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trinuviel · 5 years

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A Lady’s Armour - Some thoughts on Sansa Stark’s season 8 black dress (part 2)

The final season of Game of Thrones is airing next month and promo season is upon us, which means a first look at the new costumes. A few weeks back Sophie Turner caused a bit of a stir when she told Entertainment Weekly that Sansa Stark would be wearing jet-black leather armour in the final season of the show. Promotional photos revealed this be more of a warrior dress than actual armour. Turner was photographed wearing what looks to become a show-stopping blue-black leather dress composed of innumerable tiny leather flaps composed in an overlapping pattern.

It is a dress that has caused much speculation online - what is that overlapping pattern supposed to represent? Are they supposed to represent feathers, dragon scales or fish scales? In my previous essay on this costume, I considered various possibilities and found that the most likely answer is that the dress is supposed to evoke fish scales as the texture of the costume is extremely similar to the leather armour of House Tully, the family that Sansa’s mother was born into and while Sansa’s costumes has included subtle references to her mother’s House in the past, those references have always been connected to her mother’s style and never to the clothes of the male members of House Tully.

However, Sansa’s new dress not only evokes elements from her previous costumes, it also is a bit similar to a costume worn by Cersei Lannister, which is what I intend to discuss in this essay.

DARK SANSA

Besides fish scales, the texture of Sansa’s new costume also evokes feathers. I want to return to the feathers because it is an element that has appeared in some Sansa’s previous costumes and the question remains what these feathered costumes mean in relation to her story on the show. The use of actual feather as a costume element that is unique to Sansa’s character - and they appear in two costumes that have been worn in seasons 4-5 and 6.

The black dress with the collar of raven feathers that she dons at the end of season 4 as well as the dark grey dress with the feathered panel on her bodice that she wears in season 7.

The black colour and the iridescence of the leather dress primarily brings the raven dress to mind. It was a costume that caused quite a bit of attention both in the fandom and in the press, where it is often referred to Sansa’s Maleficent-dress (x).

David Benioff about that moment in the season 4 finale when Sansa appears in her new black dress: “We call it Dark Sansa” (Silk, Leather and Chainmail: Costumes of Season 4). It is a sort in-joke between the crew and Michele Clapton also uses this term once (x). But this dress is generally interpreted as an expression of Sansa stepping onto a darker path by the audience (x).

Sansa Stark only started wearing black when she came under the influence of Petyr Baelish - so does a return to the colour black indicate that Sansa will go dark in season 8? That she’ll plot against Daenerys who comes to Winterfell expecting to be hailed as their new Queen? That she’ll plot against Jon because he allied with Daenerys and bent the knee? Well, one of Sophie’s new interviews can certainly be read that way - if you are entrenched in the idea of Dark Sansa.

“Sansa this season is very much enjoying becoming a leader in her own right, and this year there are certain challenges by people who threaten that.” (Sophie Turner, EW)

Personally, I very much doubt that Sansa will turn dark in the final season of the show - that narrative of her being tempted by power and Baelish’s ambitions was resolved in season 7. However, it is worth keeping in mind that the showrunners like to tease Dark Sansa very much as part of their game of misdirection since they value surprising narrative twists to shock the audience. Fx the promise of Sansa becoming a dark femme fatale that the black raven dress teased in the finale of season 4 never materialized. Instead, we saw Sansa put in another, even more abusive situation in season 5.

In season 7, the showrunners teased Dark Sansa once more because they wanted to mislead the audience regarding the conflict between Sansa and Arya. This is an excerpt from the script:

However, the scripts are written in terms of audience perspective, i.e. what the showrunners want the audience to think at the various moments of the narrative. Shortly afterwards, the show revealed that there was no Dark Sansa - the whole thing was a ruse to trick Baelish - and the audience.

So despite the Dark Sansa nickname, the black raven feathered costume never signified Sansa turning to the dark side in the game of thrones. In this context, it is actually very important that Sansa wears her dress with the feathered panel, which refers back to the raven dress, when she pronounces the sentence of death on Baelish - because the feathers refer to her time under his tutelage:

“There’s feathers again from her time in the Eyrie.” (Michele Clapton, UpRoxx)

This particular costume is also a sort of deconstruction of the black raven dress as @lostlittlesatellites points out (x). It is, in fact, a repudiation of Baelish and his ambitions since the feathers represent her time under his tutelage.

Despite people thinking that the black raven dress signifies a darker turn for Sansa with her becoming some kind of evil femme fatale, this aspect was actually never mentioned when costumier Michele Clapton discussed this particular costume:

“We’ve always known that Sansa makes her own clothes, so it was a very deliberate decision of hers, to change and say, ‘I’m not going to be pushed around. I’m going to take charge.’ […] “When she comes down the stairs, she’s playing with it like, ‘This is me, taking control of this situation.’” (Michele Clapton, The Cut)

David and Dan came to me with the idea of a transformation for Sansa. They wanted her to be her own woman rather than this victim. […] It’s meant to be as if she is somewhat reborn while mourning for all that she has lost. […] The metal piece is really a miniature of Arya’s sword, Needle, and the idea is that there’s a ring that you stitch through and then that’s her weapon. I like that she carries it when she descends the stairs, now she’s armed and it’s a link to her family.

It’s so easy to make someone look strong, but if you don’t think about the story, it’s kind of a wasted gesture. She could have probably looked even more amazing if I had put the reasoned arguments of where it could have come from aside, but ultimately, it makes it a stronger look if it’s a more believable transition. (Michele Clapton, Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones season 3 and 4)

When Clapton speaks of this costume it is solely within the context of transformation, strength and mourning. People have tendency to equate black with “evil” because it is an age-old symbolic connection in Western culture - but when it comes to the costumes in Game of Thrones we have to compare how Clapton uses the colour, both in relation to other characters as well as within the narrative arc of the individual character.

Mourning

When it comes to the colour black, Clapton primarily uses it as a sign of mourning. Cersei and Margaery don black dresses after the death of Joffrey and while Cersei’s grief is genuine, Margery’s is performative yet she still wears black because she’s now a Dowager Queen like Cersei. Olenna also wears black after the deaths of her son and her grand-children in season 6. At the end of season 4, Sansa has lost her father, her mother and her eldest brother - and had been forced to witness her enemies mock those deaths - and while she knows that Arya is alive, she believes Bran and Rickon to be dead. In King’s Landing she couldn’t mourn her dead family openly so it makes sense for her to adopt the colour black when she’s finally free of King’s Landing and the Lannisters. This is actually the first time that she can express her grief openly.

Transformation

The raven dress also marks a complete change of style for Sansa - one that she authors herself as we actually see her making this costume.

“We’ve always known that Sansa makes her own clothes, so it was a very deliberate decision of hers, to change” (Michele Clapton, The Cut)

The raven dress thus signals a sort of rebirth, of Sansa trying to forge a new way ahead, reinventing herself.

One thing that is noteworthy about the raven dress is the plunging neckline, which is a completely new element because Sansa’s costumes have never been sexualized, even when when sex is explicitly brought up in her scenes (x) or when she’s made the object of other people's desire, like Tyrion’s in season 3 (x) and Baelish’ in season 4. At this point in the story, Sansa is still a virgin and really very innocent about sex - so the plunging neckline and the somewhat seductive poise she attempts in the scene when she debuts her raven dress feels like an uneasy fit. It is meant to entice, inviting the Male Gaze in a way that her costumes have never done before (or since). Sansa’s raven dress also represents her entry into the game as well as her attempt to play Baelish since she thinks that she has identified what he wants (her). She puts on an identity that doesn’t fit her because she isn’t a seductive femme fatale, she’s still an innocent who is attempting to enter a game she hasn’t mastered yet.

Strength

Clapton also talks about the raven dress in terms of strength. Sansa has created this dress as a way to to express her wish not to be a victim anymore:

“When she comes down the stairs, she’s playing with it like, ‘This is me, taking control of this situation.’” (Michele Clapton, The Cut)

David and Dan came to me with the idea of a transformation for Sansa. They wanted her to be her own woman rather than this victim. (Michele Clapton, Inside HBO’s Game of Thrones season 3 and 4)

So while the raven dress is, in a sense, Sansa trying on an identity that doesn’t quite fit her (seductive femme fatale), it also serves as an attempt to project strength.

When it comes to the connection between the raven dress and the season 8 leather dress, we have to try to determine which of these aspects (mourning, transformation, strength) of the raven are applicable to the new season 8 costume. In my opinion, Sansa’s new costume is first and foremost an image of strength - but whereas the raven dress was Sansa’s way of trying to make herself feel strong, her season 8 battle dress is not just about herself. She is now a leader, the Lady of Winterfell and the head of House Stark - when she takes pains to project an image of strength through her clothes it is not just for herself but also for her people.

A dire situation

Sansa’s battle dress is black and Clapton primarily uses black as a colour of mourning - so does Sansa’s new costume indicate that she’s in mourning? She still grieves her lost family members but I don’t think that this new dress indicates a new loss. Rather, it is much more likely that it is connected to the dire situation all the characters find themselves in, which is reflected in the costumes of the three ruling women.

When talking about her plans for season 7, Clapton emphasized the use of darker colours:

The situation is becoming very serious and in some ways the darker colours sort of tell that story better ... everything is just slowly closing down and I think it makes it more oppressive. That’s the idea anyway.” (Michele Clapton, IGN Live SDCC 2016)

In season 8, the Long Night is finally upon Westeros. The situation could not be more oppressive since it is the very survival of mankind that is at stake. In that sense it is perfectly appropriate that Sansa wears a costume that is jet-black, the deepest and darkest black in the spectrum of colour. However, jet-black is a glossy colour and it is clear that Sansa’s costume reflects light. This choice is probably partly due to practical reasons so that Sansa won’t disappear in any night scenes. However, I do find the use of a glossy black that reflects light interesting because in terms of colour theory black is an achromatic colour that absorbs light.

Black is the darkest color, the result of the absence or complete absorption of visible light. It is an achromatic color, literally a color without hue, like white and gray. (Wikipedia)

In this context, using a glossy black that reflects light instead of completely absorbing it is a very interesting and suggestive choice.

LIKE CERSEI?

Many people have pointed out that Sansa’s new leather dress seem similar to Cersei’s infamous coronation gown, which is also made of black leather.

Whenever there are similarities in style between Sansa and Cersei both the fandom and the press jump to the conclusion that Sansa is becoming Cersei 2.0 and that she’ll turn against her family (x). I find this incredibly annoying because:

Sansa’s style in the later seasons is about incorporating everything that has happened to her, which also includes the people she has learnt from - and while she has learned from them, she never adopts their ambitions or their toxic “wisdom”.

Michele Clapton deliberately plays with the similarities and differences between the three ruling women in season 7 - a trend that I’m sure will continue in season 8 as well.

It is a lazy argument that doesn’t take the narrative arcs of these two characters into account.

There are certain visual similarities between some of Cersei’s seasons 6 and 7 costumes and Sansa’s new season 8 costume in that they all are black, have high collars and sport textured surfaces.

There are, however, also significant differences. Let’s begin with Cersei’s coronation dress, which she debuted in the finale of season 6 where she took the Iron Throne in her own right. While April Ferry took over as costume designer for season 6, Clapton was hired to design four costumes for the season finale (two for Daenerys and two for Cersei).

Like Sansa’s new season 8 costume, Cersei’s coronation dress is made from light-weight black leather - and it has a textured surface.

To mark the character’s triumphant milestone, the show’s Emmy-winning costume designer Michele Clapton returned to the series to create the episode’s badass costume centerpiece—a coronation gown made from lightweight Italian-cut leather (from D’Alessio Galliano) and silver and black textured brocade (from London’s Altfield). (Michele Clapton, Vanity Fair)

However, just as the similarities are important so are the differences - and there are marked differences between Cersei’s season 7 costumes and Sansa’s new season 8 gown.

Firstly, the silhouette and construction are different. Sansa’s costume is side-laced and it doesn’t have a slit to display an underskirt like Cersei’s coronation gown. Furthermore, while Sansa’s gown evokes the leather armour of the Tullys (x), she doesn’t wear actual pieces of armour like Cersei does with her steel pauldrons.

Another significant aspect is the fact that Cersei’s season 7 costumes are made of heavier fabrics that Sansa’s new leather dress. If you look at how Sansa’s new dress drapes compared to how Cersei’s season 7 dresses drape, you can see that Sansa’s dress drapes softly in a way that indicates that the material isn’t stiff or heavy. When we look at Cersei’s costumes we see the opposite, they all drape rather stiffly - even the coronation dress because while it is made of light-weight leather, this thin material is placed over textured brocade, which is a heavier fabric.

Cersei’s season 7 costumes are all stiff and heavy, which combined with the armour and the high and tight collars indicate that she is in a defensive position. She may be Queen but she is surrounded by enemies: “Enemies to the east, enemies to the west, enemies to the south, enemies to the north.”

So while Sansa’s black leather dress does have a superficial similarity with Cersei’s black leather coronation dress, that doesn’t mean that she’s turned into a mini Cersei because there are also significant differences.

It is, as I said, a lazy argument, especially since Sansa’s new warrior look references the traditional Tully armour far more than Cersei Lannister’s coronation dress. We should also bear in mind that Cersei debuts an entirely new look in season 8. Interestingly, Clapton says that Cersei’s season 7 look is in a sense a transitional look:

“With Cersei, at this point, she’s attained the throne and there’s a strength in her embroidery. It’s actually quite ornate and over the top and that’s a precursor in a funny way — it’s the last gasp before something else, in my sense.” (Michele Clapton, Insider)

We actually see the sartorial change in the very last episode of season 7 where Cersei attends the meeting in the Dragonpit wearing a dress that looks like finely wrought chain-mail under a black coat with a slashed pattern on the back.

For the stand-out dragonpit outfit in Episode 7 however, Clapton used a chain-mail style dress and a black molded coat, with one telling design ‒ a slashed pattern on the back of the queen’s coat. “I knew she was lying,” Clapton explains what inspired the look. “Something about the slashing and the twisting told you a lot about her character, a contradiction of the costume from the front. It’s almost like a sting in the tail, something on edge as you see her walk away: there’s something really disturbing about this woman.” (Michele Clapton, Making Game of Thrones)

From the promotional photos and the trailer we can see that Clapton has built Cersei’s new look around this slashed pattern. @lostlittlesatellites has written a very interesting essay on this new style of Cersei’s, arguing that the slashed pattern, which Clapton calls a “stinger”, could refer to a scorpion and that it represents an aggressive stance on Cersei’s part.

If we compare Sansa’s leather dress with Cersei’s new look, we can see that there are actually not many similarities, hardly any, in fact. They both wear a chain of some sort and there’s an symbolic “armour” aspect to both costumes but that is pretty much it.

Sansa and Cersei have unfinished business and I very much hope that we’ll get a final confrontation between the two characters - but since we only have pictures of just one of Sansa’s new costumes, we’ll have to wait to see how Sansa’s and Cersei’s differences are expressed sartorially in the final season of Game of Thrones.

To be continued...

(GIF not mine)

#game of thrones #costume design #sansa stark #cersei lannister #michele clapton #gotcostumes #gameofcostumes

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emurgency-festival-digital--blog · 4 years

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(Em)Urgency Performance Symposium Program for Day 2

(EM)URGENCY - DAY 2

BA Performance Arts – A First year showcase

1pm-5:30pm

On Listening

All the works presented today are a response to Text as Performance, a first-year unit that this term explored the theme of On Listening. Performance Arts is a course which brings together a range disciplines – and all the artists have responded in their own way to what has been presented during the term. No piece is the same, no artist is the same, and we present to you an eclectic mix of short and early work that may influence our later practice – this is our first public sharing as a cohort, so please speak to the artists and enjoy.

With thanks to: Third Year students on BA Performance Arts, Platform Southwark and Diana Damian Martin.

Durational works – in the studio

Untitled Billy Buttars

An exhibition of paintings, sketches, and other works that are reinterpretations of texts into visual forms. Exploring text in the language of art objects, and concepts of inspiration and influence.

Billy’s work surrounds concepts of personal influence and representation, as well as what radical really means in a temporal context and the impermanence of it all.

Gaze Joy Kincaid

Whose body is this

As she looks at her

With your eyes at her

As she sees herself

She sees what you see

And then doesn’t see

So, she looks at herself

And doesn’t look at herself

This is not meant for you to watch?

If watching was the only way

Then I ask you not to watch

I ask you to engage more then

Your eyes and your hands

And your mind  

I ask you to see more then

Her. I ask you to see yourself

And in her yourself is buried

And in myself your eyes are burned

So, I ask you not to watch

But be born

As she is born

Joy Kincaid is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is centred on deconstructing monolithic narratives on black and queer bodies within the interrelations of white spaces through radical acts of embodied contradictions, witnessing and shape shifting.

Family Jukebox Tom Dodd

In the foyer and someone will wait, pick a mixtape? Choose your favourite song? that I will then play for them. Songs chosen by the performer’s family members – take your pick and hear the soundtrack of someone’s life?

Tom is a performer who hopes to work with sound and how sound affects people. The company Darkfield are one of his biggest inspirations and he looks forward to creating similar work. For tonight’s performance Tom will be looking at how sounds in the forms of songs affect different members of his family.

Performances – on the stage

What is the C word? Alicia Bridges

‘What is the C word?’ explores ideas of Consent in an abrupt, disassociated, inhumane way. From my own experience, I feel I have always been trying to connect the pieces together.

Content warning: references to sexual assault.

Alicia enjoys and is interested by multimedia performance, verbatim and immersive theatre. Throughout her degree she expects this will change and develop. She is excited by the prospect the next three years will give her to challenge her own artistic practice. She has previously worked with physical theatre and directing. 

Instagram: @alixiabridge

Voicemail Jody Davies and Chloe Knowles

‘Voicemail’ is a physical theatre piece that reflects upon real-life experiences both artists have endured. These two different stories surround listening and lack there-of, where both artists reflect on unsent voicemails they wish they had sent.

Content warning: references to sexual and domestic abuse, emotional manipulation, explicit language.

