Barrett's Round Robin

A warrior took his son hunting, but the son was struck dead. The warrior sought vengeance on the gods.

A warrior, grieving his son's death, obsessed with taking his vengeance on the gods, became convinced by grief and sunstroke that he was a god himself.

"Blinded by fury and the fact that his glasses had been stepped on in battle, 
the warrior was unable to see his son was alive and well."

In his blindness and panic, the father became disoriented. Mistaking him for an enemy, he put his spear into his son.

 

As his father stabbed him with the spear, Andromedes remembered the myth: sons killed by their fathers become demi-gods. 

Aidan: The first thing that comes to my mind about this assignment is its organizational difficulty. It would be simple enough if it were done all at once and in person. However, for our group at least, the virtual element became problematic. Whether from technical difficulty, or the kind of miscommunications that occur in virtual conversation, we experienced confusion. In my case, this was creatively restricting because I spent more time stressing over communicative errors than thinking about artistry or collaboration. As far as the work that was done, I found it to be challenging because there is no sense of control. However, it does prompt one to be more economical in the use of language. I found that to be a valuable experience in making less words mean more.  

Tabitha: We’ve repeated frequently that creativity loves constraint, and in these short story exercises, I’ve found that to be the case. There’s something really challenging and yet freeing about having to communicate plot, character, theme, and ambience in 20 words, ten words, six words – whatever the case has been. It’s intriguing to build off other's ideas in both written and visual form, but in this particular assignment, the communication and technicalities tripped our group up a bit. In Totems without Taboos:The Exquisite Corpse, DJ Spooky speaks of breaking down “the linear flow of ideas between people.” The at-times confusing form of this assignment made it a bit hard to do that, and it sometimes seemed as if we were creating an unwieldy, passive Frankenstein, a painfully self-aware and pointless monster, instead of the one that haunts Mary Shelley’s novel purposefully. It’s an elegant art form, however, the very short story, and feels like a language of its own. To learn it feels essential, but the path to doing so can be hard to navigate.

Trevor: These story sequences were exercises in entropy both in the interpretation of them and organization to do them. Writing and compiling the stories became a weird mission of preservation. There was an odd weight of lineage and legacy to respecting the last story and passing on something understandable and inspirational for the next while trying to write something decent. It’s an odd way to play the surrealist game DJ Spooky told us about, turning the Exquisite Corpse into a preservationist exercise. A truer playing would have veered into the irreverence of something like Axe Cop’s childish, self-contradictory bliss nightmare.

Camden: This telephone-esque exercise was a fine example of how the style of a story can develop a momentum even if the various chapters of the tale are written blindly by different authors. As readers, we can easily discern the familiar components of our favorite genres.  As writers in a group, we perceived distinctive story components and were able to incorporate those components into whatever chapter we contributed. It's almost compulsive. We don't want to write something that goes against the established theme or tone. As a testament to this, some aspect of the original tone was preserved within each mini-series written by our group.

Barrett: Throughout the entire assignment, I was most fascinated by the way my story seemed to evolve. It made me realize that whether or not we intend to apply the “Exquisite Corpse” idea to our art and our stories, historically, it is bound to happen anyway. Do not all stories and ideas become embellished and drawn out over time? The organization of this assignment was inevitably a disaster. Not in the ideal sense, perhaps, but in the realistic carrying out of it. I’m still not sure if it was all done correctly at this point. But I tend to believe that is part of the process and certainly part of the art. Confusion is only compounded into the spontaneity of our responses. In fact, disastrous collaboration is often what spawns cherished art. The somewhat humorous example of the ruined Ecce Homo fresco in Spain comes to mind. It developed from ancient art to bizarre reconstruction attempt to template for memes. This assignment allowed us to just taste that process and be aware of doing so.

Dark Glass - Musical Mosaic

Song: Rhapsody in Blue - 8 bit

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

For my musical mosaic, I decidedly spent time looking for one of the most beautiful classical pieces I could find. After browsing through various compositions, I decided on “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin and then found an 8-bit version of it. The gorgeous intricacies of the complex music sound ridiculous when played and compressed in 8-bit, which is exactly what I was looking for. I then spent time locating several pictures that are either iconic, beautiful, or personally meaningful to me and I edited them to be my own, purposefully pixelating the images until they are only recognizable from a distance. Doing a Google Search for famous or beautiful images was a very intentional decision and one I took some time with. The viewer needs to recognize what the image should be in order to be affected by what it is not. The compression of both music and image is jilting and is meant to be off-putting. While I included the pictures and song, as the assignment calls for, the piece is really most powerful when viewed as a video and is intended to be so. Consequentially, I will also include a link to the work as a video. I decided to call my Musical Mosaic “Dark Glass”.

My intent for the project ties well into the writings of Annie Dillard, as my intent is all about seeing and perspective. The pixelation of famous or beautiful images beyond the point of enjoyment parallels the way in which the western world now experiences or “sees” culture; that is to say, we see what we expect to see, and what is fed to us through our screens. Culture and relationship is not necessarily unalterably ruined by technology, but it is vastly affected. From the music we enjoy to the politics we feel passionately about, nothing we experience goes unaffected by our high-speed cultural lenses, and it is difficult to truly enjoy beautiful things such as a kiss without the cultural weight our perceptions give us.

