The Tale of Geoffrey the Confuzzled Gnome: A TMA 112 Compilation

The Tale of Geoffrey the Confuzzled Gnome

by Bryce Bolick, Helen Butcher

Moran Akana, Jess Baird, and Steven Bills

"Geoffery was a bright little gnome, but was

 not quite sure how to pronounce his name."

Geoffrey realized he was having a hard time 

remembering how to articulate a lot of things. 

He decided to drop by his doctor’s office and 

nip his hereditary dementia in the bud.

After the completely successful and universally 

known surgical procedure, Geoffrey’s doctor 

prescribed him a diet of asparagus and sage

banana smoothies, exclusively.

The latest fad diet it in: asparagus, sage and 

banana smoothies. People rushed to the store get 

the ingredients for their new health drinks, hoping 

to finally lose the extra weight.

The Michaels family celebrated each time there 

was a waning moon, which annoyed the family who 

lived below greatly.

From the Exquisite corpse, “The remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script — anything else, simply put, would be boring.” It seemed as if everybody was “flipping the script” as we continued the last person’s story, sometimes taking it in a whole new direction. On the flip side of that, there are some stories where a thread is woven finely throughout all five of the mini-stories, making a (more or less) complete narrative, with each story complementing the last.

This technique of starting a story and then passing it on to another to complete is nothing new: there is a game called “Photoshop Tennis” where one person introduces a photograph, and then sends it off to another person to add an element to it, who then passes it on to another person to edit. This goes on indefinitely, unless a specified  number of edits has been pre-agreed upon. Examples of this include:

“The “text” is never inanimate — it’s the human imagination that gives shape and meaning, the elixir that breathes life into the golem.” In some ways, pieces of art that we create and “finish” are never really done. Unbeknownst to us, somebody could pick up that piece of work that we created, and add to it, etc…, until, along down the road, it is unrecognizable from the work that we created initially.

Another art form that can be remixed is music. Famous artists create and release music that then gets into the hands of the remixers, who then make the music their own by adding and taking things away, but re-structuring the song in a way that was never meant by its original author.

In our Round Robin storytelling experience, each of the tiny stories exist by themselves as a stand alone. However, combining five of them together to create a collage of different ideas that all sprang from the same seed. Each contributor used a different vocabulary to try to make sense of the unusual and limited information they were given. In a way, one artist’s choice to use “the hardiest of folk” to describe a group of people that a previous artist described as “notoriously rowdy bunch” differed in verbal texture as much as water colors and oil paints do. Thus, even if all of us tried to preserve the tone and content of the story, it would inevitably change over time.

Our individual pictures added an extra element of expression, and another opportunity to leave our mark on the story. We had varying styles and a wide variety of framing to suggest plot. As mentioned earlier “The remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script”. On occasion, an author would create a juxtaposition, fragmentation, or script flipping between the picture and the text, thus creating an odd precedence in the mind of the next author. Close ups versus wide shots, color versus monochrome all added something different to the mix.