Webspinna Artist Statement

I was really excited for the Webspinna battle, because I love any project that involves me getting attention. But, I was a little worried when it was announced that it was moving up a week. And then I didn't get a partner on the Thursday before it was due, which was very worrisome. Really, I only had two days to work with my partner on out presentation - which is very stressful. But, in the end I really like how it turned out. Taylor and I decided to do Halloween vs. Christmas, which is awesome for me (ignoring the fact that another group had the same idea).

We decided to have Christmas sort of encroaching onto Halloween's territory, and Halloween not being happy about that. It was sort of a reflection on how, during the holiday season, decorations for the next holiday go up before the current one has even happened. At the beginning of October, Christmas decorations had already been put on display in stores, despite it being three months, and two holidays, away. One of the sounds I used was for an Onion video about how Halloween has become over-commercialized, poking fun at how people have lost the true meaning of Halloween and are taking the shortcuts to make their experience easier.

It was interesting only being able to use sounds that already exist, and not being able to edit together anything or record anything. From other people's work, we had to create our personas and out entire presentation. We needed to raid things that had already existed and break them up and reform them into another, separate work. In this week's reading "The Ecstasy of Influence: a Plagiarism" by Jonathan Lethem, there is a nice quote about this idea about literature being broken up in this way to great new works: "Literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time." This project is more obvious in its breaking up of previous pieces to build up a new, greater piece. But, this sort of thing has been happening since the beginning if literature, people borrow from previous things in order to augment their creations more.

One thing I thought was fun about this project was how it was live, which meant things could (and did) and we needed to improvise and create. We had an issue with our Webspinna that required me to improvise a lot. The last few clips didn't work, which meant our presentation lacked an ending. Instead of floundering in front of everyone, I simply yelled out what our ending was, and then threw the prop glow-sticks to show that something happened.