Webspinna Artist Statement

This experiment was quite fun, to be perfectly honest. I had a ball taking on the challenge of "becoming" a persona and actually applying those traits to the sort of media we were using.  There was also a sort of New Frontier, uncharted territory, "to boldly go where no one has gone before" mentality that I had going into this. I didn't know exactly what I was doing, I didn't really have a reference point. Yet, it didn't matter because that's how we all were. In class we discussed the need to push ourselves outside the norms of our creative minds. I think a large number of us were ready to prepare and mix a full audio clip, upload it to the site, then sit back and relax the whole time as the sounds did all the work. While that could be fun, I liked Ben made the parameters of keeping it all streaming and making sure these would be more spontaneous. Spontaneity scares me, I'm someone who likes to know what's going on and what's coming down the pipe. Yet, as much as that was a stressor, I felt like it stretched my ideas of creativity much more. I learned a lot about how sounds interact and that sometimes, by accident, you come across a new harmony that two seemingly dissonant sounds make. It's a bit like art in that way: sometimes combining two separate concepts can make for the most thought provoking discussions.

One of the fascinating avenues we got to explore this week was the thought of art through technology. In class we watched that video about Glitch Art and we discussed the songs by Pogo (which inspired me to go and listen to quite a few of his other masterpieces, I'd recommend "Bangarang") and for reading we explored DJ Spooky. That DJ Spooky piece was clever, in my opinion. Some people may not like how there was nothing linear about it, but it reminded me of the "choose your own adventure" novels I used to love. Who says art has to be conventional? I think that's another reason Ben gave us the "All Streaming Clips" instruction; to help us learn about the artistic merits of live performance. As film majors we like to tweak, edit, and otherwise manipulate our works before they are available for public consumption, but that's not the only way to create. Creativity is creative because of the different paths you can explore with it. There's no right answer yet to the question of "Is this art?"