– As someone who has been trained in classical music performance, I enjoyed coming across 1950’s composer John Cage in this article. He was known for avant-garde, experimental pieces, his most famous piece being titled “Four Pieces.” This piece is designed to be played by any instrument and any group of players, although it has famously been performed by pianist David Tudor. It may be considered a chance artwork because the entire piece of music consists of complete silence and no instruments are played. The first silent movement is 30 seconds, the second movement is 2 minutes and 23 seconds, the third movement is 60 seconds, and the final movement is 30 seconds; for this, it has also been given the name “4:33”. To perform this piece, a musician simply sits with their instrument in front of an audience, in any location. They use a watch, clock, stopwatch, etc. to keep track of when the movements end, and then they let their surroundings — the audience’s breathing, door creaks, AC buzzes, bird chirps, and everything else — make the music for them. The outcome and experience of the performance is independent from the artist themselves, and completely dependent on nature’s random, unexpected assortment of movements and sounds. I’ve included a performance of the piece below:
– The Exquisite Corpse technique is a way of producing a piece of art with a group of people. Each person draws their portion of the piece with the other portions covered up or out of sight, so that they have no knowledge of what the other artists have drawn. The result is a piece constructed by individual random events. I see how this technique could work very innovatively when used to design avatars in computer games. One phenomenon that happens in the realm of character and avatar design is the tendency to overdraw white, thin, Eurocentric bodies, leaving little representation of different body shapes and non-white avatars. Here are some examples:
Such a phenomenon occurs due to people’s subconscious biases about beauty; starting when we are young, we are socialized to believe that white, thin bodies with Eurocentric features (ie. large eyes, pale skin, tall nose bridges, structured jaws) are beautiful, and anyone below these standards is not. Hence, I think applying the Exquisite Corpse technique to design avatars and game characters would be an interesting and creative way to combat these biases. Using this technique, different people can be responsible for designing different parts of the character, such as skin tone, hair, eye shape, etc. When put together, the character may have a combination of many different features, and while they may look more “ethnically ambiguous” or not entirely “realistic,” it’s a step towards deconstructing our internal standards of beauty.
– One of the most unique aspects about art is the space it creates for endless creativity and openness to new ideas. Just as artists can explore and master any techniques, forms, and genres they have interest in, I think they should also take advantage of the freedom they have to utilize art in a multitude of sites, and not just the canvas. As important events happen in the world, such sites could be political, environmental, technological, scientific, or educational. For example, in my hometown, Olympia, Washington, there is a local artist who paints scenic landscapes on public electrical boxes. She paints these landscapes to remind people of the impacts of climate change on our developing city, and to evoke a sense of nostalgia for what that location looked like years ago.
– My methodology for curating a random number was based on the idea of convenience. Sometimes it’s too cumbersome to preform multiple different tasks in multiple different locations to get a number. For my method, you only need your phone, and although all the work can be executed in one, physical space, the digital space on your phone is really just as vast and numerous as the real world. To curate a random number follow these steps:
1. Open the main platform you use for email. Look at the time of your last received email (read or unread); the last digit of the time (minutes) will be the first number
2. Open your main messaging app. Find the last message someone sent you and look at the timestamp. The hour it was sent will be the second number
3. Open your main app for storing photos. Find the last photo that someone else took of you. The date the photo was taken will be the third number.
4. Multiply all these numbers together to get your random number.
sources: https://www.npr.org/2000/05/08/1073885/4-33