Talking to Strangers: A Fireside Chat

I actually had a really hard time coming up with something to talk about for this project. I had to do some real self-examination to find a topic that I thought would work well for this project. I ended up thinking about my most significant experiences from the past few years, and I realized that they all involved people that had been strangers to me at one point. From there I was able to develop that idea into my presentation. The soul pancake video I used in my presentation was something that I had posted on my personal blog about a year ago, and it fit perfectly into my topic so it was great to be able to use that.

Talking to strangers really is something I feel strongly about. I love stories and I am fascinated by people. The story I shared was a time in my life that I was really able to interact and connect with another human being on a deep level without knowing them very well. That experience awakened something in me and ever since then, I’ve been a lot more aware of the people around me, the strangers and the people that I do know.

One thing that I gained from this project was a better understanding of myself as a person and how I think about my own beliefs. This project required me to really dig deep and ask myself what I really believe in. What I realized is that a lot of my beliefs are more like ideas floating around in my head instead of things actually solidified into words. After making that realization, I wrote an entry in my journal in which a solidified several of my central beliefs. It was a really important experience for me, because it offered me an opportunity to shape a part of myself that I had kind of been afraid to touch before.

I also really loved watching the presentations from everyone in our class, and I was so sad that I wasn’t able to see all of them. I love learning things about people and it was so cool to get insights into parts of people that we don’t normally have when we interact in class. It was cool to have this project right after the exercise in empathy, because it helped me connect to everyone on a deeper level. I’m really sad that this class is ending, because I’ve learned so much about art and about myself as well, and I want to keep going!

~Brontë Campbell

Making the World a Better Place

Artist Statement:

For this project Jacob and I decided to talk to some friends we had who were doing humanitarian work. We ended up going with my friend Kyla’s story. She’s a dance education major and she’s currently doing an internship in India with a couple different organizations. I had her send me pictures and videos, as well as a description of her experience that we could put into the documentary.

It was really interesting to get her overview of the experience as well as get a glimpse of what she’s been able to learn through her experiences. It was also cool for me, because I know her pretty well to see the way this experience has changed her and how her perspective has shifted as a person, and as a teacher.

I wish we would have been able to get more footage of her interacting with the kids and more of her just talking about her experiences. I kind of want to do a re-make when she comes home in May and actually sit down and interview her about the experience, and talk about everything that she’s gained from it.

The biggest difficulty we had with this project was getting enough material together to make an informative documentary. (It’s especially difficult when your subject is halfway across the world). If I were to do it over again, I would definitely start earlier and work on gathering the media ahead of time, and possibly try to get an interview, whether over skype or chat or something.

One thing I really gained from doing this project was a realization of just how powerful and influential art can be in a society. Something that really stuck out to me in this week’s reading was “Artists expand social imagination, helping us envision the transformations we hope to bring about, stimulating our thoughts and feelings toward the new attitudes and ideas that will drive recovery.” I definitely agree with that, and I think that if more artists realized the power they had to inform and drive social change, the world would be in a very different place.

~Brontë Campbell

Changing the Game

 Over and Out 

Artist Statement:

This project was actually really difficult for me. I had a hard time coming up with a way to make a game about an issue that I’m passionate about without making it overdramatic or offensive in some way. Also, I am completely inept at video/computer games of any kind (except for Typershark, which doesn’t really count). So this project really challenged me on several levels.

The TED Talk we watched really made me want to find an issue that isn't really considered by many people, but is still a big issue. As I was racking my brain, I finally settled on one that I feel doesn’t get much attention in the media, and is actually something that I care a lot about: the extreme number of homeless veterans. In my research I found that between 529,000 and 840,000 veterans are homeless at some time during the year, and on any given night, there are more than 300,000 veterans living on the streets. I also found that veterans are twice as likely as regular citizens to become chronically homeless.

Coming from a family with a strong military background (my father, several uncles, and one grandfather have all served in the armed forces), this disturbed me greatly. Here are men and women who have spent significant amounts of time serving their country, and they don’t even have a home in that country they were willing to give their lives to defend. It just seems wrong.

I was having kind of a difficult time figuring how to translate this into a game until I looked at some of the top reasons veterans become homeless. One of those reasons was PTSD. PTSD is extremely difficult to overcome, and it can be extremely detrimental to a soldier trying to live a civilian life after being in combat. I decided to center my game around the experience of PTSD, and the struggle it presents. The monsters in the game represent the “monsters” and the terror that PTSD creates. The escape pod represents the escape from PTSD as well as an escape from homelessness.

In my research I also came across several organizations that are working to resolve this problem of homeless veterans. There are foundations such as U.S. VETS that provides shelter for homeless veterans and helps them find steady employment to get them back on their feet. Other organizations such as Veterans NOW are doing similar things to help veterans integrate back into society and readjust into civilian life.

Reading and learning more about this issue actually made me want to get more involved, and do something to help. I’ve always been taught to have respect for those who fight for our freedom, and I believe that the least we can do is make sure they have a decent quality of life when they return home.

