Outstanding Final Projects (GenEd 1001: Fall 2019)

Proximity, Photographs, and Podcasts Nyla Brewster, Sruthi Palaniappan, and Sahar Mohammadzadeh Podcast link:  podcast INTRODUCTION For our final project, our team decided to compose our own apocalypse using the mediums of comparative photography and podcasts. Throughout the course, several apocalyptic themes and motives have been studied, from robotics, environmental, nuclear, and even religious. Countless authors and artists have chosen to represent their interpretations of the end of the world through a multitude of different media, ranging anywhere from videos, paintings, cultures, and literature interpretations. Although there exists great diversity in the way individuals believe the end of the world will occur and even more so through the mediums through which they are depicted, there stands one common mysterty between all hypotheses about the apocalypse: when will it occur? The timeline and proximity of the end of the world ranges dramatically, but u...

Dancing the End of the World Away Xochitl Morales         This past summer (2019), I followed DJs and musicians from all over the world around Mexico City. Jumping from club to club every night, I heard a new set every hour. I not only learned the technical ropes of mixing and producing, I also learned how to keep a crowd excited and dancing. Although there was something interesting about every set and every crowd, the memory that stuck with me the most is one that I did not even experience myself. Talking to my friends one night, I asked them what was one of the craziest reactions one of their sets had ever received. My friend Yuv from Berlin mentioned that one time he was mixing a set for a night in Tokyo, and included a tsunami siren; he had heard it once and thought it sounded like something that would excite a crowd. However, he recounted that when he played it, half of the audience stopped and worriedly looked around. Before that moment, Yuv said,...

[Untitled] Emma Kay Maybe you’ve caught the plague. You’re not sure, really. Since lunch your vision has been going fuzzy at the edges. You hammer on the up button, listening to your building’s elevator slowly descends. The grinding stops. You check the panel. Ninth floor. Ages before it’ll get to you. Sinking to the carpeted lobby floor, you let your head rest against your knees. No one is in the lobby to see, and you are too heavy. The elevator dings. You startle, stumbling to your feet. It must be only a few seconds since you sat down. It’s still dark outside. You slide into the elevator and huddle in the back corner.  Getting out on your floor, you fumble with your keys. Your door key has a distinctive metal triangle at the end. You know what it looks like, but you can’t find it. The keys are on the floor. You pick them up. The door key glints in the dim incandescence of the hall. You let yourself in.  As soon as you flip on the lights, you stumble into you...

[Apocalyptic Story (Untitled)] Christopher Dolce He couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong; there existed this lull state of confusion that only seemed to be getting worse as the “miracle” progressed.   The people who were once awaiting a final liberation from war now seemed to have regressed into a catatonic stupor—unable to perceive the great changes happening to the world around them.   In a great metamorphosis, the last remnants of society were supplanted by a verdant paradise.   A lavish and undisturbed landscape blossomed.   Great deserts reverted to their aqueous beginnings.   The fires of war that had raged for decades had been reduced to ashes—their decaying cinders left as perhaps the only remnants of a past whose people would be no more.   Yet Jim persisted. The genesis of such an innocent world came suddenly.   Only a few months before, Jim Evans, a middle-aged retired army veteran and single father of a 6 year old girl, Evelyn, ...