Jody Davies is a Welsh performance artist with a background across musical theatre, physical theatre and experience in vocal coaching. Her interests include live art and photography but her works mainly consists and explores physical theatre and immersive projects.

Chloe Knowles is a performance artist from England.

She has experience in acting, writing as well as directing theatre for younger children between the ages 7-16 at Sonnets Theatre Club Newbury, John Rankin Junior School, and Cheam Private School.

Her Interests mostly include writing and directing.

When I was 5? Jaydon Merrick

An exploration of celebrity idolisation, jealousy and discarded dreams through a casual, reflective and participatory dance experience. Suitable for all skill levels, the less talented the better.

Jaydon is an Australian actor, writer and director. He has been living in the UK for 2.5 years now; in Australia, Jaydon’s work was heavily musical, and stage based, since moving to the UK his practice has become more film and screen orientated.

Nostalgia for a Time Gone Nowhere Evie Stopforth

I feel like I am constantly leaving a home behind. I know you inside out and they have no idea who you are. I’m three different people, and a stranger.

Evie Stopforth is a young performance artist investigating the relationship between audio and visual entertainment. She focuses in this piece on loneliness, homesickness and the feeling of being stuck in limbo.

It’s Your Birthday! Miel Celeste Nadam

‘It’s Your Birthday!’ is derived from a personal hatred of my own birthday. I regress into a somewhat younger and pinker version of myself, as the cracks of the present seep through.

Miel is interested in the idea of nostalgia and objects behaving badly. For her, art is the most potent when humour is sprinkled into pain. Laughing can slip into crying.

Candidate 14 Grace Oskiera-Vooght

An examination for a job role that requires you to not react, talk or feel. You must detach yourself from human instincts: feelings. Will you pass or fail?

Content warnings: references to death and suicide.

Grace has a background in straight acting and is interested in the arts sector. She is interested in writing, creating, directing and performing. She has a cross-arts practice taking inspiration from across many art forms, particularly performance. She is currently interested in exploring intimacy and relationships and the way it is performed as part of her arts practice.

The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (Cancelled) Reena Black

This adaptation of 'The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek' explores the underlying, darker themes of the play. This piece will delve into the character's mind and bring the audience with her on her journey of confession.

Content warnings: references to death and mental illness.

Reena Black is a British actress, dancer and writer; she has been trained in classical and contemporary acting techniques for many years. Experimenting with different techniques has always been a passion of hers and she is continuing to do this through her degree in Performance Arts.

Dès l’aube Irène Pawin

Look around. What can you hear? Smile. This experience is only for you. Put on the headphones. Only you will hear this story. You are truly special. Enjoy.

Content Warnings: mentions of death, suicide, and explicit content in some pieces.

Irène is exploring her potentiality as an artist, and has been exploring writing her own work. Irène is particularly interested in oddness and queerness, the feeling of being out of place, of being foreign. Irène is an impulsive creator that never knows what her next obsession will be.

Dinner Time Cerys Salkeld Green

A piece focussing on the idea of intrusive thoughts and dealing with grief in opposition to modern life.

Content warning: references to sex and sexual content

Cerys is interested in the boundaries between fact and fantasy.

Alexa Owen Whiteside-Ward

Alexa: With technology always advancing, what happens when technology makes certain advances?

Owen is a writer, director and performer from Norwich. He has a long history of musical theatre work as a performer and in the last few years has written directed and produced his own musical: this is something he is currently still doing, working on numerous other musicals. In addition to this Owen has taken a strong interest in writing plays and films and likes to create pieces that often leave the audience questioning. This is Owen’s first work outside of Norwich, which he is looking forward to.

Email: [email protected]

Can you hear it? Esme Mai Davies

Can you hear it? Is an immersive piece that combines film, sound and live elements. What happens when you lose safety in your spaces?

Content warnings: mental health and panic

Esme as an artist is primarily interested in performance; her background is in traditional theatre. She is now exploring a mixture of performance, visual art and drag as well as working to incorporate technology and new mediums into her work.

A train running on a jointed track Ben Church

When we listen schematically, do we listen for the relation between sounds? Or is it something more? This piece aims to answer none of these questions.

Ben Church is a performance artist with a multitude of different interests and fields of study. These range from more traditional acting at Stratford upon Avon’s RSC, to writing and co directing pieces of immersive theatre and teaching drama. More recently he has been looking into composition and how sounds gain meaning.

Why Are You Wearing That Stupid Man Suit? Anja Hendrichova

Dates first dates no dates first sex holding hands broken hearts brave knights crushed buses Czech girl singing jumping in the rhythm of love or no love the end.

Rather than viewing this piece as a criticism of any kind, feel free to laugh at me and / or with me. Anja has the superpower to watch the same film or series 50 times. The more people to embarrass in front of, the less shy.

Find your Bite Jack Gallagher

Find your bite tonight. I know you have it in you. Please.

Content warnings: references to sexual violence.

Breathe Tsen Day-Beaver

During this piece I focus heavily on the subject of panic within the body, documenting its reactions and tendencies, situating this subject in the event of a panic attack.

Tsen is an artist/performer from Scotland interested in performance within film and text-based work. She is currently focusing on composition of the body within performance and its relation to the mind.

displacement Jasmine Wright

Ripped away. It’s not homesickness, it’s yearning for a place that doesn’t exist anymore. Is home a place or a feeling, and how can I find it again?

Jasmine is currently exploring ideas of unfamiliarity, strangeness, the body, and Asian heritage. She is really enjoying writing as/for performance. She is also interested in creating multimedia experiences and experimenting with artificial, anthropogenic, and naturogenic sounds and visuals. 

See with Sound Juan Salazar

A quick informational guide on maternity, nuclear fallout and social conventions. The piece explores themes of listening through imagination, primal instinct and tribalism in a post-war, ever-growing technological society.

Juan is an audio-visual artist. He is interested in space, time, dreams, memory, metaphysics, meta-metaphysics, regular physics, and irregular physics.

Can you hear my silence? Molly Denbigh

When silence becomes too loud.

Feelings of anxiety and fear are felt by many but speaking up honestly about them is done by few. It’s difficult. Emotional. I ask myself the questions that we need to answer for ourselves. Do I truly belong? Am I me?

Molly Denbigh is a performance artist with interests in immersive and physical theatre. She is also interested in fine art and musical theatre and would love to combine these different styles in future work.

The School Pen Mia Lulham

A short immersive/interactive piece commenting on the learning difficulties neurodiverse children face when first entering the education system. The piece shows the struggles involved with “basic” tasks such as learning to read and write.

Mia is heavily interested in and influenced by dance, choreography and physical theatre as well immersive theatre, and aims to continue to use these influences in her developing practice.

The Voice James Brewer

A man must overcome his anxiety about how he sounds and goes through many different types of voices in order to pick the right voice that suits him most.

James is an actor and performance artist from East London who has worked with London Bubble Theatre and National Youth Theatre.

Can I be loud? Beth Timson

Can I be loud? Who Can be loud in spaces and why? Where can we be loud? An exploration of loudness in institutional, normative space and where queer and non-normative identities fit in to this.

Beth’s work centres on community, feminism and queerness. Beth is a writer, theatre maker, spoken word artist and facilitator from East London, and an early career artist who has presented solo work at Shoreditch Town Hall and Battersea Arts Centre. Alongside studying for her degree at RCSSD, Beth is working, freelance in various capacities, ushering at The Yard Theatre, and as a Young Creative for All Change Arts. Beth started out in community arts and her work centres on using performance to bring people together and spark conversations. Her work is deeply political and seeks to challenge normativity.

www.bethtpeform.wordpress.com

twitter: @BethBRT

(Em)Urgency Festival Digital Feed Noa Taylor in collaboration with the EFDF Collective

The (Em)Urgency festival digital feed considers the performativity of multimedia performance documentation performatively. We document the work of the (Em)Urgency Performance Symposium and publish the material on social media platforms during the event.

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videogamesincolor · 6 years

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Detroit: Become Human (2018) -Exploitative Sci-Fi for Gamers

The Following article contains major spoilers for Detroit: Become Human

Folk can’t quite believe DBH’s player base loves Markus by an 80% plus margin. It’s like Grey’s Anatomy doesn’t exist or something.

On some level, Quantic Dream’s video games following Beyond: Two Souls are going to be a mechanical refinement of their gameplay, and not much else. If the Ellen Page driven game demonstrated anything, it was that the studio’s creative head has an innate inability to learn from his mistakes and he’s got a fetish for particular narrative cues, and all of them revolve around violence, racism and shock value.

Detroit: Become Human shares a lot in common with Max Landis and David Ayer’s 2017 direct-to-Netflix film Bright. Both are allegorical tales that utilize the iconism, present and historical, of the Black community and their key movements as a backdrop for the oppressed fantasy caricatures of their tale. With Bright, Orcs were the Allegorical Black community of the here and now.

With Become Human, Androids are representative of the Black community at various points in our people’s history. All of it is supported by the locale of Detroit, Michigan, a state with connections to the Underground Railroad (the game hits you with this trivia bit right off), Martin Luther King Jr., and anti-black violence that embroiled much of the United States when my parents were children.

Bright attempted (and failed) to re imagine some weird not-so-post-racial world where Tolkien-inspired aesthetics and archetypes were our history and influenced our present, with little changed about our factual history. Mankind is united in mutual hate of Orcs, and the motto “Black Lives Matter” continues to be a punchline to those unaffected by police brutality in a world where fairies are the equivalent of pests.

Become Human is yet another in the long line of over bright and sterile science fiction games that want to be Blade Runner, but doesn’t have the wherewithal to pull it off. And this is mostly because it’s too busy trying to shout “message!” For lack of a better word, Become Human gags itself with its own allusions despite some particularly interesting mechanics and sequences that exist within the ham-fisted racism narrative.

What is Become Human about?

The primary narrative of Detroit: Become Human is driven by the story of “Markus” (Jesse Williams), a specialized android, that, like most, runs the risk of triggering a dormant "virus” that simulates sentience in androids. He was gifted to old artist by the android creator (a man named Kamski). The beginning of his narrative sees him care for Carl (Lance Hendrickson), the old man in question.

He gets kicked around by anti-robot protesters, and has to ride the back of the bus with other androids. After telegraphed prompts that tell you his mistreatment at the hands of Carl’s son, Leo, is not far, the virus triggers itself, Markus begins to act of his own accord. The end result, where he may or may or not kill Leo, or simply gets blamed for the death of Carl when he dies of a heart attack, leads to his being shot by the police.

After he’s practically destroyed, he reactivates and he pulls himself out of the mud Shawshank Redemption-style and finds an abandoned ship full of busted androids that were looking for a leader. Markus, not interested in hiding the shadows, more or less appoints himself in that position because he’s the only one with some kind of proactive goal: To end enslavement of androids everywhere.

The secondary narrative focuses on a service android named “Kara” (Valorie Curry), who was busted up by her owner - a man named Todd Williams (IIRC) - during an abusive fit against his daughter, Alice. After she’s repaired, Kara returns to his home and resumes caring for him and Alice and accidentally discovers that Alice is not a human child, but an android (apparently Todd’s wife left him for an accountant and took her daughter with her). She ignores it, and, under duress, gains sentence when she believes Todd is going to kill Alice while high on Red Ice (a hyped up version of Crack).

She runs away with Alice in the hopes of reaching the Underground Android Railroad to escape to Canada where there are no robot laws, and encounters a fairly large (Black) Android named Luther, who decides he’ll do anything to protect them from harm.

The third narrative is that of “Connor” (Bryan Dechart), an android type, designed specifically for police investigations. Connor is sent to work with a grouchy old detective named Hank Anderson (Clancy Brown), who hates androids (because reasons) and doesn’t want to be bothered Connor’s overly stiff behavior and awkward attempts to get to know him.

Connor and Hank effectively run behind the likes of Markus and Kara, their narratives intersecting every now and again (until the end of the game), trying to figure out why Androids keep going homicidal and killing human beings.

While Markus’ plot drives the surface narrative, not unlike Bioshock Infinite, behind the scenes, the plot of Become Human involves a faceless corporation named CyberLife. From how I understood it, CyberLife, with the sole living monopoly on android creation, is looking to create an artificial conflict between humans and androids by using a virus that simulates sentience in machines that causes them to rebel against their owners.

When enough chaos is created, CyberLife would keep up the facade of an issue and supplant their man-made rebellion against humans using android (Connor) with no real “free will” of its own. It’s about as sci-fi as you can get and probably should’ve been the focus of the narrative from the jump.

Characters in Become Human;

I can’t wait to see white-face Android cosplay at this year’s conventions :D

Out the three playable characters that the player can control, the androids Kara and Connor have narratives that are focused more on the “personal” than the Frankenstein politics of the game that Markus represents. Performance wise, of the three characters, Valorie Curry and Jesse Williams give an ideal “robotic” performance that feels natural to their characters respective roles.

Of the characters within Markus’ narrative, Josh and Simon are probably easiest to become endeared to. They have opposing opinions on how to handle their rebellion, but they’re not rivals. They have the strongest rapport with Markus, but the game barely gives either any screentime so they’re effectively minor characters that get wasted for some arbitrary “Josh and Simon will remember that” nonsense.

She’s like that guy from Two Souls who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer

Carl is an obnoxious “nice old man” type that’s supposed to represent the best of humanity, but given the context of the world, he’s willfully ignorant to the climate that game itself ignores, and his interactions with Markus are uncomfortable to watch. The narrative pushes the android North (Minka Kelly) at the forefront of the Markus’ narrative (at the expense of his relationships with Josh and Simon), and she is the least interesting character out of the bunch that gets face time with Markus. She simply exists to say “Hey, Markus, choose violence” and instantly be promoted to lover. Simon and Joshua are right there, my mans.

Markus himself is a frustrating character for me, because (aside from my scruples with his actor) he is so representative of a white writer’s ideal Black character. It’s hard to even root for the character beyond the general principal. His arc stokes a kind of anger in me like nothing else. And the other part of me simply cannot wrap her head around Jesse Williams (a former public school teacher, with more than a little knowledge on racism) just signing off on this nonsense that effectively makes the character what he is. But, this wouldn’t be the first time a Black actor made questionable career choices.

With Kara, what keeps her narrative engaging are her interactions with Luther, Alice, and her denial that Alice isn’t a machine, but a human girl. But, Kara’s disadvantage is that she is a female character created by David Cage, so he spells out to the audience what he thinks she is: A motherbot to a childbot, that’s her entire role.

Why can’t we be friends?

Her desire, her want to save Alice from Todd isn’t Kara being concerned about someone who’d be under her care, someone who has to rely on her for help given her age. Instead it’s treated like the path to motherhood as opposed to a friendship. It’s like watching a version of Ripley and Newt’s relationship in Aliens where the reason for Ripley and Newt eventually regarding themselves as mother and daughter (their shared loss) doesn’t exist. Even the guy who assaults Kara and (potentially) wipes her memory assigns motherhood to her concern for Alice and it’s like, “well, that’s a bit fucking presumptuous of you, mate”.It’s really gross.

And in that sense, Alice isn’t a character; she’s a narrative tool to further exemplify Cage’s odd fixation this particular aspect of femininity. The performance of the actors sells the relationship quite well, about as well as Ellen Page sells the suicidal agony of her character Jodie Holmes in Two Souls, but the sudden promotion to “mother and child” is unearned and artificial.

The attention to detail that goes into Connor’s narrative, the choice of whether or not the player will allow the virus to trigger sentience, or go full on Robocop and fulfill the desire of CyberLife to the letter, is not the kind of detail you see in Kara and Markus’ tale. His narrative is primarily driven by the pseudo-paternal relationship he ends up forming with Clancy Brown’s Hank Anderson, who mourns the death of his son (insert “Jason!” joke here), but for reasons completely unrelated to his hatred of androids (he admits that much in the climax).

Every time the game puts Hank in danger, you’re given the choice of perusing the mission or risking a 40-80% chance of survival doesn’t mean the game will fuck you over and kill the Kurgan. I’m gonna assume everyone dove over their coffee tables to save Mr. Krabs and hung the mission.

Clancy has really round eyes, and I’m just noticing that for the 1st time

The he arc is as engaging as it is because of Clancy Brown’s performance. Dechart tries, he’s got a great rapport with Brown (unquestionably), but his limits are obvious. He often sounds like he’s putting on an act, something you shouldn’t be thinking of during an actor’s performance, and that can be distracting (I’m sure the direction doesn’t help either). I wouldn’t be surprised if that some point Quantic Dream was debating over whether or not this would be a game focused solely on Kara or Connor. Markus feels like something that was jammed into the game at the last minute to satisfy Cage’s celebrity itch and ideas of being progressive. That’s something I’ve always thought since they debuted the character back in E3 2017 (IIRC).

Out of all the human characters in the game, Clancy Brown’s Hank Anderson is the only one that feels like a person and not a plot device. Sure, he’s wrapped in all the trappings of a generic loner cop who hates partners (insert Buddy Cop Reference Here), but Clancy Brown manages to make an otherwise dull character work. On the flip-side, the generic asshole cop is such a walking stereotype there’s nothing genuine about his interactions with anyone.

He’s just there to reinforce the fantasy prejudices of the game and harp on and on about “them robots are gonna take our jobs”. Like, he didn’t need to exist because he does not contribute to the plot. The all too comical way he says “Fuck” (like he’s sneezing or some shit) – in a poor attempt to emulate the frustrations we often see in procedural dramas or action films when a standoff occurs – only further highlights how much of a caricature he is. This nigga can’t “bad cop” to save his life.

There aren’t a lot of characters to write home about in Become Human, or if there is I keep forgetting all about them and I can’t be arsed to recall them. Most of them are inconsequential and disappear after a single level appearance. If I’m being honest, I don’t hate the characters in Become Human (not most of them), so much as I loathe what some represent.

