Truth is in the Fire (side chat)

In his NPR article ThereIs Such a Thing as Truth, Errol Morris asks what truth is.  There are some things that are facts.  One of them, from Morris’ article is that Reno, Nevada is further west than Los Angeles, California.  He continues explaining how truth is not relative of subjective.  He says, “There is such a thing as truth, but we often have a vested interest in ignoring or outright denying it.”

I’ve often felt that while there is absolute truth, often the details and nuance get lost or skewed and truth becomes confused. This became a topic I started following a long time ago, but during an environmental biology class I took last year, I learned that the real truth is much more difficult to reach.  There are many documentaries made about the environment, and it seemed that arguments on both sides benefitted greatly by not looking at the whole picture when it comes to climate change and global warming. I came to the conclusion that climate change is a real problem enhanced, if not created by man, but the very best way to save the environment is to go back to the stone age and live in caves while the majority of society dies off.  So what did it take for me to reach that conclusion?  Spending a semester studying it under the guidance of a professor. 

But then over this past election cycle, I began seeing how some of my friends on facebook and social media became absolute experts on the candidates and all of the hot-button topics from the environment to terrorism to immigration and beyond.  They would cite sources that to me didn’t seemed frankly shady.  So I began a quest to try to find truth in that mad house, and came to another conclusion – to get to the actual bottom of the story, I would have to dig, dig, dig, and dig. I would perhaps have to fly to D.C. and interview the candidates themselves along with family and friends.  I would have to become the expert, and it would be my full time job from here on out.  I don’t have that kind of time or those resources.

 

When it came time to share what I believe in for our fireside chat, I immediately gravitated to this subject.  I started out by combing through facebook looking for posts that seemed off to me, and trying to dig deeper, not to find an answer, but to see both sides of the argument.  What surprised me the most was that by taking this approach, I actually found that both sides had interesting arguments, some that seemed valid, and some that seemed not quite so valid.  I then tried digging deeper finding facts supporting what those arguments were based on.  Again, I found other posts.  As it turned out, we have arguments built on what some call “facts” which are built on posts about facts which lead straight down the rabbit hole.  Interestingly enough, I even found people trying to make legitimate arguments based on memes, as though someone thought, “it’s legitimate because I see a picture next to words in quotes”.  My head was spinning.

I found a couple of examples where fact and fiction crossed lines – one from a current event, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and one from the past about Khrushchev and Kennedy, and a mysterious picture of the two and what it means.  But to make a point about the absurdity of where some people turn for information, I made a meme of myself, and closed the presentation by saying that my meme proved everything that I said in my presentation was fact.  Basically my point was that truth does exist, but it’s not always in our face.  We have to work for it and earn it.  And that I feel as creators of art, media, and stories that we have an obligation that when we are dealing with things of a factual nature, to work a little harder for the truth.  I just hope that with all the false information, real truth doesn’t become some mythological creature. 

Sleep Sweetly Sleep Softly

Our concerned citizen project followed Grant’s niece, Kelsey Hamstead, and her efforts to help inmates maintain relationships with their children. Kelsey is involved with a program that allows mothers in Utah State Prison to record themselves reading bedtime stories for their children. These recordings are then sent to their children for them to listen to. We documented her story as an audio recording featuring audio from Kelsey herself, inserts from actual recordings of some of the inmates Kelsey works with reading to their children, and soundbites found on the internet. Our documentary, “Sleep Sweetly, Sleep Softly,” shows an individual trying to preserve valuable family relationships.
Having a parent in prison can have a tremendous impact on a child. The most immediate effect is that the child is separated from his or her parent for an extended period of time. Kelsey’s involvement helps to shorten that gap by still allowing the parent to participate in an elemental parent-child ritual such as reading bedtime stories. Nurturing the relationship these mothers have with their children reduces the chance that their children will also find themselves in jail in adulthood. Kelsey’s contribution literally keeps families together and keep children out of prison.
One item that caught our attention how Kelsey described her interactions with the inmates as very affable and warm. We thought it was interesting that someone would feel at home inside a prison center. We thought breaking stereotypes in this way, like how the beehive stories video specified the sheepherder was educated in college, was instrumental in giving life to our audio piece. Conveying this specific concept was a central goal in putting together our audio piece. One way we went about that was embedding clips from the recordings of the mothers reading to their children throughout the audio piece. Bookending the documentary with bedtime stories carried the pathos we were after and mimicked the pattern of a bedtime story, such as the book read in the audio piece, “I’ll Love You Forever.” 

                We would hope that people who listen to “Sleep Sweetly, Sleep Softly,” and consider how warmth and familiarity can be found even in a setting such as a prison. With that, we’d hope listeners would be more understanding toward these individuals and the needs they have. In our initial interview with Kelsey, she admitted that it wasn’t always easy to reserve the time to participate in this program, but helping these individuals stay connected with their loved ones was, and continues to be for her, a labor worth pursuing.

Follow the...Twine?

