Game for Change

On a thursday last month I attended a TMA forum that was led by BYU Gaming, a track within the Animation department. Throughout the presentation I oo’ed and ah’ed over what students could do, but there was a large noticeable gap indicative of the greater problem in the gaming industry. I brought my concerns to my partner, an avid gamer, and he agreed. “Mainstream industry video games are all about playability. Storylines, social issues, that sort of thing, aren’t given priority, because when it comes down it it it’s all about spectacle.” But when it comes down to it, all video games really are about is agency. You make a path in a narrative through decisions, ultimately resulting in some sort of conclusion. Text-based video games get at the very core and basic nature of games. It makes sense that we use such a format to exhibit a societal issue, because in order for video games to take that leap forward, they need to take a step back. If you strip back the spectacle and focus on the basic elements, maybe we can build up to something great again. So in my simple, text-based video game sustained, I focus on the issues of sustainability, resources, and consumer responsibility by giving the user a set amount of daily limits of water, and they must make it through the day sometimes sacrificing things such as watering their dog or growing food in order to take a shower that day.

I wanted to show how high the stakes are for sustainability in the real world by raising the stakes in the virtual one. You start with 75% of the average use per day per person, and if you make it through that one, you move on to 50%, until you are down to days where you don’t even have electricity and your water and food supply are scarce. I draw a lot of my inspiration from Bird on Fire, a book written by Andrew Ross on what he calls the “world’s least sustainable city,” Phoenix, Arizona. However, having lived in both Phoenix and Provo, Utah, I am equally scared for both. Provo’s air quality, recycling programs, energy suppliers, and food sources are not up to par with a truly sustainable model. If things continue the way they are, sustained will be come a stark reality. I am hoping that living in a virtual world where resources are limited, will urge players to find out more about how they can prevent this from happening. (I even provide links at the end.)

I wanted to keep my facts in line with stats of resource use for the average person in America, so I used websites such as USGS, the US Energy Information Administration, and Duke University’s Center for Sustainability. But I wanted the game to be engaging beyond using information based in reality, I wanted to make aesthetic decisions that would help a block of text become more inviting. So I started with lot’s of choices, but ended up scaling back a lot. I wanted to bring the user face to face with the kind of restrictions that water limitations could face them not too far in the future. The minimalism of text also strips away the coating that society uses to get away with overusing resources.

I’ve often heard people use the religious argument that God made the earth for us, and it is there for us to use as we please. The problem with this argument is that it is a single story, that is dangerous like the ones that Chimamanda Adiche warns against in her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” This argument contradicts other religious teachings within Mormon and Christian doctrine itself, as well as shows a lack of engagement and responsibility with the issues.I hope this game encourages users to come face to face with the realities and stakes with the issue of sustainability, and realize that these easy write-offs that we hear and repeat are dangerous, and the rhetoric needs to change.

http://water.usgs.gov/edu/qa-home-percapita.html

World Building

https://soundcloud.com/enthusiasm-1/demo-along-in-years

Artists' Statement:

Our activities in class prompted us to begin this assignment by creating a little bit of history for our world. Our world was a simple: a world in which elderly people are seen as beautiful in the way that young people in our society are seen today. So why is youth seen as beautiful? Youth is equated with a sharp mind, healthy body, and a sign of more years to come. So in order for old age to be seen similarly, it would have to represent those same things. In this society, old age is equated with having survived something others have not. So in our world, nuclear devastation created defects and illness in the newly born. Young people are sick and afflicted, whereas their elders are healthy. Their age indicates affluence, a long life, and wisdom.

With a backstory in mind, we were able to better imagine what kind of physical artifacts would manifest themselves in such a society. It was hard for us not to focus on things that we see in our own world. The glamorization of youth is often seen in the fashion, beauty, and advertising industries, and the artifacts we created are indicative of this. In a society that values age over youth, these industries which value the outward appearance and pocket change of individuals target the group that is most influential and affluent. They project the type of people that everyone wants to be. So in our magazine and advertisements, we catered to that group by using simple designs, easy to read text, and images of wisdom and old age. It is an aesthetic that is created out of an underlying principle of society, inspired by this week’s viewing of La Jetee, where production design and aesthetic choices matches this pioneering science fiction film, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where fashion is based on caste systems and products such as Soma are born of a deeper cultural implication.

