wam-project

[wam-project]

Final Project Rationale

Bail was kind of an experiment for me, I wanted to create a short turnaround project that was centered around using the internet, as I had a website and the skills to put together the pages for it. The core part of this is that I felt that an internet presence was intrinsically important to a transmedia product and a transmedia narrative. A lot of my personal inspiration was looking at the explanation of Because the Internet and the Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek. Additionally the website itself in which we examined to look at the analysis of Because the Internet by Camden Ostrander offered a sort of framework in how I wanted to approach creating this work ultimately. In particular the line of “describing Because the Internet as a world encapsulates the variety of transmedia art pieces that comprise its entirety, the time period in which it developed/released, and the audience exploration it encouraged,” was something that was a key inspiration in the composition and the way that I considered how to talk about the death of skateboarding (also the rise and following deaths). While obviously what I created is far less deeply complicated and operates on levels that are more initially accessible, I wanted to make a note of the fact that if you were curious about some information presented in the document that you could dive deeper into the exploration of the culture, so that’s why I chose to link things like Thrasher magazine or the first 900 landed. There was a key importance in things like this to me in terms of understanding what some of these things look like. Of course, not everything was linked for the fact that these things take time and I didn’t want to riddle the entire page with links as I felt it looked kind of bad and kind of lead to a lot of accidental clicking.

I made the entirety of the website using Dreamweaver and the website was coded by hand, the headers were made in Illustrator and placed into the working document and hosted on my own website. The entire website is text placed at odd angles that are meant to emulate a feeling that it’s kind of haphazardly assembled or sort of emulating this punk DIY aesthetic. The entirety of it is written in a natural language, I really felt that writing it as a standard academic/historical piece with not bias in what I was saying would ultimately be a disservice to the culture of skateboarding and the idea that skateboarding is a sport for everyone. I considered the fact that there were continually things that were innately connected with one another at variable levels of depth, things like music, professionals, clothing, styles of skateboarding. Simultaneously, I needed to discuss the actual timeline of skateboarding, which is key to understanding why and how things kept dying down, which lead to the linear structure of the website. We at one point were asked to look at the documentary, Hollow, and Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek this served as an inspiration for the creation of the timeline. Granted, Hollow was created over a greater period of time and was a much more personal exploration of the subjects of the project, but also did convince me that a website would be the most effective use of my time to create something. Mostly due to the fact that I could create something that was interactive, allowing for the user to see some more information as they read through it, and also I wanted to make something that felt like it was a modern encapsulation of something with a long history, which in turn was something that was particularly important to consider after reading Snow Fall. I felt providing the background information of things that may not be particularly important in a narrative sense provided a little more understanding of the topics at hand, discussing things like how clothing evolved beyond the point of skateboarding and how skate culture and music have become not necessarily inherently associated with skateboarding.

The physical object I created was a CD case, intended originally to contain a CD that had the music listed on the back of the album, I had to ultimately settle on a Spotify playlist, which I’m particularly not happy about, but still gets the point across. The designs were all put together using Illustrator, just like the headings. It’s worth noting that I bought a copy of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 from a local Disc Replay and gutted the artwork out to make the CD case. The cover art is a sort of roughed up skate wheel design, not based on any particular wheel set, just an original design. The back cover is meant to be simple, but matches the website in terms of the DIY nature and design of the entire thing, the misaligned text, the shifts in spacing between letters, it’s all intended to feel like it was made by hand and fits nicely into this DIY aesthetic. The decision to use a CD case was taken from actual marketed part of Because the Internet, which was the CD itself. Something that was an easy to understand entry point into the greater narrative surrounding the album without needing to delve any deeper, and also was on it’s own a greater work. Secondly, use of a CD sort of highlights the nostalgic nature of skateboarding, which feels like it reached this unimaginable height in the late 90’s and early 00’s, a time period in which the CD was the dominant form of information transfer, from music to computer programs. The CD case was not intended to actually be missing a hinge originally, but in bringing it home, the jewel case caught a corner badly and the hinge snapped off., I felt that the broken hinge of the case sort of added to the sort of “time-lost” aesthetic, it felt like it added this idea that the entire work was aged and not quite of the modern age and had experienced a lot of wear and tear. The idea that the object itself is not modern and is from a time of nostaliga went into what music I chose for the album as well, I could have easily just checked out the albums for the Tony Hawk skateboarding games and said, “Well this is it”, but I decided to set a soft time limit on myself of roughly 2001. I opted to look at those game soundtracks, the Vans Warped Tour lineups, and looked at what music I had heard in skate video parts and selected music that fit into those genres.

