Protest Poster

Artist's Statement
          This project stemmed from a Japanese class I was in last week. The class focuses on speaking and thus each class begins with an opportunity to have conversation with the fellow students in Japanese. We are assigned topics beforehand so that we can prepare what we will say in class. That particular day's topic was to be a a debate, "Does the United States of America's future look bright?" I figured this would be a fairly lop-sided debate seeing as all the class members, with the exception of one Canadian, were all young, male, born and raised American citizens. To my surprise, when the class divided into teams myself and the Canadian were the only two with a vote of confidence for America, the rest spent the the entire time trying to convince us that our country was doomed. I having been raised in, what I consider, a very patriotic home thought that everyone was as invested in the future of our country as my family is. One of my arguments was that the current generation had recently become more proactive in politics and I asked home many had voted in the previous election. Only myself and one other class member out of the 15 or so had. Perhaps, as the assigned viewing suggested, I had heard only a single story all my life and faith really is dwindling.
          My simple and subtle poster is trying to call attention to the lack of faith in my generation. It may not be noticeable at first, but the engraving on the US 25 cent piece has been altered slightly. Instead of reading "In God We Trust" the letters "ed" have been added onto the end to make it past tense. Our nation was founded on certain beliefs that are slowly being abandoned. This gradual change to complacency has made us loose focus of our duty as citizens. To emphasize this gradual change in attitude I purposely did not draw attention to the change of wording but left it up to the viewer to figure it out, which is exactly the predicament we find ourselves now. An influential movie in the creation of this poster was the newer version of Miracle on 34th Street in which money, in that case a dollar bill, was used to remind the court system the beliefs on which they were founded. Although my focus is somewhat different from the movie the idea of calling the people to a remembrance of our founding fathers is still very apparent.

   

Webspinna

http://www.rainymood.com/
http://www.incredibox.com/en/#/application
http://www.realmofdarkness.net/pc/sb/wayne/1
http://www.flashkit.com/soundfx/Ambience/Restaurant
http://www.hark.com/clips/bcgnrchtkq-i-have-a-dream-part-2

Artist's Statement
I guess I didn't know what to expect out of this whole new experience, but I'm glad we were given this opportunity to try something new. The phrase that continued to come to mind was from the screenplay from our reading. One section talked about the collectivism that arose during the boom of Deejaying in the 80's. It talked about art belonging to everyone, and that fine art tended to run away from that idea, and making it less accessible to the average person. I felt this webspinna event was the exact opposite of that notion. Content available to anyone with an Internet connection was compiled and performed in an extremely casual social gathering. It was less focused on the art itself and more on the fact that art bring people together. My personal performance tried representing two equally famous, yet polar opposite figures: John Wane and Martin Luther King Jr. Many of the westerns I have seen Wane in have depicted him as an Indian hating old Calvary man. I almost have to laugh at some of his racial lines. Dr. King on the other hand speaks for the exact opposite. My performance was a dialogue between the two put to music.
He whole experience, to include finding and compiling the sounds as well as performance night, reminded me of watching my friend free style break dance. He would go to competitions and I would go watch, but the reason I connect the two is that neither would be very impressive without the social gathering behind them. So many recent art form have been formed into communities by e influence of modern technology. Art, even more so in our time has become everyone's. In those dance competitions the competitors would practice moves over and over, but would have to go back and forth with a competitor like a conversation. At our webspinna many had to do a little adjusting to fit the previous act. In this manner our art becomes more like a conversation. It was really fun to be a part of.

Specificity

Artist's Statement
          What is music? That is what I sat down to figure out this week. It wasn't easy, exploring the medium to render it's core. I appreciate the profound definition given by John Cage, as demonstrated in his experimental piece entitled 4'33". Although I find his definition of music valid, I couldn't help but feel there was more to it. As I experimented with several different ideas I came to the realization that of course Cage was right, all sound could be music! Yet having the potential to be music does not mean all sound is constantly music. This is the tangent that gradually brought me to my conclusion. All sounds can be music because music is the organization and orchestration of sounds to bring about human emotion. I find it so interesting that sound waves emitted from any number of devices and instruments can cause us to cry, laugh, become motivated, or to smile. The powerful force behind this medium is the combinations, repetitions, and intervals that the artist utilizes different pitched noises. These combinations of sounds (even without words to accompany the music) can carry the above mentioned emotions. My piece is an attempt to manifest these emotions through singing. I have recorded my voice (at some points 15 different layers of me) in a variety of different feelings. Each emotion is connected to the next by a common note. This was done to show that nature of music. 1 note can have a completely different feel when put in combination with another. I tried to bring about excitement, solemnity, happiness, adventure, anxiety/fear, and even feelings of awe and wonder. I sang these combinations, but in reality it could have been accomplished with any number of instruments or a combination of many. In fact, inspiration for this piece came from the THX theme song, Deep Note, which was originally created entirely from computer programming. I think it is so interesting that those 200 lines of programming are now associated with the excitement of the theater and movie watching. I feel that music has much less to do with what makes the noise, rather the design that is put into combining a variety of sounds for an intended purpose. In the reading Show and Tell  we read about comics being a mixture of different types of art (pictures and words). I feel that the same can be applied to music. When powerful words are put to powerful music the feeling is multiplied, but my project is more interested in the base of music and the power carried in the sounds themselves.

Textual Poaching

Artist's Statement
           While serving my mission in Okinawa, Japan I became acquainted with a very learned, local man who taught history at the university level. We chatted with him on several different occasions and our discussions always ended up being deep and philosophical. I grew to respect him very much and although he did not think the church was right for him, he loved learning about it and was respectful in turn. One day he started ranting about how much he hated the US military bases on the island. He told us of a US Marine helicopter crash landing near an Okinawan elementary school a few years back. I remember being embarrassed to silence as he ranted. I used to live on those bases, furthermore, my father was a helicopter pilot for the Marines! I am not at all ashamed of my father, quite the opposite. I take great pride in my brave father for defending our country, but after living and serving in Japan for over 9 years, even marrying a Japanese woman, I find that some of these old sentiments are using me as the rope in a game of tug of war. I felt the pulling of the opposite side when I visited the Pearl Harbor site on Oahu. I found myself asking "how could they do such a thing?" The same words came to mind when I visited the bombing site in Hiroshima or the war memorials on Okinawa. These historical events were far before my time, but have left troubled waters in my life as they echo from the past.
            My project is symbolic of how I feel being tossed emotionally between the two countries I love. Thematically, it is similar to the photography we looked at in our readings. Although there are no visuals, the audio makes you rethink identity despite race. The powerful positioning of words from the "Star Spangled Banner" and words from US presidents about the war with Japan reflect on how things might have been different and the value of human life. 
            As for the form, I thought of some music accompanied with recordings like Micheal Buble's Christmas album where he sings "I'll be Home for Christmas" with recordings of US military members saying marry Christmas to their families while serving in some foreign land. I felt that putting music that has deep emotion and history attached to it juxtaposed with equally significant voice recordings would make for a power piece about how I feel.   



The Okinawan song at the end is called "Shimanchu nu Takara" and the line is translated to mean: "I wonder how well I know this island on which I was born"