Ben Haskin's CRV Blog

This was such an interesting and fun assignment. We’ve talked about these limitations on our art in class from that Ted talk, and the limitations on this assignment actually made it really fun and cool. Since we had to get our sounds only from the internet, we ended up putting more thought into it that we might have otherwise. Instead of just getting some cowboy boots and recording footsteps, we had to actually find a recording of footsteps that we liked (which turned out to be surprisingly hard). Instead of editing things together, we had to find websites that would turn our youtube links into links that started the video exactly on time.

It was cool also to have to think about telling a story with sound. We could have done things that were more ambiguous and showed the audience with our “acting” what was going on, but we wanted it to be really clear what was happening just from the sounds. Interestingly enough, if you think about it, a lot of sound design is just plagiarizing sounds, kind of like what we were doing. The difference is that some sounds are copyrighted, in which case you have to get permission and then give credit. In the readings for this week, however, it talked about how if we didn’t have plagiarism, we would be missing out on a lot of really amazing art. It mentions West Side Story and The Wasteland, and says, “If these are examples of plagiarism, then we want more plagiarism.”

The performative element was also really interesting. There’s a big difference between editing sound all together to create something smooth and perfect, and opening it up in internet windows that you’re not even sure will load in time. There’s an edge to it; it’s more exciting. You never know if at any moment the internet will crash and your performance will be ruined. It also made it more interesting to watch other people’s because, like glitch art does, it brought the flaws out instead of hiding them, and glorified the flawed-ness and the humanity of it. It was fun to see people pop out of the art unexpectedly when something would go wrong and the acting persona was broken as the actor suddenly realized “Oh crap! I clicked the wrong one!” It made the performance more interesting, and in a way, more human.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Textual Poaching

Full Size Picture

Artist's Statement:

For my textual poaching assignment, I wanted to find something pretty old, so I was looking through paintings. I stumbled upon Sower with Setting Sun by Vincent Van Gogh, which I’d never seen before, and immediately got an idea. The sower in his field reminded me of back when we first moved into the home I spent most my life in in Lakeville, MN. When we were first there, we had the only house in the neighborhood, surrounded by fields. It was very peaceful and rural looking, very like this painting. However, over time our neighborhood developed into a packed suburb, and the town itself grew, becoming a booming commercial center instead of a small farm town south of St. Paul. To illustrate this change, I put the power plant (representing pollution, etc.) and a commercial entity, Walmart, along with a suburban home, then finished it off with a nice road tearing straight through the beautiful field. I initially planned to make these pasted items look painted-in and a part of the canvas, but it was beyond my technical mastery; I think the final product turned out well regardless.

When talking about Star Trek and its legacy in our reading this week, Jenkins stated: “Intense interaction eventually leads many fans toward the creation of new texts, the writing of original stories.” I think that this can be true with other mediums, such as oil painting. While studying and thus mentally “interacting” with this Van Gogh work on such a personal level, I was drawn to create a new piece of work, however unpolished and poached it may be. Looking at this thing created by another man, I felt both inspired and obligated to do something with it beyond just think about it. In our discussion in class last Tuesday and Thursday, I definitely felt as if this was one of the paths we were setting ourselves upon – the road from an old creation to a new creation. This is something that is taught a lot in the film program, even in non-fiction production, as you have the discretion to take the stories happening in the world around you and tailor it to a message you wish to share or bring to light.

I think many people would argue against this concept from a practical standpoint, and I think rightfully so. Many people shy away from the idea of “ripping off” the work of others, not seeing how analogous it is with simply being inspired by them. When done incorrectly, it can certainly be harmful, such as literal plagiarism. However, when properly cited and/or referenced, a work you have “poached” becomes a small part of a new whole, such as a class paper or this assignment. It is not that I disrespect or wish to discredit Van Gogh. Contrarily, I believe I heavily credit his ability to speak to the soul by demonstrating how his work drove me to create “new texts” and give new meaning to a beautiful work of art.

Monday, October 5, 2015

Historical Piece

*Final Version PDF*

(My partner was Nadia.)

History has the ability to tell powerful stories. These type of stories can become personal and very dear to the heart depending on who tells the story. We decided to do our Historical Piece on a family living in communist Russian in the late 1940s. This story carried a dark gloomy feel because Russia during this time was withheld from expressionism and freedom of speech. Our story took place in the heart of Russia: Moscow. Moscow was the home to many of the political problems that existed in the U.S.S.R. We felt this was the ideal place for our characters to change, suffer, and fail.