      We strived to make ourselves a part of this world. While, yes, we were only able to create things that  we have seen or experienced, we were able to arrange them in a way that was new and tailored for our new environment. This, in a way really blurred the line between science fiction and science fact. We had to ask ourselves questions that sometimes we never asked before to enter into this new world. Questions such as: »If I was driving down the freeway, what would I see?« »Would they really wear that?«. What makes this even more interesting is that we all have our own vision on what this world would be like to us, which in some ways was challenging but in others gave our artifacts some dimension. Afterall, it would be strange if every magazine in our society is the same, but there is a common thread that illustrates a cultural trend.

       There is still so much room to grow with this project. In our brainstorming of ideas we talked beyond advertisements and fashion, and discussed how this might affect the value of art in general. In a society devastated by nuclear war, would art even exist in the same way? Would magazines still be a practical way of communication? Or even advertisements? Our advertisements reflect a value of homeopathic remedies over perhaps more complex medications. In a simpler world like the one we imagined, perhaps our artifacts would be of mediums that are completely different than that ones we experience in our society. If we were to further explore this project, we would like to completely change the medium conventions reflected here, but with the same emphasis on the affluence, wisdom, and beauty of age.

Webspinna Battle

To represent a theme, a character, an idea, or a setting sonically, is the work of many talented people in the media industry. Whether it’s mixing songs for a radio show, a DJ mixing sounds for a live performance, or a sound mixer creating a soundscape for a film, each delivery of music, spoken word, and sound effect communicates an idea, sometimes so iconically that image provokes an accompanying sound. In our piece, “The American Dream Webspinna Battle,” we explore the iconic places of America, and the sounds associated with those places through the minds of an optimistic, patriotic believer and a cynical, doubting American-mythbuster.

In Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence,” he attributes the success of Jazz and Blues music to an open source culture, where the music in this landscape is reworked by musicians and other musicians. In our conception of our work, we referred only to existing sounds and music to portray our idea, using the recognizability and cultural cultural context of a sound in order to shape a bigger theme. Our theme was the myth and perception of the American Dream represented by three iconic American places: Disneyland, Hollywood, and New York City. Each place is introduced with a song that is considered a possible theme for that place. (Main Street Music from Disneyland, Party in the USA for LA, and Empire State of Mind for NYC). We tried to sonically portray each place as a idealistic glimmer with upbeat music and pleasant soundbites, then broke it down with its darker counterparts. A child screaming and screeching cha ching allude to the capitalist and miserable side effects of Disneyland, horror music from the very films to come out of Hollywood refers to the darker contributions of the film world to society, and police sirens and gunshots refer to the anxiety and fear associated with crime in urban America. However, with our final sound clip, we push aside the over-glorified and over-demonized aspects of a specific cultural context, and replace it with sounds that represent a universal connection that attributes to a true ideal.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a pretty big inspiration of the idea’s we were trying to present. The Great Gatsby is a good illustration of the expectations vs. reality of United States society. We often think our concepts of what America should be like will be what it is like in actuality. We are devastated when we find out we worked so hard only to accomplish very little. Though it seems like a little at first, we come to find out that it is sufficient. Success in careers, families, and other aspects of marriage are little bits of the American dream that are attainable. This relates heavily to the ideas Fitzgerald was trying to present.

Textual Poaching

There are outward and inward components to identity. The inward is nuanced and has purely to do with our minds. The outward is more social and classifiable. Male, female, black, white, doctor, student, mother, daughter. In my own outward identity, my biggest personal output is “female filmmaker.” With this social external identity comes an external social context. In my work, Understanding the Film (industry), I explore this context in the film mecca itself: Hollywood. And like this identity I have adopted, the art itself is very external and projecting. It is meant to speak for itself without much provocation unlike the inward identity that rests within my mind. However if you probe the pieces just enough, you might just get a glimpse.

This project started weeks before the assignment was announced when I was perusing the film texts at Pioneer Book. I stumbled upon a film textbook published in 1977 titled “Understanding the Film.” The images and aesthetic of the text were inspirational to me, and I purchased it knowing it would come in handy for some art project or another or even just for kicks and giggles. Then for this project I decided to use this textbook as my poached text, using unintentionally symptomatically unrepresentative images and text to show a stark reality juxtaposed with hope and optimism towards the oppressed. I created my own book, taking subtext from a book on the subject I am most passionate about: film. It is this subtext that allowed me to take this mass produced text intended for another purpose, and like the Velveteen Rabbit, make it my own. And as a female filmmaker, I identify this subtext perhaps more easily, and therefore feel obligated to point it out to people whose identities offer them other lenses that don’t quite have the same prescriptions.

