Webspinna Battle

Artist’s Statement

by Ethan Hallstrom and Steven Olson

Lizards and wizards are as essential to the genres of fantasy and sci-fi as the strong, independent woman is to the romantic comedy, or the cabin in the woods to horror. If you need to whip up a quick, 2-cent minor antagonist, intriguing side-character, or mythical being, make it a lizard or a wizard. This is such an overdone, common, pervasive practice that finding sources for our respective sound clips was actually too easy. We ended up with too high a volume of potential sources, and had to trim down. Gandalf, Dumbledore, Merlin, Tim the Enchanter, Wulfgar, The Wicked Witch of the West, Ganondorf, Mysterio, Dr. Strange, and others represented only a cross-section of the wizard characters so entrenched in our culture, and these are largely the traditional magician-types. There exists an entire pantheon of non-elderly, clean-shaven, more subtle wizards in fiction not even listed above. The list of lizard characters is just as expansive, reaching from video games to movies to books to even comics. The Lizard, Bowser, Jurassic Park’s entire cast of antagonists, Godzilla, The Gecko Geico, the Sleesak, the Kree, the Argonians, the Silurian, Smaug, Alduin, Randall from Monster’s Inc. Lizards are just as well-represented as their magical opponents featured in this Webspinna.

Both of these pantheons of characters represent a sort of fictional crutch. Both reptiles and magicians are exotic, but comprehensible at the same time. We know what wise/crazy old men are like, but we’re unfamiliar with actual magic, and beings with the ability to manipulate it. We’ve all seen crocodiles at the zoo, or anoles on a tree trunk during a vacation, or turtles in a pond, or any other number of naturally-occurring reptiles, but not giant, earth-shaking, scaled behemoths of uncharacteristic intelligence and cunning. Both lizards and wizards are familiar and foreboding. They represent crazy, out-of-this-world conflict. They aren’t a part of our daily lives, and thus they make perfect fodder to populate our sci-fi or fantasy worlds. This makes them extremely prevalent in popular culture, which makes for a really fun and recognizable Webspinna.

In many ways, this assignment addresses similar concepts as the previous assignment, textual poaching.  For this assignment, we had to take pre-existing audio and use it in a way that it wasn’t originally intended by its creator.  In doing so, we created something completely new and original: an epic battle between wizards and lizards.  In Jonathan Letham’s article “The Ecstasy of Influence: a plagiarism”, he comments on the dangers of enforcing copyright laws by stating that “Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work”.  In other words, copyright can greatly limit the creative abilities of an artist and can even deter the very people who appreciated the original work in the first place.  Some may consider our Webspinna battle to be a form of plagiarism.  We did use audio from many, many sources without the express permission of the original creators.  We even performed our piece in a semi-public setting, which is frowned upon by copyright law.  However, just as we learned in last week’s project, every piece of art has a cultural history.  Everyone is influenced by everything, and it is foolish to ignore that.  With this assignment, we embraced this fact. We used other people’s work in order to influence and shape our own.  No one else has put these sound clips together in the exact way that we did, and so by doing this, we created something new and original.  By changing the way that we view plagiarism and copyright, we as artists are able to explore new artistic depths and find new ways to do what has already been done.