My entry in this week's Single Frame Stories Challenge is a collage of screen shots from Immersion, a video about the impact of our immersion in the network information stream. It reflects on our interior image of the world, which is also a collage, unconsciously assembled from millions upon millions of fragmented impressions.
"Original" is the joint prompt this week for both the Single Frame Stories and 100 Word Stories challenges. I ended up using the virtual set I created for the Single Frame Stories image to create this 100 Word Story video. Here's the story in text:
Original - A 100 Word Story
I died again and it’s starting to bother me. I know it shouldn’t. We are taught that the Self is nothing more than identity and the continuity of our memory. So every time they restore an archived brain scan into one of my clones, it is the real I who awakens.
But what about the lost memory of each death? All gone. A sniper’s laser. A drone’s warhead. An enemy’s blade. Abandoned in the black hole between my last scan and the last breath of each incarnation. They who died are dead and gone. Irrecoverable. May we rest in peace
My maternal grandmother lived into her eighties, her last months bed-bound in a nursing home. Up until the end, she cared about her appearance and insisted she have her hair and makeup done. I couldn’t imagine what comfort she found in the mirror’s reflection of sparse hair and time-eroded skin and features.
Almost twenty years later, the image I see in my own mirror appears decades younger than the person who looks back from a photo of myself snapped moments before.
The permanent self is an illusion. It feels like I’m killing time, but time is killing me.
Vanilla’s earliest sexual memory was a horrifying night in 6th Grade Camp. Cinnamon, Cayenne and Cardamom had learned the hateful taunt, “Vanilla Sex,” and decided to humiliate him in front of the other spices. They held Vanilla down, tore off his wrapper, and let the taunting circle of classmates inhale his sweet, innocent fragrance.
As the jury filed in to announce his fate, Vanilla thought back to that childhood trauma and how it had become the defining event of his life.
“Has the jury reached a verdict?”
“Yes, your Honor.”
“We the jury find the defendant guilty on all counts.”
Kisagotami’s beautiful son, the light of her life ran into the street and was struck dead by a runaway cart. She wandered the village in a blur, child clutched to her heart.
She went to the Buddha for an herb to revive her son. He sent her into the village to find a mustard seed from a household that had never suffered the death of a loved one.
Of course, there was not a single home without loss. She found that the living are few, but the dead are many. Her personal grief was transformed into compassion for all beings.
A 100 Word Story based on a traditional Buddhist Parable
The Single Frame Stories and 100 Word Stories challenges used the same prompt this week, "Switch." Since I didn't stress the part of my story when I ran home in fear for my life, I decided to communicate that adrenalin infused feeling in the audio version I created for the 100 Word Stories podcast. I would have loved to do a full narrative animation for the video, but didn't have nearly the time. Instead, I ended up using a bunch of Google Maps images of the actual place the events transpired along with the Single Frame Stories image.
Screech! The car lurched to a halt. The acorn I’d thrown with all my might hit the driver in his face. I dropped from the tree and ran home. A minute later he pounded on our door. My father answered and took the brunt of the driver’s rage. Next thing I knew, I was getting spanked for the first time in my life. It didn’t go well. I was so upset that a blood vessel burst in my eye. My father sprained his wrist. That was also the last time I was spanked. Good thing he didn’t use a switch.
As Marshall McLuhan wrote, "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." New technology, from the wheel to the printing press, has profoundly changed both mass culture and personal psychology. Although the full extent of each transformation can take generations to fully manifest, we can discern some of the implications in the present.
This week's Single Frame Stories prompt is "Anonymous." I was looking through some old images for another project and came upon a photo of a 1920's crowd scene. It suddenly struck me that if you didn't know anyone there, you would truly be just a face in the crowd. Today, you can post a Selfie and instantly establish a sense of personal identity within the mass audience. There are 90 million Selfies and counting on Instagram alone.
Our current pervasive social network is creating a retro-future morph of tribalistic narcissism. Ironically, we are intensifying our sense of unique personal identity through the through the imagined eyes of a largely anonymous global crowd. Or if we're actually noticed, the feedback from a handful of strangers.
After eight weeks of the Single Frame Stories Challenge, I'm just beginning to appreciate it as a practice of not simply art, but of self-reflection. These are two of my entries for the week. The prompt was "In retrospect . . ."
I invite you to give it a try. You can use any medium . . . Second Life shots, sketches, painting, photography . . . hell, even scanned crayon drawings. Your text can either be embedded in the image or used as a title. To enter, submit your image to our Flickr Group. We publish a virtual gallery every Saturday, along with a prompt for the next week. If you hurry, you can submit something for this week under this evening's deadline!
This spin on a traditional Zen parable emerged when I was thinking about the differences between the natural and virtual worlds. I work every day in the digital environment. I don't chop wood and carry water. I cut, copy and paste ideas and images. But the same direction applies. The quality of my activity is experienced through the state of my mind.
This week's Single Frame Stories prompt is, "Little did he/she know." This is my entry. There's plenty of time to enter one or more of your own. Another fun collaboration opportunity is our A is for Avatar blog. We're still looking for contributors to write 100 word definitions or create accompanying images.
You still have until Friday, August 10 to submit your entry for the first Single Frame Stories challenge. The prompt this week is "Last Words." Join the fun!
Whiskey Monday and I are starting a new weekly challenge for people who'd like to try their hand at creating Single Frame Stories:
Each Saturday we’ll offer a new word or phrase for a prompt. Participants will each create a Single Frame Story based on the prompt of the week, consisting of a single image with up to 140 optional characters of text. The image can be a photo, screen shot, drawing or painting. The text can be integrated into the image or used as a caption or title.
The prompt for the first week is "Last Words". We're giving a bit more time on this one, so submissions are due by Friday night, August 10. Our first showing on the Single Frame Stories blog will be Saturday, August 11.
To participate, email your image to SingleFrameStories@gmail.com. We’ll aggregate all the submissions and present them here on the following Saturday. You can also upload images to our Flickr Group. (If you submit images to the Flickr group, please specify the date/prompt of your image.)
Please include the following with your submission:
Your name
Your blog or website if you’d like it linked
Your flickr name if you have one
Send questions by email, leave a comment here or on the Single Frame Stories site, or ping Whiskey or I on Twitter. There are plenty of examples of Single Frame Stories in the blog's introductory post, and you can check out some of my visualized tweets below.
I have no clue where this one came from, but it's more or less a Single Frame Story. Check out Whiskey's new post about our upcoming anthology site and virtual gallery. While you're at it, you might as well read Crap Mariner's take on art and my post yesterday on Vaneeesa's I Rez Therefore I Am site.
My maternal grandmother lived into her eighties, her last months bed-bound in a nursing home. Up until the end, she cared about her appearance and insisted she have her hair and makeup done. I couldn’t imagine what comfort she found in the mirror’s reflection of sparse hair and time-eroded skin and features.
