For the Bartleby audiobook assignment, I was part of the Office Crew team, acting as the groups presenter. While the majority of my work was towards the end of the project due to the nature of my role, I still had the opportunity to collaborate with my team and discuss how we’d go about the project. We discussed ideas and collaborated through Zoom and a Gmail thread, and shared files through Google Drive and Dropbox.
We began the project discussing through a Zoom call, deciding to fist define our constraints and overarching goals of how we wanted to go about the project. We ultimately wanted to be as independent as possible, and wanted to be considerate of our external workloads and personal lives. In many ways, we also seemed to agree that we were less interested in producing a perfect final product than we were hoping to have a good experience working on this project as a group. As such, montage proposed that we use the “Exquisite Corpse” game as our project’s model: a parlor game devised by Surrealists in the early 20th century, in which participants in a group would individually draw parts of a body on one piece of paper, folding the paper over what they drew each time. Once everyone had drawn something, the paper was opened to reveal the final product of everyone’s work. In this way, using the Exquisite Corpse as a framework for our project allowed us to hold as much freedom as possible in our contributions, while provide a method of refusal: specifically, the refusal of pre-meditated meaning and organization, instead opting for a method that allowed for spontaneity and surprise. Using this framework, everyone in the group worked on their parts of the project independently: choosing what ever lines they wanted, recording however they wanted, editing how they wanted, and finally, presenting how they wanted. Because we didn’t care much about producing an amazing final product, we went in with low expectations and standards, making the production process less stressful and more fun.
Once everyone had done their part and Maggi had published the final product, everyone was pleasantly surprised with the final outcome, all of us not expecting it to be that good. In our final meeting, I facilitated a group discussion reflecting on the process and our thoughts on the audiobook; including the way we loved all the speakers voices in different ways and loved Maggi’s sound editing. One comment that stuck out to me was when Lisa noted how they found themself frustrated trying to listen to montage’s TTS voice, from which they made a brilliant connection between her frustration and the narrator’s with Bartleby. I was really interested in how our framework—as a way to refuse order/meaning—produced new ways in which to understand refusal; here, thinking of quiet/noise as a place to just that.
All of this in toto—the process, the audiobook itself, the Exquisite Corpse framework, and our final discussion—were central, and elaborated in, my presentation. I approached my the presentation like a reading/analysis of all these moving parts; keeping in mind our readings from the class, as well as this higher-level trope of refusal. I started by outlining my slide deck, looking to first highlight our framework, from which to understand and move through our group’s process, audiobook, and discussion.
Once I’d outlined the slides, I created script. Because this was something my group had never seen before, and because it was, in a way, a piece of the exquisite corpse of our project, I wanted to not only narrate the our process and such, but break the fourth wall in a way through my analysis of a project I, myself, had participated in. I also wanted to do this by specifically pointing out during my presentation that this was a piece of the corpse, and that my team had no heard the presentation yet.
Overall, this was a fun project, and I had a good time not only participating in the audiobook, but also using my role, as the presenter, to look at our work from a birds-eye point of view.