Each image was carefully curated and placed during hours and hours of editing. However, the most pivotal image is one that I didn’t touch or mess around with at all. It is an image of a room full of men, with a woman looking through a window with blinds  into the room. In a single image, most likely unintended by the creators of the text, all the context of being a female in a male-dominated industry is powerfully portrayed. In other pages, I play around with the power structures of the characters. In one page, male cinematographers look through their camera up at a female actress. In another page, a woman takes up an entire page surrounded by oscars, while her oppressors taunt and smirk on the other side. I tried to use the book format to my advantage, using the center divide of the book to help play out power structure dynamics. Finally, I include text from the book that lists 101 influential films, every single one of them directed by men.

I think the first step is showing the rest of the world what it’s like through our perspective. That is what this work meant to me. Once we can get past that point and people are aware, just like art generating more art, new perspectives will generate new perspectives. I think Jesse hit it on the nail with the Gentileschi painting. The original painting was from a perspective that provoked a response from another artist who showed us another side of things, and in turn, Gentileschi inspired me in my work to also explore my perspective as a female artist.

Medium Specificity

I noticed how painting is often used as a metaphor. For example, how familiar do these lines sound: “The stars were painted across the sky.” or “The words painted thoughts in her mind.” So how is it that painting, which is traditionally thought of as a specific medium, can be understood figuratively in such a way? With this in mind, I formed my understanding of painting that I would build my work off of. In Understanding Comics, the author is able to explore a medium by narrowly defining that medium. Instead, I found it to my advantage to broadly define my medium.

Painting: v. To apply a medium onto a surface.

My idea started as such: take a single image and put it under as many different forms of painting as I could, without ever using actual paint. For the subject, I decided to use a bit of cardboard that I have had for two years and used as a painting palette. It has years of mixed paint, doodles, and basically is the incubator for many of my own artwork I’ve created over the years. First, I took a photograph of the subject. (Medium: Surface :: Light: Sensor) Then, I uploaded the picture and digitally painted on it in the appropriately titled Microsoft Paint. (Medium: Surface :: Digital Paint: Digital Surface) I then printed the image (Medium:Surface :: Printer Ink: Printer Paper) and painted on it with fingernail polish. I chose fingernail polish since it’s a form of painting that is closer to the more traditional form of painting, but isn’t thought of as such. I then transfered the fingernail polish painting, which was inspired by and closely followed the printed image, onto a blank sheet of paper and drew on that. Finally, I weaved the two paintings together and scanned the final product onto a computer. The final three dimensions are: film, the color grading (I took out all the green midtones to “paint” the film a magenta color, which evokes a sense of creativity to me) and editing, and finally the sound.

The sound was a particularly interesting element for me because originally I was planning to compose a song with whatever my subject was, so basically the idea of using the subject as a tool of painting. Instead, I decided to use natural sound from the entire film process to compose an organic soundtrack which presents themes of artistic process, filmmaking, collaboration, and of course, my original definition of painting.  

What my work exhibits is the deep dimensions in which painting can explores, but also a process of painting in general. My final film is a painting of the process of painting. (With the added obstruction of not using any paint.) It pushes the boundaries of what “paint” is. Can painting be painting without a specific pigment? I’d say painting is maybe the only medium that has this kind of versatility and I wanted to explore that. And I could have gone beyond 12 dimensions. I painted with light, voices, props, and even my body. Many artists paint in a similar way-- using material other than paint to create a painting.

Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic artist who frequently paints with light in his work as shown in the photograph below. His experiments with light and color influenced particular elements in my piece, including the use of magenta in editing and use of a disco ball to light the scene where I collage.

Historical Script

Artists' Statement 

In Satrapi’s The Veil, Satrapi is forced to wear a veil she is not used to as her country as her government seeks to establish a new order. For Satrapi, so much of her history – of her country’s Cultural Revolution – is of veils, of hiding behind things. Satrapi dons a veil and dons another figurative one as she pretends to want to be a doctor, not a prophet; her mother must disguise herself to avoid trouble.