The interior CD case design is a digital collage of what I personally find important to my skateboarding experience. Song lyrics from albums that I listen to whenever I skate around, album covers, the brands that I wear and ride, everything that I had a personal connection to. The design itself was meant to emulate this drawer full of different stickers or sheets of paper or clutter and the importance of it was that it was this at a glance understanding and to serve as this comparison of what was important to me against the information that I had on the website. I felt that the personal element meant that this entire work was something beyond just me examining the culture and aesthetic of skateboarding in a clinical sense and asserting myself as a part of the contemporary culture.

[wam-project]

Final Notecard Reflection

The two major learning outcomes intended by the class that I feel came across the most clearly and effectively were learning how writing and rhetoric are utilized across various forms of media other than just writing and also how to analyze these texts when they don’t have as clear of a system of analysis as something like a book. We talked a lot about affordances and constraints of different pieces of media and what these constraints and affordances actually allow. Funnily enough I feel that the constraints often let the created work be meaningful in ways that would have not been predictable.

In particular the affordances of Because the Internet, and also the constraints of all the different individuals components, kind of created an incredibly fascinating greater work that allowed for so many different points of analysis. Things like the Roscoe’s Wetsuit billboard, which was completely nondescript and was constrained by it’s lack of clarity was able to entice people to want to learn about what exactly it was getting across. I thought the incredibly complex depth of Because the Internet and the accompanying materials was engaging in ways that are kind of hard to describe. The multilayered narrative that had so many different entry points, as well as accessibility based on personal knowledge, was genuinely gripping, and when we used the website that archived all of the information I found myself combing through all of the small details that were given by the author.

In contrast it’s, legitimately hard to describe what my least favorite text is, because I promise this one isn’t just brown-nosing, but I didn’t find any in particular to be difficult to engage with or hard to get through. They all felt like they had a purpose as to be assigned. The only ones that I can imagine I probably disliked were ones that were text heavy, just due to the lack of direct engagement outside of reading for me.

My particular favorite project was creating the audio project, the soundscape work allowed me to do something that I often think about but never really get around to doing due to my schedule, so carving out a period of time to actually need to do it, was gratifying.

My least favorite was probably just making the comic. I wasn’t super happy entirely with the illustrations but there’s not much I can do about that.

[wam-project]

Transmedia Blog Post #2

So I set out to find the Geocache at the Seibel Center, a tiny scrap of paper hidden on a post near the north entrance of the building. It was, interesting, and something that I have some experience doing actually. For 10 Cloverfield Lane there was an ARG that was running that involved finding geocaches in Illinois and Louisiana, in particular I tried to find this locker at Union Station that ultimately contained a pre-paid phone that had a bunch of weird messages on it. This one, however, contained a small note for putting your name into the logbook.

I can forsee there being a political sort of slant to the concept of geocaching, in a similar way to skateboarding, to the sort of unintended use of public spaces for recreational or strange purposes. They create a narrative in themselves as the items begin to form a history and relationship to the area around them, as well as sort of forcing the searching party to become familiar with the area in a way that is unexpected or strange. For example, the hints provided were not entirely clear (to the benefit of this cache, realistically) but it mentioned that it was camouflaged but after some looking I ultimately found what I was looking for, velcroed to the side of the disability door opening button post. (Don’t really know a better name for this.) In particular I thought this cache was fun to find, and it sort of inspired me in the way that the supposed “misuse” of the area relates to skateboarding, utilizing components of areas in ways that are unorthodox or semidestructive. I don’t know if in particular I could make a geocache about skateboarding (granted it would be interesting to say the least) but I am intrigued about the sort of political ramification of using geocaching in a possible anti-authority way, making a statement out of the hidden objects themselves just by the very nature of their existence.

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Independent Reading Blog Post

Star Wars Minus Star Wars is a video work by Kyle Kallgren in which the entirety of the narrative structure and some other key tonal beats, of Star Wars Episode IV are recreated from scenes from other movies that are not Star Wars. Almost scene for scene, not in length, but in tone, plot point, visual, or character designs, each scene mimics a scene in Star Wars. Going through the entirety of the film in about under 17 minutes and covering the entire journey including the opening credits. Kallgren quotes critic Pauline Kael in the description of the video, “an assemblage of spare parts—it has no emotional grip… an epic without a dream” so as to highlight the point that the video is highlighting the fact that Star Wars is not comprised of wholly original parts, but is a combination of ideas from the past, both filmmaking and writing wise, that have been put together in a new creation. He quotes Roger Ebert as well to highlight Star Wars itself has become an inspiration for so many films that came long after it. Kallgren ultimately states that “For better or worse, Star Wars engulfs the past and future of moviemaking.”

