World Building

It’s amazing that by looking back on history and wondering if it had been different I gained so much perspective as to how one small act can change the world. Particularly I thought of one man, Constantine, whose mother was associated with a small upstart of a religion—Christianity. This association ended up changing the world.

Constantine did not seem to start out as a particular devotee of Christianity. In fact, the culture and history laid out before him did not leave the religion with many positive associations. Christians were brutally persecuted, particularly in Rome. One only has to recall Nero to think of the devastation Christians faced. In the year 250 a decree was made by the emperor Dicius proclaiming citizens of the Roman Empire were required to practice sacrifice to the Roman Gods—Christians included. Constantine himself waited until he was well past his prime and major civil wars to declare himself a Christian at age 42.

But you only have to think a moment to realize the repercussions of this small act. Christianity shaped the world, both East and West. The religion was the largest political power from Constantine through most of history. Even the next largest religion, Islam, was not likely to have shown up without the spread of Christianity. Art and language were dependent on it?

Realizing the ridiculously enormous amount of answers to the question “What if Rome didn’t adopt Christianity?” I decided to take a step back. I in now way have a comprehension of what the world would be like without Christianity. However, I do know a few things about humanity and design, stemming from the Roman age, that would have held true for the rest of history.

First, I was inspired by National Geographic and Time magazines. I absolutely love looking through these magazines, something I have done since I was a child. I was always fascinated at how their covers, featuring fantastic design and photography, could sum up some sort of truth about humanity. For example, National Geographic recently featured a story about the disappearance of race, and featured on their cover the face of a beautiful mixed-race girl. It is amazing to me how this picture can reveal so many truths about where humanity currently stands.

Another trend I often see on National Geographic is the forgotten. A forgotten world, an unearthed civilization, a mummy no one knew about. These themes could perhaps trace back to the very Roman ideals of my own world—a respect for history and heritage, illustrated by the Romans through their love of the Greeks.

It was for this reason that I chose to do a magazine cover featuring Constantine’s face. It is a tale of the forgotten, and yet it also illustrates a whole world’s identity, because history had pivoted around this man’s choice to declare and adopt Christianity.

As for the rest of the design in the hypothetical magazine, I thought of our reading. According to the author Julian Bleeker, design tells stories. So I asked myself what kind of a story I was telling through this magazine. First, I decided to make it more clean than modern magazines, keeping in mind the clarity and proportion of Roman art and architecture. Second, I thought of the ways details could communicate all of the repercussions of the loss of Christianity in Rome. This is seen through the image captions and table of contents.

Overall, I found it very interesting to explore both the amazing change one person can have on history, as well as the way humanity will shape itself.

Textual Poaching

When I was five years old, my parents went on a trip to New York City. It was my first time without them, but my parents promised they would bring me a present if I was brave. That present was a picture book telling the story of Degas’ statue Little Dancer of Fourteen Years. I have always identified with the statue. I was a very shy little girl myself, and certainly not the best in my own ballet class. In the picture book, the little girl was shy as well, and also struggled in her classes, but she was good enough to model for a statue—that is why her face is so resolute.

            I was reminded of this experience after the reading “When Texts Become Real.” In the reading, the author describes a group of girls who watched Star Trek and got so involved in it that it became something of their own creation rather than simply a television show. In my own way, Little Dancer of Fourteen Years has become my own creation—a person with a clear identity, created by my young imagination.

            As I’ve grown up, that statue has become a symbol of that part of my identity—they shy, naïve girl who tries very hard. Having gone to college very young, I have often felt like the statue with the resolute face.

            However, in many ways I was also very thoroughly prepared to attend college. My parents’ jobs as university professors in music and the humanities gave me the opportunity to be widely exposed to a great amount of thought and art. By the time I was fourteen years old myself, my brain was filled with Hemingway and Stravinsky. I won’t deny that it has given me an advantage in my schooling, and I am very grateful for that.

            Looking back to the young girl of the statue, I realize that representation of a young, female youth ended up having much less to do with my identity than I thought. Though I still feel young, I have an opportunity for growth and an access to knowledge this young girl would never have. Historically, she would not have the potential that I have to become educated and create a career for herself.

            In order to represent that, I took an image of Little Dancer of Fourteen Years and edited the photo so that it was simply a silhouette of the statue. As my confidence and knowledge have grown, that part of my identity that is represented by the statue has become a shadow as well—which is why I chose to represent the piece as a silhouette. Over the top, I laid a grid of portraits of the great artists and thinkers that have expanded my mind, influence me intellectually, and given me the opportunities that have separated me from the Little Dancer. Here I took inspiration from Frank Gehry’s architecture. He combines fluid shapes with structural grids. In my piece, I took the more fluid shape of the impressionist statues and then superimposed the grid of images on top of it.

            I made sure to make the grid of images fade a bit, so that they compete with the silhouette of the Little Dancer. In a way, I am still competing with these two elements of art in my own identity—trying to figure out of my access to knowledge or my innate shyness will determine who I am.

