Webspinna Battle

This week, Aurelia and I worked together to create an audio battle between order and chaos. We knew that these were basic ideals that have existed since the beginning of this world, and many people have tried to capture those ideals through audio. Raye and I wanted to personify these ideas while making them neutral, not allowing one to appear like the good guy or the bad guy. We were able to mix songs, movie clips, and sound effects together to create a story that brought these two ideals to life.

The way that we found the music was similar to the reading we had this past week in class, the article dealing with plagiarism. We had things that we wanted that symbolised order and chaos (ex: the preamble, chaotic entrance, and a waltz) but we never found something that wasn’t a personal rendition of an original work by someone else. Just like the man looking for the quote had to sift through a chain of edits, renditions, and paraphrases to get the original quote, we also found, in our youtube searches, lots of parodies, indirect quotations, and bad 3rd party recordings of the things we wanted. The waltz was a version by Kovacevich, the “chaos” was a clip from the movie Dinosaur, and the preamble was someone’s personal narration of the article on a video clip. Although we never created something original ourselves, the mixture of different clips was something that no one has ever done before. I’m sure no one has ever mixed an orchestra rendition of Sweet Child of Mine with a clip from Avengers: Age of Ultron.

We also found inspiration for this project from the two quotations from movies that we used in the battle. The Avengers clip that talked about humans thinking chaos and order are oppposites, and the clip from The Dark Knight discussing the potency of chaos and fear showed the two elements at their height. These movies talks about just how closely related these two forces really are. We wanted to communicate that in our battle, that Order and Chaos are powerful things, but they rely on each other to thrive. Just as Aurelia and I went to more extreme measures to communicate our message each time we messed each other's’ clips up, so do Order and Chaos reach their full potential only when they have opposition to fight against.

Our success in this performance was widely due to Aurelia and I striving to make sure that every clip, every action, and every reaction existed to ensure that the original conflict of order vs. chaos was communicated. In these days, parodies, remixes, and mashups are really only entertaining if we can see the original feeling/intent/theme behind the new content, and I think Raye and I were able to do that in our performance.