Response 7 and 8: Kathie's Automatist Exercise

The content of each square relate to each other in pairs such as the first and third square relate to each other and the second and fourth square relate to each other. It seems that the third square is telling the story of the first square with its various shapes as well as the second square telling the story of the fourth square by illustrating that with a broken arm, the character had to consume various medication. Therefore, it seems that the element as a whole is split through the middle to tell separate stories such as in chapters. So, there seems to be a narrative formed but seems that there are two different narratives that is happening at the same time. For the second and fourth square, I can visualize the pair as a commercial for medication or any advertisement associated with medicine due to the narrative that states “ kindergarten on the monkey bars equals broken arm,” which is directly associated with image of a character taking medication. However, just like consumerism of various products that are influence through the media, I interpreted the that the person who drew fourth square mocking an advertisement through the character saying “blah blah blah,” which shows that media speaks out information that people take in daily to influence a higher rate of consumerism and production. The aggregate effect of the four people’s contributions seems to fit in with each other as well as it seems that many of the people seems to think similarly when we were asked to fill in these squares. Therefore, as we would pass down the paper, I would notice that the majority of the people would have similar ideas and visual interpretation to the prompt for all or most of the squares.

It may be that the majority of the people think and interpret the prompt for each square similarly due to the influence of media and consumerism. For instance, the first square consisted of shapes that one person drew after a word was read a loud. However, even during the exercise, I had noticed that most people drew down similar shapes, which may have been influenced by the media and information that we take in daily through consumerism, or according to Lasn, the brain washing of the consumer society was successful through manipulating the way that we all think similarly given the same prompt. The shapes do make some kind of concrete reference to production and consumption due to some shapes having an industrial forms to them such as the rectangle, which is often associated with production like boxes, to assembly lines, to various other products as well as other shapes such as the jagged lines. However, there are a few shapes that have an organic form that I interpreted as landscape but those shapes can also reference production and consumption, such as various shapes that are often associated with products such as the jagged shape in which someone might say that it was influenced by nature (autumn leaves) or even the production and consumerism of products (even products such as marijuana).