            

Medium Specificity

Artist Statement

I talked to my mom on the phone briefly before I dove into this assignment, and told her goodbye by saying "Well, I'm off to write an excruciatingly boring story!" to which she responded with this quote by John Cage: 

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

For the project, my chosen medium was fiction prose, and my chosen elements were story-structure and repetition. I came to the decision to use that medium and those elements after I was initially inspired by the film Purple Rose of Cairo. In the film a romanticized movie character, Tom Baxter, walks down out from the movie screen to have some adventures with habitual moviegoer Cecilia. These adventures reveal some very hilarious things about movies by showing Tom getting into hilarious situations. For example, Tom and Cecilia have to make a run from a restaurant and so they jump into a nearby car. Once in the car, however, Tom expects it to go without having to even put the key in, push the gas pedal, or turn the ignition. He explains that in the movies he never had to bother with those little micro-processes. Later that night, he and Cecilia kiss. However, before they get very far into it, he stops, wondering where the fade-out is—because there is always a fade-out in the movies before the kissing gets too passionate. These scenes were major inspirations to me as I thought about what micro-processes and private parts of life fiction prose ignores. While daily micro-processes may somehow fit into a typical 3-act plot structure, and repetition (which is technically a good element of writing) is something we constantly interact with in our routines, our daily interaction with story and repetition is uninteresting and obscenely mundane.

And it is exactly those uninteresting and mundane parts of life that prose glosses over. Whenever a person writes a piece of fiction, they are constantly prompted to “cut out the unnecessary” and to “not begin too early.” And while this may be a good practice for fiction, it certainly pinpoints one of the major shortcomings of fiction & prose: it can in no way portray real life in an interesting way.

After thinking about this, I highlighted both repetition and mundane story structure within my “story.” Story-structure I hit more head on, by telling a story very unnecessary to tell and by having the climax be something completely inconsequential (a girl turning off her alarm). Repetition, however, was more tricky as I took an abstract approach. Here I took inspiration from the reading “Show and Tell” as well as the Chuck Jones cartoon we viewed in class. In both of these examples, the audience was very aware of the artist and their control over the creation. Just like the animator announces their presence by animating a pencil, I tried to reveal my existence as a creator through my use of repetition—over-using particular phrases, such as “The phone alarm went off at 6 o’clock AM.”

Now, back to the quote I started with. While I initially started out intending to make a critique on the superficiality of written fiction, I discovered something better than that: by presenting the mundane and the boring in this very medium, it ended up making it far more interesting than normal life could every be. I discovered that by writing about an alarm going off, I went through a full thirty-two minutes of boring and found that it was not boring at all.

6 O'Clock AM

At 6 o’clock AM the alarm went off. It was on a phone—not an iPhone, but just one of those old phones that looks like a smoothed brick. The sound was a really bad mixture of elevator jazz, birds tweeting, and dogs barking, and when combined with the over-enthusiastic vibrate it sounded more like a newscast featuring bad camcorder footage of an earthquake taken at a zoo. The ring was called “On the right side of the bed.”

The phone alarm went of at 6 o’clock AM and the phone was on the side-table that someone had put together from Ikea. Except when that someone made it, they put the bottom board on top so while the rest of the side-table was stained that nice Ikea black-brown, the top was white and bare. On the surface were a few rings left from cups of water and hot cocoa. There was a good amount of dust too, mixed with bobby pins, a yellow sticky note with dust and a hair caught in the sticky part that had “Finish History Reading” written on it, a broken rubber band, a strangely bent paperclip, a piece of chewed gum wrapped up in paper, a used toothpick, a fortune cookie fortune saying “You will soon meet a person of influence,” and a stack of books in the following order: the Gideon Bible with a Days Inn stamp on the inside cover, a battered copy of Beezus and Ramona, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point with a big yellow USED sticker on it, a book called The History of Newspapers with three of the big yellow USED stickers on it, and finally a paperback Harry Potter an the Prisoner of Azkaban except the front cover had torn off and so it just showed the title page with the picture of  Sirius Black hiding in his hair at one of the barred windows of Azkaban.

When the phone alarm went off at 6 o’clock AM playing “On the right side of the bed” with a terrifying vibrate the phone buzzed its way into one of the bobby pins which touched another bobby pin which touched another bobby pin which touched another bobby pin which touched the yellow sticky note that had dust and a hair caught in the sticky part that had “Finish History Reading” written on it, and the sticky note fell to the floor.

