Group Presentation.

I never got a chance to really offer an explanation of our group presentation. I would first like to mention that this was the best group I have ever worked with for these projects. We had a great time doing it, and best of all started meeting early so we had time to really develop our ideas. Thanks to Thomas for his mad editing skills and creativity (and access to the 7D!), Sam always came up with loads of great ideas, and Erin made a killer quiche.

Our group was in charge of the 20 minute lifetime. We decided to portray this through the structure of a dreamer. Shortly before we gave our presentation (and by shortly I mean 2 minutes) I realized how much overlap there is between our theme and that of Life as Fiction. Would some differentiation have helped? I don't really think so. It is important to understand that there is strong overlap between all of the themes of this class. And clarification doesn't always clarify.

So the dream idea was that a lifetime could exist within one of Professor Sexson's tangents during a lecture. As the student, I fell asleep and began to have a dream. As we mentioned after our presentation, if you found any element to be a bit strange than the easy explanation is: it is a dream, it is supposed to be weird! However, we did try to incorporate a whole bunch of elements and themes from this semester.

Some of those were: notions of Alchemy and purification of the soul, birth, growth, life and death, lists, memory, narration, deja vu, recurrence, circularity, chaos, and illogicality. There were plenty of references to the different texts and sources that we used this semester as well including: The Tempest, Four Quartets, Beckett, Vico, Stranger than Fiction, The Matrix, classmates' blogs and plenty of other familiar sources of influence.

My favorite part of the video was the sucking stones bit along with the recitations of Finnegans Wake. So cool... and in HD!

Thanks to all my group members for making this a fun project, I think we did a great job!