{"id":191,"date":"2015-03-06T16:51:24","date_gmt":"2015-03-07T00:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/?p=191"},"modified":"2019-03-05T20:32:28","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T04:32:28","slug":"becoming-raven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/2015\/03\/becoming-raven\/","title":{"rendered":"Becoming Raven"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/103547623\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" title=\"becoming raven\" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Schiffler is the first recipient of the Colin Wang Memorial Scholarship, a $1000 award for a CHID study abroad student, created in memory of University of Washington student Colin Wang. Because Wang was an aspiring stand-up comedian, in order to compete for the scholarship, students were each asked to submit an original limerick. Schiffler&#8217;s limerick tells the story of a sparrow propelled out of its home by the need to travel and find connections with the world:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In a fair hallowed hill off the highway<br \/>\nSat Sparrow who\u2019d never seen the skyway<br \/>\n\u2018Til the land did upheave<br \/>\nForcing Sparrow to leave<br \/>\nDissolving into mist on the byway<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Created in Iceland, Schiffler&#8217;s performance piece perpetuates these themes of wings, flight, and pushing boundaries.<\/p>\n<p><em>Artist&#8217;s statement:<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In June of 2014, I traveled to Iceland ready to witness a story. Almost immediately, the raven, a prominent figure in Norse mythology and in Icelandic culture, started poking its sharp black beak into my experience. J\u00f3nas the Learned searched for the bezoar in the skull of a raven, and almost every hostel at which we stayed had an image of a few ravens in the window. They are the eyes of Odin. I consumed stories of Hrafn-Loki, the first Norseman to come to Iceland, who flew with three ravens. I heard the cry &#8216;Nevermore&#8217; from Poe&#8217;s poem. Yet nothing was more magical or immanent than looking up at night and seeing a raven gently beat its wings above me.<\/p>\n<p>I started to develop a method with which to understand how my own story intersects with the raven. Willem Flusser&#8217;s Kraken Phenomenology treatise explores the relationship between the vampyroteuthis infernalis and the human, and allows the human to &#8220;hold enough together so you can experience the same space for a while.\u201d Jane Bennet in Vibrant Matter, writes, &#8220;I believe it is wrong to deny vitality to non-human bodies, forces, and forms, and that a careful course of anthropomorphization can help reveal that vitality, even though it resists full translation and exceeds my comprehensive grasp.\u201d I not only hoped to reveal the vitality of the raven, but allow myself and the raven to share the same space, even if just for a brief moment. By attempting to give myself wings, I positioned myself at a place of vulnerability, opening up my ability to resonate with the raven.<\/p>\n<p>The story that I found during my travels in Iceland is an experiment in speculative embodied storytelling. Using the Flusser model of speculative fabulation, I decided to create a pair of wings for my body using the wingspan and body length ratio of the common raven.<\/p>\n<p>Through a performance piece, I explored the Icelandic landscape with the wings. It did not take long for my human body to lose balance as I stepped from a rock. No part of me expected flight, but my body could feel the wing potential as the wind passed through my prosthetic limbs. As much as I can speculate on the life of a raven, ultimately I am bound to my human body and all of its limits. However, that does not mean that this speculation cannot uncover new ways of thinking and connecting. I will never reach the space that the raven inhabits, but the value and honor I hold for its capabilities to inhabit the world strengthens my relationship with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Schiffler is the first recipient of the Colin Wang Memorial Scholarship, a $1000 award for a CHID study abroad student, created in memory of University of Washington student Colin Wang. Because Wang was an aspiring stand-up comedian, in order to compete for the scholarship, students were each asked to submit an original limerick. Schiffler&#8217;s limerick [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[48],"tags":[12,31,22,55],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/chidint\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}