Reflect & Write

Emerging Themes

  • Writing in obscure fashions.

John’s video  “Remember Me, Please.” featuring the writing in reverse. (5/50 Assignment)

Sophia’s “Dismemberment” object (5/50, Cosmogeny story)

Sophia’s “Why Are You Crying” object (5/50, Why Are You Crying story)

Gabrielle’s objects 1-12 from “Easter, 1996” (the cut-out letters we rearranged together)

John’s “You & Me” story objects 1 (The World & Us) and 10 (Let Go)

  • Creation Myths

Molly’s 5/50 Story #3 – Adam & Eve

Molly’s 5/50 Story – The Origin of Love

Multiple Objects from Sophia’s Cosmogeny Story (ex nihilo, in the beginning, etc.)

(Bit of a stretch here) Omar’s “The Land Before Time” story just based on the name alone.

  • Music & Songs (perhaps too broad of a theme)

Carina’s bad singing performance in “Failure” (5/50)

Maddie singing “Human Again” + Carina’s juxtaposition piece involving the masks, the music, etc.

Omar’s lecture + show-don’t-tell piece on music reading (ELI5 + Show-don’t-tell)

Maddie’s lecture on chords and jazz (ELI5)

The Titanic music from Carina’s story (5/50)

Kimmy’s Beyonce-related story (5/50)

Phoebe’s 4th Story: “Sing us a Song” (5/50)

Bailey’s spooky music/chanting (Five Senses)

  • Our Self-Image Changing from Child to Adult

Maddie’s Hunger Games Story (5/50)

My Job Application Video Pieces + Sophia’s juxtaposition (5/50, juxtaposition)

Carina’s decision to research the Syrian refugee crisis (ELI5, Show-don’t-tell)

Omar’s Adventures in the Osaka Red Light District (5/50)

Kimmy’s “Ripped from the Womb”, “A Summer of Sisterhood” stories (5/50)

Gabrielle’s “Easter, 1996” story (5/50)

  • Self-Reflection/Self-Recognition (again, perhaps too broad)

My family’s history of alcoholism, my anxiety disorder (5/50)

Paige’s story about  OCD (5/50)

Molly’s story “Realizing Tourettes” (5/50)

Carina’s story “Failure” (5/50)

Maddie’s story “Dead Squirrel” (aka “Hunger Games” again) (5/50)

Bailey, “Brothers” (5/50)

Omar, “What’s in a Name? Puns, probably.” (5/50)

Kimmy’s 5 Senses Piece and her Show-don’t-tell piece.

____________________________________________________

2-3 things of mine which interest me:

My “Juxtaposition” performance piece, the letter from my dad (5/50), and my job application videos (5/50) interest me the most because they all explore what drives my anxiety and insecurity … and sharing that stuff with other people makes me feel significant.

_______________________________________________________

3-5 things of others which interest me:

Omar’s beat poetry “Juxtaposition” performance, Bailey’s “Show-don’t-tell” performance, Carina’s “Juxtaposition” piece, and Paige’s object in her “The Interestings” story entitled “Jules Jacobsen, looking back.” (5/50).

Why do these interest me? Omar’s writing and delivery are incredible and he deserves a TV show, Bailey’s placement of the audience as a vital part of his performance was really stunning, Carina’s experiential piece in the AMT blew me away, and Paige’s written piece struck a chord with me because I’ve been considering law school but I’m worried I’d become that man telling the story. (So, in short, I remember them the most vividly.)