Twine Game For Change

When I was a kid, I didn’t like reading much.  I played outdoors, watched tv, and made messes.  But when one of my friends showed me their “choose your own adventure” books, I was intrigued.  You would read a little, then be given two choices like, “go up the stairs” or “open the closet door”.  Depending on what option you chose, you would turn to a certain page and continue reading until you got to the next choice.  I call that interactive 1.0.  Now jump ahead many years, and today we have a free app called Twine.  In it, users can create their own stories and give the reader choices as to what they want to do next.  But what if that game was used to create awareness of a particular issue society doesn’t quite understand clearly?

The movie Damnation about dams built along the Columbia River and its tributaries addresses an issue of the impact that has on kayakers, fish, wildlife and ecosystems.  But it also failed to address other erosional and geological issues that I felt would contribute more to their argument.  I then took the question further, if not hydro power, then what?  There are the standard energy sources we use such as coal, natural gas, nuclear power, wind, solar, and a few others.  

I wanted to see how each contributed to energy and how each affected the environment and found a couple articles from the EPA and the US Energy Information Administration.  That was a good start because it gave me a baseline of statistics to draw from.  But I still needed more information and turned to my Environmental Science book I used in my Environmental Biology class.  That and referring to a few notes helped me remember a few things – basically that what I learned was that the truth is a bit more complex than that.  Movies like An Inconvenient Truth and many other tend to skew the real picture.  People watch a documentary and instantly become an expert on the subject.  Arguments abound, and people divide. 

Issues such as opening up ANWR and the Keystone Pipeline seem to light firestorms on social media.  Everyone has an opinion.  But getting back to my experience in my environmental biology class, I learned that the only true way we can protect the environment completely is for mankind to return to the stone age.  While greenhouse gasses are a naturally occurring thing, and in nature the carbon cycle takes care of it, we humans are pumping more carbon dioxide and other gasses into the atmosphere at a level greater than what the carbon cycle can handle.  This exacerbates the greenhouse effect.  Some feel that it’s not real, while others feel we need to cut all use of fossil fuels immediately.  This is the genesis of my game.

I want those that play this game to come to learn something that maybe they hadn’t thought of before, and perhaps to consider ideas that would make us less polarized.  I hope to show people that there isn’t a simple solution to this problem.  Both sides of the argument are right, and both are wrong.  Do you want to know what the answer is?  Then play the game!

It's Been A Sweet Alien Ride

Alien cultures, civilization, and what they would do to us if they ever invaded has dominated the world of science fiction. Films like The Day The Earth Stood Still, Mars Attacks, Independance Day, and even children’s films like Chicken Little all tell stories of what that scenario might look like. So we, Matthew Taggart and Grant Gomm, asked the question, “what would the world look like today if in 1947, aliens really did land in Roswell, New Mexico?” Our world building was off to a start.

The goal? Design items that reflected this alternate version of our world. In Julian Bleecker’s article, Design Fiction, in talking about the design of an object, Bleecker says, “They are things around which discussions happen, even with only one other person, and that helps us to imagine other kinds of worlds and experiences.” That is our goal with this project - to generate conversations about our works in this fictitious world. We chose to express this through images that in our own actual history tend to generate conversations, such as famous photos, billboards, and maps.

When we began discussing what this world would look like, ideas flowed one after another. We asked questions like, “would the aliens be friendly or aggressive?” and, “what would the governments look like if a superior alien race invaded our world? Would mankind stop fighting amongst ourselves and unite against a common enemy?” We both lept feet first down this rabbit hole and came up with an interesting alternate storyline for this world.

We imagined that further contact with aliens continued to happen, and that the original aliens who crashed near Roswell were in fact refugees from attacking superior aliens. Our planet took them in, but eventually the earth was attacked. Governments broke down as we know them, and for the most part united together against the aggressive aliens. The world divided up into varying federations united against the invaders. However, we also imagined that there would be those who would side with the malevolent aliens in an attempt to gain power from them.

As we continued developing our world, and our story was unfolding, we took a step similar to what Bleecker describes further in his article, “Might it be a kind of half-way between fact and fiction?” It seemed our world certainly was becoming this way. We grappled with the current presidential election, and thought what if our candidates today were not running for president of the United States of America, but had different political aspirations in our world?  What if Hillary Clinton was the human liaison with the aliens? What if Donald Trump was a man trying to usurp power among the federations? What if he was really planted there by the aliens as a strategy to overtake the world? In a strange way it felt that even in a fantastic world like the one we created, there would still be some striking parallels with the real world.

Our ideas grew, and before we knew it, our world was fleshing itself out. But what of the objects we were to create? We made several images using Adobe Photoshop and hand drawing, depicting various parts of our story. Each image has it’s own intrinsic message. It is our hope that discussion will happen around our images as Julian Bleecker has suggested should happen.

It's a sonic blast! (But you can't drink it!)

A new favorite artist of mine is Pogo.  This guy takes cartoons and remixes the audio, making songs that find a happy little corner in my mind to play their trickster style sounds that even I can appreciate - and that’s saying something coming from a guy who doesn’t have a musical bone in his body.  But one of the things I find most interesting about this artist is how the sounds already existed.  He’s just remixing them to make something unique and new.  Being able to mix sound to me is like watching a magician perform.  I have no idea how it's done, but I am mesmerized with each beat.

