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.

Specifically, the Medium

Aperture & Distortion by Grant Gomm

In Ian Rhuter’s video Silver & Light, Ian examines the process of wet-plate photography by converting an old delivery van into one large camera.  By covering a sheet of metal with chemicals, then exposing them through a giant lens, Ian creates beautiful images.  He says,  “The reality of the situation is that at this point it costs me five hundred dollars to take a single photo. When I shot my first wet plate image, and to hold something tangible that’s not a negative, it’s not a print.  And it was  so beautiful in my hands. It’s like I create this with silver and light.”  Converting a van into a camera, and spending $500.00 on each picture is not an efficient way to capture an image.  But there is something more to what he is doing.  His process, as he mentions, is really hands on – it’s “tangible.”  But it’s also not just about the process either.  Perhaps there is something intangible we create within us when we examine the medium itself that we choose to express ourselves and our art.

Scott McCloud’s work, Understanding Comics takes an interesting approach at examining comics by creating a comic about, well, comics. His piece is about defining what a comic is.  He says, “If people failed to understand comics, it was because they defined what comics could be too narrowly!”  He then compares comics to such things as the Bayeux Tapestry, pre-columbian art, and Egyptian hieroglyphics.  What better way to discuss a medium than through the medium itself?

In my piece, I examine photography and digital manipulation through photography and digital manipulation.  Originally I started out with an idea inspired by Andy Warhol’s Eight Elvises, and Ian Rhuter’s wet plate photography, and decided to make an image of a series of cameras each shot at a different aperture, lined up next to each other similar to Warhol’s piece.  An old Nikon 35mm film camera was cast as my subject, according to plan.  I took a series of locked-down pictures from a tripod mounted DSLR of the old Nikon in whole stops from f/2 through f/22 (f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, and f/22).  Those familiar with photography will understand that by also decreasing the shutter speed in whole stops, I was able to maintain equivalent exposure.  Therefore, the only differences between each picture is the depth of field.  But when it came time to manipulate the images in Photoshop, my original idea went out the window.  I wanted to say more about photography than just examine the aperture.  So I decided to make a picture with many ways to look at photography.  

In my finished work above, the cameras are positioned to create a chase scene that is reminiscent of a Star Wars battle of x-wing fighters being chased by ti-fighters.  Each camera image is placed in a layering manner from left to right, and front to back, as well as large to small.  On the right side of the image, the larger cameras represent a larger aperture and more light, more exposure.  The cameras on the left represent a smaller aperture, accounting for their size, and less light, or a darker exposure.  In the analogy of the Star Wars chase scene, they can be recognized as being on the “dark side”.  

Further, the lenses and cameras are distorted. Sometimes we like to say “the camera doesn’t lie,” but the reality is that often the lens of a camera can in fact distort the truth.  And then finally, there’s the chase.  It seems that each photographer is chasing the next, fighting for “the money shot.”

"The Plum Jar" by Grant Gomm and Camden Argyle

Click here to view the script.

Artist Statement

Hollywood has attempted to tell the stories of World War II nearly since the end of the war.  Movies like Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day, and Series like Band of Brothers all tell the stories from the perspective of the soldiers who fought in the war.  

Audie Murphy was the most decorated U.S. soldier during the war, and even starred in the movie To Hell and Back where he played the role of himself, telling his story while he fought in the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division.  In 1945, in what is now famously known as the Colmar Pocket in Eastern France, Murphy held off an entire company of German soldiers by himself for over an hour.  He was awarded the Medal of Honor for this achievement.  

But what about the average citizen that was liberated by the allied armies portrayed in these films?  What is their story?  What was their experience having to endure German occupation for nearly six years?  One moment they are under the control of the Nazi German government, then the bombs fall and bullets fly.  Sometimes the fighting lasted for many days as was the case during the battle of Jebsheim, which was a part of the Colmar Pocket - the same offensive fought in by Audie Murphy. Today, the French Foreign Legion tells the story from their perspective on their official website, http://www.legionetrangere.fr (be sure to click the British flag in the upper right corner for the English version).

But again, what about the citizens?  Do they not have stories to tell?  Not far from Jebsheim, and within a few short minutes from the German border is the village of Durrenentzen.  Lucy Eischer, who had been a long time resident of the village told a story that she experienced shortly after the French and American forces pushed the Germans out.  Lucy’s story is the framework for The Plum Jar.

From the outset, we wanted to preserve historical integrity as much as possible.  Emails were sent reaching out to Lucy through her family in Durrenentzen.  Even still, not all of the details could be filled in, so some things were fictionalized to help the flow of the story.  As we fleshed out the missing parts, we found ourselves devising unique ways to recreate the history, or at least to tell the story as we imagined it.  

One such exchange was when a fictionalized object, a jar of pickles we said was found by the story’s narrator, Lucy, was turned in to a symbol, then becoming a metaphor ultimately underlining the theme of the story.  The idea was that the jar of pickles represent  goodwill, charity, and perhaps even forgiveness that was extended by the villagers to starving, young soldiers on their escape back to Germany.  When one of the soldiers is shot and killed, the jar fell, shattering on the ground, symbolizing that peace was not to be had in spite of best efforts.

As we discussed this metaphor, we felt that pickles were not the right item.  They are tart, sometimes a little bitter.  We decided to fill the jar with something sweet – the local plums known as "quetsches".  Not only did that satisfy the demands of historic plausibility, but we felt the sweetness of candied plums better represented the meaning of the metaphor.  This metaphor then became the title of the script, alluding to the meaning of the The Plum Jar.

Albert Gantz, and his "papers" during the Nazi occupation of Alsace.

Nice, Ice baby!

We are often encouraged to look a little less at the destination and 'enjoy the journey.' But how often do we actually do it? The point of the process piece is to stop for a minute to see beyond simply the product. In this creation, the means carry far more meaning than the end, and in many ways supersede its value. The short film Five, for example, is more concerned with showing the commonality of children preparing for religious initiation rather than the initiations themselves. For our creative work, we wanted to capture the experience of our first time ice climbing. It's always a bit of a sketchy ordeal, and most climbers have sort of “figured it out” with their buddies. Our process of capturing the experience in audio followed on those same lines. We didn't give too much forethought to what our finished product would be—we just went up and tried to figure it out as we went. And we don't think we're alone. The unique creative process for each individual is, in some ways, common. We can appreciate, for example, a child's drawing; for though it may lack understanding, it conveys pure ideas and demonstrates the child's creative process. We can see a similar creativity in the body of Jackson Pollock's artwork. He is described as an action painter, wherein the process of the painting takes precedent over form and function. It's expressionism, not of ideas, but of emotion and movement. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.” —Pollock In documenting our experience with ice climbing, it was interesting to realize that we spent very little time actually climbing ice. The bulk of our time was spent hiking, setting up the equipment, and learning what to do. The enjoyments did not come so much from completing the climb. They came from the camaraderie of being with cool people and enjoying the beauties of the ice fall and inclement weather. We had hoped to include the process of actually recording the event, but due to constrictions we were unable to. Thus the narrative of the piece really evolved on its own. Unlike Pollock, we didn't have the luxury of limitlessness on our side, so it was all we could do to express something coherent. Our process is about learning to ice climb, but the real process that occurred was in putting the composition together. Listen closely and realize that this piece is made up of many layers, agonizingly stitched together to express in two minutes the events of an entire day.