Reflect + Write

Themes/Groupings

  • Traveling to unknown or faraway or new or mysterious places
    • Maps and cartography, ELI5 (Molly)
    • The Party Express, ticket & train whistle (Phoebe)
    • Gregor McGregor, ELI5 and performance (David)
    • Midnight NYC (John)
    • Highway to Hell (John)
    • Hotels Across the Country (John)
  • Power of remembrance
    • How memory works, ELI5 & performance (Phoebe)
    • Easter, 1996 (Gabrielle)
    • Goodnight, Soldier (Gabrielle)
    • Short-Term Memory (John)
    • Picture of the Stars, story and image (John)
    • Juxtapositions (Sarah)
  • Love in its many different incarnations like bad love, funny love, hurtful love, love that we will never forget, love that we wish we could get back
    • Hotels Across the Country (John) & the original drawing by Paige
    • Lolita (Paige)
    • 3 Dates & a Wedding, the whole story but also the arrangement of the cards on the board (Gabrielle)
    • The Origin of Love, Story #5 (Molly)
    • Adam and Eve (Molly)
    • You & Me (John)
    • “Love is…” Juxtapositions (Gabrielle)
    • Poem about mom in Story #3, The Land Before Time (Omar)
    • Live forever (Bailey)
    • Once in the Highlands, Story #4 (Kimmy)
    • Don’t Forget Your Mission, Story #3 (Kimmy)
    • A Kiss for the Heart to Grow, Story #1 (Kimmy)
    • Us, Story #4 (Paige)
    • Short-Term Memory (John)
  • Spirituality & Religion
    • Gnosticism (Sofia)
    • Syrian refugee crisis (Carina)
    • Feng shui, ELI5 & performance (Paige)
    • Cosmogeny (Sofia)
  • Historical figures, groups, events and its interaction with the present
    • Gregor McGregor (David)
    • Black Panther Party, ELI5 & performance (Kimmy)
    • Syrian refugee crisis, ELI5 & performance (Carina)
    • Maps and cartography, ELI5 (Molly)
    • The Federalist Papers, ELI5 & performance (Sarah)
    • The Baker, senses (Bailey)
  • We have a slight obsession with food, especially weird seemingly out-of-place food
    • Bailey’s homemade Roman-era bread (Bailey)
    • Brownies with Raisins (Phoebe)
    • Tea with nutmeg (Sofia)
    • Whipped cream with red pepper flakes (Carina)
    • Cocoa powder & salt (Maddie)
    • Story #1, Kraft (Omar)

Objects from My Own Work

  1. Story #4: Short-Term Memory, Object 4: Remember Me, Please
  2. Juxtapositions: Hotels Across the Country

— There’s something really powerful about the way in which we remember the loves we’ve experienced—like the loves we never had, the loves that hurt us, the loves that made us happy, or sad, or cry and everything in between—no matter what we go through in life.

Objects from Other People’s Work

  1. 3 Dates & a Wedding (Gabrielle)
  2. Show, Don’t Tell: How Memory Works (Phoebe)
  3. Show, Don’t Tell: Hiccups (Bailey)
  4. Juxtapositions: “Love is…” (Gabrielle)

— I was very drawn to the way that a story changes and can be told depending on how you arrange objects, people, and your audience in space and in relation to one another.

Show, Don’t Tell: Electric Bicycles

Object 1: Highway to Hell

  • ft. The Serendipitous Addition of John Laughing  While Blowing Up Balloons

Object 2: Hair-Rising Electricity

  • Since it was dark, there really wasn’t a way to record this event, but the idea is simple. Just blow up a balloon and rub it on your arm. Then, pass it over someone else’s arm and see/feel their arm hair rise because of the static electricity.

Object 3: A Million Volts

Five Senses: The Central Limit Theorem

Fact:  As your sample size increases to a reasonably large amount, the sample will reach a normal distribution, centered on the mean, regardless of what the actual population distribution looks like.

Sight: A Fractal in Motion

  • Play around with the settings of the fractal generator and see how small shapes can generate fascinating and intricate designs.

Sound: Gradual Symphony

Touch: Harmony

result.brf

  • NOTE: I was going to take a picture of the sign I made, but I accidentally lost it. So I’ve included a picture of what the braille arrangement was in the event we need to recreate it.
  • A handmade sign in braille that reads (hopefully…) “Harmony”. While each individual bump might feel insignificant or like nothing more than a small pebble in a mound of sand, taken together they create something entirely different and meaningful. They’re a whole lot more than the sum of its individual parts.

Smell: Is This a Febreeze Commercial?

IMG_1517

  • Here’s a bunch of gross, sad things that came together and became something entirely different once I joined them together in a mist of clean-smelling, soothing Febreeze.

Taste/Combination: Trail Mix

[INSERT TRAIL MIX IMAGE HERE]

  • TFW you can’t go to Walmart, so you have to improvise a trail mix by combining different cereals and granola to create a mixture that tastes, sounds, and looks really great!