Meike and Angela hide behind a variety of veils during their own revolution: the Iconoclastic Fury, or Beeldenstorm. Entoen.nu, a website developed by the Committee on Development of the Dutch Canon and managed by Hubert Slings of the Dutch Open Air Museum, speaks of the Netherlands’ own cultural revolution. “The Calvinists [a branch of Protestantism] believed the [Catholic] Church had to be purified of “papist superstitions”. By…smashing images of saints, they aimed to rid these Catholic symbols of their mystical value and make clear that Catholicism had been twisted into a sacrilegious puppet show of the true faith…the Calvinists believed they were restoring ties with the earlier, in their eyes more pure, Christians.”

            Meike and Angela’s involvement in Beeldenstorm forces them to hide under cover of night and hold secretive church services in their home. Even in Meike’s coffee shop, Angela first hides in a cloud of smoke. Like Satrapi’s mother and sometimes even Satrapi herself, Meike and Angela are liberal, independent women who fight for freedom. In Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, Russell Shorto defines liberalism: “Historically, then, liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights, and not just for oneself but for everyone, every human being who breathes the air.”

            Meike and Angela, then, are two liberal women in a world slowly changing, a world of idols and smashing them. They come to live forever by saving the painting of the Virgin Mary, an act symbolic of true liberalism and representative of the colliding chaos of their time. In the present day, they remain the same kind of women. Meike owns a coffee shop named Gedogen, a Dutch term which translates to “technically illegal but officially tolerated”. The painting of Mary hangs on the wall, remembering a different side of the past, next to the landscapes that represent the sea of change that came out of Beeldenstorm.

            In the script, art heavily affects ideology, but in the writing of the script, ideology heavily influenced art. Reading Shorto’s book is what inspired the script in the first place, and it was important that Meike and Angela embraced the liberalism that so characterizes their city. The sources helped us understand the importance of art, and so we applied that to the script to symbolize the complexities of the two situations and times. The result is art that hopes to convey not just a story, but a time, a city, and an idea.

Process Piece

Future Library

The beauty of a process piece is the focus on creation, and at our core that is what sets humans apart from other living creatures on earth. What’s so wonderful about documenting a creation process, whether it is through the medium of film or through sound alone, is a compound effect. One creative piece inspires another and the potency of that creative process is given room to grow, much like a tree in the forest. This idea is evident in the short documentary, “The Smokehouse”. With each appropriately composed shot of the wood as he carved, we were watching a communication between two artistic works. The first being that of the woodwork and the second being the medium of film. This collaboration of artistic mediums illustrates a macro-process, similar to our audio documentation of “Future Library,” in which two processes compound and communicate. As art begins to communicate with art, it has a better chance to influence the people who come in contact with it and in doing so it has a better chance to stand the test of time. This idea of artistic communication and time is something that we wanted to portray as we started on this work.

The idea of Future Library is timeless, growing like tree roots into the past, rooted in the future, and growing upwards towards the future. The link between a tree and a book and man is as old as the written word itself, leading up to the moment where we are always faithfully writing books for a near-future audience, but now we are looking further into the future. Future Library will contain books that will not be read for a century, and authors such as Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell who are contributing to the project must faithfully write for an audience that may not even exist.

Rachel first stumbled upon the idea of “Future Library” as she was scouring a artistic journal publication for ideas. The idea stood out to her because it seemed like a simple time capsule, but it was actually complex: filled with questions and implications about the future of humanity, libraries, forests, and books. The artist, Katie Paterson, believes that these things are interconnected. She got the idea for Future Library when she thoughtfully compared tree rings to chapters of a book. We particularly liked the idea of trees growing as a book was growing, since their fate is interconnected. We wanted to reflect that in our process piece by juxtaposing the forest sounds with typewriting. We also decided that since the idea behind this process holds equal weight to the process itself, we wanted to avoid following a strictly linear path. We introduce the process piece with a quote from Fahrenheit 451, a book all too appropriate for this project. This introduces our theme, then we introduce our forest, a steady presence throughout the piece. The forest is the only component of this process that will be present in an interactable way in our lifetime, so we kept it throughout. We also thought forests and libraries to be very similar, so we juxtaposed them in the beginning with the audio of turning pages and stacking books.

Finally, we wanted to end the project with the theme of the unknown future. We included a clip of a news reel with no real news to introduce the idea of a century where anything could happen. Then, we end with a quote from T.S. Eliot: “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”