Propaganda was a big influence for us as we created our story. We wanted to have historical accuracy and we knew by including Russian propaganda, we would be able to accomplish this. Using Russian propaganda was eye opening because we as Americans have only really seen American propaganda from the cold war. We used the poster “Us vs Them” which suggested Russia was great and powerful and that America was weak and undesirable. (http://io9.com/the-most-sensational-and-lurid-soviet-propaganda-poster-1464264698) The poster itself presented false beauty of communist Russia. We felt this was appropriate because it completely contradicted what the family felt in our story. At the end, the family wants to go to America, which is completely contrary to what the traditional Russians thought at the time.

In the reading “The Veil”, Marjane Satrapi discusses how unfair certain revolutions and governments can be. In the first strip of this comic, viewers can see how Satrapi is unhappy once the government ways are enforced upon her. Her giant smile transformed into a frown. We liked this idea of political power to create personal imprisonment and this was heavily placed into our story. The veil in this short comic was symbolic to the lack of freedom. The government in our story also represented the lack of freedom.

This story was very personal because it was based off of one of our relative’s lives (The family member is our second historical source). There was more power to it because it was told directly to one of us. Just like the video “My Grandmother Ironed the Kings Shirts,” there was a stronger emotion attached. The story had its’ own character and own problems that could only be relevant to that particular story. Being able to connect to an ancestor’s culture and life brought more passion and emotion to this story. It is different hearing a story from someone who actually lived through these historical times. Historians do a good job telling facts but those who actually lived through it tell great stories.

Overall, historical pieces are empowering and have the ability to tell amazing stories. Stories can be told in numerous ways but those that stick to their cultural roots can be the most powerful.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Process Piece

To Bathe A Hedgehog

(Click link for audio)

I will begin by saying that this week's assignment was done solo, because of a series of boring events resulting in my not having a partner. With that aside, I did really enjoy this week's activity. I took a long time trying to figure out a process I could depict with sound that would be both interesting to hear, and a worthwhile exercise. I ended up deciding to record the process of my pet hedgehog Felicity being given an oatmeal bath.

When viewing this weeks "readings" (i.e. videos) I felt a similar thing throughout all of them: the connection to other human beings pursuing something that fulfills them. My favorite video, as I indicated in class, was the video by Commoner about Rohan building his smokehouse. Things that are very hard and labor intensive to do are frequently avoided by a lot of people, unless of course it is to accomplish a goal they have a stake in. If given the task of building a smokehouse or even just a tiny back porch smoker, you would be hard pressed to find someone willing to do such labor. The man in this video loved what he was doing, and that drove him to push himself through the arduous, even painful, process.

Many people would contend that everything that people don't set their mind to is a painful process, as I touched on. But what I noticed during this recording is that all people need is an open mind, not necessarily a predetermined desire to do the thing. My wife typically does not wash Felicity because she can be so wild and and can puff out her spikes, and even sometimes poop on your hands in protest. Despite this, she had an open mind and was willing to pursue this labor to wash, scrub, and handle the crazy wet hog. She enjoyed the process though it wasn't necessarily a labor of love, like building the smokehouse or taxidermy, because of her willingness to participate. While I didn't really set out to prove this, I think it worked out quite nicely in seeing her have a good time washing the hedgehog regardless of preconceived notions. Furthermore, the lighthearted and "cute" sounds created within the recording bring about a sense of joy rather than a sense of laborious action. The icing on the cake is the quiet, almost imperceptible sniffing of the microphone by Felicity toward the end - her naive curiosity unabated by what some would consider an annoying process.

Monday, September 21, 2015

Round Robin!

Once upon a time in the medieval woods,

There lived Big M, a wizard from the hood.

Big M, the wizard from the hood, got lost in the woods. He tried to use his magic to escape, but then he remembered he was actually a sea turtle. He missed the sea.

The sea turtle longed to return to the ocean and ride the pleasant currents. Suddenly he remembered that he was actually a computer programmed to think he was a sea turtle.

All of a sudden, someone looked through the sea turtle's porthole. It was a hermit, who claimed that he had the secret to eternal life if the turtle would let him inside. The turtle was suspicious, but decided to let him in anyway.