The title of the mosaic refers to 1 Corinthians 13:12 and how we quite literally “see through a glass, darkly”. Annie Dillard makes the case that it is so difficult to truly and objectively see something other than what we expect, and I think that case is only even stronger in the 21st century. A work of art that explores a similar concept as the one I am attempting to depict is actually located pretty close to home. It is a sculpture on BYU campus of a pixelated elk out in the woods. Of course, we expect to see an elk in the woods, but we also are used to experiencing animals and anything outside of our immediate world on a screen. My guess is that the sculptor’s intent may be similar to mine: while we recognize and even celebrate technology’s place in society, we also hope that we can outgrow it’s iron grip on perspective in our culture.

Film Version:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4vx7xFzn6s&feature=youtu.be

Thinking and Writing — Nightcrawler

“The best and clearest way I can phrase it for you, to capture the spirit of what we air, is think of our news cast as a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut,” counsels news director Nina Romina in Nightcrawler, a 2014 film that explores the underbelly ethics of TV journalism in LA. The story centers around one Lou Bloom, a new cameraman who finds he is very comfortable working in the industry, and who will stop at nothing to get the most graphic shot he can—“If it bleeds, it leads.” However, to say that Nightcrawler is only about violence in media would be to commit the same crime as so many of its characters: seeing at face value. The story’s anti-hero is very decidedly a charming, slithering psychopath. “What if my problem wasn't that I don't understand people but that I don't like them?” he says. His insensitive behavior never changes, but only continues to horrify at greater levels, and he is ultimately rewarded for it. The film deliberately puts a clinical psychopath front and center to symbolize the psychopathy that is becoming pervasive in the news and media industry. Through its main character, Nightcrawler shows that, like Lou, TV journalism isn’t just violent—it’s heartless.

Many elements of the film reinforce the idea of a collective psychopathic approach to journalism. The way the characters at the news station interact with one another feels nonchalant after reporting terrible and grotesque things. Lou is rewarded by the industry for taking unethical risks and breaking laws, similar to the way clinical psychopaths often achieve success. Lou’s continually darker demeanor and dangerous demands also seem to parallel the increasingly violent appetite of the news director and she seeks more graphic footage to air. His behavior seems abhorrent at first, until the audience realizes by the end of the film that he fits right in. No one but the police seems to care when Lou’s partner dies getting a shot, or worse yet, that Lou actually films his partner dying and sells the footage to the station. By the time the credits roll, we cannot truly hate Lou for being a psychopath, when his sins are so disgustingly pervasive throughout the entire TV journalism machine.

The aesthetic of the film supports this idea, as does the music. As the film’s cinematographer, Robert Elswit creates a “look” that feels slick and dreamy, especially at night as Lou grabs his footage. The neon lights and popped-out glow of the city scream superficial. Elswit’s sweeping shots of LA cityscapes and broadcasting towers are meant to remind us that the emotionless industry never sleeps. The choice of cinematographer for this project is also notable, as this isn’t the first time Elswit has visually connected psychopathy to an industry. His award winning work on There Will Be Blood follows a very similar theme. The music, too, is specifically set to give the audience a level of disconnect. It certainly never feels ominous, but captures a sort of dreamy quality, even when Lou is doing particularly atrocious things, such as dragging a dying man’s body across the street to get the shot he needs. The music isn’t contrapuntal, but rather fits with what Lou is genuinely feeling, which is perhaps more horrifying. The same dreamy music underscores the “glory” of the news industry, welding together Lou’s insanity and the industry’s disconnect.

Screenwriter and director Dan Gilroy explained the reason for using Lou in a 2015 AwardsLine interview. He stated, “What we were aiming for in telling this success story—what we wanted the audience to walk away with—is that the problem wasn’t Lou, although Lou is obviously a problem for quite a few people in the film. The problem is the world…the society that created Lou and rewards Lou.” He goes on to explain that the film never answers the question of whether Lou is actually a psychopath, but rather urges the viewer to wonder about their own assumptions based on the world Lou finds himself a part of. Because of this, the case could be made that perhaps Lou is, in fact, not a psychopath at all. Regardless, the theme is less about the possible mental condition of Lou and more about the obvious emotional disconnect of the television industry. The case for Lou as a psychopath rests in the idea that his clinical behavior serves a symbol for the larger corporate monster.

As a filmmaker, a personal takeaway of mine from Nightcrawler is to avoid losing my humanity trying to get “the perfect shot.” The film seems to be a relevant critique on the media industry in general, on trading values and goodness for producing a good product. The subject is certainly poignant and true for TV journalism, but could be applied to any medium, or even to our consumerism culture as a whole. Despite myself, I couldn’t help but relate to and even root for Lou. Filmmaker or not, perhaps the further-reaching point of the film is that if you sympathize with Lou, there may be something wrong with you, too.