So when our class had to dress up in costumes and sonically battle it out in front of an audience, I was terrified. In the book “Arts Education and Literacies” is a chapter on performing.  In it, twelfth grade Media Arts teacher, Mr. Amerika, and his school’s principal, Miss Bliss, got dressed in costumes, and had what they dubbed a Webspinna battle.  Instead of throwing sticks or chineese stars at each other, they would play live sounds in a sonic fist fight.  This is exactly what our assignment was.  Pick a theme, remix some sounds, perform! (or so I thought)

Most groups in our class were made up of two people who would pick opposing sides of a theme – Mac vs. PC, Hook vs. Peter Pan.  I came in to the class late this semester, making up for missing classes from my accident last winter.  So I was the odd man out, and our group was made up of three.  There was Luis, Stephanie, and myself.  Our theme was nature, beast, and man with Luis being beast, Stephanie being Nature, and myself perhaps going a bit overboard as a sort of war god like the character Ronan, from the film Guardians of the Galaxy.

Our plan was simple enough.  It was to start out with sounds of nature, followed by Beast grazing on the grasslands, followed by Man hunting and killing beast.  Our performance was to escalate further and further.  Man kills beast, nature strikes back with natural disasters, beast eats man, man chops down forest in the name of progress and expansion.  Cities are built, and beast releases Godzilla to wipe man out.  Man and beast go at it when nature has had enough and sends forth a meteor destroying the world.  This story was to be told with live sounds streaming from the internet at the appropriate time.  We each had our own google doc with links to the sounds we found online, and were supposed to play them at the right time.  That was the plan.

What actually happened was a cacophony of sounds that I assume would have been difficult for the audience to make any sense of.  I found an online repository of sound effects, that I think would have been better suited for downloading and mixing into an effects track of a movie.  I don’t feel that it played as well as I had hoped.  That being said, I’m lucky to have been in a group with two very creative and talented people who in my opinion saved our performance.  

Regardless of how I felt about the execution of the Webspinna battle, I had a great time.  I’m not a performer, but found myself having to stretch out of my comfort zone and explore mediums of creativity I would not have dared to otherwise.  It was great to see how others did their battles, and overall I loved it.  Can’t believe I said that!  Be sure to watch the video of our performance.  It was a blast, sonically speaking of course. 

Closer To The Limit

Click here to view the video
I know people who play musical instruments and call themselves musicians.  I know others who raise cattle on a ranch, ride horses, and they call themselves cowboys. When I was a kid, I used to love to surf.  I said I was a surfer.  But I don’t think I’ve identified with a group for many years.  Some would argue that my religion is a group that defines me, but I disagree as my religion is a guide to how I can live my life. 

However, I’ve decided to create this work as I’ve found that something that I love doing, which is riding a motorcycle does have certain societal stigmas attached.  Just like DJ Spooky’s mix of the Beetle’s White Album and J-Z’s Black album, I created a video taking parts of the old and mixing it with the modern to get inside my head, and express my inner negations and feelings about riding a motorcycle. 

No Limit is a 1935 film starring George Formby who plays the role of “George Shutterworth.”  George is a young man living in England, who has built his own motorcycle and decides to race in the real life street race on the Isle of Man know as the Isle of Man TT.  I have taken this movie and edited it along with footage from other sources, some including more modern footage of the Isle of Man TT.  The music and edits are designed to express my thoughts and feelings about motorcycle riding, as well as what other seem to think. 

My piece starts out with the thought, “Hey, I can do this.”   Light hearted music, a piece by George Formby himself made for the movie begins playing.  Even though in George’s world, he’s considering a race, this reflects my innocent, perhaps naïve outlook on riding.  I’ll be the greatest rider ever.  Then reality kicks in about the time the child goes down on his bike.  Nothing serious, but a bruised ego and a wakeup call as when I fell cracking a rib. 

The music changes to a harder, intense sound.  As I ride, I realize things can happen in an instant, and I need to be on my guard.  As the lyrics say, “I’m breaking in, shaping up.”  Family, friends, and youtube all say motorcycles are dangerous.  What follows is a visual of the imagery in my head as I think about riding.  Crash after crash.  But I keep going.  George finally goes over the cliff in No Limit, and decides he wants no more of it.  Similarly I crashed breaking bones in my shoulder and ending up with a plate and eight screws.

 I modified the reasons why George decides to no longer ride – he doesn’t have a bike.  That was my situation for a while as the insurance company totaled my bike and was going to junk it.  In a twist of fate, I ended up with my bike, repaired and ready to ride.  However at this point, I diverge from my edit.  I wanted to show another angle, that I feel is unfairly portrayed in the media.  That is that people who ride motorcycles are thugs and violent.  Yes, there are thugs who ride motorcycles, but just because someone is on a motorcycle that doesn’t mean they are a thug in my opinion.  And again, unlike my piece where George ends up winning the TT, my ride is not over, and I don’t know where it will take me.  I just hope wherever that is, I get there safely.