A HELLISH BAR
A group of "friends" walk into a bar, but they quickly find out that they are not where they think they are, so they are left to figure out their next moves and make sense of the situation.
By Luke G. Sumpter and Gabby Perez
By Luke G. Sumpter and Gabby Perez
Image from Unwinnable.
The project:
There are multiple components of the project. Firstly, this website and page is using an open source program called AudiAnnotate, which is a tool created at UT's Initiative for Digital Humanities by Dr. Tanya Clement and the Brumfield Labs to annotate, organize, and present ideas on audiovisual artifacts held in libraries, museums, and archives. So, this project is looking at a piece of audio, and evaluating it through annotations and using the program. The audio artifact itself is a radio play written by us. So, this project is meant to be at the crossroads of creative engagement with the play itself, but also educational in the sense that we are both supporting claims that we hint at or make in the play while also criticizing them. To attempt a clear definition of what our creative artifact is, or a radio play: a play that was intended to be only expereienced through the radio, meaning it s completely audio. Though, with what you will see in the screenplay, it was written with visual elements in mind.
Because the radio play was made without too much consideration about the specific choices, as well as the fact that we learned more after having finished it, we thought doing this opposed to just turning in the radio play would provide us a chance to criticize some of our choices, as well as making the experience more educational. So, some of the annotations will be the transcript of the screenplay written for it, and some of the annotations will be commentary about our choices.
Project outlines to the prompt:
Seriously engage with the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus.
We not only use each character in the play as a representation of each of the philosophers, but we also attempt to use the setting and plot of the play to analyze our reading of them as well.
Convey the practical usefulness of existentialism in the everyday lives of your audience.
Making fun of the common idea that existentialism isn’t exactly helpful to anyone, especially considering all of the characters in the play die, with the turnaround of the bartender showing us how we take them and continue to live. Because it is a satire and art itself, there is a lot of vagueness that allows the viewer to make some of their own decisions about intent of characters or ramifications of choices they make, but we attempt to clarify our perspective on it through the green annotations.
Do this in an appealing (and ideally witty) way, so that it would serve well as a means of popularizing existentialism.
It is satire and a radio play. Written at first as a screenplay with visual elements, we decided to make it a radio play due to the inaccessibility of resources to make a film or recording of a play. So with the radio play, we decided to focus on the conversation between the characters and use the imagination of the audience to create as authentic an experience as possible. However, we also put and annotated the play on AudiAnnotate (what you see as the green on the next page), making it able for the subtle choices of our play to be analyzed and explained in an effective way. So, it is both creative through the writing of the play (which is what would hopefully make it popularized) as well as educational through making it fun for students to analyze it.
Description of the radio play:
Characters Bea, Ess, Enne, Kay, Haytch, and Cee walk into a bar. It is meant to be a satire of the common structure of “So X and Y walk into a bar” set-up as a type of joke. The problem they face is that they thought they entered a bar, but when they realized something was wrong and attempted to leave, they saw an indescribable void. So, it is up to all of them and the bartender to make sense of this and figure out what they should do.
We not only use each character in the play as a representation of each of the philosophers, but we also attempt to use the setting and plot of the play to analyze our reading of them as well.
Convey the practical usefulness of existentialism in the everyday lives of your audience.
Making fun of the common idea that existentialism isn’t exactly helpful to anyone, especially considering all of the characters in the play die, with the turnaround of the bartender showing us how we take them and continue to live. Because it is a satire and art itself, there is a lot of vagueness that allows the viewer to make some of their own decisions about intent of characters or ramifications of choices they make, but we attempt to clarify our perspective on it through the green annotations.
Do this in an appealing (and ideally witty) way, so that it would serve well as a means of popularizing existentialism.
It is satire and a radio play. Written at first as a screenplay with visual elements, we decided to make it a radio play due to the inaccessibility of resources to make a film or recording of a play. So with the radio play, we decided to focus on the conversation between the characters and use the imagination of the audience to create as authentic an experience as possible. However, we also put and annotated the play on AudiAnnotate (what you see as the green on the next page), making it able for the subtle choices of our play to be analyzed and explained in an effective way. So, it is both creative through the writing of the play (which is what would hopefully make it popularized) as well as educational through making it fun for students to analyze it.