This entire work at a surface level highlights the importance of inspiration and the lack of originality of all works, not to a fault, but simply that ideas don’t come from nothing, something sparks an idea and the idea becomes changed and put with other ideas to create a brand new whole. Something that was key to a significant part of this semester. We spent a lot of time discussing scavenging, proper usage of scavenged parts, intentionality and the ethics of remixing. Particularly it tied heavily to the project that were assigned at a personal level, I cited Star Wars Minus Star Wars in my rationale as the structure heavily influenced why I did what I did, the sort of cut and pasted nature of the project came from this directly. But Star Wars Minus Star Wars was something to keep in mind constantly when reading the article “Imitation Game”, as Star Wars was effectively nothing but homage to things that came before it. Kallgren writes about this in the description of his work, citing the fact that George Lucas was outright about his inspirations and his interests and that these influenced the things he worked on. Additionally Star Wars Minus Star Wars itself can be analyzed by the information imparted by the article as it considers what defines plagiarism and defends the act of usage of prior ideas to create new works. Star Wars Minus Star Wars falls not under plagiarism, despite it’s direct use of clips not created by it’s editor, but homage and analysis of Star Wars proper as the clips are rearranged and strung together to create this ramshackle and stitched together version of the narrative, while using other people’s ideas to get to that point. The other piece that Kallgren’s work touches is Melancholy Elephants, a short story about the perils of copyrighting every single idea. Something that stories like Star Wars relied on other ideas to create what they needed. That in the future something like Star Wars could never be created again.

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Transmediation Blog Post #1

After searching into more of Because The Internet’s greater transmedia narrative I feel like this is legitimately something to do in the modern age that can gain a traction only with the sort of far reaching nature of the current systems we have. I don’t personally think that it should be the future of entertainment as a whole, as it would be sort of absurd to consider anything the absolute “future”. Personally just due to the nature of the amount of effort and planning and amount of knowledge that the potential audiences have inhibit it to do as such. So for the example of Because The Internet, we’re looking at twitter feeds, websites, billboards, “#roscoeswetsuit”, an album, a short film, a script, a fake video game. There’s so much across so many different platforms, which in it of itself is incredibly fascinating and I had to legitimately stop myself from falling into the full hole of seeing where everything connected to one another and had to sit back and sort of take it that I was never there in the moment and I missed it, which in it of itself, that also tends to devalue these things as they move serially. Take the webcomic Homestuck for example, it’s a comic with music, animations, and even games within itself. But externally there is an actual game that ties into the narrative, there is a secondary comic that is discussed within the comic, there are allusions to other works including the author’s previous works, the story plays with the framing device of itself and leaked out onto a blog, a DeviantArt page, GameFAQs, and part of the epilogue was available exclusively on Snapchat, it was originally available serially and when the time passed, the novelty and possible interest faded away due to not experiencing it in the moment. Which is something that I consider a lot as to why these things aren’t inherently the future, they may happen more frequently but I don’t imagine that they will be mainstream, I think personally they’re incredibly gratifying and interesting to sort of piece together a story from many parts, there’s something so engaging about giving me parts that are complete on their own that are ultimately just smaller parts of a much greater narrative and, in a way, universe.

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Major Project 2 Rationale

“I’m going for my own jugular, or the jugular of someone who looks a lot like me!” is both the opener of this piece and the crux of this project and taken from Cheekface’s "Big Blank Distraction". The scavenged parts of these songs, from bands that I greatly enjoy, is meant to serve as a somewhat lighthearted criticism of how myself and a lot of my friends live their lives. It’s kind of a joke at this point, the sort of down on their luck, depressed, and schlubby twenty-something who spends their weekends (and sometimes weekdays) drinking, getting high, eating bad food, and engaging in self-destructive behavior. There is almost a glorification of the sort of listless lifestyle where the person doesn't fully care for themselves. Jokes about being a failed person or a mess or being self-destructive pervade a lot of conversations with friends or just really any major social media platform. There's a sense that people are working with what they have in terms of their personality, that "it's not much but it's what I have". These jokes while they come across as just jokes, have the bit of truth that they genuinely feel something is wrong with what they do but they're doing their best. These songs I've chosen are meant to encapsulate this sort of weirdly positive spin on feelings of shortcomings, where there's a bizarre positivity put on anger, drug use, alcoholism, being messy, or kind of a burn out, but the positive spin feels like it's done with a feeling of "well this is fucked but what can I do." There’s a pointedness to the entire construction that is not intended to be positive, and the point of the entire work was intended as a distinct answer to two questions raised in the Colton reading: “’In my sampling and remixing of this work, am I wounding or caring for the people who took part in the works I sample from?’ and ‘In my remixing of these works into a new composition, am I wounding or caring for those people and others who might be exposed to my own remix?’” (Colton, p. 25) The answer to both of these is, in fact, there is an intent to wound, to a lesser extent the creators and to a greater extent those exposed who are sort of part of the intended audience. While “wound” may come across too harshly, I am intending on delivering a criticism of how miserable all of these songs are lyrically and how they cast a sort of bizarre positive light on these feelings. While that is probably the intent, to have the music juxtapose against the lyrics, that is an entirely different conversation.

