Textual Poaching

One aspect of my identity that I wanted to explore was my “blue collar” working identity.  You may be wondering, “But you’re a college student! You don’t have a blue collar job!” In addition to attending school full-time, I also have a full-time job working at a radar company to produce their marketing videos. This is out of necessity, as I have a mortgage, and it isn’t going to pay itself! Thus, I need to work in order to avoid losing my house. This is why I feel that I identify with the blue collar workers in the photo that I chose to remix.

The photo that I chose to remix is the famous 1932 photograph commonly called, “Lunch atop a Skyscraper.”  The photographer is unknown, but it was taken on September 20, 1932 on the 69^th floor of the RCA building, and it shows eleven men eating lunch, seated on a girder with their feet dangling 840 feet above the New York City streets. The men in the photo aren’t wearing any safety harnesses, which is possibly due to the time when this happened. 1932 was at the height of the Great Depression, and men would commonly take any job they could in order to feed their family, regardless of safety issues. I noticed that the man on the far right of the frame is looking at the camera with a unique expression on his face, and so I chose to do the manipulation on him. The manipulation that I made to the image is that I added a safety harness and safety rope to this man, but none of the others, and then I added the OSHA logo to the photo. OSHA stands for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and it was formed in 1971 to, “assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women by setting and enforcing standards and by providing training, outreach, education and assistance."  If OSHA was around in the 1930s, then this would NEVER have happened. They are very strict about safety regulations, and sometimes inconvenience people in order to keep them safe.

I feel that I am a safe person in general; at least I try to be. When I was younger, I was that kid who didn’t want to try the back-flip on the trampoline, because I thought it’d break my neck or something, so by me adding the safety harness and rope and the OSHA logo, I feel that I’ve connected the image back to myself. I don’t go over-the-top when trying to be safety-conscious, but I don’t want myself or others to get hurt doing something, either.

In the article “How Texts Become Real,” the author states that, “…such intense interaction eventually leads many fans toward the creation of new texts, the writing of original stories.” In 2012, director Seán Ó Cualáin directed a documentary film entitled, “Men at Lunch,” that tried to identify the men that were in the famous 1932 photograph. In doing research about the film, I came across the quote, “In the era when the Empire State Building & Rockefeller Center were built, developers factored in one dead worker for every twelve floors.” This is a horrendous fact, and further points at the fact that working conditions in the 1930s were extremely dangerous. Hence, the safety harness and OSHA logo in my remix.

Webspinna Battle

Webspinna Artist Statement

One of the things that we were striving to show in our Webspinna Battle was the disconnect between the baby-boomer generation, and the millennial generation. We have found that there are many things which these two groups don’t particularly agree upon (such as technology proficiency, embracing new things, etc…), and we chose to emphasize the differences in  music during our Webspinna battle. Steven represented the millennial group by listening to 1990s Pop Hits such as Brittany Spears’ Hit me Baby and N’Sync, among others. Parker represented the baby-boomer generation by at first criticizing the millennial music, and then coming  back with his own music. This music battle went back and forth until the millennial realized that there indeed was something cool about the older music, at which time he switched over to a 1970s hit song, September, by Earth, Wind and Fire. The baby-boomer then threw the millennial a drink, which they then use to toast, having reconciled their differences, and the battle was over.

This experience is not that far from being true. One day I (Steven) was doing homework in my bedroom, and listening to music, which happened to be Earth, Wind and Fire. My dad walked by and poked his head into the room and asked, “What are you listening to?” I replied, “Earth, Wind and Fire. They’re cool.” My dad, surprised, said, “You do know that this is the music from my generation, right? These guys were popular when I was in high school.” I replied, “Yeah, and I think it’s cool.” My dad just laughed and left the room.

During our Webspinna Battle, we created something that had never been created before. The combination of music and audio that we pulled from the web was used in a specific way that had never been done before. Jonathan Lethem, in his article “The Ecstasy of Influence,” states that, “Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked... Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.” The open-sourced culture that he speaks of is very available with the internet, where anyone can grab anything and create something totally unique. This is constantly happening today, and a good example of this is the website “Everything is a Remix.” This website, curated by Kirby Ferguson, is the host to a web series that explains how everything we view, read, and take in is a remix of something else that has already happened. We reuse the things that we know work, and make them into better things, and into “worse” things.

Group:
Steven Bills Parker Davis

What follows is a list of possible songs I will use for the Webspinna battle.

Start at :00:00:59: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-u5WLJ9Yk4#t=57

Start at 00:00:32:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ugkg9RePc#t=32

Start at the beginning.

