chat
citizen
We went into this interview without a project -- or at least without a "cause" -- but instead we had a person we wanted to focus on. Relying less on the "institution" and more on the intrinsic values or beliefs that one person -- Jesse Baird -- actually had allowed us to get to the meat of a problem he actually cared about instead of a cookie-cutter "mission." In fact, we tried to prompt Jesse to talk about various topics that we thought might provoke a discussion (politics, abortion, feminism, female circumcision, etc.) but sometimes smaller issues take precedent over these universal issues and can provide a basis to build up to them. Jesse's thoughtful critique of passivity in societal interactions relating to harmful behaviors actually does address sexism, racism, homophobia, rape culture, etc. but not in the rah-rah, grandiose Big Topic way that we are used to in confrontational social settings.
Furthermore, our aim was to capture the actual essence of what Jesse cares about and finds valuable just by himself. Our project is about how not everyone has to be the director of a food bank or spend their Saturdays volunteering at a soup kitchen to be an activist. Jesse, in his everyday interactions with other people, stands up for a cause that isn't getting enough attention from media, politics, society, etc. Moreover, not everybody has the societal influence to start their own campaign or charity, and not everyone has the opportunity or time to make a drastic global change. Thus, it's the day-to-day, interpersonal human interactions that can actually start the ball rolling toward social evolution and away from antiquated paradigms of bigotry and injustice.
As for outside media, we referenced home videos to capture a more realistic aesthetic instead of a clinical and polished experience. In home videos, you get the unedited truth and probably gratuitous material -- like Jesse on the broomstick or screwing around with a camera -- even though not all parts of those moments relate directly to the cause, they still relate to the individual.
game for slay
"Slut-shaming" is a part of colloquial and scholarly vernacular that emerged in the mid-2000's that describes "the act of making, or attempting to make, a woman or girl feel guilty or inferior for certain sexual behaviors, circumstances, or desires that deviate from traditional or orthodox gender expectations, or that which may be considered to be contrary to natural or religious law" (and that definition is from Wikipedia, because I am pond scum). In it's most typical -- and maybe most tragic -- state of being, slut-shaming emerges as besmirching women for their clothing/appearance choices and adhering sexual implications and assumptions to the women based on their dress.
One of the most basic (and cowardly) forms of slut-shaming is cat-calling in any of its many mutations. We are all familiar with the classic Yelling Something Vulgar Out of Car Windows at Women Walking on the Street. There's the stereotypical Construction Workers Verbally Violating Women as They Innocently Pass By. There's the Anonymous Wolf Whistle in a Crowd. All of these, no matter how innocent or well-intended, are forms of sexual harassment. Feeling the right to comment, especially sexually comment, on a woman's body is not only gross and embarrassing, but also misogynistic and derogatory.
My Twine game, "SLUTS R US," features an array of scenarios that hopefully address a wide-ish variety of reactions to slut-shaming and possible misconceptions about what it is and how to deal with it. For example, one of the common yet problematic mindsets that people have is that only women wearing "slutty" clothing will be slut-shamed. This is definitely not the case. Besides the fact that modesty is relative, even women wearing traditionally "decent" clothing may be assaulted for the sight of their body in any clothes. That's why I included clothing options that were more likely to be viewed as "suggestive" -- like a bikini top or a pair of short-shorts -- but I also added the option to pick a übermodest pair of BYU-approved knee-length shorts and a school t-shirt. But no matter what the player chooses to wear, slut-shaming and cat-calling are still problems that they, as literal or virtual women, have to face. That's why the Twine format is so useful in the discussion and education of objectification of women in media/games; instead of trying to talk about how to portray "strong" or "realistic" depictions of women (like Anita Sarkeesian talks about with Stephen Colbert here), Twine forces the player into a position that isn't just a "realistic" woman, it's actually you.
I referenced Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story," in the creation of SLUTS R US, particularly the part where Adichie has to reconcile the fact that she initially believed that all stories were about foreigners with the reality stories can be about anyone and any place. I added an option to my game where players who didn't understand the harm of cat-calling and in fact felt flattered by it could learn about why it's actually offensive and destructive, which hopefully kind of mimics the way Adichie had to come to terms with something she assumed she understood, even though that wasn't the case.
world building
Welcome to FLEA*.
Population: 600 Billion
Year: 3209 A.D.
Swine Flu wiped out the human race in the year 2075. After disrupting
the life cycle of Earth, the only species that was self-sufficient
enough to survive were the genus musmusculus (MICE). After decades of
research, we enter the year 3209 where mice have developed synthetic
human bodies that they use as vessels to carry out every day processes
more effectively and efficiently.
They do so while wearing visors.
They are: Mice In Visors ™.
They work together in cubicles within the pseudo-human skull. Each body contains about 10 mice working together to control the central nervous system.
The mice use these bodies to do everyday life things that they had observed back when humans roamed the earth. But despite their strides to be as human as possible, they still only care about one thing: obtaining food.
And so, in order to get food, they barter with items that they observed to be desirable and beneficial to humans when they existed. Things such as: uncharged iPhones, tampons, cigarette butts, etc. These are all items that they saw humans interact with frequently, and therefore are thought to be important for trade.
The mice have a tacit agreement as to who is in charge. So there is no government, they all just know what their place is in life, and stick it through. This makes for a very peaceful world, and within the body they all work together to create a single mechanism. Mice (In Visors™) are basically successfully doing exactly what present-day humans are trying to do.