The Mechanics of Become Human;

Next Level Detective Vision(TM)

Become Human’s strength lies in being what I think is a fairly solid attempt at broadening the multiple choice system Adventure Games are otherwise derided for by individuals with a limited idea on what constitutes as a video game. It’s clear that Quantic Dream has taken cues from the likes of Dontnod Entertainment and Supermassive Games’ Life Is Strange and Until Dawn. Both are studios (with writers) managed to create a pair of fairly compelling adventure games, with wildly different takes on the multiple-choice system that’ll probably be remembered better in the positive than most, Quantic Dream included.

There are a number of outcomes that can happen within the game, depending on your actions. Some things change completely, other times it feels like a lot of its surface detail meant to wow you the first time. There’s usually only one conclusion to a level. For instance, even if Connor investigates the ruined house that Alice and Kara are hiding in, the end state is always going to be Kara and Alice escaping, no question about it. Markus always ends up getting shot and torn apart. Whether or not you decide to attack Leo doesn’t change his end state.

From my understanding there are multiple endings a player can get based on what the game decides are “morally wrong” decisions. Connor killing Androids for example, may always lead him down to a path of deactivation if you choose to fulfill your mission to the letter. Some, if not most of the central player characters and their cast can die. Hell, Markus can apparently just peace out of being the leader of the farcical android rebellion and North will take over in his place (that cracks me up). And one the more extreme options is to nuke Detroit to run the humans out of town. Whether or not it’ll make sense is another matter entirely.

Depending on the length of the levels, there are a number of things you can investigate and locate with the help of detective vision. Most of it really doesn’t inform the world in any meaningful way, a lot of it is collectibles for the sake of collectibles that never carry any consequence into the game (and the one item that does, is hidden and used as a moralizing plot twist that reeks of Cage brownnosing). The rest actually effects what you can say to characters.

The more details you find and learn about, the longer your multiple choice dialog lists becomes for certain characters. The problem, like with most multiple choice prompts, is that single words defining the response often lead to “oh, wait, shit, I didn’t mean that!” Because Cage clearly had different ideas about what “determined” and “uncertain” meant.

Jesse Williams??? In my junkyard???

If you’ve played a Quantic Dream game, then you know the deal mechanically. Motion Controls and Quick Time Events that more or less act like a fast forward button on a cinematic. Things you’d otherwise be able to do with basic button inputs, or a push of the analog stick, without any sort’ve guide, are rigged to Quick Time Events and motion controls. Want Marcus to stand up? Well you gotta wiggle that control and press and hold down numerous buttons before the cinematic decides to allow him to stand up.

It’s basically Telltale mechanics, which isn’t bad per say, but I like being able to stand up without playing Twister. The most freedom you get as a player is being allowed to walk around – to some degree – at your leisure (unless you’re being time attacked) and just take in the environment and click on stuff. In some instances, if you take too long, the game jumps to the next cinematic and that’s that.

Respectively, Connor and Markus are the only two out of the three androids that can create or recreate scenarios of through the study of their environment or certain objects. Markus can deduce whether or not he can make certain jumps or defenses against attacks. Connor can more or less do the same, but his mechanic is structured around picking up objects in crime scene and recreating a simulation of how events may have happened.

Kara lets her Otaku flag fly

Compare all of that to Kara, who can just change the color of her hair from blonde, black, brown and white. Her whole character seems built around her pixie hair cut and to that degree, the banality of her attractiveness (and remembering the creepy as fuck tech demo this game spawned from reinforces that). Yet, Connor and Markus can be both “attractive” and “functional”.

Philip Sheppard, Nima Fakhrara, and John Paesano compose what I think might be the best score from a Quantic Dream game I’ve heard after Beyond: Two Souls (which had Lorne Balfe and Hans Zimmer as its composers). It clearly apes the Vangelis aesthetic in a lot of places (namely Connor’s segments), but each character has a unique theme that either gets integrated into myriad of moods the music can adopt, or plays straight in a lot of sequences. It works pretty well as background noise, separate from the game.

All this scene needed was a saxophone

Another strong element in Become Human, outside of its narrative tree design, is the game’s environmental design. Become Human takes what are apparent cues from Dontnod Entertainment’s Remember Me, which imagined a futuristic Neo-Paris with a far more grounded approach than something like the direct-to-Netflix film Mute or even Blade Runner 2049, which is all lights, holograms, smog, and high-rise buildings. Become Human is chuck-full of nighttime shots, and rainy environments. There are still remnants of the old Detroit, but its slowly being dominated by the future that shouldn’t be able to sustain itself with a 40% unemployment rate, but go off Quantic Dream.

If you’re the type who’s easily wooed by high definition graphics (which isn’t something to write home about anymore. It’s done capped itself), especially with all the hub-bub going around about 4K RESOLUTION AND 4K SCREENS, then Become Human won’t have to do much to impress, just hit you with a lens flare.

With regard to cinematography and choreography, when Become Human is good, it’s good. Two of the strongest sequences in the game are the dead end story thread where Connor and Hank go checking into a bird infested apartment occupied by a runaway android, and the entire attack on the Jericho. Connor’s pursuit sequence is, for the most part, is pretty well directed, and it’s what I look forward play in a game like this. But, its also where the QTEs hindrance comes into play far more often. It’s not the kind of scene that needed anything except the prompts telling which way was safer and which way was quicker.

The Jericho siege is a fast paced implementation of the character perspective switch (that began slowly in earlier parts of the level) that works to keep varying levels of stress pressed upon the player. You’re encouraged to hide as Kara (she ain’t shit in a fight) and the game tries its damnedest to kill Luther (<_<), Markus has to save everyone he can (top priorities: Josh and Simon) and suddenly gains the ability to Keanu Reeves just about everyone in his path; Connor, from I can recollect, is more background support for Markus and gets shot if you try to save North (<_<). It’s cinematic when it counts and interactive where it matters.

Those are the two stand out sequences. The rest of the action in the game is more reflective of the awkward “which Connor is the real Connor?” fight scene which is just clumsily shot and broken to hell with QTEs (to say nothing of how botched the “tell me something only the REAL Connor would know” scene was).

Questionable Worldbuilding

Kamski, David Cage’s self insert.

There’s a certain level of suspension of disbelief required when it comes to science fiction. Unless you’re an author like Michael Crichton (who lived and died by the amount of [academic] research he put into his stories, or borrowed from his own experiences) science fiction – moreso than fantasy –, especially dystopic science fiction, is always gonna be amalgamation of fact and some nonsense an author threw at the wall.

But the mark of a good writer is usually the one who has you thinking about the ideas presented in the narrative, not what you as an audience member would’ve done to fix the narrative’s persisting problems. In this case, Michael Crichton is the former. David Cage is the latter.

The world in Become Human doesn’t feel lived in. There’s no real explanation as to how the world in the game got to where it is, and its obsession with “World War 3″ is a lazy dab into politics. There are places and circumstances that fit each situation in the narrative, but on a whole, it doesn’t feel like a place that could actually exist like Middle Earth, or even the Earth of Harry Potter, which blends the “wizarding world” and the “muggle world” together quite well without creating a grievous dissonance in the narrative. It’s a collection of sets characters are strolling through.

Cage lifts strife and topical issues from the past and present to build his world, but utterly fails to understand the context and environmental circumstances that informs what are issues steeped in anti-blackness and white supremacy. He’s not unlike Zack Snyder, who is so preoccupied with how “cool” a scene in his movie looks, there’s never anything of substance in the final product. The depth of his understanding of racism, mass deportation, and antisemitism is that it’s “bad” and not much else.

For instance, there’s little explanation as to why Canada has no Robot Laws (not one I found), or why ‘sentient’ Androids would even assume why they’d be safe there and not sent right back to the United States. Another head scratcher is a law only recently required androids wear signifies that they were machines, when uncanny valley still seems to be a hugely noticeable problem (at least when the plot requires it).

There’s the usual Cage mumbo-jumbo of a messiah figure come to rescue his characters from strife (RA-9, the androids call ‘em), but given that the game constantly implies that “Deviancy” was not a widespread or common thing until recently, the attempt at creating a “folk hero” character for the Androids make little sense given the story fails to properly set up its protagonists conflict. Its ever only brought up in a explanation manner and dropped shortly thereafter. it’s untrimmed fat for the investigative bits of Connor’s gameplay passed off in a move to make the world seem more lived in than it is.

You can’t afford a job, you can definitely afford to oppress a android

The big talking point that many believe punches holes in the narrative is how the implementation of Androids have impacted humans socially and financially. Become Human presents itself as a pseudo-futuristic world (set in Detroit, Michigan) of 2038 (twenty years from now) where Androids cost the equivalent of what some folk I know think an Apple or Google Android cellphone might twenty years from now (it’s like $8k or something?). Even if you’re hard up for cash or living hand-to-mouth with a drug habit, you can afford an android somehow.

Androids are allowed to participate in sports despite the general danger to human life that poses, but no one really comments on that (you only know about it because of a collectible) in the game. Not a single person of color took issue with the fact that a rich white man created androids that looked like people in their community, and effectively built them for nothing except labor, sex bot fun times, and absolute servitude.

Androids have also become so prevalent as the labor or work force, that 40% or more of the American population (I guess??? It’s unclear) is out of work. And In which case, old man Carl, sitting financially secure up in his mansion with an android, is the personification of a rich man out of touch, but having the gall to look down on the protesting poor (which is not how the narrative frames in the least).

Reasonably, this should mean the economy is in a bad way on some level. Yet, the states is somehow stable enough to maintain pristine streets, glossy stores and a thriving economy, despite most people being too broke, poor, or out of work to actually support it.

Capitalism has gouged a hole so badly into United States, it shouldn’t be able support itself the way the game presents, and this is based on just how utterly messed up the general landscape of unemployment in the Great Depression was at a mere 25% (15 million unemployed) as most people keep bringing up. And that was following a market crash that’s often used as barometer against the 2008 market crash. Our current unemployment rate is apparently 3.8% and the US has more problems than it can manage.

You’d think the world would actually look like something out of Days of Future Past or Judge Dredd, or maybe even mimic what was documented during the actual Depression (a little less extreme than the above). But, no, not really. Folk aren’t rioting in the streets, being suppressed by the police, aren’t demanding something be done a corporation that put them in a bind, or trying to overthrow the government for fucking them over the financial hole with machines. (Or at the very least leading the rich to the guillotines.)

No, most (even people who aren’t financially well off) still live relatively comfortable lives, maybe a few of them are homeless because of the android situation, but for the most part nothing seems to have really changed. And thinking about that just rather leads you down a rabbit hole of, “okay, well, how different is the economy from our reality that this can happen and the world is functioning as it were the 21st Century present?”

The future ain’t no promised land...

The game also wants to make a big to do about there being a white female president (more brownnosing from Cage), but the most you ever learn about this character is in a collectible and she simply exists to appear at the end of the game’s “good” or “bad” endings then disappears. And for the most part, considering he’s not exactly preoccupied with how politics plays into capitalism, what is so progressive about a white female president who isn’t all that bothered by the fact androids have put most of the people who probably voted for her out of work, and doesn’t lift a finger until androids start going homicidal? She not getting reelected.

The “humans are racist against androids” spiel falls further apart you realize that Cage wants to draw a parallel to a couple people with signs and the homeless, to the literal white supremacists of [middle] America that voted Donald Trump into office on the promise that he would deport and exile immigrants that “took American jobs” from the hard working racists of the United States. He wants people to believe that, when he’s created a circumstance where people would be rightfully pissed that they’ve been replaced by machines (who aren’t immigrants, let alone prisoners in Nazi Germany) and have no financial means. But, emotions, y’all, machines are people too.

Mankind in Become Human is united by their mutual racism against robots. So much so, that the habit of referring to machines with gendered pronouns or pet names is a thing of the past. Male or female coded androids are just “it”, not “they”, “she” or “he”. Racism is apparently a thing of the past. Sure, Rose (Harriet Tubman reborn) makes a reference to historical racism, and Markus bleats, “human have been killing each other over skin color and god for eons” (as though this is supposed to distance the android narrative from the allegory Cage wrapped his game around), but for all intents and purposes, you never see this this exemplified in the game that isn’t an [un]conscious display of Cage’s racism.

Like most allegorical worlds, Cage’s world is so preoccupied with creating this victim paradigm with robots, that it appears post racial to the point where the only problem that exists is basically “goddamn, I really hate those robots taking our jobs”.

For Tracy, Blue Hair Tracy is the Warmest Android

Hell, Homophobia’s not even a problem, because two female robots with the same face can basically declare their love and the only thing unusual about it is “Robots in love? I can’t comprehend that!” So, the one thing that needs to be Kumbya’ed into the past is anti-android sentiment and thanks to the multiple choice system in the game, you can either eradicate android resistance, or create a world they might sorta kinda be free (or at least the lead characters can).

For all the bluster about humans not seeing robots as individuals, they protest against and treat the androids like they’re individuals, as opposed to protesting against them as symptom created by a company that exacerbates their problem.

Appropriating Specific Pains For Entertainment

A Black Cop faces Androids mimicking Hands up, Don’t Shoot

The internet was a big part of why so many Black voices have been heard in the wake of what has always been a commonplace thing – the violent and needless deaths of people within the Black community, man, woman, child and infant. The period between reports on the exoneration of the police officer who murdered six year old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in 2010, and the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 seems long enough that, if you simply weren’t paying attention, you’d never consider it an epidemic like we do now.

But the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice in 2014 and Sandra Bland and Freddie Gray in 2015 all seemed to bring an end to that. The less than graceful handling of the issues by the white media made it impossible to ignore how the damaging effects of the frequency of Black death were, created Post Traumatic Stress in the Black Community.

David Cage, in perhaps one the more naked displays of ignorance, decides it’s a good idea to use the imagery of the Black Power fist to represent oppressed machines wearing human faces. He decides the plight of the androids, who protest in the same fashion Black Americans did in Ferguson, Missouri, New York City, and Baltimore City, their hands up and marching through the streets, is a comparable to demanding the end of state sanctioned police brutality. He decides, the comparison of machines who suddenly gain sentience for little to no reason other than their creators manufacturing a fake rebellion for shits and giggles, to Black lives demanding that people stop killing them, are comparable situations.

She can’t quite believe the tagline she comes with

Throwing them in the back of the bus, slapping them with iconism that draws allusion to the Jewish Holocaust (which gets worse with a bad ending and references of Androids herded into camps for destruction), parking them in place like bikes, and putting them on display in stores (like slaves being auctioned off) is sensationalism mean to pull at the heartstrings – and it’ll definitely get you feeling some kind of way, that’s for sure.

I think the one thing that truly made me ill was reading subtitled off-screen dialog near the end of the game say, “Androids were being hanged all along Woodward Avenue.” It repeated in my head like an ugly mantra and I kept having to pause so as not to throw fit. The levels of irresponsibility that you have to cradle yourself in to think it’s remotely okay to invoke mass lynching imagery...

Dehumanization of enslaved Africans, whom white people regard as sub-human is not remotely comparable to androids meant to stage a manufactured rebellion by a faceless corporation headed by a deviant Black woman playing Hal-9000.

It’s a bad look and doubly insulting to just co-op the history of the Underground Railroad, which is another anvil on the audience’s head just in case the last couple weren’t quite enough for you to get the message.

And the way Markus and eventually every robot “frees” itself from “slavery” merely makes them look robots under the control of a hive-mind. They fall in line without question. They’re not acting as individuals, who’d have wildly different reactions and desires to any given situation. They literally act like the robots in I, Robot under the control of overlord A.I. that decided humans couldn’t be trusted not to kill themselves.

Anti-Blackness, Sexism, and David Cage

Yeah, I got nothing...

David Cage and his long romantic affair with anti-Blackness and sexism is one that is otherwise well documented, but largely ignored by the gaming community who still think addressing racism perpetuates racism and saying “SJW” indentures them with any remote credibility. To say nothing of the white liberals who’ve showered the game with praise because they’re convinced this is a profound take on the oppression narrative..

It’s unquestionable that David Cage is fixated on inserting violence done marginalized groups in his stories. He is incapable of handling the issue with maturity. And the news that his company reflects those same toxic ideas has spread long and loud enough that trying to pretend either is not a problem in this day and age in the name of “not ruining fandom’s fun” is stiflingly ignorant.

Sex workers/sex bots (all androids now) are brutally murdered and raped for not much else beyond the furthered narrative of characters like Markus and Connor. North only admits to being sexually assaulted so Cage can set up her as a lover for Markus, regardless of the player’s potential disinterest in romancing or interacting with the character. North doesn’t exist for much else besides being a prop for Markus and Cage exemplifying M/F relationships are compulsory in his universe.

Lesbians are used merely as a barometer for Connor’s morality, and are so ham-fistedly stuffed into the game (with awkward zoom-ins on their clasped hands, not once, but twice), that you can hear Cage patting himself on the back for even daring to think about two women in love on such a shallow level. They have no character or personality beyond that.

Child abuse and the abuse featured in the game feels jammed into a narrative that also wants you to sympathize with Alice’s father (Todd) because he immediately apologizes for being shitty. It’s also another excuse for David Cage to write a male character calling a female character a “bitch”, which is a reoccurring theme in all his games. Kara is constantly threatened harm by men and put situations where she barely escapes danger (or doesn’t) in ways that Markus and Connor aren’t. This is all meant to endear the audience to her relationship with Alice and her tenacity.

Kara and Alice ain’t even safe from the noble hobo androids

If you decide to go toe-to-toe with Todd to save Alice as Kara, Kara doesn’t get to throw Todd through a wall or even get the better of him with super android strength. She gets strangled, punched, and tossed about as though she weren’t an android but a normal human being. It’s like realizing that Jodie Holmes (Beyond Two Souls) isn’t Carrie, but is completely dependent on a ghost to protect her from sexual assault or danger in general. It’s the anti-thesis of the scene in Ex Machina where Ava (an android with a lightweight frame design) gets the advantage over Nathan. Kara and Alice barely escape with their lives.

It just comes off like cheap exploitation for the sake of making your female character suffer and it’s such a cartoon-ish portrayal of assault and child abuse. The scene wherein Kara is tied up and potentially stripped of her memory is mirrors the scene wherein the reporter in Heavy Rain is tied up and attacked by a serial killer who wants who to saw her in half and assault her.