The songs are chosen with the stipulation that they have similar sonic elements of being fuzzy and hooky so they have a fun poppy element but are written from someone in their 20's and highlight feelings of self-disappointment and negativity behind their lyrics. The songs used in this piece are Cheekface’s “Big Blank Distraction” and “I Only Say I’m Sorry When I’m Wrong Now”, Rozwell Kid’s “Hawaiin Shirt”, Sidney Gish’s “Homecoming Serf”, Cherry Glazerr’s “Wasted Nun”, Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180”, Bleached’s “Sour Candy”, Caroline Rose’s “Cry”, and The Microphone’s “I Want Wind To Blow”, generally what I would consider “Songs to have problems with your serotonin levels to”, which is often wh. “I Want Wind To Blow” plays primarily in the left channel for almost the entirety of the piece alongside background audio of a busy room and microphone static. The songs that play outside of this are doubled up and play a quiet but normal version in the right ear and a very distant and heavily reverberated version of them in the left ear. So, particularly I took inspiration from the piece Star Wars Minus Star Wars, which we looked at in class, I did not structure my work after this, as I’m not restructuring a song out of different songs, but I did consider the fact that each snippet of the films was a sort of reflection of an idea that later went on to influence Star Wars, and that all of the components of Star Wars weren’t wholly original. I took that into consideration and sort of used the components of the songs to create an idea, instead of the ideas broken down into components, where the separate parts are meant to influence the whole and in a way create a landscape of how it feels to experience the sort of dual nature of self-destruction and self-care when faced with an ever-present mental health issue that is difficult to resolve, which in turn is sort of the point of the dual channel nature of the audio. Lethem’s piece about influence and remixing work served to also push for this sort of “all parts of a whole” approach, where there’s a discussion of collage work and jazz early on in the piece and an a discussion of what it means to “invent” new work. It helped to establish that there is a value in pastiche and intentionality in effectively what is cut and paste when there’s a greater purpose involved. Two particular quotes stuck out in the Lethem writing that pushed the entire piece towards the cut-and-paste method and the idea to make it incredibly noisy in structure, “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos,” (Lethem p.61) and “Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?” (Lethem p. 68) Additionally, the second of the two helped lean me towards discussing mental health and sort of the methods that people use for self-care/self-destruction as there felt like there was a distinct link between the way that the brain processed emotions and feelings and creating something that was intentionally linked from moment to moment but with very abrupt cuts in ideas.

[wam-project]

Scavenging Blog #2

Both Star Wars and the Kallgren work are ethical remixes because they make use of materials, subjects, and ideas, that are utilized in new and interesting ways. While the concepts from scene to scene may not be wholly original, the different parts make up a different whole and that is entirely the ultimate point. In Star Wars there isn’t an attempt to directly acknowledge the materials that inspired the complete work in the end. For the remixed version, Star Wars Minus Star Wars, the sources are acknowledged in the end of the video itself. I feel personally that they’re properly credited in the end, there’s an acknowledgement of the different parts and an understanding of the ultimate thing that has been created by the finished work. Additionally, the actual work itself focuses entirely on the idea that there is no such thing as an original idea, both after and before Star Wars. In both works, the ultimate result is ethical as the works are transformative in ways that are unique and creative. Star Wars, while a retread of a lot of things in history, has ultimately put the pieces together in a way that constructs an original narrative with it’s own nuances and characters that mean something different that the different parts on their own. In the case of Kallgren’s work, the final piece highlights how the different parts of many different works create one whole work in the end, and as I said before there is an understanding and a pointed critique in the work, highlighting that there’s no necessarily original idea in the end, and that’s okay due to the fact that there’s a multitude of ideas that are combined together to create the final work. Which, personally, I feel Star Wars Minus Star Wars, highlights the mashing up of ideas to create a final work.

