Round Robin

Charlie Cutlass, fraudulent IRS worker, is arrested and dropped in the Alaskan tundra with 10 other inmates to learn teamwork.

 Charlie and his 10 new friends stand around staring at each other to determine for

themselves who will die first.

What Charlie didn’t know is that 5 of his new friends were Choki natives, which

communicated solely by eyebrow expressions.

Suddenly Charlie found himself acutely self-conscious about his own eyebrows. Was he moving them in a polite manner?

Charlie rushed to a mirror and prodded his eyebrows, concerned that his expression would give him away. 

According to DJ Spooky, “there is on one way of seeing anything,” (pg. 9) this claimrang true as we collaborated on a set of group mini-series. Our round robin experience compares well to an exquisite corpse.  What struck me about DJ Spooky’s essay was how he compared the parlor game that the exquisite corpse began as, to the current way the world processes, compiles and stores data (pg. 12).  This project was similar to DJ Spooky’s analysis of Pandora (pg. 13). On Pandora, we hope for certain outcomes, much like when we began our round robins. 

However, Pandora is unable to interpret our wants from the small amount of information we 

give.  Some of the songs it presents are to our liking and others are not, but it continues to churn out songs, sometimes getting progressively further from the source.

This project, on a very small scale, echoes Bryan Pugh’s Star Wars Uncut project, which 

won PrimeTime Emmy in 2010 for Outstanding Achievement in Interactive Media. The director, Bryan, broke down the film Star Wars: A New Hope into fifteen second segments, and asked thousands of internet users to recreate those fifteen seconds in their own way. Each person used their own style and interpreted the movie in their own way, and pieced together, the final product is much greater than the sum of its parts. The final effect is much like what we have here: a cohesive line that can be understood, but an individual artistic flair in each segment which cannot be missed. 

The creative process needs to accommodate adaptation. In the real world, projects could 

very well demand different things at different times from artists and collaborators. Deadlines can change and objectives can morph. I think that theme of adaptation is the strongest point of this assignment, as far as improving oneself is concerned. As we wrote our pieces, and prepared to illustrate them, we had to be ready to improve upon and inject individuality into the prompts set up by our peers. It was definitely interesting trying, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, to 

contribute to the thought processes of others.

Beyond the obvious communication technicalities, this assignment came with its own 

creative challenges. With all prior details a mystery, each of us was given immense creative 

leeway to take the story wherever we wanted it to go. The only constraints, generally speaking, were our resources in composing a visual representation and some kind of coherent link between the new and old story.  Of course taking into account the uniqueness and change of subject matter in each story, we all felt the creative restrictions and liberations while completing this assignment. 

        Collaboration can sometimes result in a more creative piece than if one person had done 

it alone.  Initially, the idea of writing a Tiny Story each day and provide an illustration seemed daunting. But it was surprisingly easier than anticipated, and by Friday my hesitations were gone due to the practice and experience.

Music Mosaic: Play Her Piano

The song 'Play Her Piano' by Glue is an innovative combination of historical and modern sounds. The main melody has the regality of a baroque piece, while the record scratching and digitalized drum beats slip a hip-hop rhythm between the piano strokes. 

The images I have placed with this piece only emphasize Glue's interesting dialogue between the old and the new. Glue cleverly plays the differing tones off of one another, excluding neither one nor the other, but showing that old can slip away to new. I wanted to show this interesting relationship between the past and the present in my images as well. I started by finding historical photographs, and then juxtaposing them with modern icons. The effect was startling and effective. 

I found that as I placed the images together, I discovered new and evocative meanings. Together, the images meant much more than they did on their own. As recovering blind patients met the world in a new way in 'Seeing' by Annie Dillard, I felt I had similar experiences as I encountered familiar images through a new context. Things which had only seemed two dimensional before suddenly popped into a much wider context, as they gained an element of historical dimension. In this way I think that the images are 'historically cubist'. They have the ability to show both sides of history at the same time, a sort of Photoshop Picasso. 

The images represent the music in many ways. First of all, I love that 'Play Her Piano' seems repetitive and almost glitchy, like a skipping record. I realized that history is often the same, coming back to the same places it left, just at a different time. The images I have placed together, though often very different in actuality, are emotionally linked. The trepidation and fear of college graduates relates to the uncertainty of soldiers fighting with their lives for a just cause, as the amazement at exploring the poles must have felt similar to exploring the vastness of space. The song also reminded me of a life story, beginning with a slow and simple beginning, and ending in an abrupt drone. However, as the piece seems to transform from old to new, I didn't want it to be the story of a life, but rather the bridge between lives. I placed a picture of an older woman first, passing on her history to the boy at the end, mouth open to receive it. The boy, much like us all, is taking these stories and understanding each one in the context of his modern, boyhood, world. Though we of this generation are unfamiliar what it would have been like to live in the past, we can compare it to the things that we have experienced, and are able to give our history emotional meaning. 