Things get progressively worse when you start to consider how Black characters outside of Jesse Williams are utilized. The majority of Black characters represented in the game are supporting or minor characters. They run the gambit of David Cage’s greatest hits: “Scary Black Man”, the “Black Gentle Giant”, and the “Black Sidekick” who aids and furthers the narrative of his white or acceptably Black friends. Become Human also expands to respectability politics, colorism, and violence taken to new heights.

Stop_racism.png? I don’t think that’s in my programming, Carl...

Like I mentioned before, Jesse William’s Markus drives the entire narrative of Become Human. Outside of the inciting incident (the rogue android threatening to kill the child that looks a lot like Alice), nothing officially progresses until Markus becomes sentient. He is the hero of the story. As the only android taking proactive steps to rebel against the farcical android racism and slavery, the narrative dictates which decisions Markus makes are inherently “positive” and “negative”. It’s within Markus’ narrative that David Cage demonstrates that he’s just like every other white person when they observe Black communities dealing with police brutality and dehumanization.

While Become Human uses Minka Kelly’s North to badger Markus to rebel against humans with violence, even when you reject her ideas, the narrative doesn’t approach her point of view with anything other condemnation. Retaliation is never treated like it’s just as valid as pacifism (to say nothing of how they actually portray that retaliation as just mindless violence, which misunderstands the context how a city ends up catching fire).

If you agree with her and decide to avenge fallen androids, and protect the ones that are alive from immediate danger using retaliation tactics (or violence), the narrative condemns you for doing so. Markus’ punishment for not “turning the cheek” is typically death at the hands of Connor, a white character whose narrative seems to have more end-state possibilities than probably even Kara. Become Human prioritizes “peaceful protests”, but in a manner that feels lined with disingenuous intent. Quite literally not acting against your aggressors in any way is the right (and only) way to do things.

We’ve reached maximum levels of representation in media, fam

To compound the utter rot of the allegory, Jesse Williams’ Markus removes his skin (in his words “one planet, two races” lmao) and regardless of the tone you choose (”peaceful” or “determined” for example), the player is prompted with a number dialog options that include “end slavery”, “equal rights”, and a whole bunch of other things are an explicit tie in to Black History. And, unfortunately for Markus, these kinds of prompts, which includes protesting Androids singing to win the favor of humanity, continue to pop up in his dialog tree like pesky blackheads.

The constant reminders that “violence is not the answer” invokes non-Black voices saying “if you weren’t violent, you wouldn’t have been attacked by the police”. The narrative’s attitude is verbatim the kind of inanity I see posited online by spectators with no grasp on situations where Black Americans experienced violence. It even comes up in discussions about Black rebellions during the enslavement era. That’s Become Human’s narrative in a nutshell.

Jesse Williams’ position as the figurehead character in the narrative juxtaposed darker skinned characters, which all play support roles, is a continuation of the media’s reinforcement of the kind of Black character or person that is acceptable for mainstream media. He’s Black enough that he can represent Cage’s borked narrative, but “ambiguously brown” enough that he won’t raise heckles.

Weird how this game don’t let you romance folk you WANT to be around...

Most of the Black characters in the game are androids, most of them have dark skin, and most them amount to background dressing. They’re about on the same level as Kadeem Hardison’s character in Beyond: Two Souls. They act and sound like everyday people, but they’re still representatives of Cage’s awful narrative. For instance, there’s a linebacker of a Black android named Luther and he is the embodiment of the kind of Black man David Cage is clearly terrified of.

Originally, he was an introduction to Cage’s game during E3 2016-2017 even as some Negro spiritual singer. In the game, he’s nothing much other than a supporting character in Kara’s narrative that can die or be blocked from the continuation of the narrative pretty easily (unlike Hank, who is rather glued to your behind up until a certain point).

Instead of being some cartoonish violent thug (see: Heavy Rain), his whole directive in the narrative is to protect Kara and Alice, and not much else. He has no arc of his own and is practically itching to die for them. Characters shrink away from him in fear whenever they see him because of his size, and the entire level wherein Alice and Kara are threatened by the mad creator, uses Luther like a sentinel with the intent to harm the white characters.

Cage’s visual use of the “[Gentle] Black Giant” as a means of highlighting Kara and Alice’s literal white fragility is as bad embodies literally everything I hate about how white people regard and treat Black masculinity in their media.

I appreciate these character models. Rescue them from Cage’s asset files

There are three Black women in the game with speaking lines. Two androids, one human woman. All of them are helpers for white characters or Markus, regardless of their moral alignment. The overarching villain of the game is unquestionably is Black android named Amanda (at least I think she’s an android). She’s a facsimile of the teacher who taught Kamski, creator of the androids, what he knows. She more or less plays the “guide” to Connor (in the sense that her advice is identified in the wrong) and pretends that she wants to see an end to the rebelling androids before CyberLife loses any more credibility with the public (who are scratching their heads over machines declaring “I am alive”).

The human is a Harriet Tubman analog (Rose), who embodies the downtrodden Black mother raising the difficult Black son (Adam) whose father is absent (he died). Adam doesn’t want any part of saving androids, Rose seems to think she’s beholden to help them. From a visual stand point, Rose is probably the best looking fat character model I’ve ever seen in a game. Within the narrative, she exists for little else than to fortify the “Android Slavery = Black American Enslavement” allegory hill that Cage wants to die on. She tries to help Kara, Alice, and Luther to get across the border to Canada not once, but twice.

The last is a damaged android named Lucy. She exists solely so she can tell Markus “your choices have consequences” in a scene makes her look physic when she holds his hand. It was just like the ostentatious declaration from the menu-screen girl (Chloe), “Remember, this isn’t just a story. This is our future”. And even you know androids share information through physical contact, it’s clear that Cage modeled her as the wise mystical Black woman because reasons. And the role repeats itself when she confronts Connor about being “lost” and then dies in Markus arms saying “save our people Markus”.

This scene was hard to watch, honestly...

Whenever Cage wants to demonstrate the “inhumane treatment” of androids, by in large Black androids are the biggest examples. Luther has his memory wiped by the mad creator who Frankenstiens androids together and is effectively a mindless slave until he sees Alice. One android (pictured above) is tortured (cigarette burns put out on his arm and the like) to the point of a going rogue and ends up murdering his owner.

To add insult to injury, the player (as Connor) is given no choice but to increase the Black android’s stress level to get him to confess (like how policemen pressure Black prisoners into acting against their self-preservation). This later drives the android to shoot himself (and maybe Connor if you tell him to stop trying to commit suicide) in the head. When Connor attempts to grill three identical Black androids for information about Markus’ whereabouts, he goes full cop on them and tortures them. He ends up getting his guts ripped out immediately afterward (but if you succeed in fixing him, he gets to shoot the android dead with extreme prejudice.)

Lucy, the android that helps Markus, was tortured and disfigured: Her head torn open, wires hanging out, and false skin unstable. Markus himself is actively punished by the narrative for being anything other than “peaceful” and “non-violent”, to say nothing of the physical violence that’s visited upon him from the jump (being kicked around and being shot, then torn apart).

David Cage’s exhibitionism with his Black characters works well enough that it gets a rise out of you, but it’s the same old exploitation of Black pain for entertainment purposes. It more or less demonstrates why white authors writing allegorical tales of fantasic racism, usually end up perpetuating it. Markus is David Cage’s cipher for tackling a story about racism, acting out racism, all without actually dealing with racism in a legitimate manner. (I’m of the opinion that, if you’re white, you don’t have the ability to anyway.)

I can’t imagine what this game would’ve been like without the mess, lmao

Markus bears the burden of pretty much everything that’s wrong with this damn game with regard to how it uses allegory to build its fantasy oppression. As the catalyst, he’s not only the respectable Black character (fair-skinned, “non-violent”, “well spoken”), he’s also represents the whole of the slavery allegory through his relationship with Carl. Carl’s character so obviously represents “the good slave master” (masquerading as the “father figure”) that not only educates Markus on self-realization, but demonstrates to Markus that “not all humans” (read: white people) “are bad”.

I’d argue that if you exercised the racism allegory and Markus from the game, you might actually have, not a good game, but a game about two white androids on two ends of Cage’s undercooked attempt to wax poetic about sentient robots. But, the other Black characters like Luther, Josh, and Lucy exist, and also shoulder the burden of the writer’s ignorance, so there would be no point.

Bad Allegory is Bad Allegory;

It’s a pretty looking game, with some nice moments. Not much else...

Anti-Black racism is not something (most) non-Black audiences can reasonably identify as negative for the community it happens to. When it occurs, spectators view it through the media as something that was brought on by the victim – and otherwise rightfully earned. Speaking of your experiences with anti-Blackness makes them feel doubly comfortable to say “well, I’ve never seen that happen” and insinuate that you’re lying about your traumas or microaggressions experienced.

Through the lens of speculative fiction (chiefly science fiction), the utilization of anti-Blackness as a foundation for any imaginary oppression conjured by the author, once completely removed from the Black experience, becomes a digestible and even sympathetic narrative. A commodification if you will.

There’s no talk of “both sides are wrong” and “well, they brought it on themselves”. Fictionalized marginalization often creates a white creator’s ideal victim, one their hearts can bleed for and live vicariously through, because the victims aren’t just Black, they’re also white.

Allegorical racism often ends up creating equations that consciously or unconsciously say that Black people are violent or dangerous in some way, and the fear of Black people is justified. It perpetuates the myth of the Black superhuman. The biggest example of this? Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men unthinkingly equates discrimination of superhumans with incredibly deadly powers to the discrimination of Black people. That narrative allows a certain justification to hating mutants because some have abilities that can outright kill people who enter their breathing space, something Black folks, who are discriminated against without quarter or reason, can’t do.

Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human shares all the same problems of every other speculative fiction narrative that uses allegorical racism as a backdrop. While something like Netflix‘s Bright lambasted by common sense, the gaming landscape has yet to develop strong enough set of tools that prevents games like this and Bioshock Infinite from being hailed as “daring masterpieces” for failing to properly handle the subject of race-by-another-name.

To further illustrate the brokenness of his tone deaf narrative, David Cage wants to be able to say “his game isn’t about racism” (or sexism) at the same time he admits to saying the current racial tensions in America definitely influenced him during the development of Become Human. You can’t have it both ways, nigga, pick a lane.

Detroit: Become Human is the neighbor of Bioshock Infinite. But where the latter is naked about its prejudices, Become Human takes the Crash approach (and we know how most people reacted to Crash before the honeymoon period ended). Racism is rarely handled in video games. So, the bar is so low, that merely daring to use the imagery of violence toward Black bodies, but not in any way that doesn’t make a caricature of the history, stirs something in the unaffected. I expect, like Infinite, half of a decade will need to pass before the feedback-loop from dualshock ends and think critical essays start popping up (I won’t hold my breath tho). There are people calling a duck a duck, but they’re largely ignored.

I could literally recommend anything else that handles the issue of sentient machines better than Become Human without the hamfisted racism allegory. The Terminator 2, Ghost in the Shell, The Big O, Outlaw Star, Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina, or even Alex Proyas’ loose adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.

If you wanted to see how androids and the advancement of technology play into the role of capitalism damaging the quality of life, Dontnod Entertainment’s Remember Me handles the subject better than Quantic Dream does by miles. Frictional Game’s survival-horror game Soma deals with the cloning of a human mind and how that mind handles being “just a copy” inserted into a machine or a machine like body.

Jesse Williams living the dream as Markus Luther King Android Jr.

Become Human’s story of “oppressed androids” doesn’t work from the offset. There’s little demonstration of androids demanding their freedom and equal rights up until Markus decides, “um, yeah, we should do that, guys” and androids go homicidal on their owners around the same time. Everything is second hand accounts. There are no human antagonists that inform this fantasy racism that aren’t the equivalent of cartoonish high school bullies shoving people in lockers, or just poor representation of the counterargument from the get go. Android rebellion is practically framed like everyday appliances on the glitch to the disbelief of their owners, who end up traumatized or murdered.

Cage compounds that issue even further by writing that a virus (stemming from a copy error) gives them sentience, but that simply makes them look like machines that are malfunctioning because they need a better anti-virus program. I keep seeing people use this comparison, but an android passing on a virus that “wakes” them up, is not remotely comparable to a Black mind being stuck in the Sunken Place until someone (or they) pulls them out as depicted in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.

When talking to actual people, it’s obvious that they don't like being discriminated against. That’s not remotely the same case with Androids infected with a dormant malicious error and deciding they’re not free. It implies the enslaved were fine with slavery until they just wake up one day thought otherwise.

Also, you don’t get to frame your characters as victims when they’re literally spouting rhetoric like, “Androids are superior to humans in every way, yet we’re slaves?”

I wanted to like Detroit: Become Human like I wanted to like Beyond: Two Souls. There’s a lot to like about the concept (minus the allegory) that the game is built on, if not purely for how the primary cast interacts with their own group (sometimes).

But, for lack of a better word, the game is insensitive with its comfortable comparison of non-human characters to people of color (chiefly Black people) and marginalized identities, who still suffer from everything the game fails to tackle respectfully. Half of science fiction is built on the bones of wrong-headed allegory and misrepresentation of social issues, so its celebration isn’t surprising, just frustrating.

Detroit: Become Human is a constant reminder that David Cage thrives off the pain of the marginalized and can’t be arsed to do any introspection about that. It feels like I just got thrust back into 2013 all over again.

Allegorical racism needs to die.

#videogamesincolor #detroit become human #quantic dream #david cage #anti black racism

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southeastasianists · 6 years

Link

There is a history of Singapore that is taken as a straightforward truth by millions of people in the world. According to this narrative, up until 2004 the city-state was an unliveable hellscape where violent crime, drug trafficking, terrorism, murder, and corruption ran rampant. Women were practically raped on sight, the streets were strewn with garbage, and traffic was insolubly chaotic.

All of this changed that year, when the new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, instituted the death penalty for all violent criminals, drug traffickers, and corrupt officials. As a result, the prison population was reduced from 500,000 to 50 within six months (presumably through mass executions). Moreover, in what appears to have been a matter of weeks, crime vanished, Singapore became an economic powerhouse, its universities shot up in the world rankings, and its citizens became trilingual. The draconian use of capital punishment, according to this narrative, is the secret to having a peaceful, developed country.

This narrative was popularised on the Spanish-speaking internet through a postauthored by a Cuban pastor based in Honduras named Mario Fumero. Fumero’s blog, United Against Apostasy, published a series of articles extolling Singapore’s purported crime-reducing policies. Fumero suggests that all Latin American countries should emulate Singapore’s example and exterminate all offenders (either through judicial or extrajudicial means), so that Latin Americans will promptly reach the desired development that Singapore now enjoys.

To get a sense of how widespread this narrative is, Fumero himself comments that these articles on Singapore are by far the most popular posts on his blog, a blog which has attracted over 20 million views. The actual reach of this particular article, however, goes much further. Its text has been copied or paraphrased in various YouTube videos that, taken together, add up to hundreds of thousands of views. It has been reproduced on several posts on Taringa! (an extremely popular Spanish-language “community knowledge” website), and reposted on countless blogs and forums. Its contents have even been copied in printed newspapers (with evidently poor fact-checking standards), and they have been cited as the basis of numerous editorials published throughout Latin America.

The number of Spanish speakers who have been exposed to this narrative through social media can probably be estimated in the millions; for many of them, this portrait of Singapore is axiomatic by virtue of its ubiquity. Few people have sufficient familiarity with Singaporean history to challenge this narrative.

Fumero has a concrete political agenda: the reinstatement and dissemination of the death penalty in Latin America. Although he has stated that he is against capital punishment, he immediately qualifies such statements by arguing that “…there are situations in which it [the death penalty] can be justified even biblically, becoming the only option for instilling fear in a system where impunity prevails, and where there is a lack of respect for life.” In fact, a quick glance at the many columns written on the basis of his article—as well as the comment sections of any of the websites where his article has been reproduced—reveals that the “successful” Singaporean case has become a key touchstone for the pro-death penalty agenda in Spanish-speaking virtual forums. Along with them, Fumero insists on the exemplary success of the alleged Singaporean policy of indiscriminate judicial executions.

For Fumero and his supporters, it is precisely Singapore’s prosperity and rigidity that they find useful in their attempt to promote a particular political agenda. Latin Americans may not know much about Singapore, but they have heard that it is a rich and seemingly excessively disciplinarian country—the ban on chewing gum is well-known. Along with almost complete ignorance of the country’s history, due to hitherto relatively limited cultural and academic exchange, the conditions are perfect for historical visions like that one conjured by Fumero to flourish. With a contemporary Orientalist twist, he fabricates history to create a simulacrum of an “exotic” country to advance his disciplinarian agenda. The fable he creates serves to answer questions such as “why are they prosperous and we are not?”, or “why is there so much crime here and not there?”. These questions correspond to Orientalising impulses which presume that, unlike North America or Europe, Singaporean prosperity is not natural, and there must therefore be some kind of secret to success that Latin Americans could appropriate as a shortcut to “development.”

But why should we care about this? After all, a generation of young Spanish-speakers with a completely distorted view of a remote country like Singapore could be dismissed as a mere anecdote, as a sort of contemporary version of the Prester John myth. However, Fumero’s article is not just a harmless fable; it is the historical narrative that frames a call to action, action which would ultimately promote the judicial or extrajudicial execution of thousands of people. The sobering reality of Rodrigo Duterte’s popularly-endorsed campaign of extrajudicial execution of alleged drug pushers is too blatant, too painful, for us to ignore historical narratives which might justify such policies. Law and order narratives have been successfully deployed time and time again to win elections in Latin America, claiming to end crime and drug trafficking in blood and fire, but without producing significant results.

