Courtney Kendrick

The readings this past week talked a lot about how humans interact with other humans. It focused specifically on human rights but it also discussed what one group of people thought about another group of people. This goes well with the direction our documentary took. We decided to interview Courtney Kendrick. She currently works in the Provo City mayor’s office as a creative director. She works closely with a lot of the departments in the city and tries to help support the arts and major creativity aspects of the city. She also helps to plan and execute the rooftop concert series every year. She is very involved with the music scene here and local artists.

            In the documentary, Courtney talks about the problems she sees around the city, and then about ways she has worked to remedy them. She says a lot of the problems in our community have to do, at their core, with Provo being a very non-diverse city. A lot of the people have the exact same upbringing and background, so people don’t work to make necessary changes to support those who are oppressed. Courtney works specifically to help women and those in minority groups to have a stronger voice in local politics and in business settings.

          Courtney's attention to Provo's lack of diversity is really important for our community. She is one of many women in communities throughout the world striving to make change in regards to representation of women and people of color in politics, media, and the workforce. As Media Arts students, we should look to what she is doing and see how we can apply the same thoughtful, respectful, and diligent work into our own field. In December of last year, American actress Jessica Chastain wrote an essay about the production she was currently working on, The Zookeeper's Wife, directed by the female filmmaker Niki Caro. She says "I can't tell you-- it's amazing. I've never been on a set with so many women. We're not even 50 percent of the crew- we're probably something like 20 percent women and 80 percent men-- but it's way more than I've ever worked with before. Thee are female producers, a female screenwriter, a female novelist, a female protagonist and a female director." Chastain talks about how she strives to add to diversity in Hollywood, and acknowledges that while you want to work with people based on talent, some talented people have a much bigger hill to climb. 

          And that's true here in Provo. As humans, we find comfort in the familiar. It's difficult to be surrounded by people with a different set of values and beliefs, we naturally homogenize. However by doing that, we are missing out on a world of growth and peace. So when Courtney talks about making Provo a safe zone for the 2% that don't fit into the white/LDS category, she is talking about making Provo better. And that might go against a lot of people's views, but that's part of being a concerned citizen- considering views that aren't your own, and working to make your community a place that isn't just about you. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xstn7l1AIz8&feature=youtu.be

Step In to My Brain

I was really inspired by the depression game for this assignment. I really enjoy the ability to immerse someone into a world, which is why I love video games in the first place. I was really interested in the way the depression game helped the player to understand what it is like to have a mental illness. I wanted to make a game that did something similar. I think mental illness is something people have a really hard time understanding. Eventually I decided to make a game about social anxiety. This is something I struggle with a lot, so I thought I would be able to design the game in a much more productive way.

At first, I thought this one would be too similar to the depression game so I decided to isolate my game to being at a party. This would help me to design the game in a more relatable way. Everyone has been around a “weird” kid at the party, and I wanted to make a game that helps other people understand why that person won’t talk to them or seems unfriendly. The game puts the player into the shoes of someone with anxiety to help them get that these people need some kind of validation. They need to know they are loved and wanted. My game’s aesthetic is just black and white, with a simple sans serif font. It shows the bland feeling one gets at social events. The game also gets progressively more pessimistic as it progresses. I also purposely made only two options on every section. With anxiety, it feels like options are very limited, and that's what I want the player to feel.

According to the social anxiety institute, social anxiety has a lot to do with a fear of being judgment. Social anxiety makes a person believe other people don’t really want to be around them. They have an irrational fear that people are always judging they way they do just about everything to the point they don’t want to be anywhere near other people. According to the Social Anxiety Association people have the perception that people are withdrawn or unfriendly. This perception becomes even less helpful because then the person with social anxiety assumes other people don’t want to be around them. This person’s self esteem is even further impacted.

An article in Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Attitudes written by Mark R. Leary describes a test that is used to show the level of social anxiety one has. I used this test to show when some of the most intense moments of social anxiety come. This includes ability to interact with others, go to social events, and the amount of time wants to stay, or feels welcome at said events.

http://philome.la/TheVanM/sociophobia

New World, New Body, New Way of Life

In his essay on design fiction, Julian Bleecker explores the relationship between science, fiction, and design. Essentially, Blecker concludes that the three are invariably connected when it comes to how we perceive, understand, and create the world around us. If we look at today’s artifact culture as an example, we are surrounded by items that help us function smoothly in society. Cars allow us to get around, beauty products make people look younger and more attractive, psychological and social sciences inform us how other people work, textbooks teach doctors how to fix bodies, etc. One of the most fitting representations of our culture is, perhaps, the magazines such as Time or Cosmopolitan that synthesize our advertisements, trends, theories, and sexual attractions into one concise representation of our world.  

So what if our world were different than it is now? What if we changed something fundamentally and watched a new culture, a new design, a new magazine develop from the results? Our group decided to develop this new design culture in a world where people woke up in different bodies every day.