The hermit came in and began to read silently.
"Well?" asked the turtle impatiently.
"Slow down and stay steady. Going fast burns you out. Now be quiet," answered the hermit.

Joint Artists' Statement

Our Round Robin stories started out simple. However, as various writers added additional pieces, they turned into literary conglomerations in which the final pieces bore no resemblance to the original idea. For instance, one began as a girl who liked skittles having a psychedelic experience and turned into an old man addicted to doing other people’s homework. Some of the stories were logically connected to the pieces that came before, but as a whole, the conglomeration made no sense.

Such is the nature of exquisite corpse, a collaborative art form in which one artist draws a body part, and another adds to it in his or her own unique style. The creation is ultimately not cohesive. So was it with our Round Robin experiment. We learned that it is thus impractical to observe only one small piece of the work, or place responsibility on only one person for the whole. Instead of wanting everything to work out according to the design of one single person, it’s much more interesting to supply our perspective in the collaboration and then appreciate how our perspective interacts with the multitude of others. If we want everything to be exactly how we imagine, then we would be forced to work in solitude.

The nature of art is thus collaborative. As DJ Spooky puts it in his essay, “We all produce it, we all know it!” The best movies ever made pass the test of time because they were made by teams of enormously talented individuals who each contributed their strengths to the strength of the whole. As artists we can’t be afraid to let others add to or critique our art, because we are fallible human beings whose vision is limited by our own experience. Many minds and many talents erase this element of human weakness, and leave behind the element of human capacity and creativity.

An interesting insight we learned from this activity was the process and experience of having your story evolved/changed by others. It can be a frustrating experience when the story goes in a direction you didn't want or expect it to go, but this assignment helped foster an open attitude. We liked seeing the insight that others had and the different creative trails they would go down, especially with how they would take elements of the story and utilize them in their own vision.

Monday, September 14, 2015

Music Mosaic

Music Link: Interlude by Attack Attack!

For this assignment I decided to select/create pictures at several different points in time, to try to gauge the different ways I felt about the music at individual points in my life. I chose the song "Interlude" by Attack Attack! because I didn't innately picture anything when listening to it, and it was honestly the first instrumental piece of music I came across when looking for a subject. The first two pictures I created using an abstract art program, with the target goal of the first to look like a long exposure of a bunch of glow sticks on a dance floor. This is due to the style of the song being a techno/dance song, as well as the music having a frenetic and chaotic, yet elegant feel to it. The second picture I created in the same style but with a white background, something impossible to photograph, to symbolize how the song feels “light” as opposed to dark or black.

I next listened to the song when I was out photographing for a Cameras and Lenses assignment, and felt that the song reminded me of my Freshman year, when I first heard it. Because of this, I thought of Rock Canyon and the mountains, where I spent a lot of time exploring back then, and a path ready to be explored. I also took one photo with low ISO and a relatively low shutter speed to create a feeling of false fading light, showing how memories (like light) eventually seem fade into the past, but they are still there if we look through the right lenses.

The simple EKG drawing I made in MS Paint (just because) to show that the song has a steady beat like a heartbeat, and that life is flowing through it. Further, it is very simplistic, and representative of a regular cardiac rhythm, as the song has quite a simplistic structure and generally undeviating chord progressions. Next was a photo of Minneapolis, where I grew up. I chose that skyline because I think it is very distinctive, then I added a chromatic/pop art look with a couple of filters and a perforated mask, because the warm color and plastic-y look it gave to the high-def photo is in line with the tone of the song and the culture it represents.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the Paint drawing, I created this particulate cloud using a WebGL script. It represents the chaos and feeling of overwhelming noise created by the music, while keeping it all encased in the circle, with the explosive elements making up one large whole.

Last but not least is a picture of the carpet at my workplace. Boring, I know, but there is a point. I noticed when I was sitting and trying to think of a final picture to accompany the song that the carpet has a ton of different thread colors and overlapping patters. It kind of seems chaotic, but at the same time linear and organized, which fits nicely with some of the visual metaphors I’ve already identified. It is hard to see in the photo, but there really are a lot of different things going on in the fabric, and I think that can be a physical representation of essentially any electronica.