Like Fumero, the Singaporean state and many Singaporeans have their preferred historical narrative as well, albeit one that is demonstrably less fanciful. It runs something like this: the People’s Action Party (PAP), headed by Lee Kuan Yew, steered Singapore through the chaos of separation from the Federation of Malaya in 1965. Since then, it has, through technocratic competence and indomitable strength of will, propelled Singapore towards a multi-ethnic meritocracy, good governance and a dynamic capitalist economy. If authoritarian-leaning practices were developed along the way, they are dismissed as the price of success in the face of adversity. This narrative is integrated into the national curriculum, espoused by politicians, and provides the thematic framework for performances staged by students and volunteers at the annual national day parade. It pervades journalistic discourse in both Singaporean and international media organisations. Naturally, this treasured mythos of nation-building elides many unsavoury things, but there is more than a kernel of truth to it.

Singapore’s national mythos is primarily meant for domestic consumption, but it is also part of how Singapore projects itself to the rest of the world. Its preferred origin story of chaos to order, of insecurity to wealth, is an integral part of Singapore’s carefully-cultivated image as a good place to do business, park one’s money, and educate one’s children, or even to hold international summits. This narrative is deployed for specifically political purposes: the trope of dependable PAP stewardship leading to economic success is routinely deployed at campaign rallies before each general election.

By contrast, Fumero’s reformulated narrative of Singaporean history deliberately misrepresents the underlying reasons for Singapore’s perceived success to an audience familiar only with a fleeting image of Singaporean “success”. This (ab)use of Singaporean history is instructive, because it sheds light on how powerful a tool history can be in the “post-truth” era—even when it is deployed far from its point of origin and targeted at a very different audience.

Fumero’s article represents an unusual permutation of the weaponisation of history: we are used to the idea that history is weaponised, usually by states (authoritarian or otherwise), for domestic political purposes. We are less used to the notion of history being mined far from its point of origin to generate political gain in seemingly irrelevant contexts, especially by non-state actors like Fumero.

That, however, is exactly the opportunity that the post-truth era of social media-driven news affords, and various actors have not been slow to seize it. The destabilisation of informational legitimacy—which until recently for most people was embodied in whichever newspapers and televised news channels were most readily at hand—is not the heart of the problem. The number of gatekeepers, and the location of the gates themselves, have changed. With the low barriers to entry afforded by internet access, both state actors with modest budgets and non-state actors with virtually no budget at all can now shape historical narratives, with serious consequences for the societies in question.

Fumero’s article may be an outlandish example, but it forces us to confront the reality of how history can be successfully weaponised; the consequences of his historical fabrications are hard to measure and may have yet to flower. How much easier would it be for an organisation with more resources to weaponise history, and what havoc could it wreak? The state’s existing tendency to weaponise history already gives citizens sufficient cause to equip themselves mentally to resist these historical narratives, and the cultivation of citizenries capable of evaluating or filtering information (though inconvenient to the state) has become more important than ever for democracies.

#Southeast Asia #Singapore #Death Penalty #Latin America #History

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landofsomethingsomething · 7 years

Note

ok i swear im not asking this in bad faith. is there any room for nuance between anti and concerned citizen? where is the line drawn? what makes someone an anti? I really want to know because I worry I might be one and i respect you a lot and i feel like garbage...

The line is drawn where you send negative messages meant to drive off or silence or discourage or otherwise punish to a stranger whose story you absolutely do not know based on information that you have read from an unsourced or context free call out post, or maybe just because they created something that you didn’t like, or that upset you, or that upset someone you know.

The line is drawn where you purposely go somewhere where you know there will be content you disapprove of that is tagged and labeled and easy to avoid to disparage, berate, call out, again “punish” everyone in the community.

The line is drawn where you publicly drum up negative feelings among your followers toward someone whose content you dislike or who you personally disapprove of, knowing full well that you are operating within an atmosphere where purity politics and anti behavior runs high and that there is a good chance this person will be harassed due to your post.

The line is drawn where you judge someone’s character and morality without knowing anything about them except for the type of fandom content they like to consume or create.

The line is drawn where you disregard a stranger’s humanity and personal story and history – things that you are absolutely not entitled to know, much less demand – because they wrote a fanfic or drew a piece of fanart that you found repugnant or distasteful.

The line is drawn where you mistake policing fandom creators - most of whom are on at least one and usually several axes of oppression themselves - for performing actual relevant activism that makes a difference in how popular culture perceives, interacts with and understands bigotry and abuse.

The line is drawn where you allow yourself to be drawn into a group that feeds on negativity, that sustains itself by hating others, that puts catharsis above respecting someone else’s humanity, that encourages lashing out and implicates certain people as safe and reasonable targets for personal attacks.

God, there are so many other things.

Create things you like. Encourage the creation of things you like. Produce that diverse content that we all crave so much. And protect yourself. Block people who upset you. Blacklist content that you don’t want to see. But for god’s sake, when it comes to fandom, when it comes to a place where people overwhelmingly go to celebrate the things they like, where people go to produce works to express themselves, to vent, to explore their feelings, to explore their identities, to please people who like the things they like, to seek encouragement or find the courage to put themselves out in front of an audience for perhaps the first time, to seek validation and positive attention and an audience of people who understand – don’t be an asshole.

No one is perfect. No one is pure. No one is worthy of the ever-evolving standards set by people who are primarily interested in cleansing their fandom of content they don’t like. And everyone has an agenda, so when someone tells you that someone is bad, or something is problematic, or something someone did makes them unworthy of being treated like a human being, you had better be god damn sure you know where that accuser is coming from, who they are, and that you have a perfect mastery of a situation before you go swallowing it down hook line and sinker.

Just don’t be a fucking asshole. That’s it. That’s the whole secret.

And by the way. I’m talking about fandom. I am talking about fandom creators. I am talking about your peers here down in this oftentimes thankless ditch creating content and in most cases harming absolutely no real life, flesh and blood human beings with their work. I am talking about creators who have a tiny following compared to actual creative executives out in the Real World creating actual pop culture, influencing actual societal attitudes and progress and change. I am talking about people whose work is niche and will be seen by a laughably small number of people and who are just here to have a fucking good time.

The line is drawn where you directly and intentionally harm a fellow human being because you think there is a chance, some poorly defined potential, some future situation or scenario where they maybe, perhaps, possibly and almost certainly indirectly harm someone else.

Don’t.

#text #asks #on fandom #fuck antis #fuck purity culture #anonymous #op #thoughts

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ladyxanatos · 6 years

Text

The Kylo Ren and Rey Post

Since it is actually impossible to tease apart their arcs in this film and trying to understand them in isolation from each other is also near impossible, I am going to be talking about both Rey and Kylo in this post.

For my Luke feelings, see this post.

And now onto Rey and Kylo.

[SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING]

Obligatory PSA: Kylo Ren is a garbage human and being interested and emotionally invested in him does not equate to me excusing or condoning any of his garbage human behavior. If you cannot distinguish the difference between emotional investment in a fictional character and condoning that character’s behavior, then this is not the post you are looking for. If you conflate investment in a fictional character with the real life excusing of the behavior of real life actual people, then please skip this post and trouble not my ask box.

I have not made it a big secret that Kylo Ren is my unabashed problematic favorite of the new trilogy in large part because I am a huge “Legends” EU fan and Jacen Solo is my problematic favorite there and Kylo is a Jacen/Darth Caedus analog.

As such, I had both high hopes and anxiety going into the Last Jedi, but I was 100% not disappointed. I am a well-fed Kylo fan at this moment. I am so completely here for every single Kylo thing in this movie.

As someone deeply fascinated by the relationship between Kylo and Hux, the friction between them and the way Snoke starts playing them against each other, had me very happy.

And the moment when Hux finds Kylo after discovering Snoke’s death was so brilliant. Firstly, Hux didn’t seem sure at all about what he should do upon finding Kylo and seems to waffle between just shooting him right there (at least that’s how it was reading to me on first viewing) or waking him up. Then Kylo Force choking Hux into declaring him the Supreme Leader was absolutely terrible but absolutely how the scene had to end.

Kylo’s response to communing with Rey is absolutely perfect and the building and development of how they relate to each other was expertly done.

The fact that Kylo immediately comes at it with “How are you doing this super nifty, impossible Force technique (and teach me maybe)?” is 100% Jacen Solo. Ravenclaw dark siders will forever be my faves.

The fact that Kylo begins as low-key annoyed by the connection but curious and Rey begins as high-key infuriated is on point. But the gradual horrible growth of the two into each other was just stunningly done, culminating in Rey finally going to Kylo for companionship and an understanding, unjudgmental ear after her experience in the dark place was tragic and completely the inevitable outcome of Luke making himself emotionally unavailable to Rey (this is Luke’s whole problem in this film; he has cut himself off from his super power - Love). Luke’s abject HORROR at seeing the two of them touching hands hits the audience right in the solar plexus.

Luke leaves Rey distinctly vulnerable to what happens to her by being emotionally closed off and by being shut off from the Force. He would have sensed what was happening right under his nose if he had stayed connected to and fully integrated with his feelings (which includes feeling the Force). And isn’t that just typical in these kinds of situations? Rey is vulnerable to corrupting outside influence because she isn’t having her emotional needs met by Luke as a father figure, then with the blow to her trust in him by hearing Kylo’s side of the story she naturally begins to look outside of that framework to the only other connection she has at the moment; Kylo.

SIDE NOTE: I really, really love that both Luke’s version of events and Kylo’s version are “right” insofar as they are each the experienced truth of the individuals. A CERTAIN POINT OF VIEW AND ALL THAT.

Now, let’s talk about Rey for a moment.

The beginning of her TLJ arc is so classic. The young hero seeks aid from the wizened wizard, only to have the wizard’s door slammed in their face. So then they must embark on a trial of persistence and patience as they convince the wizard to train them. #CLASSIC

The conversations between Luke and Rey are among some of my favorites of the entire film. I touched on them in my Luke post, but what I really love is how Rey’s understanding of the Force is limited and also dictated by her experience; it lets you control people. I think part of Luke finally training her is him realizing that this young woman is going to use the Force with or without training, but her use of it without training would be distinctly morally ambiguous. The only real model she’s had up until this point for Force use, after all, is Kylo Ren, and although she despises Kylo at the start of the film she has undeniably learned a lot from him for good or ill.

I am primarily concerned with Rey’s inner journey and struggle for identity. Her previous identity revolved around two things: scavenging for survival and waiting for her family. She’s not doing either of those things in this movie. She’s learning about the Force and suddenly feeling a bit lost and out of place in a newly discovered and very large galaxy to her, and although she is not waiting for her parents she is now actively searching for them within the Force and herself.

Most of all, Rey is seeking belonging. This is key to interpreting her interactions with Kylo. She is searching for a place to be and someone to tell her that who and what she is, is okay. Kylo starts supplying that (towards his own ends); Rey desperately wants to believe in the good she’s seeing in him because it would give her a place with him. That’s mighty tempting to someone who has been alone and isolated their whole life; always waiting, waiting, waiting for the people and the place where she will finally belong. The offer of sameness, of comradery is seductive as heck.

This makes Rey’s struggle fundamentally different from both Luke and Anakin Skywalker. Anakin wanted to keep what he had, to stop time and stave off death, to possess the things and people he loved and control them by imposing his own will. Luke was consistently messianic; always saving people, always reaching out, extending love and forgiveness as a source of redemption.

Rey is seeking. She wants to belong.

And now we reach the big moment. Rey leaves Luke on a mission to salvage Kylo’s soul. We the audience suspect what will indeed happen; Kylo takes her to Snoke.

I have to talk about the big moment when Kylo turns on Snoke now.

It is distinctly similar to Mara Jade in the EU when C’Baoth prophesizes that she will “bow to him.” She does indeed bow...to deliver him a killing blow. Snoke narrating what he believes is Kylo’s resolve to kill Rey but is in fact Kylo’s decision to turn on Snoke is so utterly similar and just as satisfying.

Now, a conversation can definitely be had about giving one of the most empowering female moments of heroism in the EU to a male character, and a male character who is based on the male character who murders Mara Jade (yikes). Like, that is definitely a conversation I would be here for.

But strictly within the context of TLJ as a film, it was one of the best expectation reversals of a film built on expectation reversal. And then Kylo and Rey fighting back to back, I was SHRIEKING in my chair (with a hand clamped over my mouth to deaden the noise). I could not believe what I was seeing and I was ecstatic. Rey saving Kylo by throwing her lightsaber to him was just wow.

Then, of course, it all goes south as I was pretty sure it would because I know Jacen Solo inside and out and Ben Solo is essentially the same guy. This character, no matter the iteration, is just innately tragic because he COULD have done so much good, but instead insists on making utterly garbage human choices. Ugh, why.

I am underwhelmed by the “reveal” of Rey’s parentage and I am also not entirely sure I actually believe Kylo. This is a moment where he’s torqueing pretty damn hard on Rey’s emotions to try and make her go with him and also make her believe that he is the only one who sees her, the only one who values her, the only one she belongs with (classic emotional abuse right there). So, I mean, am I really supposed to believe everything he’s saying here?

Rey, of course, rejects him because he’s gone all Anakin talking to Padme on Mustafar (it’s almost word for word Anakin’s “And together you and I will rule the galaxy. Make things the way we want them to be.”) and Rey ain’t about that noise. The splitting of the Skywalker lightsaber is hella symbolic. It’s almost too much, but I’ve decided I love it.

And then Kylo spirals into full tilt villainy and Rey rises to be the hero she is because she has found her place, her sense of belonging in the light. Her final rejection of Kylo is perfectly done. She departs with friends and what she has sought; he is left cold, alone, and with the consequences of his choices.

Gosh, I am just...ALL ABOUT THESE TWO. I still have so many feelings, I can’t.

#star wars movies #the last jedi #kylo ren #rey #sw spoilers #death tw // abuse tw //

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fionaharnett · 5 years

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On Salgado’s The Salt of the Earth film Writing by Shu Cao

Some minutes into the UK premiere of Wim Wenders and Juliano Riberdo Salgado's The Salt of the Earth at the benefit opening of the 2015 Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, someone whispers in my ear: “So what does this have to do with human rights?”

The film offers no simple answer in its trace of the artistic process of Sebastião Salgado (Juliano's father) as he travels through a forest with his camera, across the Arctic waiting for a polar bear to tell its story, or sitting alone, facing a vista of fields, vast mountains and sky, and telling us that this was where he learned how to see. Yet its depiction of the life and art of one of 20th century's most interesting photographers invites us to think more deeply about the relationship between visual immediacy, our unease with formal beauty as so often expressed in critiques of social photography, and moral clarity.

The Salt of the Earth captures a deep tension between the immediacy of Salgado's images and the breadth of time and worlds he traverses to reach these moments so that whole lifetimes and histories can be captured within a flash second. Even though framing and composition are of paramount narrative significance for Salgado, so that a story cannot be properly told in its full dramatic intensity without the correct relationship between earth and sky and between light and creatures, he does not impose the demands of his own sense of time upon others. He waits, follows, runs, climbs, or jumps behind and alongside his subjects as they are or have to be. He invites them to test him and to share what they will. The images of lives and circumstances that emerge are the culmination of mutual trust, friendship and symbiosis developed between the photographer and his subjects over weeks, months, even years.

To what extent has Salgado's career been driven primarily by an aesthetic desire for striking imagery, a restless hunger for adventure, or deep ethical concern with the human condition? The film seems to put such ambiguities on display, confirming once more how they are deeply entwined in the unfolding of Salgado's life and work. The visual desire to look at hell on earth that compelled Salgado to go to the burning oil wells of Kuwait in 1991 led to the Dantesque glamour of images of heroic firefighters. But exploring the devastated landscape, he found also the essential cruelty of the whole context of war and social inequality encapsulated in unexpected images: of birds that can no longer fly, horses going mad by imprisonment within the royal garden walls, and isolated, abandoned people whom other victims, those able to flee, considered disposable. These forlorn creatures were able to tell their stories to the world through the lens of someone who saw them clearly because he had arrived upon the scene, not with preconceptions about how to tell the story of destruction and aid, but with a fearless desire to look around him, and to produce images that combined truth and beauty.

In the Sahel in 1984-85, following the pictorial logic of contrasting foreground with background, of seeing and depicting creatures against landscapes real or fantastical, Salgado saw unfathomable numbers of people flooding a landscape that seemed to belong to the beginning of time. In sharp contrast to preconceptions about African poverty or backwardness, the suffering wrought by famines and government oppression in his pictures was taking place where it should not be. In composing the picture, the artist's gaze arrives at an almost religious sentiment, of Eden desecrated at an impossible scale. We do not reach such depths of moral clarity through consuming images alone.

Pictures do not always say what we might want them to say, nor resolve the complex problems that they capture through their unifying gaze. Salgado's vision would not have emerged as clearly in the film had the directors been less comfortable with silences. Even as it traverses continents and years, many different cultures and different states of living and dying, the story of the photographs is passed with great naturalness here and there between Salgado, his father, son Juliano, wife Leila, Wenders as if they were sitting together in a circle, talking intimately, with us, with each other, father to son to grandson to wife and mother to friend. The directors never let go of that intimate focus, nor let slip the group's particular chemistry.

Much is left unexplained and undefended: for example, the risks and sacrifices inherent in the partnership of Sebastiao and Leila, who have long worked together yet spent many years apart in the process, the relationships between fathers and sons, the photographer and his audience. Yet neither are these issues completely cast aside. We do not need to be told everything, we are simply given a hint that something might be there.

This aesthetic of restraint suggests one answer to my companion's question. An artist like Sebastião Salgado does something other than bear witness to hidden abuses, share with us what we cannot otherwise know, or shame us into looking at what we ignore. But that something is no less a route to the elemental human. Against the fear of fatigue, of inundation by media images of suffering, of the same story told over and over again, the pathway of such an artist to the images he finds and creates can help us begin from the beginning again, to look at the world afresh, as if it were a blank canvas at a moment of genesis. We do not have to agree with Salgado's ways of seeing, but they are an invitation to retrace our steps to the visual prehistoric of our own innocence.

#salgado #advancedresearchmethods #5IMAG016W

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unidramastudentblog · 3 years

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Performance Blog Entries for Making 1 Module & Conclusion

Blog 1: Decision Process

In the beginning of the decision process for our Making Performance 1 performance, our group was uncertain on what our performance should be on.

