Tiny Stories

My bit:

excavation crew broke through entered cave STOP blue light unknown source STOP shadow scout patrol MIA recovery troops also now MIA advise course of action STOP

Madi Huber:

advised course of action go towards the blue light STOP there is nothing we can do for you STOP you are on your own STOP hope to see you back at headquarters soon STOP

Danny Hunt:

He walked towards the light, but drew no closer to it. He did not know how long he walked, nor how far. It no longer mattered.

Max Johnston:

It was cold outside and it was late in the morning, but if he went out and practiced for a couple hours he'd be warmed up for the game in the morning.

Daniel Kellis:

The mourning eventually ended and he had nothing left to do. He thought about playing bingo with his neighbors, but he didn’t feel ready.

Artist’s Statement:

Creating the series of tiny stories was an interesting endeavor for me. In creating these I was really mostly looking to have fun, which is nice when it intersects with an assignment. I thought for a while about how I wanted my story to start. I decided quickly that I didn’t want my part to be told in third-person. Second-person was also out. What about narration? This seemed promising but then I alighted on an idea I liked even better: a telegram-style letter from one character to another. I felt this would convey a maximum amount of information about the time frame in which the story takes place.

Now I had decided a format and a time, I thought of what the story could be about. I wanted something that had substance and mystery to it, something with unexplored, rough edges. In the end, I settled on doing something underground, since caves have always fascinated me.  When I had finished writing the first part of my story, to me it conveyed an expedition to a cave where some unknown, supernatural force was at stake. After breaking through into a cave, the expedition came across a strange blue light. When their armed shadow scouts set out to explore, they disappeared. The backup crew went in search of them, but they, too, disappeared. The commander of the whole outfit is now very unsure of what to do and telegrams back up to the surface for feedback. The illustration I chose was of blue lights in darkness, evoking countless eyes. I hoped to convey a dark, foreboding tone with this pairing.

I was very interested to see what Madi would do with the story from this point on. I was happy to see it continue in the same vein I had begun it, as a reply from the commander’s overseer somewhere on the surface. I thought maybe it would continue on in the same fashion, but then things changed dramatically as the story changed hands once again. The story changed wildly and left the original plot line behind—or so I first thought. When I re-read the conclusion, this time it seemed to be less about the voyagers below and more about to the commander on the surface. Having lost all contact with the missing underground contingent and the expedition declared a gaping failure, he sought to find comfort after the funerals they themselves could not attend, yet could find none…

Like the Exquisite Corpse parlor games mentioned by DJ Spooky, these stories took on a life of their own, where compared separately they seemed to be dissonant notes. Looked at as a whole, they oddly formed a cohesive narrative that was more than the sum of its unknowing parts.   Viewed as a snapshot, like Dorothea Lange’s “Destitute Mother,” they create a window into a world much larger than explicitly defined, limited only by the imagination.