The first cultural design element that would change is our experience of human aesthetic. Suddenly, we wouldn’t have the constancy of our bodies to rely on every day. Our group figured that body shape, size, color, etc. would lose most of their significance. Makeup as an enhancer of physical features would, therefore, be useless. People would, however, be looking for ways to distinguish themselves every day. A name tag, of sorts, constructed with cosmetics. Instead of relying on faces for recognition, people might depend on individual makeup branding.

With our ever changing aesthetic and cosmetic insignias, we would need a different convention for defining attractiveness. Perfume fits the bill. Scent is a non-visual element, yet it plays a major role in human magnetism and sexuality. We decided that if all visual cues for allure were gone, scent alone would define youth, fertility, and beauty.

Since we would not be able to control our changing bodies or their internal health, health care in our hypothetical world is based on the idea that body transitions aren’t all that comfortable. If we lived in a world where everyone’s body was constantly being altered, it would be logical that the healthcare system would try to make those transitions as painless as possible. Most health would be devoted to giving sedatives to people who experience painful transitions.

Psychology introduces another interesting aspect of a changing society. How do people rationalize individual identity with such a liquid physical representation of self? How, more specifically, can parents teach their children self esteem when the idea of ‘self’ is so abstractly disconnected from anything concrete? At least for this issue of our magazine, we decided to focus on the development of a consistent sense of self as a spotlight issue in psychology.

The American "Dream"

To represent a theme, a character, an idea, or a setting sonically, is the work of many talented people in the media industry. Whether it’s mixing songs for a radio show, a DJ mixing sounds for a live performance, or a sound mixer creating a soundscape for a film, each delivery of music, spoken word, and sound effect communicates an idea, sometimes so iconically that image provokes an accompanying sound. In our piece, “The American Dream Webspinna Battle,” we explore the iconic places of America, and the sounds associated with those places through the minds of an optimistic, patriotic believer and a cynical, doubting American-mythbuster.

In Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence,” he attributes the success of Jazz and Blues music to an open source culture, where the music in this landscape is reworked by musicians and other musicians. In our conception of our work, we referred only to existing sounds and music to portray our idea, using the recognizability and cultural cultural context of a sound in order to shape a bigger theme. Our theme was the myth and perception of the American Dream represented by three iconic American places: Disneyland, Hollywood, and New York City. Each place is introduced with a song that is considered a possible theme for that place. (Main Street Music from Disneyland, Party in the USA for LA, and Empire State of Mind for NYC). We tried to sonically portray each place as a idealistic glimmer with upbeat music and pleasant soundbites, then broke it down with its darker counterparts. A child screaming and screeching cha ching allude to the capitalist and miserable side effects of Disneyland, horror music from the very films to come out of Hollywood refers to the darker contributions of the film world to society, and police sirens and gunshots refer to the anxiety and fear associated with crime in urban America. However, with our final sound clip, we push aside the over-glorified and over-demonized aspects of a specific cultural context, and replace it with sounds that represent a universal connection that attributes to a true ideal.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a pretty big inspiration of the idea’s we were trying to present. The Great Gatsby is a good illustration of the expectations vs. reality of United States society. We often think our concepts of what America should be like will be what it is like in actuality. We are devastated when we find out we worked so hard only to accomplish very little. Though it seems like a little at first, we come to find out that it is sufficient. Success in careers, families, and other aspects of marriage are little bits of the American dream that are attainable. This relates heavily to the ideas Fitzgerald was trying to present.

Through Mormonism

I knew what I wanted to do for this assignment almost immediately after it was given to us. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always had a weird relationship with my religion. Not a bad one by any means. I feel like I have always been a fairly religious person. Despite this, I think I have always taken a much different path than those of my peer group. There was a time in my life when I got really into raves and EDM. This was something I felt the need to express when I got this assignment. At first I wanted to find an actual painting of the Joseph Smith portrait I just found. Later I decided to do it on Photoshop because I liked the way pieces of photos fit together.

            There is a very unique artist named Matt Paige who inspired the work I did. He’s what I would call a “Mormon pop artist.” He takes existing photos and paintings of church leaders and turns them into something modern, or clever. I took his idea of taking religious art, and making it into something modern that really related to me. In this case, I used my past and combined it with a very important piece of art to a religion that is very important to me.

The readings talked about taking something and detaching it from the artist or even the subject matter. The art suddenly belongs completely to the audience and they are allowed to do with it what they will. The art I chose is something very important to me and does help me to think more about my religion. I do honestly think my view of the piece was never really what the artist wanted it to be. I feel like the artist was meant to depict Joseph as a great and powerful man, but with my remix, he becomes me. Joseph was always someone trying to find who God really was, and I feel like I found something unique and spiritual about music and the closeness I experienced at raves. This, I feel, was nothing like what the artist actually intended, but that is what the portrait became for me.

I never really saw the portrait as a way for me to show my own navigation through my religion until we got this assignment. I am now, however, very glad I came to see it this way. It made me think a lot about my past and the reason I made the decisions I did. It was cool to see how my two lives merged into this new portrait.