We had generated some initial ideas such as a comedic piece in an office meeting setting via Zoom during the Covid-19 Pandemic, although, our exciting twist within our piece would be us, as performances, imitating the personalities of our parents and referencing to us, the performers, as in the third person (for instance, Jess is instead of I am). This comedic piece’s content would include discussions of everyday occurrences in a professional setting, but also including interferences of personal life (family members interrupting, etc). When actors would engage with each other, there would be a conversation within a scene of us telling embarrassing/funny stories with our co-workers (other actors). Another idea our group generated was to possibly revisit a formative performance that had received positive affirmation from fellow actors in our main performance group. This formative performance piece introduced the concept of an AA-style meeting via a Zoom call that would resonate as an online form of group counselling. All actors would take turns to discuss in a monologue how the Covid-19 Pandemic had affected us all individually, whilst holding something sentimental.

Although we saw potential in the theatrical development for these options, we were still in agreement that we wanted to pursue something we had not yet had the opportunity to develop – our future theatrical ambitions as emerging theatre makers. We mutually agreed that some of our theatrical desires included the working on materials with dark content, for instance, our passions for the true crime genre.

Upon the discovery of our common interest in true crime, we narrowed down to the criminal activity of murder. We discussed the potential of using recent murder cases, such as the murder of a graduate student of our university, where we would also raise awareness for prevalent topics like domestic violence in relationships to current students as it doesn’t matter who you are, you can still fall victim and it’s important to leave your domestic abuser as soon as you can because if you give them the benefit of the doubt to them changing, they won’t. And it is important to realise that from early on as the abuser will use this strategy as a manipulation/control tactic to keep a hold of you. We wanted to cover the consensus that this is still an issue affecting the Western World, especially UK citizens, more so in the current climate of staying at home/working from home because a victim’s forms of escape in their daily lives have been reduced.

Additionally, we discussed the potential of using high profile murder cases from serial killers as there is more publicly accessed information on them. We deliberated covering a notoriously infamous serial killer cases of Elizabeth Bathory (a royal who bathed in the blood of her young female servants in hopes of her achieving forever youthfulness) or America’s first (well-documented) serial killer, H. H. Holmes.

Ultimately, we made our decision when we looked up the ethics of the situation the domestic abuse case. Although if we covered the domestic abuse murder case it would be legally permissible, we have a moral obligation/duty of care to the recent deceased’s family and friends because they are still currently alive. Our options were now of the two historical cases of Elizabeth Bathory and H. H. Holmes as any immediate family members of them are long gone as they are over the 150-year mark that many production companies use to fulfil their moral obligation on covering such cases.

Furthermore, our group mutually decided that we needed to consider the variation of performers in our group (one male, three female), so we chose to conduct our piece on the infamous serial killer, H.H. Holmes. Additionally, we simultaneously agreed that this serial killer case is much more interesting in comparison as it has more content to cover and will be very informational. Surprisingly, even with this murder case being a well-documented case for the time, many have surprisingly unheard of this case.

Blog 2: Research Process

Now that we had made our decision for our Making Performance 1 performance, we must progress onto the next step which is the research process. This is an important step that should not be skipped because we need to research the genre of theatre in which we wish to perform, the historical background (context) of the period, the individuals of that time, eyewitnesses/accounts, etc in order to produce a historically accurate performance that represents the era correctly.

It is a significant aspect of the process to define the genre in which we want to work on when making theatre of any kind. This helps to bridge the gap into the creative process (next blog entry) so that we can begin the process of making dramaturgical choices such as structuring, staging, and establishing characters. We made the early dramaturgical choice of selecting our true crime piece to be a mix of biographical and archival material. As theatre goers/makers, we can heavily understand that biographical theatre is simply ‘the use of characters based on historical figures,’ that derived from the ‘little mediated representation of reality in nearly all media,’ (Canton, 2011: 2). Subsequently, the understanding of archival material is recognised as ‘a dialogue between the present and the past,’ and although a broad understanding of archival material, it is heavily applicable with the usage of archives in the theatrical sphere (Craven, 2012: 10). We wanted to primarily rely on the use of archival material such as testimonies, newspaper articles, and historical records as it is significantly important for the representation of these characters and era to be historically accurate as we want to be taken seriously as the young emerging professionals we are. Our piece will (technically) contain elements of verbatim theatre as some of our early dramaturgical choices include the use of quotes word-for-word directly from the serial killer H. H. Holmes himself and his descendants.

In reflection of the style of theatre our group has selected, we came to the agreement that our piece has influenced of theatre practitioner Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and the concept he helped curate of the Theatre of Cruelty. Our intentions with our true crime piece were to inform but shock audience members with H. H. Holmes’ sadistic ways of torturing before killing his victims. We were also influenced by the theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski’s (1863-1938) ‘The System,’ for its intent of becoming the character (historical figure) instead of just embodying them.

Our next research task as a group was the research into the characterisation of the infamous serial killer H.H. Holmes and the prominent professionals with their breakthroughs on their new findings encompassing H. H. Holmes and the quotes that he reportedly said preceding to his execution in November 1894. Our other research tasks comprised of contemporary interview material from historians and psychologists, etc and using any compelling quotes we find useful to be a part of our piece. We made the consecutive dramaturgical decision to then use the same names of these historians and psychologists.

Blog 3: Dramaturgical Process

As previously mentioned in the above blog, we began to advance in our dramaturgical process in the very early stages of our piece. From our verdict of primarily relying on the use of archival material of testimonies, newspaper articles, and historical records, and a verbatim approach by electing quotes word-for-word directly from the serial killer H. H. Holmes himself, his descendants, and also of professionals.

In this process, we began to think of the performance’s dramaturgical structure, for instance, we had very assertive opinions on creating a storytelling piece through form of a media interview, that would be conducted by news presenter, who would interview the psychologist and historian, plus brief surrealistic news interruptions of H. H. Holmes in relaying his twisted logic as to why he did what he did, etc through his well-documented statements. In this process, we struggled in the compilation of our research/ideas down on the script because we had encountered numerous hurdles, so we had to edit/add further information once we received critical feedback from our tutor.

In this stage of the process, it was also critical we made selections on music and lighting. We changed our music choice excessively because we were very captious on if it went well with the feel of the piece and edited it several times within the script (changing it for something else but also eliminating some soundtracks because they would play at aberrant moments in our piece if we proceeded to leave it in). For example, we changed the reoccurring airy soundtrack that would subsequently represent H. H. Holmes (as he would come thereby come into frame) because the music choice did not quite create the tense/unsettling atmosphere we wanted our audience members to feel once they saw the appearance of the character, H. H. Holmes. Our other music selections like the introductory news jingle were an insured decision we made as we felt dramaturgically, it really pulled the piece together (audience members would know this was a media interview and create that atmosphere). In parallel to our decisions for music, we stipulated on the idea of creating a contrasting feeling with lighting, such as having the brighter lighting for the news reporter, psychologist, and historian to represent professionality and morality of these characters, and on the other hand, having darker lighting for our H. H. Holmes character to insinuate this character’s immorality and being on the wrong side of humanity overall.

At a later stage, we debated and later agreed upon the usage of additional multimedia like images where H. H. Holmes once resided (his murder castle), his recent exoneration of his body, and his skull just to name a few. This dramaturgical choice was in reference to our previously mentioned theatre practitioner, Antonin Artaud (1986-1948), as the array of pictures correlated with his theatrical intentions to ‘disrupt the relationship between audience and performer,’ (Tripney, 2017), but also the sensory aspects of his techniques as the ‘work’s capacity to shock and confront the audience,’ (Tripney, 2017).

At this stage of the theatrical process, we conversed in our ideas of costume. It was very clear for us that we wanted the professionals (news reporter, psychologist, and historian) to dress in either their occupational or professional attire, whereas we predetermined our H. H. Holmes character to have multiple changes of his costuming to symbolise the character of H. H. Holmes to be a smart, yet well-dressed and then showing the spiralling and dishevelled H. H. Holmes to his inevitable execution.

In the finalisation of the dramaturgical process, we concluded it with the settlement of minor details/refining ideas that had been excluded unintentionally at this time in the process. Some of these miniscule alterations include last minute technical aspects (like music, cues for technicians, etc).

Blog 4: Rehearsal Process

Our rehearsal process was a very straightforward stage in this piece. We knew what we were doing because our script was very detailed in its depiction of dialogue, cues, stage directions for actors, etc.

We created a clear and organised schedule for rehearsals that entailed a detailed time slot for rehearsals for our performance. We concurrently developed rehearsal diaries that made comprehensive notes of the aims and objectives of that rehearsal, content covered within rehearsal (how many times we did a full uninterrupted run-through, etc), final notes (e.g. the aims and objectives in the rehearsal thereafter). We agreed upon the idea of incorporating any forms of costume/props we intend to use in the lead up to our technical run performance.

In the consummation of the rehearsal process, we had our technical run in our final dress run synchronously. We saw a preview of what the finalised assessed piece would look like and it was the juncture to decree any very last-minute alterations.

Conclusion

In the aftermath of our Making Performance 1 module performance, it is important to reflect on our efforts and our group’s performances as a whole and our contributions to our group’s performances as emerging theatre makers. This also includes our classmates’ performances we saw and to give relevant feedback in their future theatre creations.

In the beginning, we saw the most potential in our keen interest for the true crime genre. We commonly agreed to narrow down the criminal activity of murder, more specifically multiple killings from serial killers. As our group’s piece is a biographical piece centred on someone who once lived (H. H. Holmes) we used archival material as we primarily relied on the use of testimonies, newspaper articles, and historical records as for us, as emerging theatre makers, we believed it to be significantly important for the representation of these characters and era to be historically accurate. Additionally, our piece had technically contained elements of verbatim theatre also as some of our dramaturgical choices included the use of quotes word-for-word directly from the serial killer H. H. Holmes’ mouth himself and also his descendants (media interviews they had previously given over time). The information for our performance had emerged from online sources that are widely accessible to the general public because we wanted to keep the morality of performing this case as high as possible (in the unlikely scenario that distant family members of H. H. Holmes himself or the distant family of the victims themselves and we could be accused of releasing private information about family members, etc). The online sources came under the categories of online databases, Google Scholar/Books, websites, and extensive yet informative YouTube videos on the case itself, etc. In addition, we also used some media interviews covering different aspects of the case which involved professionals and distant relatives alike and we had compiled these findings/influences from these media interviews and adapted it to our group’s own way.

In our group’s performance, we knew very soon on into the development of our piece that dramaturgically it was the most suitable for our group’s performance to be in the form a media interview, which, in turn, made this aspect of the performance very successful. As a group dynamic as a whole, our group really connected on a friendly level almost instantly. This made it increasingly easy to be able to communicate with each other with no complications. We were all very much alike in terms of personalities and what we wanted for our goals and ambitions of the finalised product for our piece, thus making it so we didn’t have any creative differences on how to pursue our piece going forward because we were all on the same wavelength.

In reflection of the assessed performance itself, our group was very successful when using a collaboration of multimedia such as additional imagery (via PowerPoint slides) of the things mentioned within our ‘media interview’ that was successful in the way that it broke up character’s speech with needed imagery to balance the piece.

However, a main criticism I find upon reflecting the development and the performance in extension, I concluded that our performance could have been perceived as static by audience members. The reason for this was because there was too much dialogue from any one particular character at any given time, aside from the exception of our H. H. Holmes character. This resulted in the inevitability that our ‘performance’ could have been categorised as an over dramatization on an informational subject within the true crime genre. Another criticism I have for this performance was the limited time we spent on the development of it altogether. Due to no faults of our own, each member of the group had other personal commitments outstanding from our performances (such as employment, family issues, health issues, etc) that it had an unfortunate hindrance in the progression of the performance in the critical developmental stages. This, however, could not be avoided and it was something that we had to overcome and find solutions that best matched our problems. Although, we discovered that on an interpersonal level we really connected in terms of how compassion, empathy, moral support, etc, we still needed to match our professional standing with our interpersonal standing as in that time, there was a significant difference between the two. In the lead up to the performance our technical/dress runs of the show were very limited to say the least. We had 2/3-hours long slot to get everything we wanted to be done technically correctly. Even though we didn’t use an excessive variety of technical aspects in our piece, it was significantly important for us to have them (PowerPoint slides of images, music, soundtracks, etc) as they added the dynamic to our performance we wanted to replicate. As an additional layer of our performance, we wanted the timing of our piece to be correct (making exceptions for delay in when performing digital theatre), however, in the performance it was evident that we needed an increased amount of time because in our piece, the cutting of the music/soundtracks had overlapped the character of H. H. Holmes, and consequently, had over-ridden the audio of the actor. This is a prominent example of why, in future performances, especially in digital theatre, we need more time to be considered efficient in producing a relatively successful performance (well, an element of it).

When watching our other classmates’ group performances, I was able to see the evident progress they made as emerging theatre makers also. The piece which I particularly found really striking was my fellow group who devised their piece on autobiographical and technically biographical/verbatim on their experiences with their mental health and their struggle with getting help from the student wellbeing services the university provides. They make a compelling case using their own accounts (monologues) of why these services our university provides is adequate at best. I found this piece very successful because it was very powerful because these experiences were their own and you (as an audience) could see the emotions of frustration for the longing of change of the mental health services for themselves but also future university students, so they do not suffer the same circumstances as themselves.

As much as I can commemorate them and other group performances within my class, there were so many elements that we could improve on in any performances that follow, especially in the department of performing digital theatre (as this was our first official digital theatre performance). Some of the general things included framing, levels, not falling into the abyss of relying on dialogue primarily instead of actually ‘performing’ like my group, for instance. In the earlier mentioned performing group that centred their piece on the issues of mental health services provided by the university, I accumulated a few minor complications of this piece which consisted of the similar problem to ours of relying on speech (monologues) of characters to fill a gap in a moment where dialogue is substituting on potential characterisation through physical representation due to performance having the be performed digitally, however, just like ours, this group needed that aspect to their piece as it felt a little static which impacted their conveyance of their important message on mental health. In supplementary to this, I thought this group’s performance had impactful framing for the most part, moreover, in my personal opinion, I believe analytically that the framing was marginally out at some momentous marks within the piece. Though, I must acknowledge the possibility that this group could have made this to be an intentional dramaturgical move, creating a representation of a ‘messy’ and ‘not put together’ performance to symbolise somebody’s mind in their moment of mental vulnerability or, if these moments were of accidentally missed cues. A smaller but just as valid point of criticism for this group’s performance was their muddled aims and objectives. Specifically, I regard the direct aim of the piece (towards the university itself) to be something I disagree with. I believe the funding for such services to be underfunded as a whole through the NHS, workplaces, etc, not just in education. However, I do understand and agree with the sentiment that the university is not entirely useless in the situation, and they could definitely do more to help their students.

Bibliography:

1. Canton, U (2011). Biographical Theatre: Re-Representing Real People? United Kingdom. Available at: Biographical Theatre - Google Books (Accessed on: Tuesday 1st June 2021)

2. Craven, L (2012). What are Archives? – Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader. Ashgate Publishing Limited: Hampshire. Available at: What are Archives? - Google Books (Accessed on: Tuesday 1st June 2021)

3. Tripney, N (2017). Discovering Literature: 20th Century – Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty. British Library. Available at: Antonin Artaud and the Theatre of Cruelty - The British Library (bl.uk) (Accessed on: Tuesday 1st June 2021)

4. Wikipedia (2021). H. H. Holmes. Available at: H. H. Holmes - Wikipedia (Accessed on: Tuesday 1st June 2021)

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allthewayuptop · 4 years

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Why We Make Art

Seven artists explain why they write, rap, take photos, draw, dance, and make movies

Why do you make art? That’s the simple question Greater Good posed to seven artists. Their answers are surprising, and very diverse. They mention making art for fun and adventure; building bridges between themselves and the rest of humanity; reuniting and recording fragments of thought, feeling, and memory; and saying things that they can’t express in any other way.

All their answers are deeply personal. In this issue of Greater Good, we explore the possible cognitive and emotional benefits of the arts, and yet these artists evoke a more fundamental benefit: They are just doing what they feel they’re born to do.

Gina Gibney: Giving power to others

Gina Gibney is the artistic director of the New York-based Gina Gibney Dance Company, which was founded in 1991 to serve a dual mission: to create and perform contemporary choreography that draws upon the strength and insights of women and men, and to enrich and reshape lives through programs that give voice to communities in need, especially survivors of domestic abuse and individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

I make art for a few reasons. In life, we experience so much fragmentation of thought and feeling. For me, creating art brings things back together.

In my own work, that is true throughout the process. At the beginning, developing the basic raw materials for the work is deeply reflective and informative. Later, bringing those materials together into a form—distilling and shaping movement, creating a context, working to something that feels cohesive and complete. That’s incredibly powerful for me—something that really keeps me going.

Interestingly, the body of my work is like a catalog of the events and thoughts of my life. For me, making work is almost like keeping a journal. Giving that to someone else—as a kind of gift through live performance—is the most meaningful aspect of my work.

Dance is a powerful art form for the very reason that it doesn’t need to explain or comment on itself. One of the most amazing performances I have ever seen in my life was of a woman—a domestic violence survivor—dancing in a tiny conference room in a domestic violence shelter for other survivors. She was not a professional dancer. She was a woman who had faced unbelievable challenges and who was living with a great deal of sadness. She created and performed an amazing solo—but to have described her performance as “sad” would have been to diminish what we experienced.

That’s the power of dance. You can feel something and empathize with it on a very deep level, and you don’t have to put words to it.

Judy Dater: I like expressing emotions

Judy Dater has been making photographs for more than 40 years, and is considered one of America’s foremost photographers. The recipient of a Guggenheim and many other awards, her books include Imogen Cunningham: A Portrait, Women and Other Visions, Body and Soul and Cycles.

I like expressing emotions—to have others feel what it is I’m feeling when I’m photographing people.