Monday, September 7, 2015

Thinking and Writing - The Last of Us

An often overlooked form of media from a critical perspective is, in my opinion, video games. Video games have become a medium of heavy themes, conscientious stories, and relevant events. Naughty Dog studios’ The Last of Us in one such thought-provoking, incredibly personal game. The ending and preceding events have been the source of controversy and several different viewpoints on what it is saying about humanity being inherently selfish versus selfless. I, however, have a more expansive view on it; I believe that the ending of The Last of Us is the perfect example of how humans can be both selfish and selfless simultaneously in the moment, and then struggle to cope with such snap judgements.

Throughout the game, the player sees through the eyes of Joel, a 40-something, grizzled survivor of a “zombie apocalypse” where a real-life brain eating fungus that causes ants to behave erratically and violently, cordyceps, makes the leap to humankind, causing the catastrophic downfall of civilization. Amidst the initial outbreak, his young daughter is shot and killed by a soldier ordered to purge the quarantine area, which forms his stoic, introverted personality. Several years later, he is given the mission to escort Ellie, a girl about the age his daughter would have been, across the country to a hospital in Salt Lake City, where her immunity to the disease will be cultivated to formulate a cure. As their journey progresses, Joel opens up to her more and more, eventually coming to think of her as his second chance at raising a daughter. This budding, beautiful relationship in a harsh and bleak world is the centerpiece to the game’s ending statement on humanity.

We live in a world of selfishness and instant gratification. This comes from evolutionarily obtained needs for tribalism or community. We are essentially pack animals, which is, in its simplest form, the driving force behind our love for family and friends. But still, the needs of the individual always seem to outweigh the needs of others, a situation magnified by our current culture and continually distant methods of cultivating relationships. How many people would be comfortable with the Hollywood-trope situation of being forced to choose between your spouse or child’s life, and the lives of dozens of complete strangers? Would you? That could spurn a lengthy ethical and moral argument, and it is hard to say who is right. What is easy to say is “when a tough decision like that comes around, I will make the right choice, no matter how much it hurts.” Unfortunately for Joel, this decision most certainly comes around, maybe even to purposefully push us to dwell on this cultural problem.

When the end of the game rolls around, Joel is leaving the hospital that Ellie is staying in when he is told that they will need to harvest her stem cells and brain tissue in order to correctly synthesize a cure for the plague. He tries to return, but many armed men are patrolling the hospital and he is told that despite the terrible pain he is feeling, he needs to let her go and be selfless. Remembering his murdered daughter, he quickly runs into the hospital, beating, shooting, stabbing, and killing dozens of innocent men working to save the world, working his way to the operating suite. When he finally arrives, he bursts through the doors, gun in hand, watching Ellie lie sedated on the table with several surgeons around her. One of them, a woman, begs him not to hurt them, and says that they are trying to save the human race. In this moment of “the needs of the many [versus] the needs of the few” (to quote Spock), Joel makes the snap judgment that no one in our culture wants to have to make. He shoots the woman in the head, then murders all of the other surgeons, escaping with Ellie’s limp body.

Was this the right decision to make? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. In fact, I’m not even sure Joel thinks so, but it was the decision he made and he quickly learns to cope with it, painfully. This is where my philosophy diverges from the typical “humans are selfish” or “humans are selfless” arguments. I think that when he made the decision to kill those surgeons and escape with Ellie, he was being inherently selfish, because his desire to raise a daughter and do right by her after his own had died outweighed his desire to let the doctors create a cure. But, afterward, I believe he was being inherently selfless, as his guilt consumes him throughout his escaping car ride, and hearing Ellie talk about how much she hoped they could find a cure still, with it becoming very obvious that he regrets what he has done. Ellie has her suspicions and, confronting Joel about his made-up account of what happened at the hospital, tells him to swear to her that what he said is true, that there was never a cure.

After a moment of staring into her eyes, clearly pained, he replies “I swear.” The opposing argument to mine says that in this moment, he had made his decision, and was acting out the human nature to be selfish. But I think that it is a combination of his selfish love for Ellie and desire for a daughter, and his selfless regret of his actions and inner knowledge that mankind deserved that cure. This is a great example of how we can be both selfish and selfless at once, and, regardless of which guides our actions, we have to cope with our decisions and their motivations.

What is most heartbreaking about this story is that it is implied that Ellie understands he is lying, and doesn’t understand his motives or inner turmoil. The feeling in the pit of our stomach over how close-to-home this strikes surely matches that of Joel and Ellie, as the game closes with her final acceptance:

“Okay.”