Webspinna Battle: Artist Statement

Our webspinna battle was a doomsday scenario mashup. If an alien invasion and zombie outbreak occurred simultaneously, which would prevail? We wanted it to be fun like the pulpy genre-clash it was. In putting it together I had a lot of b-movies culture in mind. I had a blast from the beginning, from the concept to designing costumes, to practicing, to our performance. But I learned some interesting things along the way.

As we started to develop our characters we noticed that we automatically associated each with a different kind of music. Aliens we associated much more with technology and artificiality, so we tried to represent it musically with electronic music, synthesizers and and current pop. With zombies, it was more chaotic and visceral, and that side leans more towards rock, metal, and punk. It was one of the more interesting things I was reminded of while working on this assignment--just like in doing the music montage when we were able to take a piece of music and represent it visually, but with this we found ourselves doing something of the opposite. At first unconsciously, but then intentionally, everything about these personas--from the costume, to the music, to the way we performed--was linked to the same idea.

I like to DJ and I like sound design, but I had never worked with this kind of limitation--that we could only stream audio from online and it had to be mixed on the spot. We practiced our battle several times, but on the day of performance we still expected some improvisation, which is what happened. We tried to make eye contact, be flexible, and follow each others' cues. We ran into a couple of issues with buffering, dealing with ads, and at one point I accidentally closed my blog page completely that had all the links on it. But there were no big problems and I think the little hiccups added to the spontaneity of the performance.

It reenforced and took from a different angle the themes we've been exploring for a several weeks now: where our ideas come from, consciously or unconsciously. Of course direct influences were genre films like Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Indepencence Day, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1982 version of _The Thing, _to name a few. But like Lethem argues in The Ecstasy of Influence, so much of what resulted in our finished project was spontaneous because of how deeply ingrained the genres and themes were were exploring are in our society. Even better to share it and enjoy it as a "communal art-making experience." I've had fun doing a lot of assignments this semester, but this one was the biggest blast I've had so far.