Empathy is essential to portraiture. I’ve done landscapes, and I think they can be very poetic and emotional, but it’s different from the directness of photographing a person. I think photographing people is, for me, the best way to show somebody something about themselves—either the person I photograph or the person looking—that maybe they didn’t already know. Maybe it’s presumptuous, but that’s the desire. I feel like I’m attending to people when I’m photographing them, and I think I understand people better because I’ve been looking at them intensely for 40-some years.

Pete Docter: It’s fun making things

Pete Docter has been involved in some of Pixar Studio’s most popular and seminal animated features, including Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Cars, and Wall-E, but he is best known as the director of the Academy-Award-winning Monsters, Inc. Docter is currently directing Up, set for release in May of 2009.

I make art primarily because I enjoy the process. It’s fun making things.

And I’m sure there is also that universal desire to connect with other people in some way, to tell them about myself or my experiences. What I really look for in a project is something that resonates with life as I see it, and speaks to our experiences as humans. That probably sounds pretty highfalutin’ coming from someone who makes cartoons, but I think all the directors at Pixar feel the same way. We want to entertain people, not only in the vacuous, escapist sense (though to be sure, there’s a lot of that in our movies too), but in a way that resonates with the audience as being truthful about life—some deeper emotional experience that they recognize in their own existence. On the surface, our films are about toys, monsters, fish, or robots; at a foundational level they’re about very universal things: our own struggles with mortality, loss, and defining who we are in the world.

As filmmakers, we’re pretty much cavemen sitting around the campfire telling stories, only we use millions of dollars of technology to do it. By telling stories, we connect with each other. We talk about ourselves, our feelings, and what it is to be human.

Or we just make cartoons. Either way we try to have a good time, and we hope the audience does too.

Harrell Fletcher: Anything anyone calls art is art

An image from "The Problem of Possible Redemption 2003," staged at the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. The video is an adaptation of James Joyce's novel Ulysses shot at the Parkville Senior Center in Connecticut, with the seniors reading the lines from cue cards.© Harell Fletcher

Harrell Fletcher teaches in the art department at Portland State University. He has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, and in numerous other museums and galleries around the world. In 2002, Fletcher started Learning To Love You More, a participatory website with Miranda July, which they turned into a book, published in 2007. Fletcher is the recipient of the 2005 Alpert Award in Visual Arts.

The question of why I make art needs to be broken down a bit before I can answer.

First of all, what is art? The definition for art that I have come up with, which seems to work best for me, is that anything anyone calls art is art. This comes from my belief that there is nothing intrinsic about art. We cannot do a chemical analysis to determine if something is art or not. Instead, I feel like calling something “art” is really just a subjective way of indicating value—which could be aesthetic, cultural, monetary, and so on.

If we look at other kinds of creative activity we can see how various forms can all exist and be valid at the same time. I’ve made what I think of as art since I was a child, initially drawings, then photographs, paintings, videos, and so on. By the time I got to graduate school, I was not so interested in making more stuff, and instead started to move into another direction, which these days is sometimes called “Social Practice.”

This is sort of a confusing term since it is so new and undefined. In a broad way, I think of it as the opposite of Studio Practice—making objects in isolation, to be shown and hopefully sold in a gallery context. Most of the art world operates with this Studio Practice approach. In Social Practice, there is more of an emphasis on ideas and actions than on objects; it can take place outside of art contexts, and there is often a collaborative or participatory aspect to the work.

So back to the question why I make art. In my case, the projects that I do allow me to meet people I wouldn’t ordinarily meet, travel to places I wouldn’t normally go to, learn about subjects that I didn’t know I would be interested in, and sometimes even help people out in small ways that make me feel good. I like to say that what I’m after is to have an interesting life, and doing the work that I do as an artist helps me achieve that.

Kwame Dawes: An environment of empathy

Kwame Dawes, Ph.D., is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of 13 books of verse, most recently Gomer’s Song, and a novel, She’s Gone, which won the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Best First Novel.

I write in what is probably a vain effort to somehow control the world in which I live, recreating it in a manner that satisfies my sense of what the world should look like and be like.

I’m trying to capture in language the things that I see and feel, as a way of recording their beauty and power and terror, so that I can return to those things and relive them. In that way, I try to have some sense of control in a chaotic world.

I want to somehow communicate my sense of the world—that way of understanding, engaging, experiencing the world—to somebody else. I want them to be transported into the world that I have created with language.

And so the ultimate aim of my writing is to create an environment of empathy, something that would allow the miracle of empathy to take place, where human beings can seem to rise out of themselves and extend themselves into others and live within others. That has a tremendous power for the human being. And I know this, because that is what other people’s writing does to me when I read it.

James Sturm: The reasons are unimportant

James Sturm is a cartoonist and co-founder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. He is the author of the best-selling and award-winning graphic novel The Golem’s Mighty Swing, chosen as the Best Graphic Novel of 2000 by Time magazine. In 2007, his trilogy of historical graphic novels was collected in a volume entitled James Sturm’s America: God, Gold, and Golems.

I like the question “Why Do You Make Art?” because it assumes what I do is art. A flattering assumption. The question also takes me back to my freshman year of college, where such questions like “What is nature?” and “Is reality a wave or a circle?” were earnestly debated (usually late at night and after smoking too much weed).

Twenty-five years later I’d like to think I am a little more clear-headed regarding this question. Perhaps the only insight I’ve gained is the knowledge that I have no idea and, secondly, the reasons are unimportant. Depending on my mood, on any given day, I could attribute making art to a high-minded impulse to connect with others or to understand the world or a narcissistic coping mechanism or a desire to be famous or therapy or as my religious discipline or to provide a sense of control or a desire to surrender control, etc., etc., etc.

Whatever the reason, an inner compulsion exists and I continue to honor this internal imperative. If I didn’t, I would feel really horrible. I would be a broken man. So whether attempting to make art is noble or selfish, the fact remains that I will do it nevertheless. Anything past this statement is speculation. I would be afraid that by proclaiming why I make art would be generating my own propaganda.

KRS-One: Hip hop is beyond time, beyond space

Lawrence Krisna Parker, better known by his stage name KRS-One, is widely considered by critics and other MCs to be one of hip hop’s most influential figures. At the 2008 Black Entertainment Television Awards, KRS-One was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for his rapping and activism.

I was born this way, born to make art, to make hip hop. And I think I’m just one of the people who had the courage to stay with my born identity. Hip hop keeps me true to myself, keeps me human.

Hip hop is the opposite of technology. Hip hop is what the human body does: Breaking, DJing, graffiti writing. The human body breakdances, you can’t take that away. DJing is not technology; it’s human intelligence over technology: cutting, mixing, scratching. It’s physical. The manipulation of technology is what humans do, that’s art.

Or take graffiti writing. Put a writing utensil in any kid’s hand at age two or three. They will not write on a paper like they’ll later be socialized to do, they will write on the walls. They’re just playing. That’s human. Graffiti reminds you of your humanity, when you scrawl your self-expression on the wall. Hip hop helps us to see the things in the world in new ways.

That’s why hip hop has kept me young. It doesn’t allow you to grow up too fast. Hip hop is beyond time, beyond space. That’s why I make hip hop.

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oblivionspeakk · 6 years

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10 Moments To Remember From SEO 2019

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In the particular previous example, Bob's home web page might have the title, "Bob's Soccer Store - Soccer Shoes and boots and Equipment. " The name is the most important component of SEO, since it shows the search engine exactly exactly what the page is all regarding. 47. When creating SEO articles, keep the social layer within your mind. In case you have time to get good search engine optimisation education, after that combine this knowledge with greatest practices and you are upon your way to become a good SEO expert. 46. Use SEO practices in order to optimize your social media articles. 4. Mobile SEO plus Local Business: - As we all mentioned before, users tend in order to search for local business upon the smartphones. Head associated with Marketing at @impressiontalk specialising within user-centred SEO, PAGE RANK, content marketing and digital technique. Primary will be on inbound marketing, including every thing from SEO to social press. However, a good agency providing SEO services will be all about being proactive in order to keep up-to-date with the most recent search engine news and adjustments in SEO techniques. Video marketing provides new opportunities to drive even more visitors your site and enhance its SEO status. Research Engine Optimisation (SEO) in 2018 is really a technical, synthetic and creative process to enhance the visibility associated with the website in search motors. Off-page SEO relates to the actions taken outdoors of your personal website that can easily help boost your search motor rankings. Mainly because Blog9T of this insufficient visibility this can be hard to create a sound business case intended for SEO, even though it will be strikingly obvious of the advantages to most companies of the particular number one position on Search engines. This particular is a time-honored SEO exercise called broken link building. 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The purpose of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION writing is to make your own company more visual, more attractive in website search engines. SEO will be the practice of increasing typically the quantity and quality of site visitors to your website through natural search engine results. 31. SEO data can notify a smart social media technique. Solid keyword & marketplace research assist SEO strategy plus allow us to offer realistic projections and forecasts of opportunity inside your market. Nevertheless, when this comes to developing and performing an audio SEO strategy with regard to your business, just creating content material for the keywords your clients are looking for is each arduous and, well, wrong. In this situation, in, the article ranks correct after the official Google suggestions (and it makes sense that will Google should be number one on their own branded query) but Smashing magazine is proven as a position 0” little of text on the issue Google pop up guidelines” within. Search Engine Land, a top quality SEO blog this is the pillar of the community will be ranking after Smashing (which occurs to be associated with a style blog than an SEO one).

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

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TIFF 2018: Donnybrook, 22 July

Tim Sutton’s “Donnybrook” wants to shine a light on the “forgotten” America, to give a voice to the people that have been economically and culturally left behind by a rapidly developing country. It’s set in the rural Midwest and focuses exclusively on the white communities that have been ravaged by poverty, addiction, and abuse; “Donnybrook” repeatedly and insistently signals that it’s a film for and about white people and their anger. Putting aside the obvious glaring issue that many parts of America, including and especially those dominated by marginalized communities, have also been “left behind,” so to speak, Sutton’s project isn’t invalid. White resentment is a genuine issue in America, and I have no doubt that there are plenty of approaches within narrative film that would examine such a topic with intelligence and tact. All I know is that “Donnybrook” doesn’t rise to the challenge. Instead, it revels in white rage, fetishizing the real problems that exist in vulnerable communities in order to tell a stupid story that says and reveals absolutely nothing about anyone’s situation. If Sutton’s aim is to give these people a voice, he has not only failed, but he has gone further and reduced them to inchoate caricatures.

The plot in brief: Jarhead Earl (Jamie Bell), a veteran struggling to provide a better life for his family, wants to compete in the Donnybrook, a no-holds-barred bareknuckle brawl with a cash prize of $100,000. Meanwhile, the psychopathic Chainsaw Angus (Frank Grillo) deals meth in Earl’s community with his sister Delia (Margaret Qualley), whom he has trapped in an abusive, semi-incestuous relationship. Angus commits grotesque acts of violence almost every time he’s on screen either because of circumstance or his nature (Sutton never makes this clear), but he’s destined by fate (or, more realistically, the script’s demands) to meet Earl in the ring. Also, James Badge Dale plays a police officer that blurs the line between cop and criminal (to quote Charlie Kaufman in “Adaptation,” see every cop movie ever made for other examples of this) who’s technically on Angus’ trail but really just spirals.

Sutton fails to provide any of his subjects with three dimensions, coding them in black-and-white conceptions of “good” and “evil,” but never letting the audience forget that good guys sometimes have to be bad in order to survive. He neither invests any real emotion in their pain nor explores the reasons for their suffering, except in the most offhanded of ways, instead choosing to dispassionately marinate in their misery. Moreover, “Donnybrook” traffics in insultingly reductive ideas about, as Sutton describes in a recent LA Times profile, “where we are right now.” He contextualizes his characters’ desperation in no deeper way other than platitudes about “the world going to hell,” assuming the audience will understand what that means but presumably ignore the ugly implications/connotations of such a statement. (The conspicuous absence of anything related to race or racism speaks loudly about Sutton’s naively idealistic view of these grievances.) I’ll take Sutton at his word that he honestly wanted to make “a horrible opera of destruction” about a “huge population of people in the middle of the country who feel like they are dispossessed,” but “Donnybrook” treats the upsetting reality of white rural poverty like it’s just grist for the mill. It’s a film that gets off on appalling violence purposefully designed to provoke but mostly just inspires eye rolls, which would be bad enough if it didn’t also have “political” aspirations.

In an attempt to center an underrepresented community, Sutton has reduced their plight to nothing more than a pulpy masquerade. In the process, he has also possibly confirmed some people’s worst assumptions and, worse, validated others’ toxic beliefs. “Donnybrook” makes no attempt to even nod at a nuanced depiction of “the dispossessed” because it wouldn’t fit into its sledgehammer approach or over-the-top beak tone. It’s just a broad canvas of despair that demands its audience fill in the gaps about its causes and the identities of those responsible for it, mostly because Sutton doesn’t really care to do so in his film. Sutton has no moral responsibility to point fingers and name names, but given that he trades in real-life distress, it’s telling that he doesn’t even make an effort. Maybe because doing so would take a full leap into truly nasty territory Sutton isn’t prepared or willing to broach.

I’m personally uncomfortable with depictions of real-life mass shootings on film, mostly because I think there’s rarely an artistic or political utility to employ that kind of violence in a filmic context. The first act of Paul Greengrass’ “22 July,” about the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks and their aftermath, with its suspenseful dramatization of Anders Behring Breivik’s mass murder doesn’t dissuade me of this belief. After briefly psychologizing a few of the victims, primarily Vilijar Hanssen (Jonas Strand Gravli) whom the film follows after the attack, Greengrass shows Breivik’s mass shooting of 66 innocent children at the Utøya summer camp in intimate detail. It’s terrifying and graphic, but doesn’t exactly prove its necessity, especially because Greengrass is more interested in Breivik’s trial and the lingering traumatic effects. Greengrass puts its audience through the ringer for little reason other than to prove that he can effectively dramatize such a horrible event.

Following the attack, “22 July” settles into more of a respectable, conventional approach. Greengrass follows three narrative strands: Lawyer Geir Lippestad’s (Jon Øigarden) defense of Breivik (Anders Danielsen Lie), which begins with an insanity plea and ends with a guilty admission; Hanssen’s slow but miraculous recovery from his severe injuries as well as his prolonged PTSD; and, briefly, the public inquiry into the governmental failure to identify Breivik as a threat from the perspective of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg (Ola G. Furuseth). The script spreads itself too thin and none of these threads can really make much of a potent impact. However, Hanssen’s story appropriately receives the lion’s share of the film’s attention, including a close consideration of his frustration, guilt, and fear. Gravli invests Hanssen’s fraught mental state with real emotion, which goes a long way to keeping “22 July” from being a completely exploitative mess. (It should be noted that Greengrass’ choice to have Norwegian actors speak accented English is dispiritingly predictable, given that it will go a long way to securing an international audience when released on Netflix in October.)

At the same time, “22 July” doesn’t really have anything to say about the Norway attacks. Greengrass’ commentary mostly amounts to the undoubtedly accurate point that Breivik’s abhorrent nativist beliefs have proliferated around the globe, and attacks in their name continue to this day. To me, this seems almost painfully obvious, and anyone who pays even the mildest attention to the news can see this play out in real time. As such, that’s not enough of a reason for Greengrass to pay lip service to Breivik’s extremist beliefs, even if it’s to showcase their poisonous nature. I don’t believe Greengrass gives Breivik “a platform,” necessarily (he provides the victims with the vast majority of speech and restrains himself from over-psychologizing Breivik), but his presence is still discomfiting and unproductive. It’s not clear if there’s a way to depict these types of attacks without unintentionally reducing them to the stuff of thrillers, but Greengrass at least tries to provide a fuller picture. To be clear, he doesn’t succeed, but his interests lie in those who are alive and their attempts to honor the dead rather than the murderer in question.

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ethicalmedia17 · 7 years

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Our First Approach to Dissecting Our Thesis (Part I of II)

The Analysis of Cultural Ethics in Fashion & Music | Proposal & Video Methodology

Media Ethics Fall 2017 | Nitin Sawhney

James Murphy, Jamal Perry Young and Jasmyn Baird

October 24, 2017

Key Ethical Dilemma(s) to Investigate

The key ethical dilemmas we plan to investigate circulate around the topic of culture appropriation within entertainment media. We are looking to focus primarily on the fashion and music industry. By incorporating ethical approaches to our topics, we will uncover and gain a greater understanding of the responsibility media has for society and what is ethical or unethical. There is a question of whether the media connects or disconnects society and with the topic of culture appropriation and culture appreciation, we can attempt to decipher the definitions and intent of both.

Hip Hop is a genre of music that was started in the late 70’s by minorities living in the inner city ghettos of New York City. During this time, racial and economic tensions were high. The genre was created in part, as a vehicle of expression to escape the realities of the time. Over time the people who listen to the music, the people who make the music, as well as the communities themselves have changed. There are many variations of hip hop music, as there are many variations of Rock, Jazz, and classical music. If there are these different types of hip hop music why is there only one side that is perpetuated and blanked negatively across the media. The way hip hop is portrayed can create hostile environments for individuals who are of that culture. It creates uncomfortable situations because you know exactly how you're portrayed and what a certain group of people may think of you. When parties of another race indulge in hip hop culture it is often thought to be just a phase and a light hearted joke. You don't usually see or hear negative images or ideology of other races who enjoy hip hop culture.

With regards to fashion media and its message, we plan to research who is responsible for the content creation and how their approach to these matters can be changed. In the fashion industry, designers are inspired by different cultures that can either be presented as appropriating or appreciating. The purpose of this content reflects the audience and within the audience are those who have an opinion on what is being presented. Those with a voice are essentially the gatekeepers in the society; but are their opinions considered ethical? The gatekeepers are the ones who are giving reason behind what is appropriating and or appreciating in fashion media and if they are ethically just. Are their insights doing more harm by separating cultures from merging or are they exploiting the right to pay credit to where it’s due? Studying different cases of where designers get their inspiration is heavily influenced within this project. Another ethical dilemma I want to investigate is if the media is maintaining their responsibility of truth telling. All of the cases we choose to study will relate back to most ethical principles from our class discussions and readings.

