Round Robin

A Brief History of the Foot:

He knew his shin splints were no good.

Behind bars, he pumped iron and learned to run on his hands.

Becoming extremely advanced, the feet with faces rid their bodies and ruled over them. 

The feet's power was unmatched.

The End.

-x-

In the early 1920’s, a new surge of art overcame the aesthetic world. In a hodgepodge of dreamlike, nonsensical images, surrealism was born. The point of surrealist art was to challenge convention-- it represented an uncomfortable deviance from reality. As this art form developed, a parlor game developed along with it. Sitting in their vintage suits, surrealist artists drew a bit of a picture, hid all but the very bottom, and passed it on to another artist to continue. The result was usually grotesque, and always fascinating. An Exquisite Corpse-- a mixture of different artists’ ideas and images that couldn’t quite fit together in a homogeneous form. In an attempt to recreate our own form of this surrealist experiment, we passed snapshots of stories through our round robin of creativity. The resulting stories were just as fascinating as the results of the 1920’s parlor game.

Very early on in the process, we had to surrender our stories. We watched our initial snapshot twist into a jumbled mess of other people’s creative flows. After we got over the initial shock of losing control, however, the process became something beautiful. We “...enjoyed the mesmerising flow of fragments” (Paul D. Miller, “Totems Without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse”). The beauty of our combined creative flows helped us create our hodgepodge of nonsense. That hodgepodge, however, was the point of this whole exercise. When our stories made the least amount of sense, doors of creativity opened in our minds. Suddenly making sense didn’t matter. Fitting a mold didn’t matter. Our “flow of fragments” turned into a pure example of our own freed thought processes and creativity.

Our project process represents something beyond stories-- it represents the world’s creative process on a microscopic scale. Everybody works so differently, sees so differently, processes so differently, that every bit of art is subject to billions of unique perspectives. Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí worked together on the 1929 film “Un Chien Adalou”, resulting in a nonsensical representation of their dreams in art form. They didn’t come up with anything new, they just came up with their own interpretation of the information they had. We may never create anything completely original, but we create things that are uniquely our own. Nobody will be able to copy the intrinsic meaning we assign to our own art, just as we will never understand exactly what somebody else’s art means. All of the art in this world comes from this individual synthesis of our surroundings.

The tenuous strings of narratives we created illustrate the simple, beautiful fact of our diversity. We work so differently, see so differently, process so differently… Isn’t it amazing how individual our worlds are? How we are able to come up with such a unique synthesis of our surroundings? Our stories are barely interconnected, overflowing with our ideas and interpretations and information. We may not have made sense in our exquisite corpse storyboards, but we did make something-- and that, ultimately, is what matters.

This project was a collaboration between:

Pepe Callejas

Brandon Carraway

Zach Connell

Madison Ellis

Grant Gomm

Claude Debussy's "Voiles" in Crayon

Claude Debussy's "Voiles" 

Musical Mosaic

By Madison Ellis

         

        My “Voiles” music mosaic consists of melted crayons on canvas, photographed at different points in its creation. Originally, I knew what I wanted my piece to look like. I was going for something like k. Madison Moore’s “Crystal Cave” abstractionism. I had colors set out, a visual in mind, a planned narrative to follow. My structured, pre-determined music mosaic melted away, however, as I turned on “Voiles” and picked up my blow dryer. For several moments, I shared my world with the song. I opened my eyes, moved my hands, and let it speak through my canvas. In the words of Annie Dillard, “…my own shutter [opened], and the moment’s light {printed] on my own silver gut,” (Dillard). Organically born, my work reflects the raw, wordless nature of Debussy’s piece by capturing the music in its own colorful dialogue.
        The song starts off with trickling scales and deep, rhythmic beats that are reflected by hot drops of grey and blue wax. As the song progresses, becomes more and more complex, the crayon drips more intensely—it blurs into itself in great circles, mimicking the continuous throb of the bass line. In the corner, a wave of green blooms. Bright splotches mimic Debussy’s explosions of high dissonances. The music swells in intensity as the colors become brighter, more intense, more alluring. In the crest of musical and visual climax, blooming runs are reflected in an overtaking arch of yellow that masks the cool darkness of the song’s beginnings.
        The song winds back into its chilly mystery. Once again, the throbbing beat returns, the major cords fade out. Black drips across the visual. The wax, melting darkly into itself, rests in the same deep mystery as Debussy’s “Voiles”.
        The organic movement of the wax follows Debussy’s piece, and the interspersed cool and warm colors reflect the overall feeling of the song. Working through the song left me with a single piece of canvas covered in its brownish slur of wax remnants. Both the song and the art piece grey after the process of manifestation. The song’s echoes fades. The wax’s color blurs. The beauty of the work disappears just as surely as the song ends.
        Debussy’s “Voiles” had its own structure, its own narrative, and its own color palate in mind. Before I even listened to it, “Voiles” knew exactly what it wanted to be. Debussy planned it that way. We interpret it that way. The music’s flow created its own art, and all I did was sit in the moment long enough to capture it.