The phone that had an alarm that went off at 6 o’clock AM by vibrating and playing the ringtone “On the right side of the bed” had scratches all around the input for the charger which Sherlock from the new BBC Sherlock series would have claimed were from plugging it in at night when the owner of the phone was drunk. Except Sherlock would have been wrong in this case, because the owner of the phone was only sometimes drunk and most of the scratches were just from carelessness and impatience because the phone was just a gray brick-like “dumb-phone” that had come free with the phone plan. The phone had scratches all around the input for the charger, a tiny crack in the corner of the screen from dropping it on the kitchen counter, dust in all of the crevices, makeup residue on the screen, and if the phone had been slid open the keyboard was missing most of the letter labels on the keys because they had been used far too much.

When the alarm went off at 6 o’clock am playing “On the right side of the bed” and vibrating loudly, it woke up Emily was in the bed next to the side table that the phone was resting on. The bed was a box spring bed and was propped up on cinderblocks that had been splashed with white paint, and on top of the bedframe was the mattress that had a nasty 80s-esque floral pattern on it in outdated pastels which a blue and white pinstripe sheet was mostly covering except for a corner where it had been pulled up and was revealing the ugly mattress and a good part of the mattress pad as well. Emily, who was wearing flannel pajama pants with a blue and green plaid on them kind of like the plaid of the Henderson clan from Scotland,  was sleeping on top of that ugly paste floral mattress and was covered in a plain blue comforter that had all of the stuffing bunched in the corners. She was sleeping on her belly with her arms and legs spread out and her foot hanging off the bed and she was drooling a little bit onto the pillow.

The alarm went off at 6 o’clock and Emily reacted by digging her face into her blue pillow and wildly trying to reach the phone, but her coordination wasn’t very good so early in the morning so at first she only managed to knock off Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban from the pile of books, but she finally reached the phone and grabbed it, looking up just long enough to see the touch screen of the phone (which was smudged with make-up) and slowly slide the button to “dismiss” despite the very insensitive touch screen, after which she dropped the phone back on the badly made Ikea side table which rattled the bobby pins. Then she closed her eyes and dropped her head back onto the pillow, and promptly fell asleep.

At 6 o’clock AM the alarm went off vibrating and playing “On the right side of the bed. It was on a phone—not an iPhone, but just one of those old phones that looks like a smoothed brick. It vibrated so much that it pushed many bobby pins that pushed a yellow sticky note off a badly made Ikea table that had dust, bobby pins, a broken rubber band, a strangely bent paperclip, a piece of chewed gum wrapped up in paper, a used toothpick, a fortune cookie fortune saying “You will soon meet a person of influence,” and a stack of books including a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that had no cover and so showed that picture of Sirius Black where he stands in the light of a barred window of Azkaban with his shaggy hair falling all over his face. Emily, who was asleep on the bed next to the badly made Ikea table and who was wearing blue and green plaid pajama pants like the Henderson clan of Scotland, heard the alarm that went off at 6 o’clock AM and turned it off after trying to do so with her eyes closed, and then dropped the phone back onto the table. Then she fell back asleep.

Historical Story

Getting together to work on this paper, we both expressed that part of the allure of Houdini and the history surrounding him was the consequent artistic style, shown through movies like The Illusionist and The Prestige. That sort of raw, sepia glamour was something we wanted to communicate in our screenplay. We tried to do that specifically with the reference to the poster, and the scenes onstage and backstage. 

The historical sources also had a big effect on our story. Just as Josh Neufeld, the author of the New Orleans graphic novel After the Deluge, drew from real sources and people to write his story, the tricks Houdini performs are historically accurate and many of the things the announcers say during his performances are taken from real accounts that we found in online reprints of newspapers and other sources. For example, the description of the Milk Can trick was historically accurate, and the phrase “Failure means a drowning death” came directly from an advertisement of Houdini’s trick from that time. We wanted to do this to make sure we got the syntax correct for characters from that time, but more specifically to add to the grandeur of the event. The way they spoke for performances was very over-inflated, but delightful, and made the mood we desired more palpable through the screenplay. 

Samuel, the main character in our story, was based off of Sarah’s real-life ancestor Samuel Markel. Family history accounts tell of Samuel living in London during the time of these events and actually meeting Houdini, who teaches him some simple tricks. While we did fabricate and embellish upon these records to make our script more histrionic, the simple story of him is real. We based the structure of our script off of Neufeld’s graphic novel, as the characters in his story are also real, living people acting in a (now) historical context. Neufeld’s story provided us with a good example and starting point of how to appropriately create a dramatic story with real-life people in a historical setting.

Lastly, we tried very hard to have Samuel be very affected by the history he was living in. The performance of Houdini defeating The Daily Mirror’s challenge is quite a rousing thing to read on its own. But after we read it, we asked ourselves “How would this affect the bystander?” We thought of how Houdini’s desperation and ill health after the challenge would be terrifying to an aspiring escape artist—and so it was with Samuel. In a similar vein, we tried to limit the history Samuel experienced as well. While Houdini actually goes back out on stage after the Mirror Challenge (once he’s gathered himself) and gives a moving speech, we decided that Samuel would not experience this—just as a bystander may have missed that bit of history in real life.