Relevant Context

The entertainment industry is heavily focused on black culture, especially in the music and fashion markets. Drawing examples from the history of rap and hip hop culture of how it has evolved over time will exemplify our points of appropriating from marginalized communities. Within the fashion industry there are media platforms that have executed culture appreciation rather than appropriation and we want examine their ethical practices. Teen Vogue for example, published an article “7 Girls Show What Beauty Looks Like When It’s Not Appropriated” the article explains the importance of where their cultures come from and how it can easily be stolen and capitalized by the majority. Furthermore, we plan to reach out to a former Parsons design student who incorporates other cultures within her design process and how she is showing appreciating the various cultures through unity rather than appropriating and stealing. However, no matter how well these media producers are able to contribute to the narrative, it can and will be still criticized by their audience (the gatekeepers). As for examples of appropriating; researching Valentino’s Spring 2016 Collection of their “African-themed” show struggled with diversity which led to controversy. Also, Victoria Secret’s model Karlie Kloss walked down the runway strutting in a Native American headdress. Again, our point is to exploit the practices being shown in the negative examples to hopefully come to a solution and to provide more ethics behind their failed ideas.

Professional/Personal Backgrounds to Topic Relevance

{Jasmyn} Personally, this topic is meaningful to me because I am able to challenge my own thinking and attempt to find answers to the difficult questions of cultural ethics. Since I am interested in public relations and communications, the ethical knowledge I gain through this research experience is beneficial for me to incorporate in the real world. Bringing a different perspective and potentially educating publications within media could enhance the way they handle and strategize certain situations with ethics. In addition, my professional work has inspired me to research this topic more in depth. I have interned with a Fashion Design Parsons alumni. She has been accused of appropriating different cultures from her design process and inspiration. I then realized that an expression of art could be culturally criticized due to societal ethics. Knowing the importance of doing my own research and having awareness, will allow me to be apart of the conversation in a more productive way.

{Jamal} This project will prove to be meaningful to me because I am subjected to some of the negative aspects of appropriation and I have my own personal experiences within it. Being an African American male who grew up in the hip-hop diaspora, I can explore the moral panic society and how it has been placed on my culture and opened for others. My personal background will give me the leverage to attack this subject in a rational and ethical fashion. As a child I grew up having dreadlocks and attending private schools, which turned into an altercation after the city deemed it unsanitary. In my adulthood I have a beard, which can be characterized as unprofessional for me but not for a European. Studying abroad in Adelaide South Australia, I was able to learn about the indigenous culture and the importance’s of knowing your roots. I was able to speak to leaders and representatives from those groups and cover the importance of cultural ethics and the respect society has for them. Also being able to apply my life experiences to this assignment will prove to be beneficial for my professional growth.

{James} I would really like to focus on the way hip hop culture is portrayed in the media. There are many stigmas and stereotypes attached to the culture of hip hop and it is largely due to the way the media characterizes hip hop musicians their communities and the people who indulge and enjoy the art form. In most respects the culture is demonized as crime loving, violence seeking, drug abusing, uneducated fools who go around looking for trouble. This is the furthest thing from the truth and is a huge ethical problem. This type of generalizing leads to unfair assessments of people of color who may not even listen too or agree with the messages that are the cause of these bland portrayals throughout mainstream media. These portrayals of the youth hip hop culture are a direct reflection of why a young black male in America can be in a neighborhood, followed and gunned down with no repercussion on the premise because he was wearing a threatening hoodie. This and many instances like it, happens every day and I wish to unpack why this group can be villainized daily while other communities of people can commit heinous atrocities and are never generalized or pre judged for how a small sum act.

Expected Outcomes

The outcome we expect is to explain what culture appropriation is, how it affects society, and examples of people that successfully use art to ethically express cultural values. We want to change the way society views black culture. Media companies need to realize their audience and their reach as a platform to educate and inform. Dissecting the meanings and ethics behind cultural appropriation can create new perspectives, it can either keep society apart or bring us closer together. Our perspectives and sources of information derive from the media; which means the producers of media (i.e. editors, photographers, designers, etc) need to understand the ethics behind the message that is being conveyed in order to create the change.

The Analysis of Cultural Ethics

Within Fashion & Music

VIDEO METHODOLOGY

Our Plan(s):

PODCAST

WE HAVE DISCUSSED INTERVIEWING DESIGN STUDENTS WITHIN THE GREATER NEW YORK AREA AND NEW YORK DESIGN UNIVERSITIES AND CAMPUSES TO DISCUSS THE ETHICS BEHIND THEIR DESIGN PROCESS. ESSENTIALLY WE ARE LOOKING TO CONTACT THE CONTENT CREATORS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND AND UNCOVER THE ETHICS BEHIND THEIR CREATION.

QUESTIONS THAT MAY ARISE:

WHERE DOES YOUR INSPIRATION COME FROM?

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU?

DO YOU THINK THE MEDIA HOLDS A RESPONSIBILITY TO INFORM AND EDUCATE?

AS A CONTENT CREATOR; DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO BE INFORMED? WHY OR WHY NOT?

THESE QUESTIONS ARE JUST AN EXAMPLE OF HOW WE PLAN TO CONSTRUCT OUR PODCAST. JAMES, JASMYN AND JAMAL WOULD BE HOSTS AND GIVE A REASONABLE BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT AND WHAT WE PLAN TO ACHIEVE.

YOUTUBE PANEL DISCUSSION VIDEO

FOLLOWING THE SIMILAR IDEA FROM THE SOUNDCLOUD FORMAT. WE COULD ALSO VIDEO RECORD SOME INTERVIEWS OF DESIGNERS OR HAVE A PANEL DISCUSSION AND MAKE IT VERY INFORMAL AND CONVERSATIONAL.

INFORMATIONAL DOCUMENTARY

ANOTHER IDEA IS TAKING THE INTERVIEWS TO THE STREETS OF NEW YORK OR STUDENTS FROM OUR SCHOOL AND SEEING THE INSIGHTS AND VIEWS FROM OUR EVERYDAY PEERS OF HOW CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AND CULTURAL APPRECIATION AFFECTS OUR SOCIETY.

INTERVIEW REPRESENTATIVES FROM:

PARSONS STUDENTS

FIT STUDENTS

PRATT INSTITUTE DESIGN STUDENTS

LOCAL MEDIA PROFESSIONALS

ie.) BLOGGERS, PHOTOGRAPHERS, WRITERS

FASHION DESIGN PROFESSORS

11/29/ 2017

QUESTIONS FOR INTERVIEWEES :

1. FOR THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW; CAN YOU GIVE US A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF YOUR CLOTHING DESIGN/ BRAND?

WHAT ARE THE AESTHETICS?

2. WHAT MADE YOU GET INTO THE INDUSTRY?

3. WHERE DOES YOUR INSPIRATION COME FROM?

3. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON CULTURAL APPROPRIATION?

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU?

4. WHAT FLAWS DO YOU SEE WITHIN THE FASHION INDUSTRY?

WHAT SETS YOU APART FROM OTHER BRANDS?

5. DO YOU THINK THE MEDIA HOLDS A RESPONSIBILITY TO INFORM AND EDUCATE ABOUT SOCIAL ISSUES?

6. AS A CONTENT CREATOR; DO YOU FEEL YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO BE INFORMED?

WHY OR WHY NOT?

7. IS YOUR CULTURAL IDENTITY SOMETHING YOU HAVE EMBRACED?

HOW HAS IT SHAPED YOUR WORK?

8. WITH THE WORK YOU HAVE PRODUCED DO YOU THINK IT IS CREATING A SOCIAL IMPACT?

9. WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR DESIGN INSPIRATIONS FROM? AND WHY?

10. IS THERE A CHALLENGE WITH HOW YOUR WORK IS GOING TO BE PRESENTED, SINCE IT IS BEING REFERENCED FROM OTHER CULTURES?

11. WALK ME THROUGH YOUR DESIGN PROCESS - HOW DOES A COLLECTION BEGIN TO BE DESIGNED OR THOUGHT OUT?

12. DO YOU THINK YOUR BRAND MESSAGE IS APPROPRIATELY AND CORRECTLY RECEIVED BY YOUR AUDIENCE? (IF YOU ARE AWARE)

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vileart · 7 years

Text

Scribble Dramaturgy: Andy Edwards @ Edfringe 2017

Andy Edwards and Amy Gilmartin present

SCRIBBLE

Assembly Roxy Downstairs (Venue 139)

3 – 27 August (not 15, 22nd)

Winner of the 2017 Assembly Roxy Theatre Award (The ART Award), Scribble is a piece of new writing about mental health and supernovas from Andy Edwards, directed by Amy Gilmartin.

Ross is studying for a PhD in cosmology. He's interested in science, the universe and how

stuff works. Bran flakes, anxiety and gravity. The smallest moments in history. The largest events in the universe.

Ross can’t stop thinking about her yellow shoes. He is standing on the brink of a black hole; an event horizon stretching into eternity and gone in the blink of an eye.

Ross has a scribble in his chest.

What was the inspiration for this performance?

Scribble draws a lot of inspiration from my own experiences of ill mental health, particularly focusing on patterns of obsessive thought and compulsive action. This lived-experience was really the gateway to a more sustained period of research into OCD.

I’m not particularly clear why I felt compelled to write Scribble, beginning as it did out of a compulsive response to a particular obsessive thought I was experiencing at that time – and that I had been experiencing for a while. It was a written a little bit in the first instance out of illness, out of a need to do something with a thing but not knowing why or even what that thing was.

I had a desire – and this desire was unhealthy and misguided in lots of ways – to write it out, to sort of get rid of it in some way, to put out into the world what had been something I had felt unable to speak about before. The healthy side of that desire was that I wanted to relax the grip on these thoughts, thoughts I believed to be incredibly dangerous, and find a way to not worry about them so much.

I was a bit at the end of my tether with keeping quiet about what was going on in my brain. The more I researched OCD and reflected on my own experiences the more it seemed apparent that there might be something useful about sharing that experience of reaching the end of your tether, both for myself of course but also for other people experiencing similar patterns of thought, or for anyone who has ever had to have a relationship, including a friendship, with someone who was going through a period of ill-mental health.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

Yes I think so. That’s not to say it isn’t without its problems, by which I mean that the space in which those ideas are discussed is as contested as any other space. Performance doesn’t exist apart from the world in that way, it’s not neutral in any sense – there are structures that mean that certain kinds of work get made and certain kinds of work don’t get made, for example.

That’s a little vague but what I mean is that yes it is a good place to discuss ideas but that the terms upon which that discussion are held are something that needs to be continually challenged and questioned. There’s nothing inherent in performance that means it is a good space for discussing ideas from the off I guess.

I suppose my approach to it as a performance-maker is that it is useful to work out what performance can’t do, what it isn’t useful for. Certain mediums, especially digital ones, are much better at reaching wider audiences for example. So I suppose performance is useful if the type of discussion you want to have is of a certain type.

That type is still pretty broad but at least in the work I make I find performance useful because of its immediacy, that it happens in the same time and place as its audience. That immediacy is useful but then I can imagine a lot of contexts where that immediacy is totally unhelpful.

With Scribble we’re definitely interested in that meeting between audience and work as it happens within the same time and space. There’s a discourse that will happen outside the room - we do hope that people feel engaged enough by the work to speak about it afterwards - but with Scribble our focus is on the conversations that are happening in the room, in the performance, in the moment.

Specifically the work focuses on a dialogue that is happening between me and Amy – where we are negotiating our mental health in relation to each other – and that meeting between Scribble and the audience. Both these conversations are both produced by and produce each other too. We’re interested in what this approach might mean for how we talk about mental health in the present tense, about how those acts of speaking and listening occur in the moment.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I’m not particularly sure to be honest. I didn’t really engage with theatre that much when I was younger but I started writing at a fairly early age. I remember wanting to write film scripts but then realising I didn’t have the resources to pull that off. So a move into performance sort of happened and I started writing for that because it was much cheaper to do, and then I did a bit of acting, a bit of directing and got super hooked on it as a student at Edinburgh.

Having Bedlam Theatre on the doorstep was a huge help, a building to just muck about with was a great resource which I definitely didn’t appreciate enough at the time. After that I fell madly in love with dramaturgy and I’ve been banging on about that quite a lot recently…

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

Possibly one of the most interesting things about the approach is the manner in which the most recent draft (draft forty-nine) of Scribble was written.

The work was first developed under the Playwrights’ Studio Mentoring Programme with Rob Drummond as my mentor.

I wrote a lot of drafts during that period, mostly hunched over a laptop and mostly on my own. The resulting work had this slightly contorted slightly self-abusive tone to it. I experience some emotional difficulty as a result of my current state of health and find myself lapsing into patterns of obsessive thought and compulsive action.

That illness really bled into how I first wrote Scribble, and right up until me and Amy presented it at the Traverse Hothouse I was still in this mode. It wasn’t a great way to work for me.

After we won the award I got a fair bit worse, as I really didn’t want to go back to that method of writing. I really wasn’t in a place where it was healthy for me to work on my own – and the work that would have emerged would have been pretty crap I think, too self-involved, too chasing its own tail.

So I and Amy met up to try and resolve this and as a minor solution we started writing the last draft together, in the same time and space. This process was pretty fluid, sometimes I’d look at the laptop by myself and Amy would do admin (or bang on about Mad Men), sometimes we’d go to Greggs and chat about the work on the way there and back and sometimes we’d both sit at the laptop or I’d get up and perform what I’d just written to her.

It was exactly what I – and the work – needed; it opened up some breathing space, gave the work a real lift.

There’s something really poisonous about the notion of the lone writer crafting their masterpiece on their own, or at least, I find it a really fucking horrible way to go to work each day in that way. It probably works really well for some but I’d much rather be a writer on my feet in a room with other folk in it. Writing with Amy, breaking out of that obsessive state, lightening the load and – perhaps most importantly – not trying to make a masterpiece but just trying to make a piece, was a smart move.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

Before sitting down to write this play I hadn’t written anything that resembled a play text for a significant amount of time. I had just finished a trilogy of ecographies, maps constructed through language that documented and re-performed a durational journey aboard the Glasgow Subway, a conference on heritage at Timespan Arts and

an exhibition at GENERATORprojects in Dundee.

Beyond that I was regularly collaborating with a Nottingham-based choreographer on a duet of improvised text and dance called the ground, the highest point. All these works were primarily about how language relates to the world, about how language positions and affects speakers and listeners. So my artistic practice at present is pretty linguistic-orientated on the whole I think.

Scribble fits into that in lots of ways I think. I was curious when starting out writing to think about what the language of obsession and compulsion might sound like, about what it might mean to write OCD – what a dramaturgy of OCD might look like. That’s there in the language, there’s a good deal of repetition and minor linguistic variation, and at a structural level too.

Mental health – which is a pretty vast topic – is something I’ve written about before. The last full length play I wrote, anchor was based on my experiences of hypnotherapy and I’ve written short pieces of work about OCD before.

I’ve also volunteered and worked in the context of healthcare too, so it’s a discourse I’m invested in from multiple positions.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

That’s a difficult one to answer I think, partly because what the audience experience is governed by so many factors that aren’t within our control. But I suppose what we’re hoping the audience to experience in some sense is the affective quality of anxiety – how it feels to experience obsessive thought patterns, and how the experience of particular thought patterns commonly associated with OCD can make someone feel incredibly isolated.

Hope is important too. Scribble is a work with a lot of hope I think, that carries itself quite lightly at certain moments. We want the audience to experience that lightness, a lightness that emerges through conversation, through listening and speaking, through making attempts to understand how each other are feeling. That’s really important to us. We don’t have much in the way of answers – we’ve no guidance for solutions apart from some signposts to people who might - but we do have a good deal of hope. It’d be great if the audience experience that.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

One of the most interesting strategies that Amy is using to shape the audience’s experience of Scribble is to introduce an element of liveness to the work. There are two

roles in the work, Alan MacKenzie plays the central character Ross and there is another actor in a supporting role.

This supporting role will be played by a different actor every day, who will be reading the script for the first time on stage in front of an audience. We’re really excited by this idea because no one will know what’s going to happen next in Scribble, the work will be different from moment to moment, performance to performance.

This strategy isn’t us reinventing the wheel, not at all - there’s a long list of work that has employed a similar mechanism – Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit is probably the most famous example. Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree too.

With Scribble though we’re interested in how this mechanism might help perform the idea that our mental health changes every day, as well as reflecting the fact that experiences of ill-mental health cut across the whole of society. The end result will probably be a little messy, it won’t always work and things are bound to wrong. We’re really excited by those mistakes and miss-steps.

That feels really important to making a work about mental health, and it certainly rings true with my own experiences.

On the hope front Scribble has at least two jokes in it, so that’s a good place to start, we think. They’re both nicked from Tim Vine – and he’s always making people laugh.

Based on experiences both real and imagined, Scribble is an exploration of the complexity of obsession and compulsion and supermarkets.

The production is a two-hander and the creative team are taking an innovative and ambitious approach to casting the play by featuring a different actor playing the supporting role in each performance. As a piece of work Scribble is never finished because the treatment of mental health is a continual, ongoing process. Every supporting actor will be reading the script for the first time on stage, with no rehearsals. This is in response to NHS statistics which show that approximately 1 in 4 people experience a mental health problem at some point in their lifetime.

For the creative team this approach has two aims: firstly to represent the changing nature of individual mental health on a daily basis, and secondly to represent the range of people affected by mental health problems across society by working with actors from a variety of backgrounds. The performance will be different every day because our mental health can be different every day.

Scribble was developed last year under the guidance of Rob Drummond (Bullet Catch, In Fidelity) when Andy was selected for the Playwrights' Studio Scotland Mentoring Programme. Development of the script was supported by the Tom McGrath Trust, and an early draft of the play directed by Amy was presented as a rehearsed reading at the Traverse Theatre’s 2016 Hothouse season for emerging Scottish talent.

Scribble is supported by The ART Award - a brand-new Award funded by Assembly Festival for developing Scottish performance companies in the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Twitter: @scribble_play

Facebook: /scribble.play

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