories and their experiences. The lyrics in this Modest Mouse song repeat several times, “But we were the people that we wanted to know And we're the places that we wanted go Yeah, we're the places that we wanted to go”. This song addressed the issue of not really knowing the people around you, the places you want to be, and the sense of comfort and hominess that is found in the people around you becoming the places that you want to go. This song emphasis the importance of truly knowing the people around you and the negative side effects it can have it we let that fall away and don’t speak up and “Ask the Question” and soon we then find ourselves in a society with hardly any people we need to know or places we needed to go. As the reading says, this error in connection can be corrected though story which is something the images I created try to replicate in a manner very personal to my own life story.