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Resource Blog #1

Blackline Supply is likely one of the most well hidden resources for creating on campus. Hidden in the basement of a church on 5th street on the Champaign side of campus. It fills one single room that is locked with a shudder door and a padlock when not in use. It markets itself as a store for architecture and industrial design students, selling a plethora of small modelmaking supplies, markers, blocks of foam, and pieces of wood. To access this building, as it is in the basement of a church, there is an intercom with a few buttons, one of which is labeled “Blackline Supply”. I accidentally stumbled on this store when trying to get markers for a design project my sophomore year. The store itself is reasonably priced and is packed incredibly densely. The usage of it is, well, like any other store, you grab what you want and bring it to checkout. The important takeaways of the actual location is that fact that it is very conveniently located in campustown, near the quad, and that it focuses entirely on selling things for physical projects. Personally, I feel physical projects have some qualities over digital or print projects, not to say that they’re better, but they lend themselves to a more experiential final product. This store provides materials for more straightforward or straight-laced projects. Making models or crafts that require a sort of precision to them, like making a model of a house or a picture frame. I recommend Blackline though as a source of getting materials for products that are meant to be, in a weird way, utilitarian. The designs that would come from these materials would be certainly less visually stunning than if you were to raid the IDEA store for supplies, but there’s an intentionality that comes with having tighter restrictions on the breadth of materials you have, which is why I would recommend it.

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Scavenging #1

There’s a sort of nature to working in an art space that allows the creator to take work, modify it, cut and paste, and chop and screw with other work. NPR’s “What is Original” talk about the “la-di-da-di we like to party” line that has been reused over and over and over. Additionally, later in the podcast they talk about the Picasso quote “good artists copy, great artists steal”. Which ironically when I attempted to find the source they mentioned I found innumerable sources that were not attributed to Picasso. However, at a point within the podcast they speak about the notion of attributing credit to the original creators of what materials are being used originally and how a lot of young creators may not understand the importance of doing that as they’re ripping songs from YouTube to remix. The general point stands true and is somewhat shared in the rules of plagiarism provided by the University, which is, proper attribution of credit. “Direct Quotation: Every direct quotation must be identified by quotation marks or by appropriate indentation and must be promptly cited.” This is under “b. Plagiarism” under the University’s Academic Integrity Infractions article. Ultimately, the university doesn’t seem to have anything explicitly draconic about how sourcing works. I was originally here to study chemistry and now I study and practice graphic design, which means I’ve experienced two sides of managing references and what it means to plagiarize in my time at the university. This is important because in my time doing research and lab work, the whole point was to cross reference results with other peer-reviewed research. With graphic design, there is a reverence for original ideas when you can get them but an acknowledgement that work is remixed and modified based on the ideas of others, and that as long as there is an acknowledgement of what inspires your work and what leads you down the path you take, it is totally fine. Ultimately, the university differs in what is acceptable based on what department you are in, in fields where it’s centric on research, there is a high importance on looking at other research as it helps to shape the things you’re trying to learn, and thus it’s important to always explicitly state where information you’re using is coming from. But work that requires conjecture or creative exploration, it feels less important as ideas that may not be entirely unique to you, do not need to be expressed as such as they can be the results of jumping off of information you already have.

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Multi-modal Project #1

The concept of wanting to explore the complexity navigating my sexuality came from a process of remapping my own life after a particularly difficult week, which resulted in me having to completely reprioritize what I was doing with my time, my work, and myself. In this self-reflection I had to consider I the romantic relationships and how complex it was to navigate my experiences as a queer person as soon as I began to meet other queer people. The outward presentation of my sexuality was in great conflict with the discourse of my peers. I realized this concept would be incredibly difficult to explain without any sort of visual aid, something that could whittle a complex system into something digestible. Maps are inherently always levels of abstraction away from what they represent, but ultimately they convey the information needed as it highlights the pertinent information. I took heavy influence from Scott McCloud’s discussion of abstraction in Understanding Comics, in which he states, “by stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’ an artist can amply that meaning in a way realistic art can’t”. (McCloud, p.30)

I designed this as a brochure, the inside being the map with a legend and the stops, like a branded guidebook similar to what you would see on the Metra. This was to be designed in Illustrator with intent for printing if the chance were ever to arise. I wanted to create something that was could be held by the viewer, something that required the viewer to interact with directly as an intentionality of understanding and reading the map is added. But how would I lay it out? What information needed to be included? How could I make something complex into something simple? I determined a few things, I would utilize the colors of flags of the LGBT community, primarily bisexual, as the train lines for any romantic prospects. Blue for male, magenta for female, and purple for non-binary identities. Ultimately, I realized that I shouldn’t restrict the navigation of my identity to simply only my romantic prospects, as this is not really where my difficulties sorting out my identity stemmed from, but rather I should include my general friendships as a line too, marked in grey. Additionally, each “stop” would be marked with why it’s an important note in my life, from “12 - First Crush” to “22- Now”.