Thinking and Writing

Tomb Raider: The Believable Killer

With such stiff competition as Zelda, Samus, and a literal endless number of armor-clad gun-wielding heroines, it’s no small honor that Lara Croft was recognized as the most successful human virtual game heroine by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2006. Since the release of the original Tomb Raider game nineteen years ago, the pistol wielding super-woman has paraded her short shorts through eleven video games, two feature films, a number of comic books, and several theme park rides. In March of 2013, Square Enix rebooted the series with the release of the most recent game, titled simply Tomb Raider.

Tomb Raider is not only a reboot of Lara Croft’s storyline, but is also a reexamination of her character. Visually, narratively, and ideologically, Lara Croft has changed from the pixelated fleshy blob of 1996 to a relatable human being. However, Square Enix’s fantastic graphics and candid plotline may unintentionally alarm more than it delights. Tomb Raider invites us to judge this new Lara as a responsible agent as opposed to a morally untouchable oddity, which has its challenges.

The first major change to the Lara of 2013 is a noticeable desexualization. The short shorts, which have stuck with Lara through the preceding seventeen years, have been replaced with more practical work pants. Thanks to sophisticated(and frankly gorgeous)motion capture technology, Square Enix is finally able to present us with a beautiful yet anatomically correct Lara Croft, a drastic improvement from her earlier designs, which were disturbingly over sensualized. One of Tomb Raider’s most unique improvements is its attention to the detailed grime, sweat, and blood which collect on Lara as she works her way through combat filled jungles and caves. The overall effect is a heroine who is not the unrealistically super-powered robot of before, but a real living woman.

This is a welcome development for those bothered with the Tomb Raider Franchise’s oversexualization of women, but the full effect that this realist development has on Tomb Raider as a whole must be carefully considered. Though virtually all encourage embracing realistic representations of capable women as role models, does Square Enix’s humanification of Lara go far enough to make her a fully redeemable character? To answer this question, a closer look at the narrative is required.

Tomb Raider takes place upon an uncharted island, where Lara’s exploration boat has crash landed. Lara must survive in a jungle full of natural dangers and psychopathic cultists. She begins the game, weeping, and wounded, in a position of weakness. Slowly building her confidence, she finds a bow which she uses to defend herself from packs of wolves, but refuses to use her tool as a weapon against human enemies. Up to this point, Lara is extremely easy to relate with. We can see ourselves as Lara, panicking to survive through a situation of intense trauma.

About thirty minutes into the game, Tomb Raider takes a drastic shift, as Lara is accosted by one of her captors, who she must kill with his own handgun. The scene is graphic and appropriately startling, and Lara falls to the ground, dry heaving in shock. At this point, we bond with Lara on a moral level. We can imagine, or at least sympathize with, what she must be feeling. The image of Lara Croft, bleeding, mud splattered, and crying on all fours, is a boldly realistic and arguably positive move for the Tomb Raider franchise.

Unfortunately, what may be the most beautiful moment in all of the Tomb Raider games combined, quickly becomes problematic. Seconds after going into near shock over her first experience as a killer, Lara holsters the pistol and assumes the role like a pro. Within minutes she has more than quadrupled her body count, and as the game progresses she goes on to kill literally hundreds more. By the end of the game, she masters gruesome ‘finishing’ and ‘stealth takedown’ moves using an ice pick, rendered in startling gratuity. The human Lara, who was once so familiar, has become a killing machine.

The effect on the gameplay is disturbing. Lara, who you feel is so much like yourself, is killing with confidence and ease. This differs greatly from most other popular shooting games, where the main character is undeveloped or mostly unimportant(Call of Duty, Battlefield)or is pre-established as an experienced killer(Halo, Assassins Creed). More than these other games, where the main character is either ambiguous or live in such a different world it is excusable, you feel responsible for the killing when you play Tomb Raider. Which in the case of a game which becomes so violent, must be examined and criticized seriously. Tomb Raider, through its strong and remarkable attention to realism, has unfortunately made Lara Croft an unredeemable character.

The reason for the drastic change in style is unclear, as well as the effect it has has had on its players. Video game forums are full of questions about why Square Enix moved Tomb Raider from a fast-paced puzzle game to a full-fledged combat game. Perhaps the recent trend in media to take a more candid approach to war-related trauma inspired Square Enix. Maybe a combination of motion capture technology together with increased demand for video game violence created an unfortunately realistic combination. In any case, Lara Croft’s future does not look much different from her past. A recently released trailer for Rise of the Tomb Raider(2015) shows Lara coping with psychotherapy. Though pleasantly realistic, as anyone returning from the hell of Tomb Raider would most certainly need therapy, the preview becomes as problematic as the previous game. Unbeknownst to her therapist, it appears that Lara is coping with her trauma by going on more adventures, which, the preview does not hesitate to remind us, involves more stealth kills. As 21st century gamers, we are finally confronted with video games that give us shockingly realistic representations of life. It’s high time we started thinking about the effect this may have on our previously morally untouchable virtual heroes.