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.