Marlene Martinez’s essay “Tongue of Lead” was something that upon first reading, I found incredibly moving, it spoke to a very critical part of my identity as a very light-skinned Latino person in the US. However, upon further reflection I found that my sexual orientation and relationships began to work within the major concept of her piece. Notably the difficulties in navigating my own identity stemmed from what I knew about myself conflicting with the personal discourses of others. Of note Martinez writes, “How can you carry a Mexican surname and speak no Spanish?” (Martinez p.84). While quite literally, it poses the question of what is an identity if you fail to satisfy all the “proper conditions”. When reeled back, it was questioning what it meant to be existing under an identity but not necessarily living it out in the way that others have expectations of. Immediately when I was exposed to queer men, I became incredibly insecure. It felt as if I had become a member of a community and immediately became a pariah. It caused me to feel broken and alienated. There was a barrier that was created because of my personal sense of identity navigation.

These people I couldn’t particularly identify with because I grew up with a predominantly heteronormative lens and ideation of how relationships are structured. Meaning, typically longer term, single-partner, committed relationships. So, upon entering college, I was sort of faced with the fact that, this was not predominantly how things worked amongst the gay male community. It was incredibly daunting and made me incredibly averse to many of those people because it was experiences that I felt like were almost caricature-like in nature, because my only exposure to the way they spoke or dressed was when it was a punchline on a TV show. There were ways of dressing, speaking, acting, and even media to enjoy that I had never come across earnestly. So I didn’t understand, enjoy, or participate in any of these things as I spent most of my time doing what I knew I enjoyed and not knowing that I had been blind to an entire discourse throughout the entirety of my entire teenage years. I was considered “straight-passing” in all respects, which made me feel as if I never was quite on the same page as them. I had access to terms and words like “gay”, “straight”, “bi”, and “trans”. But I didn’t have access to understanding things like “twink”, “chaser”, or “wig”, which even currently I still don’t have command over a lot of terms or phrases or knowledge that these people have. Martinez writes, “I resented my lead tongue and the barrier that it brought me,” (Martinez, p.85), which in my case is a personal disconnect from them by way of expression of orientation.  There is an expectation to act and dress a certain way and I had failed “to ‘pull off’ a complex performance, where ’pull off’—to be ‘right’—here means getting others to recognize and accept you (and what you are doing) as a gang member, honor student, or hip-hop fan at the ‘right’ times and places” (Gee, pp. 1-2) I didn’t have any speech patterns, knowledge of slang, or knowledge of who were considered “queer icons”. I only began to know these things within the past year, as in the age of twenty-one.

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Literacies #3

In my life I’ve dealt with the conflict of myself as a queer person growing up with people around me that were straight and ultimately coming to college and having to deal with the conflict of suddenly having to become accustomed to the sort of “typical” queer community. As my personality and tastes were formed by the people around me growing up I never really had an inkling about sort of the ways that other queer people act. While I’m not sure what discourses they would break into, maybe into a heteronormative lifestyle vs. a queer-IDing lifestyle. I had conflict between what I knew and how I acted and how other queer people acted.

I had no knowledge of the terminology, outside of, for lack of a better term, clinical terminology such as transgender, bisexual, homosexual, heterosexual, etc., and was completely sort of removed from the culture of anything like that was considered “queer culture”. I grew up completely just normative in my life and never once had exposure to any of this information.

My navigation of this was presented as sort of me coming across as incredibly straight-presenting to most of my newfound friends in college, most people assumed I was just straight on meeting me except I would mention i had a boyfriend occasionally. But navigating the space where I made queer friends was finding out that I actually did come off as “very straight’, which was sort of upsetting because to me I was always bisexual, something that I thought was just inherent in me as a person. It was something that actually somewhat alienated me from my sexuality and my security in my sexual orientation, because it became to feel as if I wasn’t necessarily meeting the proper criteria to be queer because I simply didn’t have the same music tastes, media taste, knowledge of movies, or knowledge of a lot of different terminology.

