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.