~Brontë Campbell

 
Sources:
http://www.veteransinc.org/about-us/statistics/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/03/homeless-veterans_n_4890972.html

/http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/03/stephen-peck-son-of-movie-legend-leads-homeless-veterans-group/

Webspinna - It's Battle Time

THX

20th Century Fox

Action!

Scores

Inigo Montoya Quote

Movie Quotes 1

Movie Quotes 2

Movie Speeches 

Applause

Artist Statement:

Being completely honest, I was really nervous to do this project. However, it turned out to be one of my favorite projects we’ve done all semester. My partner and I didn’t actually get to perform on Friday night, but I was able to go and watch all of the other performances. It was so much fun and so interesting to see what people picked for their battle personas, and which sounds that went along with them.

For our Webspinna Battle, Hannah and I chose to do Theatre vs. Film. It was a fun and interesting choice for us because we both come from theatre and film backgrounds, so we each understood the other side really well. It was also just a lot of fun because we had so much to work with. We kind of mapped it out to where it was kind of a story. We each started out with an introduction to how a film or a play would start. Then we threw in things that are unique to plays and films and juxtaposed them against each other. After that we wanted to sort of slow things down a bit before the big finish. Toward the end of our battle we chose louder and more spectacular songs to build up to the finish, and then we ended together, with applause.

Our thoughts in doing all of this was that we wanted to address this kind of weird clash that film and theatre seem to have going on. We wanted to highlight the unique parts of each, but we also wanted to tie them together, because both mediums are trying to do essentially the same thing: tell a story. We thought that by combining sounds and elements of each medium to tell our story would be the best way to illustrate this.

In a way, this assignment is a lot like what Jonathan Letham talks about in The Ectasy of Influence. We were taking small snippets of sounds from various places and combining them to make something entirely different. Art lends itself to this kind of thing, and often old things can become new in someone else’s hands. This project was a really cool exploration of that concept, and it opened up so many creative channels that I hadn’t even recognized before.

~Brontë Campbell

 

A Whole New World

Artist Statement: 

For this project I worked with Max and Jesse to create a world where people regenerate when they die. We had several interesting conversations about what that would mean for a world, and on how it would even work. We decided that when people regenerated that they would show up at a ‘regeneration point’. Regeneration points were a major factor when we considered the layout of the world. Also, because death and regeneration are the norm in this world, we thought it would be fun to make a “how to” pamphlet for kids, like you would find at a doctor’s office, to explain the process in simple terms.

We also talked a lot about extreme sports, because if death wasn’t a factor, extreme sports would be on a whole new level. We asked ourselves this question: What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about dying? Thus the Gladiator Games were born. Basically it’s similar to regular gladiator fights, but there is also an extreme sports aspect to it. We decided that it would be similar to our Olympics, a worldwide sporting event that people train for and try to win different prizes.

We decided that dying and regenerating in this world would be painful, so that there was a cost associated with this ability. That way we were able to bring politics into it, with the invention of the Restart injection. We wanted to have something that could be potentially revolutionary, and think about the issues that would come with it. I got to write this piece and it actually was a lot of fun trying to come up with arguments for each side, and reasons for and against it.

In Design Fiction, Julian Bleeker mentions that it is essentially linking the imagination to its material form and that’s exactly what this project was like for me. I was able to take a world that we had just made up and come up with substance from that world. It made me think of J.R.R. Tolkien, and how he created entire languages for the people of Middle Earth, which in turn gave substance to that world, and made it a tiny bit more real.

To me World Building is an especially spiritual kind of creativity. In trying to build a small portion of this fictional world I became more aware of exactly how much incredible detail is put in to the world around us.  With this realization I became even more convinced that God is real, because how could He not be? Everything around us is overflowing with His signature, and I am so grateful for the beautiful world He has built for all of us.

~Brontë Campbell 

Pinned Down

Artist Statement:

For this project I decided to focus on my identity as a woman, and how women have historically been represented in the media. The main issue I wanted to explore with this project is that of objectification.

Objectification (particularly of women) is not a new thing. It's been going on for thousands of years, and there are plenty of media examples to prove it. Pin up girls fall into this category. It's really kind of sickening how they are made to look more like playthings than actual human beings. 

In the Jenkins reading he quotes the Velveteen Rabbit and talks about how a toy is more than it's material qualities. If it's true about a toy, which is an actual object, how much more true is it about a living, breathing person? As a woman, I want to be valued for more than the material, external qualities I possess.

I chose to use pin up girls as my historical representation because they represent the purely physical and materialistic aspects of women. In my alterations to the pictures, I drew some inspiration from René Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" painting. I borrowed some of his phrasing when labeling the pictures however, I chose to put my labels in first person in order to give the girls a voice that they've clearly been denied in these pictures. They are made to look like decorations rather than actual people.   

This representation of women is hard for me to negotiate with. In fact, in this project I pretty much outright rejected it. Women are not toys. We are not prizes. We are not objects. We are not decorations. My interpretation of myself goes far beyond my physical characteristics. I am more than the sum of my parts. 

~Brontё Campbell