Artist's Statement:
(*I guess this is our project. I'm sort of sorry.)
medium whatever
THIS IS A POEM
This is the first stanza.
This is the second stanza.
This is the third stanza.
This is the fourth stanza.
This is the fifth stanza.
This is the sixth stanza.
This is seventh stanza.
This is the eighth stanza.
This is the ninth stanza.
This is the tenth stanza.
This is the eleventh stanza.
This is the twelfth stanza.
---------------------------------------------------
I am a person who has taken one hundred million creative writing and poetry classes. Thus, I've been over the But What Is Poetry? question one hundred million times and in each of these debates we (i.e. me, other students, professors, various scholars who have written essays concerning the problem) inevitably come to a consensus that most things can be considered poetry; even everything is poetry. That said, in the 18th century the But What Is Poetry? debate would have gone quite a bit differently. Poets like Samuel Coleridge and Lord Byron and John Keats relied religiously on the poetic staples that we still discuss in remedial high school English classes: form, rhyme, meter, etc. However, in the anything-goes, internet-heavy, artistic free-for-all that is the 21st century, poetry doesn't have to be defined by the classicism that it was first designed with. In fact, it doesn't even need to be contained within the parameters of words or language at all.
For instance, prose poetry has become a widely accepted poetic "form" in recent years, yet it's still controversial because traditionalists are asking, "If it's prose, how is it poetry?" And thus the But What Is Poetry? question spins around again and everybody gets all flustered and upset about what poetry can or cannot be. (Check out "The Straightforward Mermaid" by Matthea Harvey and "Heroic Moment" by Charles Simic and see what you think.)
Or Flarf poetry, which has only occurred since the early 21st century and couldn't exist at all without the presence of the internet. Read "Mm-Hmmm" by Gary Sullivan and try not to fall in love.
Another post-internet "form" is the pseudo-spam Twitter account that we all known and luv, "Horse ebooks," which some experimental scholars have not-even-jokingly started analyzing in actual universities as poetry.
Moreover, there's "Drift" by Caroline Bergvall --- which my poetry class studied and analyzed last semester --- that has almost zero concrete language or narrative, and actually relies on scribbled, visual "stanzas" to convey its message. And it's still poetry, despite its apparent lack of recognizable English "language."
There's "In the Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound, which is two measly lines but is featured in basically every single poetry anthology ever. Similarly, there's an actual poetic form called a monostich which is any poem that is composed of a single line. (For example, a monostich by Ralph Hodgson which reads in its entirety: "'Skunks,' the squirrel said, 'are send to try us.'")
And these examples are, like, 0.0001% of all the other experimental poetic forms that exist. There is so much new, weird, avant-garde poetry that is just sort of hanging out on the internet, or in flimsy little chapbooks in indie bookstores, or in new Bohemian anthologies that aren't quite being taught at BYU yet.
In crafting my own medium-specific poem, I came upon the problem that if I accepted everything as poetry --- or everything as art --- then this project became extremely difficult in its inherent prescription of finding loopholes and nuances to work with. If everything is poetry, then there is no specificity to explore, you know? So finally I decided to mess with poetic form in all the ways I've been describing. Like, "If a poem is ______, then is it ______." So the tenth "stanza" --- which is constructed of regular English words --- then links you/the audience to a .jpg of a few panels of the comic Orc Stain via the internet (is the process of the linking part of the poetry?), and thus says, "Okay, so this comic is poetry." Then stanza eleven links you to a Girls music video, and says, "Not only is this video poetry, but also the song is poetry." And then stanza twelve links you to a clip from Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla, so that film is poetry, and Godzilla is poetry, and Mechagodzilla is poetry, and the characters' dialogue is poetry, etc. etc.
It's like in the excerpt from Understanding Comics, when Young Scott McCloud says, "Sure, I realized that comic books were usually crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable, kiddie fare -- BUT -- they don't have to be!" In poetic terms, I come from a place that started out as, "Sure, I realized that poems were usually stiff, flowery, rhyming, pretentious, esoteric, highbrow, formulas -- BUT -- they don't have to be!" They can be whatever ~thing~ a person messes with, that calls on tropes of the nature of speech (if not speech itself), or that uses one thing/process/idea/feeling to describe (in whatever form that describing actually takes) to describe another thing/process/idea/feeling.
histories: rabbit baby
Moreover, this project was also reminiscent of Drunk History because of its collaborative nature, and the way two ideas of an event or a story don’t quite line up perfectly when two or more people are trying to portray the ideas in the biased way that they think they happened/should happen. In Drunk History, it’s the collaboration between the actual historical event and the drunken storyteller and finally the actors attempting to kind of enact both things at once. In this assignment, it was two writers trying to wrestle two different views of what a story should look like into one space.
process piece: i am zelda and you are too
The Process Piece assignment is similar to Listen To A Movie based on the fact that both projects center around subjects or events that were meant to be heard and viewed, and once you take away the visual element you get a completely new kind of media and art. Without an image to accompany a sound—especially a sound process—it's easy for a listener to make different interpretation based on their stunted knowledge of the subject at hand. Our piece is about video games being played—a process that one hundred percent depends on the ability to see what's happening on the screen—and the unmistakeable sounds of gameplay and human interaction doesn't need to be illustrated with pixelated cartoon characters.