[wam-project]

Literacies #2

As a graphic designer the plans I have in the future for the degree are to work in digital design for video games, creating iconography and user interface concepts. The career path I’m taking has its own technical and visual discourses. From knowledge of coding languages, scripting, visual design, layout, toolsets, and visual identities. My education as is, is a key component to sort of getting a baseline understanding of what exactly I’m going to be involved with. Learning the actual literary discourses and the language of the design world. The things that I learn beyond the confines of education though, are what becomes the more important aspects of what I plan to do in the future. The discourses beyond the classroom are more complicated, involve more people, involve being more flexible with rapidly changing expectations.

The educational path I’m on is inherently enculturation through the previously mentioned baseline understanding, the people who teach me the things that essentials to becoming a successful designer are themselves designers, for the most part anyway. Some of those were involved with other design disciplines with transferable skills. In the design department the classes are taught less by instruction and through a guided creation process. While there are lectures from the instructors, there is an inherent 1-on-1 guiding process to translate rough ideas to final products, in addition to my peers who are all offering the guidance and opinions they’ve gained from our instructors alongside me.

The parts that tend to not apply is a direct apprenticeship under those who have “mastered the Discourse” so to speak. There is a clear line drawn that the work we do is almost entirely independent, and the discourse is learned on our own time and terms but is only guided by our instructors. The guiding hand that is provided to us is simply an alternative angle to the discourse at hand and is meant to expand our understanding of it.

[wam-project]

Literacies #1

My experience of going through marching band was a series of skills that I was required to learn all interconnected and layering on top of one another. Marching band itself had a language of its own to learn, both physically, verbally, musically, and visually, as well as a culture entirely centric about being part of marching band as a family.

I spent a considerable amount of time having to learn the proper terminology for marching, such as “dress”, “mark time”, and “as you were”. There was a lot more but realistically it’s not worth diving into all of it, but it was all hammered into us as how to understand what the drum majors wanted us to do and when to do it. There was a verbal literacy that was important to understanding how to navigate the in-moment information given to us. This in turn would lend itself to a physical language of itself as there was a proper action to take in accordance with each of these terms. For example, “mark time” was a type of marching done entirely in place and still rhythmically.

The information we had to learn outside of the actual marching itself was a lot of visual and musical literacy as we would be given sheets of paper that comprised of large grids with markings for our intended positions on the football field. We would learn to read these, them learn to apply them to the football field itself so we could properly navigate.

The sort of family dynamic that was kind of created by being in band was strange to say the least, but there was specific information that was privy to being in a section (in my case, saxophone), where we had a reliance on each other as well as like a weirdly tight-knit sense together, and then to a larger extend we were then tied to the other woodwinds as a separate group. This on it’s own was built around our literacies of reading sheet music that was written all in the same key, as well as knowing the same instrument in and out and being able to communicate our information with each other. Then to the other woodwinds, we were similarly able to discuss techniques and terminology that made us in the know of the instruments.

[wam-project]

Mini - Project 3 Reflection

Creating a video essay was not unfamiliar. Granted I’ve never made a proper argumentative video. This would also be included in that as it’s kind of a joke concept I made about how to review video games based on the “Does this spark joy?” meme associated with Marie Kondo. This video was put together entirely in Adobe Premiere CC, and uses an original song in the background alongside usage of third party clips.

We watched Blushades’ video How Video Essays are Deceiving you and found the idea kind of funny of the nature of making an argumentative video, effectively was a video essay. About how video essays impart a sense of authority and objectivity on a subject, through pacing, tone, color, anything really. So I was inspired by the sort of blank slate nature of the video and set about to effectively make the video that would fulfill what was visually stated to be almost entirely neutral but still cool and collected.

So I chose a boring but pleasing font (Helvetica), set it on a pale blue background, and used minimal imagery to prove my point, which to be entirely honest is kind of nonsensical but that’s not important.

What I gleaned from this is that you can honestly just say whatever you want on a video, provided you’re confident enough reading it, and just push through a script with the right tone and it makes you seem like a certifiable master of whatever subject you’re talking about. There’s so much that the creator of the video has about any subject, even if entirely made up, that is entirely enhanced when a final polished product is created.

Additionally, for those who aren’t familiar with audio and visual editing, a video is a work of magic, effectively, even if they know how it’s done in theory, a final and clean video is something that seems entirely existent on it’s own with a mysticism behind how the video was assembled.

[wam-project]

Mini-Project 

This audio project was created inspired by one of the Dungeons and Dragons settings that I created, set in the fictitious city of Timber Hills, Washington. I created a little tune to play through a radio in the scene, and took audio of some generic bird chirping, forest noises, car noises, and assorted bugs and rain. Did some modifications to them to give them a weird sort of airy audio. The song is an original composition and was created specifically for this. Inspired a little by games like Animal Crossing. 

