"finally robotic beings rule the world"
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This week's project was really fun, and tapped into a lot of the most basic forms of creativity, I think. The costume especially: one of the first deadlined creative projects we ever undertake is the careful and delighted planning of Halloween costumes, a tradition that doesn't continues every year, and is a uniquely ubiquitous creative endeavor. I've always felt that the biggest inspiration for my Halloween costumes is a lack of materials, ironically enough. Restriction can be really good for creativity and resourcefulness. This pattern held true for my plans for this project, so I ended up putting it together with duck tape, aluminum foil, newspaper, and an old DVD in just fifteen minutes. Because I didn't have a box and didn't want to talk in a robot voice or anything, I became Admiral of the Robots. And it was fun.
My theme came to me pretty quickly, which is unusual for me, but as I sat in class and thought of internet sounds I thought immediately of the computer voices from online dictionaries and encyclopedias. They can be funny, or creepy, almost effortlessly. I got from there to robots, largely because robots are cool! This medium was also particularly well-suited to robotic expression. In a weird way that I got to thinking about during the performances, all the voices we heard that evening were robots, voices recorded and imitated by electronic, metal machines. This could just be the ego of the Robot Admiral speaking, but robots were all that was heard, in a way, and I got to thinking about that a lot: what differentiates the more cliched and sentient robots most of my samples came from, what sets the voice specifically recorded to be given to GladOS in Portal, from the voice not given away in identity, but to be replayed all the same by a machine, not a human, in whatever way is manipulated by the machine operator? It doesn't make me nervous, I'm not worried that technology is taking over the world, but it gives me a new appreciation for the authenticity and growing rarity for true human voices, live music, and in-person experience.
My process for both this process and for my Textual Poaching piece was heavily influence by the Propellerheads, a group my Dad introduced me too and just keeps popping up in my head as we listen to things and discuss concepts in class, like remixing and sound manipulation. They tend to use a lot of old and interesting recordings of people talking and mix and manipulate them along with the synthesizer sounds of their music. This went along really well with my robot idea both thematically and tonally, so I used two of their sounds as playgrounds during my webspinna battle. I didn't plan my battle out hardly at all, just the order of the songs I would use as background. That ended up being a strength to me, and making it a lot more fun.
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