Start at 00:01:06:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Eo-KmOd3i7s#t=66

Begin at 00:01:51:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6M6samPEMpM#t=159

And, to be played last:

Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQf9dtrc26A#t=156

Glitch Art

Medium Specificity - Filaments

Artist Statement

The medium that I chose for this assignment/experiment was photography. Photography has been around for over a hundred years, and I set out to capture the essence of what photography was. In order to begin, I had to boil down to the brass-tacks what made photography photography, and the answer that I came up with was light. Light is the most basic element of photography, for without it, the camera (and by extension, us) would not see anything. There would be nothing to sculpt, nothing to expose, and nothing to admire about a photograph.

In terms of the function of taking a photograph, one of the things that sets photography apart is that when you take a photo, it freezes a specific moment in time, never to be repeated again, but captured in the form of a photograph.

In the “Understanding Comics” article written by Scott McCloud, he walks the reader through what makes a comic a comic. He uses the phrase “sequential art,” meaning that when taken as part of a sequence, the art of the image is “transformed into something more…” With photography, there can likewise be a sequence of images generated, with each image capturing a specific moment in time.

Wynn Bullock, one of the masters of early 20^th century photography, explored light using photographs. Among his famous “ColorLight Abstractions,” we can clearly see an experimentation process that shows the essence of what photography is and can do. Of his abstract photographs, Bullock has said, “I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism, it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say - This is real, too.”

Bullock discovered a side to life that many people don’t see, and that is the moment in time that gets captured by a photograph. In my experimenting process, I photographed the filament of a light bulb, first with the power off, and then with the power on. I used a 100mm macro lens, and I got as close to the bulb as I could before the camera couldn’t focus anymore. I personally really like the photos of the bulb when it is lit. While we all have seen a lit up light bulb before, I feel that I have captured something that is not seen every day. We usually turn away quickly after looking at a light bulb for a second (if that). What the camera provides is the ability to get in close to the bulb and freeze the moment in time while the power is passing through the filament, thus lighting the bulb.

I feel that I have captured, in a way, the essence of photography, in that without any light, we wouldn’t be able to make any photographs at all.

Historical Story

Artist Statement

Our Historical Story takes place during the 1914 Christmas Truce, when the fighting briefly stopped between the English and German soldiers and they celebrated the holiday together.

The main protagonist is Private Frederick Heath. He was an actual English soldier in the trenches during World War I, but he was not a famous person. Not much is known of him other than his name, rank, and that he was a writer of some sort. His letter depicting his experience of the truce was one of our sources. We decided to use this letter as a frame for our story and flash-back to the truce. During the flashback, the English and German soldiers play a friendly game of poker while getting to know more about each other. The story ends with each side having gained a new respect for the other, even as they resume shooting. While staying true to the 6-page limit, we feel that there is a good balance between the descriptions of the action, the character dialog, and the other action.

The story and setting are historically accurate, as far we we know and researched. The soldiers actually traded many things with each other, including buttons, photos, letters, patches, etc… We only had the space to include pudding and a photo at the end of the story. We don’t have any specific research that soldiers played poker during the truce, but setting the story with poker (presumably something they all knew) as the background made it a less-threatening environment in which they could interact and enjoy themselves, a foil to the backdrop of war.

The change in Private Heath within the story is subtle, but it’s there. In one sense, when the story begins, Heath has already undergone the change, as is later revealed in his letter home to his parents. In his real letter home, he wonders if they could have stopped the war had they been given enough pudding to share. He goes from fighting the Germans, to wondering if they could have been friends under different circumstances. We decided to juxtapose those sympathetic thoughts with the orders from his senior officer to charge that the enemy, who just hours before, were their friends.

Another depiction of this event is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s 2003 Christmas Concert, “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Narrated by Walter Cronkite, it tells of the truce with words and music. The finale of the segment is an all-male rendition of “Silent Night.” At the beginning, two men are singing a capella: one in English and the other in German. It’s a beautiful blending of two languages that symbolizes the blending of cultures, and we wanted that communion to come through in our story. We also wanted to communicate the bittersweet irony of a moment of peace surrounded on both sides by war, the way that Persepolis juxtaposes childish innocence with adult fears and politics. As Private Heath and others have reflected, the Christmas Truce had the idealistic potential to become a true peace, but the reality was war and the magic of Christmas ultimately came to an end.  

Historical Sources:

Brown, Malcolm and Shirley Seaton. Christmas Truce. London: Pan Books, 2001. Print.
The Christmas Truce: Operation Plum Puddings. www.christmastruce.co.uk. Web. 9 Apr. 2012.

Group Members:

Steven Bills

Sarah Foley