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.

Exquisitely Round, Robin Corpse (Pop!)

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. 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. 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.

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.

Clever Buster Series

#1 Buster was young, barking, biting, and chewing.  He quickly changed his mind after a zap from the Christmas tree lights.

By Grant Gomm

#2  Buster thought nobody was watching, but a cop was passing by and Buster got busted.

By Pepe Callejas

#3 Buster broke the law so he was thrown into the pound.  He knew he had to escape.

By Brandon Carraway

#4  After sneaking in and taking out the guards, Buster's poker buddies helped him escape prison.

By Zach Connell

#5  After all, he had a debt to pay.

By Madison Ellis

Fusion, Synthesis: Elemental

Blackmill’s Rain and the works of fine art nature photographer Michael Fatali have fused deep in the grey-matter of my mind inspiring a series of photographs that visualize this synthesis.  Blackmill's "melodic dubstep" is rich with sounds and complex layers existing in time, rhythm, and beat.  But Michael Fatali's images are timeless.  They are portraits of nature that capture the uniquely lit deep colors of red-rock landscapes hewn by the hand of nature.  But to understand the genesis of what I see in Rain, you must look deeper at these images, peering into the picture to the point where all that is left is abstract.  If all you see is simply water, snow, ice, or perhaps a frozen waterfall, you’ll miss it. 

Rain is made up of different layers of sound.  Now, I am not educated in music.  I am a visual person so explaining musical structure and form is a challenge.  However, I’ve tried to capture these aural layers in images inspired by Fatali and show you what I cannot verbalize.  By looking at the form alone, and ignoring the obvious - that you see freezing droplets of water, chunks of ice, and piles of snow - what I want to tell you about this song begins to take shape.

In Annie Dillard’s essay, Seeing, she talks about those that were once blind, who had their vision restored.  Upon removal of their bandages, some saw shapes and colors, not associating them with known objects.  As you look at my images this way, you will see how the droplets are bright staccato notes dancing lightly in the air.  Where you once saw rocks, a cliff, or ground, you will see a solid baseline with decisive percussion forming hard angles for the ice to grip.  You will also see snow and ice-made stalagmites forming flowing sounds of undulating, changing shape. 

The song’s layers contrast and still complement each other as they form one harmonic sound.  This idea of contrast is important in these images.  When you begin to see the lines between the bright and dark, the shape of the music begins to take form.  The depth that is created when the shape is illuminated, the light disappearing into black voids around curves and corners, is what gives us the images we see.  It is this contrast between the bright staccato and soft lulling drones of Rain moving through time that enable each image to speak.

Let’s look for a moment at the natural processes that made this.  Light, hydrogen, oxygen, temperature, and time all come together in just the right order and under just the right conditions to make what we see.  As the water flows, or as it falls in the cold, it solidifies layer upon layer – growing ever higher into a castle where creatures of the imagination rule.  Snow gathers making what looks like a soft white blanket.  But look closer, you can see jagged edges of each flake as it reaches up and out like a thousand hands raised waving goodbye to the clouds that formed them.

Finally, clothed in hues of light, the frozen citadel takes on the blend of notes soft and warm, cold and sharp. Look to the colors in between and feel which sound is calling to you.