5 senses: wavefunction must collapse under observation

Sight: http://i.imgur.com/v7Bgv.gif

Sound:

Smell:

IMG_1233 (1)IMG_1232

Left- Peel of one orange + an orange slice.

Right- Half a mug of Ajax triple action orange dish soap.

Touch: We each tried to pass our hands through the table. Try it again some time- there’s a small chance it will happen, and I like to believe that the power of positive thinking makes it more likely. Molly and Bailey managed it, after all.

Taste:

IMG_0001 (1)IMG_0002

Things that might be hard to tell from the picture- David Carter requested 2-4 almonds and received 3, Omar (I think it was him) requested 1.5, Kimmy requested 3 fat ones, Sophia (alone out of us all) requested 0 almonds, and Bailey requested 3 straight up and 5 to add to his yogurt.

Combo:

ELI5: Gnosticism

Gnosticism is an umbrella term for a variety of sects that may have predated Christianity (the exact origin, and whether it was “Western” or “Eastern”, is hotly disputed) but arose as a coherent religious movement in opposition to early Christianity, and largely faded away within a few centuries. As an esoteric (and often elitist) religion Gnosticism is connected to polytheistic mystery religions and to mystical forms of both Abrahamic monotheism and dualism (Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, etc.)

While there were many people who considered themselves Christian Gnostics (and some who still do!), the Church has always considered Gnosticism heretical, especially because it positions direct experiential knowledge of the divine (insight, enlightenment) as the key to salvation from material existence. Gnosticism and Christianity share the idea of an imperfect world caused by a “fall from grace”, but where Christianity places the blame on sinful humans, Gnosticism puts it on a flawed divine being. While there are some pretty weird things going on in every Gnostic tradition, it is an interesting twist to have humans bear no ultimate responsibility for their own suffering.

Gnostics consider the entire material world to be at least imperfect and corrupted or even evil. There was never a Garden, a perfect expression of the material world. There is a singular, supreme God/monad who does not “create” anything but rather emanates similarly immaterial beings called æons, which only descend to the material plane through a mistake, flaw, sin. While in one sense everything is an emanation of God, the plane of existence that we live on is so twisted that we can consider it completely separate from the ideal, purely spiritual and immaterial world of Pleroma (Fullness). God is then transcendent rather than immanent, and it would be a mistake to worship nature or other deities contained within this world.

The creator of the material world is called the demiurge (a term borrowed from Plato, I think), who may mistakenly believe that he is God and have servants called archons (roughly analogous to angels or demons, and linked to specific celestial bodies). Gnostics have spent a lot of time making detailed classifications of æons and archons. Æons often come in male-female pairs called syzygies–Jesus and Sophia [okay maybe I had an ulterior motive for choosing this topic] are sometimes the lowest-level syzygy, most connected to the material plane. Other times Sophia is the æon which emanated without a male partner, resulting in the demiurge.

Given its conception of the entire material world as fundamentally corrupt, Gnosticism generally does not offer rules for moral or ethical conduct, leaving this to the individual to decide for themself. Still, many Gnostics looked to Seth (the 3rd son of Adam), Jesus, or Mani as savior figures. Ultimately, release from physical existence could only be achieved after death (and reincarnation would often be the consequence of not acquiring enough insight during one’s life), by overcoming physical existence, somehow undoing the mistake of creation, and returning to the Godhead (Spirit, Fullness, Profundity).

In 1945 actual Gnostic texts were discovered in Egypt; these and other texts which have since been discovered include many additional and alternative narratives to the New Testament. One can imagine why the Church, seeking to assert a single authoritative version of Biblical myths, was so threatened by the proliferation of alternate texts, ideas, and cosmologies that sought to operate both within and without the framework of existing religions.

Sources:

“Gnosticism.” Early Christian Writings. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. <http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/info/gnosticism-cathen.html>.

“Gnosticism.” Early Christian Writings. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. <http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/info/gnosticism-wace.html>.

“Gnosticism.” Theopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. <http://www.theopedia.com/gnosticism>.Hoeller, Stephan A. “The Gnostic World View: A Brief Summary of Gnosticism.” The Gnosis Archive. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. <http://gnosis.org/gnintro.htm>.

“What Is Christian Gnosticism?” GotQuestions.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2016. <http://www.gotquestions.org/Christian-gnosticism.html>.