Welcome To Night Vale-- Thinking and Writing

WTNV's Mainstream Representation of Homosexuality

            In June 2013, the darkly comedic podcast “Welcome to Night Vale” had lurked in ITunes’ peripheries for almost a year. Without much warning, however, this satire radio show exploded all over the public eye. The previous year’s number of downloads doubled over the course of a single week; the podcast soon became the #1 downloaded podcast on ITunes, ahead of “This American Life” and “Freakonomics Radio” (Carlson). Considering Jeffrey Fink and Joseph Cranor’s beautiful writing—and the fact that the podcast is completely free—it’s no surprise that “Welcome to Night Vale” (WTNV, for short) has evolved into a monster franchise with international tours, merchandise shops, a newly published book, and a recent appearance by the writers on the Stephen Colbert show.  Within weeks, WTNV launched out of obscurity and landed itself in the middle of popular culture. The most remarkable aspect of WTNV’s rise to fame is not its astonishing speed, however; it is the fact that WTNV successfully broke into mainstream media while featuring a main character in a blatantly homosexual relationship.

            Unlike other queer relationships in media, Cecil and Carlos’s central love does not destine WTNV to an exclusively LGBTQ genre grouping with “Brokeback Mountain”; nor does the relationship typify the stereotypical, overly-effeminate “gay personalities” in media like “Modern Family” and “The Simpsons”.  Over the course of twenty-five episodes, Community Radio Host Cecil Palmer and Carlos the (Perfect) Scientist fall into a spontaneous love even the writers didn’t plan for. “We know these characters very well, “ Fink states, “…and… we just made the choices that seemed most honest” (Carlson).

            This organic relationship is built on a foundation of non-stereotypical character development that even heterosexual relationships have difficulty achieving. Media often portrays women as weak and needy, or overly independent, while the men use and abuse their masculine powers to get what they want out of relationships. Too often, the humanness of portrayed relationships gets lost under the shroud of stereotypical boy/girl dynamics. By removing the preconceived ideals of heterosexual relationships, Cecil and Carlos become a pure, timeless example of budding love. Their homosexuality effectively strips them of gender roles, and they better reflect real, human relationships.  The clarity of Cecil and Carlos’s relationship endears them to a public who—no matter their sexual orientation—can relate with their love.

            WTNV manages to take an incredibly unconventional love story and normalize it in the eyes (or rather, ears) of their audience. Cecil describes a world where a giant glowing cloud occasionally takes over the city, where mountains are a myth, where vague yet menacing government agencies constantly monitor people’s lives, and where Radio Intern jobs have the highest occupational mortality rate. Carlos and Cecil’s relationship, as put by voice actor Cecil Baldwin, “…is the least weird part of the storyline” (Carlson).  Night Vale’s incredible oddities are directly contrasted by the easy domesticity of Cecil and Carlos. The couple takes classic relationship steps—first kiss, first date, buying a condo (almost), becoming disillusioned with each other, having their first fight, etc. Cecil and Carlos aren’t terrorized by hate crimes, they don’t have “coming out” scenes, and they don’t experience any negative feedback from their community. Fink and Cranor make Cecil and Carlos’s relationship as normal as they possibly can—they don’t preach the acceptability of homosexuality, simply because their characters live in a world where homosexuality was never unacceptable. As Erin Hill of TechGeek wrote, “Many of the things that Cecil reports goes against our idea of normal, but [everything] is presented in a manner that makes it seem mundane” (Carlson). The writers seamlessly connect a controversial issue into their show and by doing so make it noncontroversial. Cecil and Carlos have a normalized homosexual relationship, and the audience accepts it without question.

            The acceptance of WTNV’s normalized homosexual relationship is also due largely to a fairly liberal, politically opinionated, fandom-obsessed social blogging platform called Tumblr. Notably sarcastic and satirical, WTNV interlaced perfectly with the darkly witty website. Already notorious for “shipping” (or wanting relationships between) gay couples, Tumblr users latched on to the canonic union between Cecil and Carlos and promoted WTNV all over the Internet. Thousands of pro-gay activists found and shared WTNV through their blogging platforms as an example of how media should represent homosexual relationships. Additionally, WTNV vaulted into popularity one month after the 2013 Supreme Court ruling against DOMA, again legalizing same-sex marriage in California. Reveling in the glory of their political victory and as thirsty for new media as ever, Tumblr bloggers latched onto WTNV and pulled it into the mainstream.

            The well-written and entertaining podcast certainly earned its place in the spotlight. WTNV is just strange enough to be interesting, and just mundane enough to be normal—much like the relationship between Cecil and Carlos. WTNV managed to attach itself to a society of quickly changing norms and ideals, effectively becoming the first normalized representation of homosexuality in mainstream history. 

Works Cited

Carlson, Adam. "America's Most Popular Podcast: What The Internet Did To "Welcome to Night Vale" The AWL, 24 July 2013. Web. 11 Jan. 2016.