The audio was assembled in FL Studio from a series of stock audio clips, recordings, and specifically created music and recordings of, well, basically just wind. The music is written on a midi keyboard connected to my computer and was written as a looping track of roughly one minute and twenty seconds.

The entirely of this was assembled to give the impression that it was indicative of a setting that was at least vaguely familiar, a rainy day with quiet music. Hence the car and the tinny audio. This was in turn inspired from the “Sizzle” podcast we had listened to, where it stresses a lot of the ideas of audio that is emotionally implicit and can construct vivid mental imagery incredibly easily when it’s evocative enough. Granted, this isn’t that crazy to imagine, as that’s the basic principle of how background music works. I wanted to be able to create something calming, familiar, and evocative. Which, I greatly hope I did. The music itself kind of carries the entire work, in my opinion, comparatively to the audio in the background. While I think it in total, accomplishes what I wanted it to do, I think that the straightforward nature of the audio clips almost is a little too blunt about what I’m trying to accomplish.

Making the audio myself in conjunction with the use of stock audio and recordings, combined with my knowledge of how to create audio projects, sort of left the possibilities for what I could create to be wide open, with virtually no limitations other than whatever technical aspects I didn’t fully understand of the programs I was using. Which, in reality, was very little.

[wam-project]

Mini-Project 1 Justification/Reflection

From the start I knew I wanted to introduce some sort of superhero, due to the visual nature of introducing a character working together with comic books, and from the information that had been gleaned from Understanding Comics for creating distinct shapes and color forms for characters in comics, which is covered a little bit when he begins to discuss abstraction. So then I designed the protagonist, the one with the yellow tubes, to have those yellow tubes as a way to always easily identify them in the scene because of how they stood out against the purple background. It is also noteworthy I created this single page spread in PaintTool SAI, a drawing program which greatly allowed me to utilize virtually any color as well as easily edit and redo new layers and so a lot of color comparison of shades of yellow and purple to find something that really popped was a consideration. The freedom that using this program gave me allowed me to constantly update and change the page as I came up with refinements for the ideas I had. For example, the would-be thieves were originally uncolored. They were all simply single flat black lines on the purple backdrop. But I decided it was too plain and they lacked more distinct personality, so I colored their jackets white, red, blue, and green, so as to make them far more visually distinct on the solid color background. This in turn, was a concept from Understanding Comics, which while not the exact same process, was similar to how the book explained the visual distinctions between characters in TinTin and their backdrops. Additionally, my choice to make the thief speech-bubbles different colors, such as turning the actual bubble part from the traditional white to black, and the black text and outlines in the same colors as their jacket, was done purely stylistically, because I felt that all white and black text bubbles was a little too plain for a single-page spread. Which, on its own, was somewhat of a constraint I placed on myself.  Buy that in it of itself was the type of freedom that using PaintTool SAI allowed me, I was free to edit, draw, redraw, refine, confine, and expand all parts of the comic endlessly. Making stylistic choices when I wanted, redoing the dialogue as many times as I wanted. Comparatively if I had done this with pencils on paper, or crayons, or metal etching, I would have been unable to make as many changes or constantly change colors or redo the entire comic if I felt the need to.

[wam-project]

Week 1

In terms of writing as a technology, when I finally read it, it reminded me of how when I was younger someone described the human body was comprised of simple machines (such as arms being levers and the like) and it was a sort of strange thing to deal with. While that isn’t entirely pertinent it is a similar effect that I found it incredibly novel to think about.

I personally was aware of non-verbal languages, at least conceptually, as I am studying graphic design and it’s a key part of it. It is worth noting that the written word plays a significant part of the design process. But often a lot of designs begin by ignoring the text on it’s own, treating the text as a piece of color or space, the text is often simply a part of the visual language of design. Symbols and images can take the place of text in a design but often need to be accompanied by the text to be fully understood. In reflection I find it somewhat funny that in the modern day it's expected to use text to clarify a design and in the past Baron states it was used to mislead and trick others, while in the modern day it's such a standard that we need to help convey information especially in graphic design where on posters, for example, text is needed to covey information like times, dates, and locations as quickly as possible.

After the activity in which we were denied the ability to simply speak or write answers down, I realized how actually important to conveying information in an accessible manner the ability to speak and write is so vastly important. I struggled incredibly even using a phone to communicate, likely due to the fact that other people physically near me built back on my already built in reaction to speak verbally to people around me for information. Tying this back to my graphic design career, using subtle cues that support text seems to be the future standard for my work.